Tomorrow, Today - Biodisaster X, Artificial Intelligence, and 6G with Dr. Dean McDonnell

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

In this episode, we dive into the paradigm of modern technology and ecological collapse with IT Carlow’s Dr. Dean McDonnell. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. McDonnell was an Associate Lecturer of Cyberpsychology in the Institute of Art, Design, and Technology (Dun Laoghaire), and in Educational and Developmental Psychology in Marino Institute of Education. We discuss his work “Addressing Biodisaster X Threats With Artificial Intelligence and 6G Technologies” Check out Dr. McDonnell’s work: https://www.itcarlow.ie/research/researchers/meet-researchers-e-n/dr-dean-mcdonnell.htm Andy IG: @theandyciccone IG @poorprolesalmanac www.poorproles.com Nash: Twitter: @Itsnashflynn Twitter: @DeathandFriends

Nash, we are a podcast. A podcast about... Did you know that? No. I just came into the studio because you told me to. I followed direction well. Yeah. There's candy in a van.

Go find out. It's delicious. What's your favorite type? It happens to be that. This is how I get taken everywhere. This is how I got married, actually. I don't remember that. Well, it wasn't just you.

Oh. Well, this is weird. So welcome. This is Tomorrow Today. A podcast brought you by. by Navery, Inc. The future is now, old man. The future is Havery.

Follow the navery. Okay. I don't know. Sorry. That was terrible. Yes. Are we releasing this as the first episode that's like an episode? I don't know.

You're the one in charge. I don't know either. I thought you were in charge. Isn't that why we have like a team of people to like make sure we're on task? Jake? All right. I guess this is the first episode. Neat.

So welcome. Assuming you've listened to our whatever first episode, you kind of know what's going on. Unless this is the first episode in which case. Unless this is the first episode in which case, we clearly don't know what's going on and you also don't know what's going on. So guess what? We're all in the same boat together. It makes all of us. It's sinking.

It's real bad. So speaking of real bad, we're actually going to be talking about, I don't know, collapse, you could say. Oh. So we have a special guest. that we're going to be interviewing later on, Dr. Dean McDonnell, over at the Carlo Institute of Technology. We chat a bit about this idea of biodicastor X and how technology is going to save us, which, you know, is the beginning of every terrible movie. And maybe it could be like a really cool, like beach body workout, biodysaster X. Like, get collapse fit.

To be perfectly honest, I'm hoping not to survive collapse. So fit is probably the opposite of what I've. want. Like your body's a disaster. Master that disaster with the bio-disaster X. I can no longer tell. I can no longer tell this is a metaphor for something. Yeah. It could be. It can be whatever you want it to be. I don't want it to be a metaphor. Anyways, my name is Andy and my co-host. Hi, I'm Nash. Sponsored by Beachbody. Yes. I look incredibly fit, which is why I have a voice for radio. get your endorphins up when the chips are down. Hell yeah.

Maybe the potato chips, maybe, you know, having access to water and all those other important things. I thought you were going to go with gambling, but I guess freshwater is probably a perk. Yeah. So speaking of this whole subject matter, we wanted to talk about this idea of technology because honestly, I'm kind of a ludite. So when we talk about things like technology, I'm just like usually like drooling in the corner and don't know what's going on. Can verify.

So what is really interesting about this whole concept of technology is that I don't think people, at least myself, really fully understand the scope of what technology is capable of and kind of that escalation, so to speak, of how significantly it improves. If it does. I say improves as in like how many people here listening used to use Napster? Lime wire for me, but yeah, sure. So do you remember what it meant when you had a fast download speed? Do you remember what that number was?

No, I just remember it took ages. Yeah, so I think for my computer and my internet, which is like, you know, AOL or whatever, it was like 4.8 megabytes per second, which meant like a song, if you downloaded a song real fast, it took like 10 to 15 minutes, right? Wow. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. And that was like, oh, man, we got that so quick.

and like, you know, if you want to like download a video, you'd only get like the first 10 seconds anyway. And, you know, if it was porn, like, that's all you needed anyway. Wow. Right out the gate. Yeah. Episode one. We did it.

We done did it. We got banned. We just lost. We're no longer a part of Navy Inc. I'm sorry, everyone. We can no longer use that brand in any of our advertising. Sorry, Jake. The point being is that technology has evolved really quickly,

and I think it's really easy to forget how quick. involves. So we're talking about 6G, which I know, you just got your 5G shot and like, you might have gotten your 6G booster, but, you know, it doesn't have a use yet. So what is the, what's the big deal? What's the big deal between 4G and 5G? What's the big deal between 5G and 6G? Did we start at 1G? I feel like the first G I ever heard about was 4. I thought it was G unit. That seems like a different thing. You sure? No, I'm not positive, no, but it does seem like it should be different. All right. So if you don't know what a G is, it is a G unit, but not that G unit. Oh. Sorry. So G, 1G was considered like analog, which is like, you know, getting data that isn't, like,

images and stuff like that. And then 2G was digital, which was like this really big transformative moment. It's when, like, you could start sending texts and pictures and not just, like, audio waves. So, like, that was a huge step forward for, like, the anxiety-induced crowd that don't like making phone calls. Nash. Don't know who that is describing at all. Yeah. So this whole concept, even though it went from analog to digital, it's still functionally

doing the same thing. It's riding these radio waves. And in this process, like, we can basically use new radio waves at, like, lower frequencies, which allow us to carry more content. So the band gets wider, but the distance gets shorter. So that's why like, oh, we need to roll all these 5G towers and things like that happens is because it can carry more stuff, it can't go as far if that makes sense. I don't know.

I'm not a scientist. Well, that's what I have you here for. Just be like, are you rambling like an idiot or are you actually making like salient points? I'm following you, but I'm also comic relief. Sure. Is this supposed to be funny? Are you funny, Nash? Oh, okay.

I didn't realize this is going to be a bullying podcast. Brought to you by Neighbour Inc. And Beachbody. Pull your friends in the fitness. The American way. So the big deal about this is that, like, technology can, through, like, the increasing use of new G's grows very significantly. If we think about, again, the big deal of sending, like, a really crappy pixelated picture

through 2G to, like, being able to send video content, like, you know, at the snap of your fingers. that's like, you know, multiple gigabytes large. And that's going to continue to expand with 5G and 6G. The big challenge is that when you're traveling that distance, and there needs to be more towers because it's traveling shorter distances. Now, the big deal about 6G versus 5G, though, is really important because with 6G you can travel, again, exponentially larger amounts of data. And the problem today is while we have, like, the Internet of Things,

it's not enough to, we don't have the capacity to process all of that data from different places in any meaningful way that we can get a real-time analysis of it. With 6G theoretically, we're going to be at that point. What does that analysis do exactly? So what that basically does is it allows us to be able to take things. The only way I can think of it is like if you thought about like an image of a city and then having data points from every single spot in the city and like watching overwhelming trends.

So you could watch for trends of sicknesses and disease and things like that in real time through a number of different resources, which we'll talk about in the interview. And that allows us to be on top of things. Like if you think about like as you're listening to this, I'm sure there's probably at this point some new variant of COVID that has come out. Great. Yeah. Welcome, future. But the important thing with that is being able to identify it as soon as possible to limit it. its spread. So obviously, COVID is probably not going to be the last biodasaster that exists,

but having the resources through artificial intelligence and then being able to travel that data in ways that are meaningfully efficient so that we can synthesize it through that AI to be able to say, all right, we've seen in New York City from five million different points that the data is changing every second. We can see this trend and we know something's happening. We can deal with it immediately. So I hear that. That sounds good in theory, but I'm going to put my tinfoil hat on just quickly and wonder aloud, is this infringing on our rights? Listen, as a proud American citizen, an eagle. As an eagle, I will tell you, Ka, also don't tread on me unless it's explicitly treading on me.

unless I do it unless it's only against brown people well okay so so yeah no it's a huge problem and again this is all like in almost like a utopian sense of this is how theoretically this technology could work is it going to do that probably not it's the same reason why I am running another podcast that's about preparing for collapse

because it doesn't end that well very often but that's at least the process that we're trying to think through when we're talking about this conversation, kind of what opportunities exist and like, all right, we understand this is the utopia of it. Let's scale that back to like what a meaningful, realistic goal would be. And I don't have an answer for what that goal is, but rather to at least broach the question about whether or not this is something to consider and to be aware of, because obviously as we move forward, like there's going to be more COVIDs. I mean, 6G sounds great, but I always worry about things that sound great plus late stage capitalism.

You know, those things don't usually end well. Listen, future President Buttigieg is going to make sure that all of our sewer rats are collecting our data and they're only giving it through, you know, anonymously through Google and Google will process that data. and then, you know, if you suddenly start getting ads for like, I don't know. Things you've only thought about. Things you've only thought about. Hey, have you considered that maybe you need to have some more fiber in your diet based on what will be found in your sewer? Oh. Please don't suggest that the future is the sewer rats diagnosing our gastrointestinal issues.

Please let's not go there. It's too late. It's been done. Oh, God. Why do you think he was putting, what hells his title now? He's the Transportation Secretary. Oh, who cares? He's in charge of all of the sewer systems now in the world.

He's Mayo P. He's the rat face. Come on. It makes sense. Like, if you ever needed like real life symbolism in your life, it's that rat face is in charge of the sewer and the metro systems and all of that stuff. And eventually, he's going to empower his people to take over the world through, you know, very smart, MBA driven decisions. Oh, God. Well, look, he can do whatever he wants as long as we are allowed to call him President Pete in which we can make him pee-Pee.

First off. Pre-O-Pete. No, no. P-Pee. That I will only ever, or president but, a judge. I'm sorry. It's got to be Preo-Pete. It's like Mayo Pete and president. I guess we can agree to disagree on that one. This is where I draw the line. Okay.

I'm willing to accept a lot, but this is it. The podcast is over before it starts. Like many great things in the world. Like 6G and AI solving our poop problems. So let me ask you this. We're at 6G now, which has rolled up to no one. Pretty much nobody has 5G phones unless you're a millionaire. Do we get to 7G or is that an apocalypse trigger?

It's interesting. So one of the things that comes up in our conversation is around this idea of, you know, we're talking about radio waves and like everything. It can create, like, there's a byproduct, and that byproduct is heat. Now, the bigger the wave and the more data it's carrying, the more heat it lets off. And 5G is starting in some very limited capacity to have problems because it's impacting, like, insects, which, like, you might say, all right, that's not that big of a deal, like, fuck insects anyway, but also, like, that's the foundation of our food system. That's kind of a problem.

And, I mean, the planet is so cold now. Right? We want to add more heat to it. It's doing great. Listen, I need to be able to look at like 8K porn on my phone at any given moment. Like, if I can't look at Carmen Electra's 1995 butthole, then what are we even doing all this for? This is the third time you brought up pornography, and I just am wondering if you're fine. I'm fine. We've been in quarantine for years. I'm totally fine. Okay, great. Well, like Carmen Electra know. So, all right, let's talk about the other thing, I guess that's sort of about this episode, and that is around like, porn.

Yes, porn, absolutely. Think about all the, no, we're not going to go there. Okay, we'll back right up. Yeah, let's put that in reverse and just start over. Drive on over it. I want to talk about this idea of, like, biological weapons. And obviously, like, there's a whole conversation about COVID or whether or not it's a biological weapon that I do not want to touch. No.

Not even with like Mayor Pete's like nasty assingated corpse. Yeah. So the idea of biological warfare, I think, is like this thing that is like really impregnated like our brains in terms of like how we envision the future of war. Like it's going to be like drones and robots and bioterrorism, right? Sure. So while that might be true, biological weapons really been something that has existed and been used for like thousands of years and I'm getting this weird like gnome grinned at me and I don't know

why I actually know a decent bit about the history of the first instance of biological warfare oh yeah I do we did an episode about it on death and friends it's about Hannibal of Carthage oh no who's yours tell me yours so the Hannibal of Carthage is one example there's a bunch of stuff about 3,000 years ago, that was all happening around the same time. And the one that I'm thinking of in particular is basically they would take these clay pots, throw a bunch of venomous snakes in them, and basically shoot them at people's, like, boats. Oh, shit. That's pretty legit. I'm not going to like. Like, where are the snakes going to go? They don't want to drown. This is a very Viking tactic, I feel like. It could be, but Carthage isn't Viking. Well, I know, but I mean. Yeah, so there's this

And then, like, at the same 3,000-ish years ago, people would use, like, moldy rye, which would cause, like, rabbit fever. And that would displace people off of lands because they would basically think that the land was poisoned or that, like, everyone would be sick. And you could just, like, walk in and butcher them all or, you know, whatever they did, like, you know, sign a deed over and then let them gently walk away, you know, depending on if you're watching the Disney version or not. So, like, this is something we've been doing for a lot.

long time. Sure. Now I want your story. So this is actually Black Plague era, and this is one of the first instances of humans using sick people as weapons. But Genghis Khan's army is outside of an Italian city, or excuse me, it's a Turkish city being held by the Italians. The city is walled in, so they're having trouble, you know, having an effect attacking, attacking the army. So what they do is the Black Plague comes with them along the Silk Road to, to Turkey. he, and what they do is as their people start getting sick, they launch their bodies over the

walls, infect the entire city, and then storm the gates once everyone in there is sick or dying. So I like my idea, which is to take those bodies, stuff them full of venomous snakes, and then shoot them over. Because now they've got a cushion for when they land. Oh, a collaboration event. You love it when people work together. Yeah. The point is that this is something that has existed for like a long time.

And it's, despite being something we've been afraid of for like a long, a long time, we've actually, at least the two hosts here, have lived through a few of these experiences, not personally. Not with snakes. Not with snakes. No, no, no. With anthrax. So I don't know if you remember way back when we were in high school, not to date you at all.

Thank you. Appreciate that. But that's probably the most recent, like, first world example. of biological warfare was that someone sent basically like seven letters out to like several media organizations and some Democratic senators, which ultimately killed like five and infected 17 others. That was back like the first time that mailman had to wear gloves when they were delivering mail to be safe.

I don't know. Actually, did that ever go away? I don't know to answer that question. But you know the world is bad when I completely forgot about the entire anthrax thing. Like I feel like we've lived as a generation through so much. horseshit. Like I totally forgot about the first time I was ever scarred by getting mail. And this was like right around 9-11. I think it was like a couple weeks after 9-11. Oh, I thought it was before. Let's Google it.

Hey, guys. Welcome to Google. They've got our stool samples and now they're going to find out our questions about anthrax. We're starting a podcast called, let's Google it, where we just Google things. And all you hear is us breathing into the microphone while we look it up. Well, when I typed it in, it said soon after the terrorist attacks of 9-11, so boom. It was September 18th. It was so scarring for me the entire like package of events. I just blacked it all out. Yeah. She was born her age today and anything that happened before that didn't happen. ADHD and depression have deleted so much of my memory. It's almost surprising that I have a backstory at all. This is something that's existed for a long time and I don't think it's going away.

You know, from simple technology like catapulting, rotting corpses to snakes and, and all that cool shit, it's going to always exist, and it's a tool that people will have. And the role of technology in that process, whether it's through mitigating or exacerbating these types of tools. I was just going to say, can you imagine when we get 8G 9G and we can digitally send people physical viruses?

That's going to be pretty dope. You know, you can Wi-Fi power, like electricity. Explain. I can't, but I know it exactly. exist. Like, it's a thing. Like, you can put it like a switch and then it like uses that it's able to travel past electricity through that radio wave somehow without zapping people in between. I don't like that at all. I know. It sounds fake. It sounds, it makes me want to go move into like a mud hut and just be like, you know what? I'm done with civilization.

It's almost, it sounds to me almost like chem trails are real. And I don't want to have uttered that sentence literally at all. You've heard it here first. I know. Please foil hat. Chemtrails are real. But you know what I mean? It sounds so fake and dangerous that it just gets to exist and we don't get to be like, no, we don't want that power. Thank you. Tass. Yeah, it doesn't respect your laws of physics.

So yeah, that's basically what we chat about in this conversation, a little bit less about the rotting corpses, a little bit more about the technology and the reality that things like COVID are going to be an intimate part of our future under climate change. Hell yeah. Thank you, aerosol cans. the 80s hairstyle just fucking really put a dent in the future. I mean, the 80s did a lot of that in a bunch of different directions, but let's blame hairspray. Fuck hairspray. This podcast is very explicitly anti-hairspray.

Screw you, Revlon. It's not V-O-6. Get out of it. Okay. It was just predicting the future. It was V-O-5G. It was V-O-5G. I don't like this.

Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's disaster climate. change? Maybe it's the booster. I was going to say maybe the boomers invented it. The boomers didn't invent anything good. So yeah, hopefully you guys enjoyed this conversation. I know I didn't. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. Goodbye. Oh. You're stopping it. Do you want to say anything else? Interested in growing food? No, I mean really growing food. Building systems with your ecology and creating sustainability beyond typical stories of permaculture.

If you're interested in this, as well as traditional practices around land management and stewardship, tune into the Port-Prol's Almanac, a podcast that's focused on history, ecology, and of course, growing food, available wherever you get your podcasts or at port-proles.com. Thanks for taking some time to chat. How are you doing in this COVID era as we talk about biodigasters? pleasantly surprised, kind of shocked, I think a range of emotions, to be quite honest. Awesome. So I'm really interested, the thing that springs to mind first when I saw your paper is like,

what came first, the idea or COVID? See, that's why I'm slightly pleasantly surprised. You've fallen into my trap card. Basically, myself and my colleagues there, we've never, physically met. So myself and Sue, for example, and then like Allie and then Juniat and stuff, we've been collaborating on projects since the start of COVID. We've had quite an awful lot of papers going at the same time. We've never met in person and we've always kind of threatened each other with kind of attending conferences together and kind of looking forward to that. But we always

have these discussions about what is the next step and what are we going to be looking at in the future and trying to look ahead because it gets incredible. incredibly upsetting and very kind of everything is the same. Like every week, it's this, these are the many numbers. This is what's happening now. And it's, it can be incredibly bleak. Like my background of psychology, I'd look into mental health quite an awful lot and technologies. And another one of my pleasant surprises is how far advanced we've gotten in terms of Zoom, like Zoom, like Blackboard in terms of education and stuff. We've done so many things. And then this kind of biodastor end.

And we were kind of thinking about it before and Sue came up with the idea. I was like, maybe we should do a paper on something that we kind of have, we've heard an awful lot of definitions. Is this a biodessaster X? Like what could we actually learn from everything that we're going through now? And is it possible that we could extend it that little bit further? So it was kind of the idea and then trying to apply some of our experience to these ideas that little bit later. And then our interests. Like I think we're all nerds at heart.

Like, I was raised on pretty much Isaac Asimov all the way through to everyone else. So, like, technology has a big place of my heart. And I think it kind of parallel, I guess. I'm sorry, I actually didn't do a great job. I should have asked you to introduce yourself. I know you're a professor. Can you talk a little bit about that and your qualifications, I guess? Sure.

No, sorry. Yeah. So Dr. Dean McDonald. I was just too excited. I was as well. I didn't stop. So currently I'm working in the Institute of Technology in Carlo. So that is based in Ireland.

I worked quite an awful lot in Dublin. I got my PhD from Dublin. My background is in psychology. So currently I am a member of council of the Psychological Society of Ireland. So basically what my interests are is kind of looking at that bridge between human interaction and technology. And how technology influences things like human development, social development interactions. And yeah, pretty much that. And again, love gaving, love anything got to do with technology.

I try to get as many of the gadgets as possible and to try and mitigate as many debates or fears that people have about technology. There are fears, don't get me wrong, but I think sometimes the way they're kind of portrayed in media is nuanced and there are errors. So hopefully that it doesn't spark too many debates, but let's, or maybe it does. But yeah, there's just quite a few things that we could discuss, I guess. Yeah, I'm kind of the opposite. it. I'm a Luddite farmer who I would like to see as to do as little as I have to to integrate technology that's going to break. So I'm I'm the person you are trying to convert to utilizing some of those stuff. I want to talk a little bit about this idea of disease X or biodicester X.

Like I think it's one of those things that we all understood and I have this visceral memory of watching like, you know, those cheesy prepper shows that used to be on TV? Yeah. And, like, somebody would be like, I'm afraid for, like, the flu that is the end of all flus. And, like, then at the end, they would have the little pitch about, like, scientists say, you know, this is something that's going to happen in the next hundred years. But we're well prepared. And you're like, oh, cool. These people are nuts.

And here we are today. So you brought up these ideas of, like, artificial intelligence and technology. How do these things correlate to one another, technology, AI, and these ideas of like disease or bio-weapons or whatever you want to call them? So one of the kind of areas of research that I'm particularly interested in is that idea of, again, AI. So in my master's research, I was looking at kind of telehealth, looking at online therapies, looking at how could we use technology to enhance therapeutic practice.

So, like, again, I'm a big fan of psychology looking like human behavior, mental health. So my, from the entire get-go, it was always that we can't replace a human therapist. That that is not something that we can do. And there's a lot, there's a significant body of research there that says that the outcomes are far superior if there is human involvement. And that's, it's quite a full stop to a certain extent. Now, we do have a lot of other programs that if there are, if it's fully online, I mean, there was a researcher, Wagman in, I think it was 88, came up with this concept of level one and level two therapy.

And it was kind of the idea of some listeners, or even yourself, maybe familiar with, like, Eliza and Parry, which were kind of chatbots. And you might remember that kind of that annoying paperclip that came up in Microsoft Word several years back. But it's kind of like a chatbot program where you just talk to it a little. bit like type and it will kind of spit out regurgitate your question and make you reflect just that little bit more and that's kind of like what eliza did by i think was developed by wisenbaum i came out of work earlier and my head is just full of different names so i've mixed that up i apologize

and that was kind of one of the first chatbots to exist and then researchers then developed something called parry and parry was kind of a chat bot again that was designed at basic nLP so natural language processor and it's exactly the same as Siri. Some people might have been playing around or even the Google or Alexa or anything that you might have played around with this idea of just asking, oh, how are you today or hello Google? I'm not going to say that because it's,

yeah, it's after turning on. So the fear of that. They're listening. They are. They never stop. So the way we interact with technologies and stuff. So what research then showed was programs that are,

completely online, that are completely full digital, have a huge dropout rate, that one study reported that 98.6%. I think that was Farvalden in, I'm going to get this wrong, but I think 2015 or 2005, 98.5% dropout rate of that particular experiment that they were trying to carry out. So people just didn't like the idea. So in a follow-up study, they included one phone call and dropout calls, like dropout rates completely, not completely reduced, but were significantly reduced. Then they followed it up with two phone calls and a couple of text messages or emails.

So even though it was still digital interaction, it was a human that was interacting, and that stopped some of the dropout. So other research obviously has then followed up that we know that the therapeutic alliance between a client and a therapist is by far one of the most important factors. And so I'm kind of deviating a little bit,

but it's mainly to show that humans need human interaction and that we can't replace human interaction, but we can support human interaction. So there are programs like games, for example, we might see lots of gamification going on in schools or even in terms of the military applications or in terms of flight simulators or in terms of surgeries.

Like one of the questions that I was posed way back during my master's was one of my lecturers, Dr. Gronia Kerwin, who's now a colleague of mine, basically asked, would you prefer to have a surgery from a doctor who was performed at five times, or would you prefer a surgery to be done on you, that someone has gone through countless hours

of performing a surgery on your body in a digital context? They know everything. They know everything that happens. They've gone through risk. They've done so many other things on your actual body, a digital kind of representation of that. What would you prefer?

And a lot of us were like, well, we prefer the same thing. surgeon who has gone through that experience. But niggling at the back of your head, you were like, but they know my body and they know everything. So it wasn't a clear cut. Like there's so much grey going on. And now we have AI.

And there's numerous TED talks that are discussing that this human technology divide and showing how, like there was, I can't remember the researcher's name, but they were looking at trying to identify cancer cells in pictures. And it was showing that. humans were able to kind of identify cancer at like, I think it was like 92% at the time, like particular images and detect abnormal cells. A AI could detect the abnormal cells relatively similar, but combined they could identify like 96 or 97% of all forms of cancers within cells.

So individually, it wasn't incredibly high. Like it was still in 90%, but when you combine AI and human interaction, it actually increases performance. So it kind of gets rid in a way of some of that mitigates certain human error that happens, because again, we're human, we do make mistakes. But then it also looks at patterns and frequencies. So there's a huge overlap with my interests

in terms of therapy and therapeutics. But then there's also that, but people are kind of afraid of technology. There is, what are the limitations? And like, again, looking through bioterrorism or looking at kind of having a football constantly at hand in terms of access to nuclear weapons. and like there's so much fear. And I, again, I love those doomsday shows.

Like, I'm always looking at them. What would happen if my phone suddenly stopped? And the one example that I would always give is during my master's and later than PhD, I've had friends that would have conducted research on no interaction. So can people, like, not have their phone for a period of time? And I've had some students that planned for their participants to not have their phone for seven days. But then they couldn't complete their research because the participants couldn't let go of their phone for any more than a couple of hours. So it's a really interesting kind of phenomenon.

But when you think about it, it might actually be access to their entire social network, like their friends, their family that they're actually getting rid of. Not necessarily the phone. It's what the phone might represent. So there's a huge psychology going on behind all of these anxieties and fears. And I've been ranting for quite some time. So I apologize. Yeah. No, no, no, this is great.

I'm just, like, running through in my head a lot of thoughts around what you're talking about and how, you know, we talk about, like, you were just mentioning this idea that technology thinks in patterns or is designed to think in patterns, probably because it's designed the way we think, but because technology isn't us, the way that it breaks down those patterns to identify things is just slightly different than how we do it. But despite there being so much overlap, it's not quite. quite the same thing, which I think is really interesting and the way we think about how we can utilize it and understanding its shortfalls because of the fact that it's designed by us. And it's designed to think basically like us.

Now, as somebody that doesn't know anything about technology, which is me, like the extent of my understanding of like AI is like my daughter's favorite movie right now, the Mitchell's versus the machines, which is like a for a six-year-old. Highly recommend. It's a very good movie. It's, it feels very much like my, my household. So, like, one of the, the third part of this, which I thought was really interesting is, you know, you focus on the, the disease component, the AI component, and then the 6G. Now, when my understanding of 6G is basically like, it's better than 5G, but as somebody that suspends a lot of time outdoors, the challenge with it is that it does emit a lot of heat, which can be damaged. for the environment. That's my extent of knowledge about 6G. Could you talk a little bit further about the importance of it and kind of it's reality? Yeah, like in terms of what it is, again, you've got to absolutely bang on the head in terms of 6G. It's the sixth generation of internet network service providers. You might have heard of like there's been lots of debates in terms of 5G towers and lots of other kind of components to it as well. I was new to this area until I start looking through this paper

and kind of going through it in a bit more depth, but then trying to focus on what the positives would be and what they could look like. So in some terms, generally what the idea is is that it's going to be kind of hyper-interactive. So it's going to be quite instantaneous to a certain extent in terms of how information is transferred. So I had seen a graph here

and I wanted to just showcase what it actually represents. So within 6G, according to some of, these kind of like papers, one terabyte could be transferred in less than a second or just over a second. So within maybe three or four seconds. So a terabyte of information, what the equivalence of that would be is either 500 hours of movies, 310,000 photographs, a thousand hours are 40 days worth of video and then 17,000 songs, music. So that's quite an awful lot of information to be transferred in a second is quite strange. It's quite alarming in terms of trying to wrap your head around the speed or the actual approach.

Like, I get frustrated whenever a YouTube video starts to buffer. And, like, that apparently will stop that for a certain extent. I don't know. Like, again, like, every generation. How good they get it. No, like, not at all. Like, you remember old dial-up? Like, that was kind of the first generation or even seconds.

That's not just that the fear is rising. But it's the speed, like, every now and again, like every couple of years, there's always a new form of generation, a new kind of advance. And there's always going to be those kind of hurdles at the beginning. So in terms of the heat, in terms of damage to the environment, they tend to be, they can happen. I haven't read anything on that yet, but I'm going to since that you mentioned it. But in general, there's always going to be one of these kind of situations that we need to try and find out a better way to approach it, especially now with kind of different types of climate policies, climate change policies,

in terms of some government organizations and kind of lobbyists are trying to argue for how to, how can we make things as safe as possible? Like there is, I'm coming at this very much from, in an ideal world situation where everything is like non-economic reasons, that we're trying to make sure that this happens, that this is fine, that everyone will be healthy, that nothing is going to go wrong and look at the benefits.

But it's when things like businesses and organizations that are trying to get as much of a profit as possible, start getting involved and start focusing more on how much their net worth is going to be at the end of the year, as opposed to how can we best help people and how can we best kind of get knowledge out there and how can we best kind of bring people together. So that would have been a lot of our focuses. Like you might have, throughout the paper, it was kind of looking at less so much in terms of

the economics of it, less so much in terms of what kind of like budgets might be, etc., etc. But more so this is what this is and this is how we could potentially use it for different reasons. but in terms of the heat, could you elaborate a lot more, that sounds really interesting, like in terms of how that could be a risk or an issue. Yeah, I mean, I can't speak specifically to 6G. I just, I know that folks that work especially like with like insects populations,

that they've really struggled with with 5G and that it's caused some problems. I don't know the extent of those problems, but that it is something to be aware of. you know, given the insect collapse that's happened globally, that is kind of, you know, something to be aware of and to be concerned about. But to come back to this conversation. So now we've got this AI, we've got this super fast internet, and we have a future that'll

be encased in, basically, in my opinion, examples of things like COVID, just given climate change and permafrost thought and all the other things. that we have no idea that's coming. Yeah. I remember reading, I'm actually after opening up, sorry, I'm one of these types of people

that if somebody says something I find interesting, I will open up a new tab and look at it. So I now have a study by... So you've got like 150 tabs like I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Balmori in 2020,

electromagnetic radiation as an emerging driving factor for the decline of insects. So, precautionary principles. So I'm actually going to read that later. And that sounds interesting. But yeah, sorry. So when you write that paper, you definitely have to touch base with me, right? I totally do. Yeah, that could be really interesting. Sorry. So yeah, like in terms of the hyperconnectivity, in terms of the interaction, and then in terms of,

sorry, you mentioned something then towards the end. Could you repeat that? Like climate change driven, like biodasters. So there was a recent study that was carried out, and it's actually been carried out for quite some time. And I think it's gotten a lot more accessible, but it's basically looking at what some researchers are doing and scientists are doing is they're actually looking at sewers and wastes. And they're having a look and trying to predict pandemics or predict epidemics before they happen

by looking at stool samples from cities. And they're looking at kind of wastewater, waste, kind of sewerage. And they're developing these kind of systems. whereby it may be possible to detect issues such as a potential COVID-19 situation in the future from happening again just by kind of going through that process. So if we take that and then if we have a look at that and try and kind of, how could we look at this on a, so I'm obviously based in Europe, so how could we look at this and trying to create real-time data points?

So if we were to look at that and every European country, for example, or if it was coordinated by, I don't know, who could be like a WHO or like a collaborative party, if they all shared this kind of information if, like the hypothetical, if somebody did that, it could be possible to predict very significant kind of health threats in real time constantly.

And like I can very much see the benefits of that, especially having lives pretty much in this series of lockdown, slight release, slight restriction, then heavy lockdown. And like that has had a huge influence on in terms of mental health, in terms of social interaction

in terms of so many issues. So the longer and the more kind of locked down people get and the more restrictions there are, the more comfortable I am with the idea of trying to predict these things before they happen. So there's obviously going to be ethical issues about having access to information and data, especially in terms of GDPR

and in terms of who has what and how is it accessed and even just in general permission. Like do people and are people comfortable with sifling through waste? So like there's a lot of, kind of ethical and moral decisions that would need to be made. But through 6G, it is possible that we can, even just with this, with waste, it is possible that we could maybe predict some of these things before they happen

or having a look at behavior and like behavior patterns, like in terms of when you go to a shopping center, you can, some people may have a loyalty card on their keys that you scan it. And then you may get coupons or vouchers for whatever frequently bought items that you might get. But like these are all things that could be tracked. your coupons that you get are the vouchers are tailored to your buying behavior. So all of these things are metrics and they are all in a way data that could be used in a way to try and support you. But at the same time, there's that big issue of who has access to this data. And again,

on the side of that, I'm always terrified of, again, hacking or in terms of people getting access to information or like in terms of myself, I need a very boring life. So I literally work, I cook, I have ducks. So when you mentioned that you lived on a farm, I was like, oh, cool, we can totally talk about that in the future. I have ducks too. Oh, fantastic. We need to talk about the breeds and then like why they stopped laying during winter.

Because mine haven't. It's a pain. But it's kind of like all of these things and all of this, like I, they literally would not be able to find anything. Like there's not anything I think of interest about my life. But when you start combining that with so many other people, you're developing this profile to a certain extent, where you're developing this kind of behavior of culture or behavior of a mass. And then all of a sudden, you can predict certain things. And like in a way, it depends

on how that information is being used. So while I completely think that like again, jumping back into the paper that having access to all this information could be fantastic, we're very much aware that we need to also have a look at the morals and the ethics behind here. Like just because we can access to this information should we or can we or how can we make sure that people's information is safe still? Like in terms of that natural language processing in terms of chatbots, like we can see lots of benefits to certain things, but we also need to take this at a very snail's pace to a certain extent to make sure that people are safe.

So that one particular paper, some of those papers in terms of sewage-based epistemology, we mentioned that in the paper. So if you want to have a look and through some of the research, and that's absolutely be fine. There's also other really interesting ones that I remember we were thinking about mentioning, but we just didn't have space. But it was in terms of language. Like I was brought up native English speaker. I live in Ireland. I don't speak. Well, I try to put in a few words of my native Irish language, like Gaelic, trying to learn French. And I love traveling. I loved traveling. I can't do it much anymore because of COVID. But this idea of having instantaneous access to

information or even Google translate. Like the idea of making travel so much easier that I can say a sentence and then it'll automatically translate and say it to somebody else. Like that could be a huge benefit. But then from a psychological perspective, does that mean then that we don't need to be teaching languages because the technology is going to be doing it for us? Like when I was going through my exams to get into college, I learned or had to go through French or I was interested in French.

And I could see the benefit of just, look, we have a technology. We can totally, we don't need to be learning this. But the benefits of learning additional languages have such a profound influence on things like cognitive decline. Like you can slow or halt it in certain situations. You start thinking in, like, for example, in French, if you're a native French speaker, you technically have your French personality or your own native language personality. So if you speak English, you can jump between different kind of personas to a certain extent.

and like your accents might change a little. Like there's so many cognitive benefits of actually learning those hand-off things. Like I'm not using technology for certain things. Like a map, how many of your listeners do you think have stopped using physical maps and now rely on Google Maps?

Like on my way home from work, I live maybe half an hour away from work. But according, when I got home, I shut the door and my phone, Google Maps thought I was still in work. And like it just kept bouncing between where I live and where my house was or where work was. So they're unreliable.

Like there's a lot of issues there. There's a lot of teething issues. Will 6G fix all of this? It might make it quicker. But I don't know in terms of the limitations. Sure. Yeah. The quicker broken thing.

Yeah. I think about what you're talking about in terms of, you know, I also used to enjoy traveling in my family's from Italy. So I would visit family over there. And, you know, one of the things, when you go over there as an American, you want to go see, like, the big churches, the Duomo's. When you're there, they'll talk about, like, we have some ideas about how they were built, but we don't really know. And it's like, how could something so magnificent and so specialized have been lost? And, well, it's easy.

They stop doing it. Yes. And that speaks to a lot of what you're talking about is if we use it as a crutch versus something that is helping elevate. people's skills when necessary. And those might sound very similar, but they're not. Yeah. Like I think the late Robin Williams, when he was in acting in a goodwill hunting, discussing about like when he was talking about Damon on that infamous,

the bench overlooking the pond, saying that you could probably recite every poem under the sun. You could probably talk to me about the Sistine Chapel, but you don't know what it smells like. or that you don't know what it means or you don't know how it feels to look up and see all of those fantastic paintings. So, like, there's a huge kind of components of actually experiencing these things. At the same time, there's quite a lot of programs and some that I'm implementing or hope to implement in one of my modules this year in work. But it's looking at different forms of mental health issues. So looking at, for example, schizophrenia, that there is, I bought myself an Oculus, which is essentially like a virtual environment,

you kind of, a virtual reality environment that you just put on a headset and you kind of look around and you're kind of in that particular world. But what this particular game does, it's a game, but it's more like an edgy game.

It augments reality, so you can look around and like your room is still your room, but it will kind of give you visual hallucinations or auditory hallucinations, or you can kind of experience to a certain extent what it may be like for somebody who is suffering from schizophrenia to experience these kinds of hallucinations. Or even in terms of agoraphobia, like going outside, you might be able to experience what it might be like to feel that pressure of trying to leave the house but being afraid to. Or arachnophobia, for example, that you're looking at the table and you see a virtual spider running along it.

Like, they're all small and short kind of exposure therapy programs. But for somebody or a trainee or for a trainee clinical psychologist or a counselling psychologist or even social care practitioner, understanding what a person experiences can be the first step, even though we may never experience it, obviously, what they're going through. Technology can empower us to a certain extent and kind of getting a glimpse so that we might better understand. So in those situations, I know that I'm totally saying that it's better to try and experience them, but there are some situations where we just actually can't. we don't know what it's like to live with particular conditions, but some technologies are now being used to try and give us that information. So there's an enormous amount of good, even though a lot of the time,

a lot of the negatives will kind of make it to the top of the media, but there are quite an awful lot of good things. That's an interesting concept. I was going to use the term forced empathy, but that's not really right. Yeah, the idea that we can appropriately utilize the technology. That seems to be the, I guess you call it the crux of the conversation is,

will it ever be properly utilized versus collecting this data and then reselling it for marketing purposes or to influence social perception of whatever politics or, you know, the economy or companies or whatever it might be. You know, this is all wrapped into that conversation. Yeah. how can technology be appropriately utilized? Yep. Now, to bring this back to the conversation about like the, the biodissast,

we really haven't talked too much about that, and that's the part that I think is really interesting. So you have these two different terms, disease X and biodastor X. Yes. What exactly is the difference between those? One is which has been developed by an agent. So in other words, by agent, somebody has intentionally made one particular type of

thing, while another one is more naturalistic. So, for example, I know that there's been debates and there's still investigations ongoing in terms of where has COVID-19 come from. And we may never know, we may never get the full rounds of information. But in general, the kind of rule ofum is that it was derived from bats, like whether or not it was developed or not. Again, I'm not going there just in terms of what is biodeastar X, what is, just in terms of what it is, it's kind of like a biological weapon that we don't know. It's this kind of fear of the unknown. It's almost like one of these, if you've ever seen a movie like stealth, for example,

developed ages ago that there's these series of war games. And we have to try and, it's almost like, again, the Kobayashi-Maru, that no-win situation from Star Trek. Like, movies have this fantastic idea about using technologies to understand how somebody is going to act and behave. And in a way, biotivisaster X is one of these situations. where we don't know what we're going to be facing. So how can we best prepare for something that we have no idea about?

So again, you mentioned earlier on that we had this, like, that we thought that we'd be okay, like in terms of managing these types of issues or problems or situations that we don't know yet. But then COVID kind of wrapped that on its head in terms of we are actually very unprepared for so many different things. Like disease X, a couple of years ago, we might have foresaw or we might have thought that something like COVID, 19 is going to be something like disease X that it's something that we need to be preparing for. And I know that there are some individuals that have been saying for a long time that something could happen. And everyone was like, no, we're fine. Like this is fine.

We're grant. We're getting on well. But then the entire world stopped because of this. Like the last biggest thing was probably the flu epidemic. 1914, I think, the Spanish influenza. And now it's this. So we don't know really what's happened in the past. Like, we have some ideas in terms of the black death, in terms of, like, there's so many other ones.

But are they getting more frequent? Like, as we get older, or as we get older, as our population increases, our level of interaction is also increasing. Like, at the same time, one of the reasons why COVID-19 spread so fast and has been so effective is because we have never had the ability to travel as fast and as wide as we have now. Like what we're kind of, it's, we're kind of not to blame ourselves to a certain extent, but we kind of made it easy for different diseases to interact because we are so spread. Like we interact. Like this is what we do. We do socialize.

We do gather and we feel human because that is the natural human condition is to interact. But when we're being told not to do that, what's going to happen? So we know that now. So how if once COVID-19 is finished and over and hopefully is a distant memory, that whether we have vaccines that will extend or whatever happens, I don't know. But how can we use this to try and prepare ourselves for the next thing? And Biodastaster X is almost like one of these human-made or kind of something that has been developed for the purpose of something like bioterrorism.

And that's always something that's been terrifying. Like in Ireland, we don't get a lot of that at all. In terms of the word bioterrorism, I don't think I've ever heard that until, I don't know in terms of like movies that came out of probably an American movie like diehard or something probably yeah and then you had Jeremy Irons saying what's going to happen so it's um I've never heard that term and like again

it's a neutral country and like very small as well I think like most of your states over in the US are bigger than Ireland by a lot the ratio is ridiculous but now when I start getting into academia it's always preparing for that what could happen if. And it's almost like, yeah, like how can we best prepare ourselves for something that we just don't know what it is? Like, how can you prepare for something and you don't know

what's going to happen? So we know that in terms of COVID-19, like, what have we actually learned? Like, cutting out travel, closing borders sooner, and soap, like how some simple techniques can be used in a way, like, even in terms of misinformation, we now know, like, how dangerous that can actually be and giving like, oh, I don't know, but maybe if you do this could work. And there's been no scientific evidence to support it one way or another. Like misinformation has been incredibly dangerous across the board. But then again, you also have scientists that when they disagree, that's when the public suffer the most. So there's been a huge element of that. So going into a new kind of biodastor X or disease X, what can we do

to try and solve it? And that's kind of what we were going through here. Like how can we prepare for something that we just don't know. And again, that's what myself and colleagues were talking about. Like, we spent quite a while just, what have we actually learned? Like, this was written quite a while ago. But then, like, technology-based solutions, like, we can prepare ourselves. We can get ready for these things. It's almost like your car has so much technology in it, that it will tell you that, look, I need to put coolants in here before I break. That is, in a way, an artificial intelligence to a certain extent. It's telling you that you need to do something. Or when you go shopping, again, it's predicting some elements of behavior to make your life easier. Or if you have Fitbit

or like some kind of monitor or health tracker, that's telling you like how many times you've moved so you can try and control your own life to a certain extent. You can just make sure that, look, you haven't moved in an hour. Maybe you should get up off your desk and kind of go for a walk. And if I didn't have that during lockdown and teaching remotely, I probably would be a shell of a man. Like, that told me to move after class. And again, my Fitbit was telling me to do things. And I listened because I knew that ultimately it was trying to guide me because I allowed it. So there's a lot of ambiguity.

And again, how can we try and move forward from this, I think? Yeah. Now, I know you wrote this a couple, I'm assuming before it got published in anything. So you probably a couple years ago now. Is there anything in a little? looking back, you wish you had done differently in the paper or things you would have focused on more now that you've lived COVID for two years? I think if I was to do anything, I think rewrite it.

Well, it is there now. That's all. Just the whole thing. Just change it. No, I think write it, but then also write a better version that could be implemented easier. Like one of the flaws of academics is that we write for academics. like we write for other academics to be able to read it to know what this is, to know all of these approaches,

like even the way that we reference things. Like if you look through the paper, it's all blue and like you can look at it at the very end. It's like there's all the references, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, how can we actually write this so that the public can arm themselves better with a lot of this information? And I think that's something that we need to get better at.

So when I was reading through it, having lived through the last, it would have been the best part of a year, if not slightly more. I think what I would do differently is go back and write an academic version and then a public version whereby I'm saying, look, this is what you need to know. This is what we've learned and this is how we can do things better because, like, I was going through it and just thinking, if I was to give this to my students, they would probably switch

off after the first two paragraphs. They would ask me questions and then they would probably try and Google answers and then they may get the wrong information. So I think what academia, what we really need to do better is to talk to people more, such as yourself. Like absolutely. Like we need much more of this to try and get rid of all this psycho babble. Like why use long sentences? Why use long words?

Just say it as it is. Yeah, the semicolon mandatory title where it's like first title, semicolon, second title. Yeah, I think we did use a semicolon. Yeah, we did. We used the semicolon. Did you? I was actually my last question for you was going to be, to let people know what the title of the paper was.

It's addressing biodissaster X threats with artificial intelligence and 6G technologies. Then we have our semicolon, literature review, and critical insights. There you go. It was a really interesting read. Highly recommend it. I know you can find it fairly easily on ResearchGate. It's available if folks want to check it out. Dean, do you have any other projects, anything if somebody wants to hear more from you where they could find some work?

Like, I mean, myself and my colleagues have been publishing regularly. in terms of COVID-19. So we're trying to get a little bit more public-friendly in terms of that. But again, if you want to check us out, you can head over to our research gate or if you want to Google my profile on IT Carlo's website, that's entirely up to yourselves. Awesome.

Dean, this has been great.