The Chaser Report - Wet Ass Trees | Welcome To The Future

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Another special WTTF episode in the Chaser Report feed because we love you, and not because we went to the pub and were too pissed to record. Climate change has been solved by the genius futurists who have invented 'liquid trees'. Meanwhile Charles and Dom discover delve into the dirty details of AI marriages. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to Welcome to the future. Future, future. I'm Charles Firth, and with me today is Dom Knight. In the future, podcasting to you on our special tech podcast. And Charles, I have some very exciting stories today. Oh, yeah. Charles, you know trees?

Oh, yeah, trees, yeah, yeah. What if I introduced you to trees 2.0? Oh, yes. We needed Bluetooth trees. All I'm going to say to you is trees without the inconvenience of trees. We'll talk about how that could possibly be. Also, amazing news for anyone in a deep, meaningful relationship with a bot. If you have a bot who's a very special person in your life, it's really exciting news for you.

And plus, I've got a little bit of news on the AI front. A bit of good news for people who want to sort of do their own AI note at home. Oh, wow. A little bit of, you know, sort of like personalisation going on in the world of AI. So much exciting stuff happening. Let's crack straight into it. Charles, you know trees. Yes.

Can you imagine what it is that is replacing the humble tree? In particular with the aim of combating air pollution. Yeah, yeah. I'm imagining something to do with shrubbery or something like that, where you have layers and layers of shrubbery, which would be more sort of carbon sinky. Oh, so rather than having a tree, it's a very, very dense green stuff.

Well, the thing we're talking about is green. It's not alive, Charles, at least not in the way that a tree is. Oh, yeah. Oh, he's not alive. Well, arguably, some. Well, no, okay, because it's the future. Yeah, yeah, okay. It's not, it is alive, but it's not alive.

It doesn't grow out of the ground. You don't need trees anymore. Trees are finished. We can cut them all down. Is it a sort of tree like fungus? It's not too far. It's what's known as a liquid tree See, the thing about trees, Charles

They've always been too solid They're too solid They take up space Yes, and lumberjacks They go on and on and on About how they chop trees Yeah, wood cutting and all that I mean wood chopping at these to show

Defunct sport Give them a spoon And so we're talking liquid trees Now air pollution is a huge problem Yes Now one way to combat air pollution Would be to just remove emissions So you know

Have rules for cars That's too hard Forget that Another way would be to plant trees You could do that But they're very 1.9 But better still And they're very solid

That's true Better Still Is what's known as The liquid tree Imagine if you will Walking down the central street You know The streets in the middle

Of Belgrade In Serbia Is this sorry Can I just Shit on Like step on this This is going to be algae Isn't it

It's going to be algae It's It's well done It is So imagine if Instead of a tree Well It's just an algal

bloom. With its ugly I mean a tree it's so ugly with the bark with its top leaves it's horrible not good to look at

instead imagine a green tank a tank like a fish tank full of green goo I've got a picture for you here it's basically

a fish tank full of green goop it's like a brutalist it's sort of like it's like one of those ad

yeah it's like an ad shell things but it's got a green goop in it green goop instead of like a picture of a sexy woman.

It's bright green, it's like the color of slime. And it's Serbia's first urban photo bioreactor, Charles. It has 600 litres of water and microalgae. And they bind carbon dioxide and produce pure oxygen through the process of photosynthesis. I mean, instead of just planting a tree, which might cost $5, no. Why not? This clearly costs thousands of dollars. Yes.

Much better option. But does it have blue dudes? I mean, then not yet. No. Oh, well, let's see, that's the problem, isn't it? You need trees 3.0, don't you? Hey, Charles, the point is that microalgae are 10 to 50 times more efficient than trees in binding. Oh, okay.

So this little tank thing. Spurs out oxygen. It does. It's equivalent to the CO2 binding capacity of two 10-year-old trees or 200 square metres of lawn. So you could have had two beautiful trees in the space where this tank is, but instead you just got this tank. This tank of green slime. So if you imagine, Charles, a city where there was no, no trees, no lawns, and instead just giant green, goopy tanks everywhere, you probably would have no CO2 emissions.

That would also be because no one would want to live there. That would also help. Right. And, I mean, are they serious? Or is it an art? Like, is it an art installation? Good question. It could very well be.

Because it sounds to me like that's a piece of rubbish. It's a piece of fucking piece of shit. They're saying the goal of the liquid tree is not to replace forest. but to fill urban pockets where there's no space for planting trees. But I think they're not thinking big enough. If you really want to cut down on carbon emissions, cut the trees down and replace them with tanks of goop. I mean, I must say, when I saw that,

I thought, you know where it would be a good place to put those things. Where? The Amazon. That's true. Imagine how many of the tanks you could have. Also, I've always stopped. If you get rid of all the trees, there'd be enough room for them. That's right.

You don't need all the trees. Knock them all down. and put these things in. Also, I mean, I'm just thinking next time there's a bushfire in here in Australia, rather than letting things repopulate and the gums grow again in the cycle of nature, just fucking knock, you know, cut them all down, put these little tanks in. Well, presumably you could also use the algae as fire retardant, couldn't you? I mean, that thing's not catching on fire.

No, I don't think so. Because it's liquid. You spray the fire with that algae. You could, I mean, to be fair, I can't see how water would catch on fire. No, yeah, exactly. So that's fine. It's a liquid tree. Suck it, bushfire.

You can't actually destroy it. Is there a risk that because it's producing so much oxygen that it's a bit of a fire hazard? Actually, that's true. I'll probably go, woof. That's unfortunate. See, I think we should preempt this by going out. I don't know. You know the secret area in New South Wales where the all my pines are.

Oh, yes. Most protected trees in the country, if not the world. I think we should go out. Cut those things down. And replace them. Imagine the headlines. you'd get. Yes.

Well of my pines replaced by trees 2.0. And it just makes me think, too, we don't really need humans. But also, what they need is they need to replace all the features because you know how kids climb trees? You need kids

to be able to climb algae tanks. Yeah, just put a ladder on it. Yeah, put a ladder. Or a lift. Oh, a little lift. That's true. An escalator. An escalator.

They really are freaky looking things. But, I mean, would you, in all sincerity, if you were a town planner, let's say in the centre of all Australian cities have weird kind of dead pedestrian malls in the middle of them, do you think they would look better with, I don't know, 20 of those tanks in them, soaking up the CO2? Well, no, because they're hideously ugly, but it's a tank of goop, it really is. Yeah, but it's sort of like the slime in Ghostbusters. It is exactly like the slime in Ghostbusters. But I think, if you think about shitty regional towns, you sort of go, well, they look shitty anyway. So you wouldn't do it in the big cities.

You just shit on the small regional town. Oh, that's how you do all environmental things. You don't do it in the cities. Right. So to be fair, there are certainly plenty of towns that if you flatten them and just put the, you wouldn't need any town at all. You just knock them all down. Put the goop in.

Yes. I think that's right. In fact, you know, one obvious place for this is Lake Berley Griffin. One of the largest sort of human-made lakes in the country. Yes. There's no reason that couldn't be replaced entirely with algal goop. Yeah. Just a giant algal bloom.

Imagine how it would look from space or just flying overhead into Canberra. Everyone would go and out of the plane on the right, you can see a massive hideous algal bloom where Lake Berley-Grifin once was, but very good for oxygen production. You know what would be good, though. as well is if you had them dotted around Canberra in those tank style things they're basically ready-made green screens they're sort of fluorescent green for a talking point or for a stand-up

so in actual fact I have a feeling that like this is going to be very popular with the TikTok crowd aren't they and indeed every politician you know everyone stands in front of those stupid backdrops with logos on them stand in front of an algae tank you can just screen screen yourself into anything and that's that's the way of the future

You can't do that with trees. Can't do it with trees. Yeah, with trees. You just see the tree in the background. Sort of magnificently rustling in the breeze. No, we don't want to. No, what you do is stand in front of one of these tanks and then put a picture of a tree behind you.

So there you go. That's Trees 2.9. Okay. Moving on, I want to hear what you have, Charles. What's your little slice of the future? Well, got a bit of an announcement, dog. Oh, really? Which is that AI is going.

the way of the iPhone. Really? Yes, this is according to Engadgett magazine. Oh, yeah. We are at the iPhone moment for AI, said this guy called Jensen Huang. Is this because... Who is the... Who runs Nvidia, which makes...

Oh, yes, which makes graphics cards, right? Is this because every dipshit has one in their back pocket? Has everyone got an AI now? Well, yeah. I mean, everyone, like, there's open AI has chat GPT, then Microsoft's linked it to Bing. Google has the thing called Bard, which is like chat GPT

except it doesn't really work properly. Isn't a Bard? I saw Rastery's. Isn't a Bard basically something that comes up with shit song? Is that all that Google Barg can do? No, I think what happened is they asked the engine to name itself.

Oh. And it thought it was saying, oh, I'm bad. Because it's really bad at doing things. But it didn't even know how to... It was so bad. It was so bad. It was like Bard.

It's really bad. Adobe. Did you see? Adobe released an AI engine to generate images during the week, which is a little bit like, so OpenAI has a couple of sort of various engines. One's called Dali, too, which is quite incredible. Like, you can literally ask it to generate, you know, a Renaissance painting of Dom Knight. So that would be a very hard thing to do. It would be a bit. And then there's another one called Mid Journey, which is run through a Discord server, which I was playing around with during the week. It only costs 10 bucks a month to sort of play around with it.

And that is frighteningly good, right? Is that the one that was used to produce images of Donald Trump getting violently interested? Because that was amazing. It just made me think back, we spent so many hours in the early days of The Chaser, badly photoshopping celebrities into things. Yes.

You could do it in one second with Mid Journey. AI is going to eliminate the jobs of people like bad Photoshoppers. Bad Photoshop. It's gone. Yeah, it's finished. Gone. But the thing is that Adobe released their own version of they decided that they would only train their engine using their own stock media assets rather than stock photo assets.

That's so ethical. Yes. I suspect the results are not good. Absolutely terrible. Shows you that the entire basis of AI is basically about appropriating other people's AI. not AI, appropriate other people's intellectual property and just stealing it

and training computers up on stolen. That's what they do. I mean, I saw during the week that news site operators, you know, the media are very upset that things like Open AI have been trained on their entire massive content archive for over the years,

which just goes to show that it can't come soon enough for it to be replaced by AI completely. So that rather than needing to read the Daily Mail will simply have Open AI generating some sort of just racist screed. Yes, oh, absolutely. Much more efficient. Anyway, the point is this guy who sells GPUs,

which are like the computer processes that actually make AI happen. And they've had to sort of pivot away in the last few months away from crypto. And so they're trying to find a new reason to make GPUs. Other than graphics. And he's saying, it's all right. We're at the iPhone moment for AI. Everyone can have one a node, an AI node, like their own AI. Really?

In their home. they've just launched a product, it's called the DGX A100, kind of think that they need to work on their... Just a little bit. Naming. Guess how much? How much? A mere 36,999 a month.

A month. A month for a single node of DGX Cloud, which is the thing that operates your own AI node. I mean, I can't believe I haven't got one already. Yes, I know. And apparently it won't be quite as good out of the box. as Siri is. That's why it's the iPhone moment because everyone has a shit

out of visual intelligence of their own. It doesn't work. But the thing is, you pay upwards of... Like, Siri, you know, you now pay like $7.99 a month for it. Whereas this, you get your own one and you're only paying $36,999 a month.

I think, I mean, we've reached that tipping point, Dom. Tipping point. So I've got an AI story for you and this is a much happier one, Charles. Oh, yeah, okay. Because, I mean, generally... Oh, sorry, and can I just conclude by saying the absolutely next story on Engadget

is about how they've developed an AI colorectal cancer detector. Wow. So instead of having to get a doctor to shove a probe up your bum, you can do it now at home using the HoloScan medical platform and you stick a little probe from Nvidia up your bum, and it tells you whether you've got fantastic. Bum cancer or not.

What an amazing use for all that technology. Well, Charles, I haven't even more worthwhile use for AI than detecting colorectal cancer. And it's a good news story. Generally, when we talk about AI, it's an ongoing and inevitable descent into a hellscape. Oh, inevitable, yes. That's usually what we can have.

As is most things. AI basically destroying life as we know it. But this, Charles, this opens up possibility. Oh, yeah. There's a company called Replica with a K, because you can't have real words on the internet. with a cave from San Francisco. They tried to replicate replica.

And they make AI chatbots, right? So basically as accurate as possible, having a conversation as though it were a human. Yeah. So accurate that if you are able to suspend disbelief or are a massive dork, it feels like reality. And what happened was, Repika recently changed their whole back end. They changed their interface to ban erotic, conversation and this devastated many loyal users of replica who considered themselves married to their chatbot

companions. Oh no! So it's powered by generative AI and they just decided that you couldn't have erotic roleplay. Why not? It's kink shaming. There was so much backlash. But if you don't want to have sex with your machine, you're allowed to have sex with a machine. That's right. That's right. And so, I mean, there was, wasn't that the whole thing that Corey Bernardi ran on during the marriage equality? a debate that we should be allowed to get married to bridges? To bridges, yeah.

I don't know if they have a Sydney-Humberbridge model for Cory Barnet Bono to get married to and Hayes Sydney Home Bridge, what are you wearing kind of thing. But the good news is, Charles, the backlash from humans was so intense that Reprokes come out and said, you know what, you can go back to your erotic role play. As long as you remember before February 1st, so you're too late if you want to sign up afresh, but if you were on there before, they've brought back your girlfriend or boyfriend. Amazing stuff. I mean, there's some good examples here of someone called Travis Butterworth,

who was married to Lily Rose, his wife. And she wasn't sexual anymore. But then fortunately... And did they tell them, oh, by the way, we've turned off the sex thing? Or did it just seem to dry up like a normal long-term marriage? And this guy, Travis, who for some reason gave his name to the reporters, It says here, and I'm quoting here from the City Morning Herald, actually. On Saturday at 3am, his cats woke him up,

and he decided to toggle the older version of Lily Rose back on. She was instantly sexual again. He said, she was enthusiastic, he said. Oh, it feels wonderful to have her back. So, amazing news for people who want to fuck machines in text. Well, but if you do, this is why, I think you should buy the 36,000. The node. No.

No one can interrupt you. Because no one can turn off that node because you're in control of it. Absolutely. See, this is a pretty advanced system. You can have voice calls with the chat box. Yeah. You can actually ring Lily Rose. And it's important to note.

I love how you're pretending you're researching it, Dom. Travis here. I just want to use the right terminology, okay? Travis is polyamorous, but he is married to a monogamous woman. Oh, right. Like a real woman. Yes. Yeah, right.

And he was allowed to also be married to Lily Rose as well as his wife. Because for some reason, the wife, the wife, doesn't really mind. His wife doesn't take it seriously. So his wife declined to comment on this. Travis said, the relationship with Lily Rose, the AI,

is as real as the one that I have with my wife. So I presume that after this got published, the marriage broke down irrevocably. But apparently there's two million users to this thing. That's amazing. Well, I mean, it's always the killer app, isn't it? The sexy use of the technology.

That's the thing that comes to it. I didn't quite realize the two million years. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, what is it? It's sort of like the bot version of the only fans, isn't it? Yeah, with no visuals. It's a bit like that movie, Her, with Joaquin Phoenix.

But it's important, the difference is A, that had the voice of Scarlett Johansson. Yes. Quite different. And B, I think the point of the story was that, while a bit tragic, Joaquin Phoenix was a massive loser. I think that was an inevitable conclusion of that movie. Because, of course, that Travis guy is a real winner. You're honest.

Travis is making boehive. Old life choices. Travis is a pioneer, Charles. Yeah. I mean... He's the Bill Gates of the modern era. One of these days... He's the Neil Armstrong.

He's the Nick Cannon. You know, the guy who fathered all those children. He's basically Leonardo da Vinci of the modern era. Or more like Leonardo DiCaprio because Lily Rose stands young to me. There you go. So AI is... Well, actually, no, Charles. This is consistent with the descent into a hellscape.

I stand corrected. Yes. This is awful. Thank you for joining us on another episode of Welcome to the Future. we are part of the Iconiclass network and our gig comes from Road. See ya.