The Chaser Report - The Girl With The AI Tattoo | Welcome To The Future

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

Charles has discovered a bluetooth tattoo that could win the award for most dystopian product covered on the podcast. Meanwhile he also tells Dom about a mechanical arm controlled by AI, and why everyone should watch season two of The Rehearsal.---Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] our caviar addiction: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello, and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Hello, Charles. Look, I've got to tell you, I'm done with the present. I'm not enjoying the present at all. I think there are lots of things about the present that I'd like to leave behind for just one episode of this podcast. Well, maybe we should welcome you to the future, future, future.

Oh, thank goodness, this is so much better. Charles, in this future in which we now inhabit, does Bluetooth work yet? Well, the thing is, this is a future without Bluetooth. Oh, my goodness. This is a future where you don't need Bluetooth anymore. That's a great question is what's going to replace Bluetooth? I presume Bluetooth Pro. It's going to be nothing.

And everyone go, oh, why wouldn't we doing this before? Like, not connecting devices to the Internet of Things. You know what it'll be? It'll be a chord. That's right. We were just talking about the drones that work much better when they're plugged in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, so on this episode, we've got a few topics to square off.

First one that I want to get to is E tattoos on your forehead. Wow. Yep, which is just fantastic. Amazing. And Bluetoothless. Good. The next one is a robotic arm, which unfortunately is sold out. Oh, no.

That has just gone on sale. the US, but it has suddenly sold out, that is quite remarkable because, I mean, there's lots of robotic arms around the world. You can do robotic arms. Of course. This one, you don't have to teach it how to move because they're using AI to do all the hard stuff of teaching it how to move. Okay. It's quite interesting. And then the last thing, it's just about tickling. Tickling? Yeah. Is it E tickling? Is the robotic arm tickling me, Charles? Well, it's more science than everything. It's just apparently tickling. is completely under theorised.

Talk it up, but it's a big discovery. It's changing the way you'll see the world. No, no, there's no discovery. The point is that they've discovered that we don't know anything about tickling. There's an amazing opportunity for a PhD coming up in this episode. You too can enrol in a very torturous academic program.

Not that that's related to my experience or anything like that. More after this. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply.

Details at fizz.ca. So we'll start with the most exciting thing, which is the e-tottoo on your forehead. Yes, and that's what I'm excited about. I'm really hoping, when you just put that idea to me, Charles, I'm thinking not only amazing kind of creative opportunity, I'm thinking mobile billboard. I'm thinking logos. I'm thinking like scrolling news updates. What if the chase their headlines were visible on our foreheads all day as we walked around?

I say forehead, but anyway. Would there be a problem? I suppose if you then added Bluetooth to that tattoo. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Programable. Yeah, you could program it. Yeah, okay. So this is not what the breakthrough is.

Yet. Yet. Yet. But that is a very good idea. But let's get to that once I've introduced what the idea is. Oh, yes, I'm putting the cart before the Bluetooth horse again. So these people at Device Magazine, which is actually a scientific journal and is a very, very, very boring journal.

Like, it is tediously written. I mean, I'm just kind of getting that sense from the fact that the editorial conference that shows the name of the, let's avoid ambiguity. This is device magazine. Their slogan is supports open access. Wow. Oh, no, no. Their actual, their slogan is actually science that inspires.

That's actually quite good. I think that's a nice aspiration. They've got more to do. So there's this new device that has just been published in this piece, which is what they've done is they've created a wireless forehead e-totoo for mental workload estimation. So basically, it's a little device that you implant into your forehead. they've done it in a way where it just picks up the electricity

that's going through your body to run the whole thing and so it's very low profile like it just looks like it's your skin is it kind of like a gauge like an activity monitor on the computer yes and what it does is it monitors the EEG and EOG of your brainwaves and it does a little bar that tells people who are looking at you how much your brain is working. So the one person who'd want to know that, perhaps in privacy, i.e. you yourself.

Yes. You've got to go and look at a mirror, but everyone else can see your mental load at all times. Well, part of the problem that they identify and the reason why they think this is a good idea rather than a dystopian nightmare is that any sort of interruption to your concentration where, for example, self-estimation, right? where you actually go, oh, how are you feeling? Like, estimate how overwhelmed you are with work at the moment. Interrupts your work.

And so therefore, there's a whole problem with self-monering. And even, like, looking at a little gauge, you know, on your wrist or something like that, saying, oh, this is your workload estimation, will actually interrupt the results. So it's a monitor that says, fuck off, I'm busy, basically. Yes, exactly. Oh, wow. Yes. Or it's a monitor.

Another way of looking at it is that. that, you know, your boss could walk around and see all the employees. And if an employee isn't overworked enough, then, you know, you could go over there and do more tasks. I don't know, zap them with a taser or something. Yeah, because our employers should definitely have the right to get us to have tattoos on our foreheads. That's a, I mean, is this like a permanent thing?

Yeah, it's a permanent thing. It's implanted. Well, you got to. Why would you, earth, would you want it? Well, do you want to listen to the incredibly boring reasons given out by device. I do. I do. I do.

I can't, this sounds genuinely dystopying. This sounds like sort of thing that the makers of severance considered and thought it was too far-fetched. Yes. Our work presents a breakthrough in wearable neurotechnology offering a scalable, cost-effective

and user-friendly approach to continuous mental workload assessment. Future applications could include real-time cognitive load monitoring in pilots. So you look over and you see Sully trying to land on the Hudson and you go, oh wow. He's actually thinking about this.

Oh, Sully, you look busy. That's right. He's like, ah, no, I've just, yeah. And then you realize he's actually got his air pods in. You've just distracted him from saving the plane. You realize he's got his AirPods in. He's actually just listening to a rock song. Operators, that's, by the way, that's an in-joke if you've seen the rehearsal.

Oh, I haven't, no. Have you seen the rehearsal? Sorry, I know that this is a slight tangent, but the rehearsal, which is Nathan Filter's latest TV show. Yeah, yeah, no, I've heard very good things. It's on Max. I think it might be the best TV show I've ever watched. It is unbelievably good. Even including your own?

Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a very good idea. Yeah, right. We'll check it out. Okay, so anyway, future applications could include real-time cognitive load in pilots, operators and healthcare professionals, advancing the field of human machine interaction and personalised cognitive augmentation.

So essentially, if you're standing next to a robot and they're not very good at reading your expression on your faces or, you know, anything about you, It's just easier for them to be operating next to you if you've got a little tattoo on your forehead telling them how concentrating you are at the moment. This is quite chilling to me, Charles. I mean, for instance, this tattoo could potentially reveal during the courting of this podcast whether I was interested in paying attention to what of your theories. There'd be no way if I might be just wondering.

It could be socially embarrassing, couldn't it? And what if when... Especially if you're paying attention to or you're pretending to pay attention. attention to your kid, you know, like not a day goes by without, you know, your kid coming in and telling them about the latest, you know, daddy, daddy, the amazingly banal thing happened in the playground. Yes, oh, great. But Charles, what about the other things?

So let's say, not that I would do this, but let's just say, I don't know, your partner comes home and says, like, what did you get up to today at work? And suddenly, do, do, do, your affair is writ large because you're stressed. it gives new meaning to it was written all over your face very well done so it's funny because you know they're sort of trying to work out who will actually use this I'm just imagining the dinner parties where it's just genuinely awkward that the graph just shows how bored you are but it's interesting because they're sort of going vehicle drivers aircraft pilots like air traffic controllers you can sort of see that and tele operators oh wow which is I think you know like how these

technologies, they always go, oh, you know, like nuclear is going to save the world in terms of, you know, carbon. And then it turns out to just be used for bombs or whatever. So is this like call center operators? Yeah, I think teleoperators. Being tortured because not paying attention. Yeah, yeah. I think that that's, it is true that they're sort of having trouble justifying why it

needs to exist particularly. I mean, look, I could see that in some professions, like a band that you wore that you could take off or something might, but a tattoo permanently on your, on your, on your forehead. No. No, but they're saying that the problem with bans restrict the user's range of movement

and suffer from significant motion artefacts, making them impractical and uncomfortable. Yeah, I like the practicality of a permanent tattoo. Discomfort and restrictions on user movement also inherently modify the task environment, reducing task performance and undermining the purpose of mental workloads of the assessment. I don't think I like device magazine, Charles.

Also, unrelated, I think I know what I'm getting issue for your 50th. so anyway I did want to find there's a sentence here oh yeah and I hear you ask Dom what is this stuff made of

I know I've already moved on I'm sorry my tattoo is very disengaging yeah what's it how does it work actually that is a good question so the answer is

I've just read what it's made of and I still don't know which is I'm sort of thinking E ink or something instead of using thin noble metal films such as electrodes

and interconnects oh forget that no way which is old technology We adopt the cut and paste method to fabricate stretchable serpentine ribbons of commercially available conductive graphite deposited polyutheran sheets or GPUs, as they call them. To reduce the contact impedance of GPU and improve attachment to human skin, we create an adhesive P-T-O-D-T-P S is honestly true,

composite coating of GPU filamentary serpentines for forward EEG and EOG measurements. with suppressed motion artefacts. Can you tell how bored I am by this already? This isn't written all over my face. No, look, I mean, this is just one of the, I guess, many, many, many, many, many, many devices like this where you're just sort of saying, if it's so good, you get it, which is my sort of response to Elon Musk's neuralink. No, but don't you think that if you did contribute to the device magazine, you probably would get it. I just look at the image.

It's actually worth looking at this if you can online. No, it really isn't. But the extent to which they're massively intrusive. Like, it does look a bit like something out of that cyberpunk 277 game, right? Yeah, it would actually be... It's like an augment. It would be really cool to have this for art. Yeah, if it didn't do anything.

But the moment it becomes useful. Because just to give you a sense of what we're looking at, there's what it is is there's a series of tattoos, little black squares. There's like little boxes and things. There's four boxes on your head. And little squiggles joining them up. And then a little tattoo that goes down underneath your eye. There's also this small, though, the giant blue box.

There's like a battery or something that sits flush on the, it's literally like just getting, I don't know, a matchbox and gluing it to your forehead. But that's just in the beta version. Sure. Okay. Yeah. Can we do that one in place.

But I do think that once they get it up and running and it's all good. Because what they say is actually their method for measuring all this stuff is unbelievably accurate. Right. It's actually the right way to do it. It does look like a whole bunch of EEGs hardwired to your forehead. It looks like the sensors are in there too. Yeah, it's like tattooing ink.

Like the ink is conductive. So it can sort of... Well, I look forward, Charles, to this being applied to Amazon workers to see whether they really do need to go to the toilet. And how much does it cost, you ask? Oh, God. $20 for each tattoo? Really?

Yes. I think $20. Yes, it's really cheap. And your dignity. and sense of kind of cerebral independence. This is what's going to happen in the future is that our employees are going to monitor our engagement to see if actually working or not.

What a nightmare. Well, it won't be our employees. It'll be AI robots. Of course, they're AI overlords. Yeah, AI overlords because it's exactly the sort of hard data that an AI robot needs to sort of get you to keep working. I suppose it's the equivalent of the metrics we get about how long people listen to our podcast for,

which means, I don't know if we can cover all the things we've got in this episode, Charles. It's been a really interesting discussion. To me, that is perfect for Welcome to the Future because somehow at the same time, Charles, chillingly dystopian and yet really dull. That's an absolute slam dunk. So we should have a break and then we'll just quickly square off on the other two things. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold. anymore, FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes.

Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. And it's really disappointing because I really wanted to buy one of these things. But this guy on Hacker News has put together a little, you know, GoFundMe style, what are they called, you know, Kickstarter-style project where he's put. together a whole lot of like a robot arm right but the difference between because you can just

get them you can actually 3D print robot arms now and put them all together the difference between his one and the 3D printed ones is instead of because the problem is once you build the robot arm you've then got to program it to move and there's all these different protocols that you've got to use to get it to move up and down and left and right and the you know the grip strength is a whole different thing that you've got to teach it and everything like that and become the It does sound very complicated, yeah, yeah. And instead what he did was he hooked it all up and then he just and also hooked a camera up.

He plugged all that into an AI and said, okay, just watch me do things for half an hour and try and interact with the world using all this sort of motives. Wow, so it actually just observed and figured it out. And try and work out, you know, how the arm moves based on, yeah, based on just doing it yourself and after half an hour he's he's reached this point where it's actually it works right you can play chess and stuff like that and it can you know so he's then hooked it up to just a chatbot GPT type thing and said okay um play chess against me and it's accurate enough to be able to pick up pieces and move them on a chess board we are so doomed we're as a species

We are so doomed And then it's 200 bucks Wow but as against that If you put wheels on that thing That thing can tidy my house So I say bring it on That's what I want to do But actually Charles

I don't know if you saw this Wouldn't that create That's too much compute To be able to tidy your house dom That's not going to happen They would destroy the environment Like suddenly we use Oh yeah

We'd have to mine We actually have to have nuclear power Wouldn't we To solve the problem of Dom's house The cleaning of Dom's house I've just moved House and the sheer effort involved. So there's a really interesting kind of counterpoint to AI. And I know this goes against a little bit,

this goes a little bit against the vibe of Welcome to the Future. But kind of reassuringly, there's this whole assumption that, you know, you can teach a large language model to do anything. And at case in point, what you've just talked about with the arm. And Apple's got a study called the illusion of thinking, which has looked at whether these new AIs

that actually is supposed to be able to reason. So things like, what's it called? the Chinese deep think, whatever it's called. All these ones are actually supposed to be able to apply logic and learn how systems work and so on, rather than simply predicting the next thing, the way that large language models do well now.

Oh yeah? So they gave, Apple gave these, gave it increasingly complicated puzzles and it simply couldn't solve them. Yes, but you do know what the actual paper says about that. What does it say? It doesn't say that it can't ever solve them. It's saying that,

if you limit the amount of time and the resources that it has to be able to solve them, you can't solve them. So it's not saying AI can't solve every problem in the world or really complicated tasks. It's saying it's not very, it fails very quickly once you limit the amount of time and compute and the ability to sort of be able to solve it themselves. Oh, sure. I mean, presumably down the track, this is solvable. But the other, no, no, no, but it's saying it's solvable now.

But the problem is, and this paper is specifically not saying what everyone in the press is reported. Okay. What is actually saying is the problem with AI is that as soon as you start limiting its ability to solve problems by saying, okay, you've got only 12 gigabytes of RAM to do this or you can't keep accessing the internet the whole time and you've got to do it within one minute or something like that, that's when it breaks down. If you say go for your life, take as long as you want, it will still be a, it will actually be able to solve those problems. That's what they found. Except that of course they're not going to, that's not a realistic thing you can do.

Well, this is why Apple is so interested in this problem, right? Because what they want to do is they want to put intelligence on their devices and have local things that happen really fast. Because you've got literally hundreds of millions of users who don't want to wait around with their iPhone going, oh, you know. Hey, Siri. Hey, Siri. What are your time is my flight. Yeah. What you want is you want Siri to go, I found some web results.

Check your phone. Charles, I thought this whole paper was to justify the bit at the start of their, it's another excursion, the WWDC presentation that they just gave where apparently everything is going liquid metal, whatever it's called. Yeah, I've installed it on my phone. Oh, you've got liquid glass already. I've installed the beta on my phone. Oh, nifty.

Look at that. It's exactly the same. Just the clock is slightly bigger. Yeah, the clock is bigger. They've got an annoying. bookmarks feature, which makes it harder to... Just looks more like Vision Pro, which nobody wanted. But there's a point where at the start of the presentation

where Craig Federeg says, we need a bit of extra time to make the AI do all the personalised things we wanted to do. And I thought that because of that, because the AI has been massively delayed, because it's supposed to be able to be aware of context, right? And it can't do that at all. No. And they've kind of said, oh, we're going to get that down the track.

And I thought they were saying it's not possible for anyone to do that. All AI is shit. I thought that was the point of the paper. No, no, no. they're saying is it's actually impossible given the limitations that we thought we could do it with. The other thing I love about this study though is that the AI is also excessively confident and extroverted and we trust it even though it sort of boldly says it all to do something and then it can't. Well which brings us to the perfect example of that which is

one of John's articles on the Chase website went incredibly viral over the past couple of days And then, of course, a whole lot of Americans wanted context about what the hell the chaser was, you know, was it a serious news website? Great question. And so all these people were asking GROC, which is Twitter's AI, you know, what is the chaser? And GROC was quite, you know, actually accurately answering.

The chaser is a theoretical website. Because on X you can do at GROC, what is this? And it will reply. It's quite useful. But then it got to. the thing of, so John put the article under his name right, because he wrote the article

and so it's giving a whole lot of explanations for why it's a parody website. And one of the, number three, visual and stylistic cues. The image accompanying the post includes a red coffee cup icon a nod to the Chaser's branding. The article is credited to John Delmenico

a fictional name, often used in their satire. I looked at his entire output. I have many, many, many any years and assume there's no such person as John Delmenico. And he has a Twitter account that shares, like, literally that's right in front of them that he's a real person. But I kind of feel like this is the future value.

You don't know whether even the real person. Like I'm starting to question the existence of John Delmenico. Does that mean you have to pay him? Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking maybe. Maybe we just need to sort of cut off the bank transfers and see what happens. It could be an illusion. And if anyone questions it, like, say, the law, I can just point to this and say, but

I got told it was fictional. Speaking of which, Charles, and this is an opportunity for the chase, just another excursion, sorry about that. But did you see the story that a lot of remote working positions? So if you advertise a job that can be done remotely, 100% remotely, a lot of the applicants, it turns out, are North Koreans operating surreptitiously. I did see that. And they've got, they generally have someone sitting in America or whatever with the bank of 50 laptops.

Yes. So they look like they're coming from America. Yes. But that made me think, should you hire some North Koreans? I don't know if there's a law against it here, the way there is in America. They'd probably come very cheap. John gets a North Korean satirist. That's a very good idea.

To post as John Delmenico. Yes. Yes. Do you think they would be up with Australian politicians? I suppose it doesn't matter, does it? No, they can Google Anthony Albanesey, can't they? And in effect, a lot of our most viral articles are about the US and Trump and stuff like that. Yes, and they'd probably be able to do that.

They can be the foreign desk. You'd be able to tell if they didn't have a very good sense of humor about Kim Jong-un. Yes. That might be a bit of a giveaway. That would be a bit of a problem. But that's it. I mean, one person's scandal is another person's business model, Charles, as we've often seen. Yep.

No, I think that's... Have we got some more future to unfold? So just the robot, which was suggested by J.T. by the year. Thanks, J.T. A big country bit up. Vassar robotics. So if you want to look it up and buy one even though you can't, because it's all sold out, Vassar robotics is the fast learning arm.

Yes. And then the final piece, which is also from JT, is about how actually people don't know why tickles tickle. Oh, right? Gargolasis, which is the technical scientific term for tickling, is still a complete puzzle for neuroscience. And this is science. advances magazine has reported on the fact that there has been no advances in the science of tickles and basically has called in an editorial on the idea that actually we need

proper studies about it because it's a sort of it's something common to all humanity why does a tickle tickle it's a great question yes and it's pointing out socrates aristotle bacon galileo descart and darwin all theorized about tickling but after two millennia of intense philosophical interest, experimentation remains scarce. So the only problem is, I don't know about you, Dom, but would you sign up to a tickling...

No, I hate being tickle. I hate being tickled, too. I think it's cracked why there's no research in a randomised trial. Okay, there we go. That's a good one to finish on. Charles, thank you for that amazing rundown of so many current scientific topics. If I had a tattoo,

it really would truly say that I was at least most interested. We're from the iconic ice network. Catch you tomorrow. In the present. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes.

Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.C.