Forward Thinking Tech At CES 2016

Jonathan attended CES 2016 and talks about some of the technological trends that will shape the future, from connected cars to crazy exoskeletons.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. He there, and welcome back to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says your
face to face with the man who sold the world.

(00:20):
I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren foc Oban, and I'm Joe McCormick.
That's kind of melancholy note to begin on. But we
are back. Yeah, wait, wait till you hear the quote
for the next one. It seemed okay. I I took
it hard, but no, we are back. This is a
moment of celebration for us. We are so pleased to
be recording new episodes. This isn't an update to an

(00:43):
old episode. This is brand new. Yeah, we had to
like do research and like I had to go to
Las Vegas. Oh man, that is an intense podcast episode, Jonathan,
be straight with me. Sure, how futuristic were the buffets?
I only no, eight I ate it to buffets, neither
of which felt particularly futuristic. Although I started to I

(01:05):
started to question my recent decisions after I started eating them,
so I was really reflecting on the past, essentially the
specific moments that led up to me going to a buffet,
but I didn't really think so much about the future,
which was pretty evident o the way I was eating.
Question number two about Las Vegas, is anybody working on
the packet bread from the Force awakens? As far as

(01:27):
I can tell, no. But but keep in mind that
we're talking about CS sixteen in this episode, and some
of the forward thinking technology I saw there CS is
is enormous. I mean, the number that was thrown around
for two thousand fifteen I don't know that this is accurate,
was that it had two point two million square feet

(01:48):
of exhibit space across the Las Vegas Convention Center of
the Sands, as well as a bunch of hotel suites.
So it's just normal and ud uh like vendors shows
close to close to four thousand, yeah, because it's and
so some of them are huge, Like some of those
booths are enormous and you could fit like forty booths

(02:10):
in one of the big ones like Intel or Sony.
In the future, we will have booths that take up
entire building. That's kind of what it feels like. And
of course, not all of the technology on display there
is particularly forward thinking. Some of it is just you know,
the latest in stereo systems, and it's not that all that, right,

(02:30):
It's it's not it's not that that technology is is
subbar or anything like that. It's just not the kind
of stuff we associate with. All Right, what's sort of
the groundbreaking pioneering tech out? Yeah, what's going to drive
are our very lives over the next forty years. Yeah,

(02:55):
and we wanted exactly twenty to forty years. Oh, it's
good to be back, but also we wanted to uh,
you know, I want to stress this is this is
a show about consumer technology. So you wouldn't expect to
see tech that is like the super prototype cutting edge.
You know, we're ten years away from seeing this implemented
kind of stuff. You tend to see stuff that in general,

(03:18):
you know, you're talking about possibly a lot I imagine
there's not like a DARPA booth. Strangely enough, you would
be incorrect only in the sense that DARPA has a
presence at CES, because often they end up being uh,
you know, people who end up working for DARPA also
end up working on these other projects, like Toyota hasment

(03:41):
and stuff. Yeah, Toyota had a couple of former DARPA
UM executives joined their artificial intelligence research facility for example. Uh, yeah,
that's really interesting stuff. And ASSA has a booth there
too actually at c Yes, okay, so actually what you're
saying here is that there's so much going on there
that you don't know for sure that there wasn't an

(04:03):
entire wing devoted to the bread from the Force Awaken there.
There could have been. I did not witness it myself.
But then usually when I get home, the first thing
that happens is I start looking at some of the
footage from c e S and it looks like it's
a totally different show than the one I went to,
just because my experience was so limited. I just want
to assure you listeners, by the way, who might be

(04:26):
worrying if you haven't seen The Force Awakens yet, the
bread is not a spoiler. This is no major platform now.
The bread doesn't spoil. That's what makes it futuristic, all right.
So we wanted to talk about the actual technology that
I did witness and read up on as well while
at CS. So these are these are just some examples
of some of the stuff I saw personally. Keep in mind,

(04:48):
this is not an exhaustive list, it doesn't include all
the other things that I didn't get around to seeing. So,
for example, I don't have any A R or VR
stuff really listed here, and that's because I never got
a chance to go to that part of the show floor.
That's how big this show is. And I didn't even
get a chance to go to where all the drones
and robots are because I was running short on time.

(05:09):
But I guess the lines for the A R and
V R stuff for really long they were, And in fact,
I think I might be mistaken, but I think Oculus
decided to have a reservation's only approach, so you had
to actually book a time to go and get a
demonstration of the Oculus technology. I might be incorrect about
that because I never went to see it. But one

(05:31):
thing I did get to see was Intel's booth. I
mentioned them earlier, and one of the reasons I think
Intel is really interesting when you go to C E.
S is Intel is known for making the sensors and
processors that make other technology work right. They don't tend
to be the company you would think of for a
finished product. They make the guts of consumer products exactly,

(05:52):
so most of the stuff you see on display at
Intel is actually the representation of a partnership with some
other company or multiple companies, where the the insides are
Intel powered. And they showed off a couple of different
things that were implemented in different ways. One of them
was Intel CURI and this is it looks like just

(06:15):
a little microprocessor. It's essentially a very simple computer on
a chip system. It's about the size and shape of
a button. Yeah, it's tiny, tiny, and it has uh
six axis accelerometers and gyroscopes in there, as well as
a means of communicating over Bluetooth low energy protocols. So
it it SIPs it power has a tiny little battery

(06:36):
that is dedicated just to this device. And this is
something you would embed in other things like a wearable
technology or as was the case in some of the
demonstrations um sporting equipment. So we saw it in like
snowboards and bicycles. And one of the things that could
do is actually measure rotation in real time. So imagine

(06:58):
you're watching the X games, like the Way or X Games,
and you see a snowboarder leap into the air and
start doing all those crazy twisty turny things. You could
get real time update on exactly what sort of maneuvers
that person was doing, and including like to the degree,
and so it could be like, I'm sorry, that looked

(07:19):
like a ten eighty, but it was not. This is
snowboarding ten sixty and you have failed that. You could
get that specific Yeah. I don't know that that's going
to get to the point of judging, but you could
at least, you know, as someone watching it, you could
have a live feed that was just giving you the
data from the Intel Cury PROCESSORB. We we always use

(07:40):
technology to judge better. That's shade is important, right, I
mean you can't bribe the sensor. No, No, it's it's
not subjective. It is it is actually quantifying something that
before we would just sort of say that was very impressive.
Now we can say we can say exactly to what
degree that was impressive. Now I have a question. You

(08:02):
said it's called the Curi spelled c U R I
E I. I assume is that named after the Curies,
like Marie and Pierre. That was my assumption. It's usually
Intel tends to name a lot of their products after places,
uh specifically places that are around Intel's headquarters. But in
this case, I think it was specifically after the curies.

(08:23):
But that's my that's my guests. I didn't actually ask
anyone there. I was too busy looking at some of
the other implementations, like they had them embedded in gloves
and then they would play air guitar and get actual
music out of it there at the Intel press conference,
which I did not attend. I only watched the video.
It's just as awkward as it sounds. Imagine an Intel

(08:47):
executive coming out wearing a do rag and and having
these gloves on and then playing either air guitar or
air drums and you'd actually get uh, you know, music
playing out of this and then looks like he's having
some kind of episode possibly that I I that would
not be outside the realm of plausibility. Should you watch

(09:11):
this video that you would have that reaction. Also, it's
just there were a couple of grandiose comments that uh,
you know, kind of like not quite to the extent
of music will change forever, or we don't need we
don't need guitars anymore, but but kind of going and
and like you could see an implication there. This is

(09:32):
one of those things where you think, really, I mean
it's impressive. It's kind of cool and fun. I could
see that being an interesting implementation of that. But there
were other uh demos as well. They actually want I
got to try. They had these bracelets with l E
D s in them, and the l d s would
light up whenever you were using the bracelet properly. They
had this big curved display. They had digital little fish

(09:56):
on them, and when you would waive the bracelet around
in front of it, it capture the fish's attention. You
can get a little school of fish, and you can
make them spiral around and direct them to different parts.
And they had about, you know, a dozen people are
so lined up on this thing, all kind of stealing
each other's fish. And it was again just a demonstration
that this thing could fit into really small stuff. I mean,

(10:18):
it wasn't a practical demonstration of the power of this.
It was more of a practical demonstration of it's so
small and self it's it's like self contained in the
sense that it's pretty much everything you need to do
some basic control. That that was really the power of
that demonstration. Yeah. Yeah, on a more practical level, I

(10:39):
suspect that it would be implemented into like the fitness
tracking technology kind of stuff, partially because the tech that
comes from Curry comes from the company Basis, which Intel
brought back in March. Um and uh I read this interview,
this really good interview with Intel's vice president Mike Bell
in the Internet publication Alpha. I had never heard. I

(11:02):
had never heard of before. Interesting, it apparently exists. And yeah,
he was talking about how they're they're working on making
technology like this adaptive to every individual who use it.
Who uses it, you know, like like learning what it
looks like when you Joe go running or play racquetball
or are sleeping. You don't want to know what that
looks like, Well maybe Intel does. Maybe maybe you want

(11:26):
statistics on on how well you're running, how how how
your body is moving, all of your heartbeat kind of
you know, all that sort of stuff. Maybe in what
point of any given physical activity do you see your
physical performance start to drop? That kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
lots of people these days are min maxing their own
bodies and in fitness tracker kind of ways, which I

(11:47):
work it's but but you know, he was talking about
how how for for a lot of this technology today
it's geared towards the average user, that there's really no
such thing as the average user. Of course, we're all
in our own ways outliers, and so you know, making

(12:07):
something that can adapt and can learn what you do
is a lot more useful to any given human. Oh yeah,
that's a good point. Now. Sometimes I wonder about, say,
the the fitness tracker on my phone. It has an
estimate of how many steps you took today, but that's
got to be based on some averaging and some estimating

(12:28):
because because it doesn't really know for sure. It's not
like it's a pometer. What if my gate is kind
of weird or what I I just don't know how
accurate it is. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes perfect sense.
I mean, especially if it's something where it's just estimating
based upon the speed and distance that you are traveling.
So in other words, if there's not a predometer, if

(12:49):
there's nothing like if the accelerometer isn't trying to gauge
an actual step, then you could do something like jump
on a moving sidewalk, and just because of the speed
and distance, it's going to say, oh, well that that
includes those those are steps too. Yeah. Oh I like
it when I know sometimes it's wrong because occasionally it
tells me that I bicycled for fifteen minutes today and

(13:12):
I have not ridden a bicycle. Yeah. Yeah, There are
a lot of other potential applications of this. Again, this
was really a proof of concept in the sense that
Intel could say, you probably have ideas of what you
want to do. We make the stuff that makes your
ideas possible. And another example of that was their Real

(13:32):
Sense technology, which is pretty similar to the way the
connect sensor works for the Xbox. It actually contains three cameras.
It's a system that uses three cameras. One of them
is in the optical spectrum. It's like a ten eighty
high definition camera. One is an infrared camera, and one's
more of an infrared projector. So the idea being that
using these this combination, you can create a system that's

(13:55):
able to sense objects in depth and um and so
you could put it into a laptop. They had several
laptops on display where that was part of the laptop camera,
so it wasn't just a regular camera. You could also
use it for gesture controls and that kind of thing.
I've I've also read that Intel is looking to use
real Sense to let your your device, your laptop, your phone,

(14:16):
your tablet, whatever, uh, watch your reactions to what you're
experiencing on that device, like whether you're happy or sad
or board. And I'm not sure why. Yeah, let me
let me get back to that, because there's there's something
specific I want to talk to you guys about. Didn't
put it in the notes, but it's called smart me
up or they might even smart me app. But it's
it's uh, it's it's it. Maybe it was a it

(14:41):
was an app with facial recognition technology that also could
recognize mood. I'll get back to that because it's similar
to what you're saying, Lauren, Okay, alright, But but you
could also put this another technology to One of the
examples they had was the hover butler um, and the
hover butler is essentially, think one of those personal transportation

(15:01):
devices that often are called hoverboards, which Joe, I know
you object to the term hoverboard for something that uses
wheels to get so, but this is a hover butler.
It's a hover butler catch on fire. It did not
in the presentation, and and considering who is behind it,
I would suspect it would not catch on fire. But

(15:24):
it's a it's a fire butler. It's like it's bring
so if they called it Prometheus, but it's a uh,
it's it's like a hoverboard, so you can stand on
it and wheel around just as you would with one
of those. But it has um kind of a little
central post that extends up a little bit from the

(15:46):
base and you can convert it into a robot. And
so the the the actual stem will switch a little
bit and a little digital screen will pop out and
these cute little eyes are there and it can talk
to you. You could even have it do things like
answer the door and stuff, or at least go and
look at who's at the door. There are cameras embedded
in it, so you can get live streaming video and

(16:07):
it uses real sense to uh to detect objects in
its environment and maneuver around them. Um. And my favorite
part was when they added arms to it. There was
a segment on the back that you could unscrew and
then you could plug in a physical extension to this robot.
And in this case, they plugged in a physical extension

(16:29):
that were a pair of arms, and uh, they let
the robot knows, okay, robot, you have arms now, say
these are my arms, and it lifts its arms up
and then goes awesome. It was in the demo and
everyone was like, oh uh yeah a do you guys
just have her butler? What a time to be alive?

(16:49):
Am I? Right? Yeah? Someone someone named a product that,
but be the people who named a product that. It's
a project from Segway and Segways new owners nine butt.
So you guys, Segway is still a thing, which is
why I would expect it probably doesn't burst into flay
hold on to Segway not make the other hoverboards. No,

(17:09):
oh I see, yeah, In fact, there there's a different,
totally different thing. Yeah, the hoverboards stuff like there actually
are some some patent disputes about whether some of them
have infringed upon Segways patents. There have actually been some
some threatens, threats of lawsuits. But the interesting thing here,
and Lauren, I know you can talk about this a
little bit too, is that while you, you know, you

(17:33):
might think, oh, that's a very cute idea, this idea
of a of a robot slash personal transportation device that's adorable,
they're also looking at involving other parties by making it
an open platform both from software and hardware and UM
and I remember, like right here in the our notes,
you've got a little bit about UM using Android operating

(17:54):
systems in order to do that. Yea, yeah, until so
far has been pairing these technology these with Android and
trying to encourage independent developers to really dive in and
find new cool ways to to use it, like like
you were saying, yea, and the same thing with the
arm extension, I was talking about that's just one potential
hardware piece that you could attach to this thing. What

(18:16):
are you thinking articulated spider legs, right, or tentacles you know,
or just dart guns, fire extinguisher extensions to put out
your hoverboard fires right right? So uncle? Nope, yeah, um,
why did you teach me to love? Uh? Yeah, might

(18:37):
be we might be a little loopy after our long hiatus.
But yeah, it was again like meant to sort of
demonstrate the potential I possibly with the hover butler more
of an actual potential product. I don't know who would
who that market is, like, don't you know it's it's
combining those you know, people with limited mobility or or

(19:00):
any time that you've got a you know that that
like office robotic avatar that we've talked about a few
times on the show. Like being able to plug that
into something like that would allow not having your your
office avatar just bump into doors continually. Must be like
way less embarrassing. I think it would be hilarious to
be fired by the hover butler because it would be
so adorable. You couldn't be mad about Yes, back up

(19:23):
your things. It doesn't come across like that at all.
The voice is so cute, but well, I mean, I
think the cuteness has got to be a factor there. Right,
you're asking who would be interested in I mean, there's
gonna be a certain audience for things that are robotic novelties. Yeah,
it's just also I imagine and I don't know what
the price would be for this particular thing, but I

(19:44):
would imagine it would be pretty expensive. I mean, you're
you're talking about Segway technology, and Segways were not known
for being cheap um. They were really known for anything
other than Yeah, I remember, I still distinctly remember the
day when Good Morning America unveiled what it was, because

(20:07):
before that they called it either Project Ginger or it
and then they had the reveal that this is the segue.
And I remember I was sitting there thinking what this um?
But you know it was and your reaction was thus
the whole world. I did not intend to be a
pioneer in that space, but there were a lot of

(20:27):
other things I got to see as well. So that
was in the central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
That's where a lot of the really big companies like
Sony and Panasonic and things like that are there. And
Intel was is always in the central hall. But the
next one that I looked at was over in the
South hall of the convention Center. And this was one

(20:48):
of those things that I would have totally missed. I
would have overlooked it except a friend of mine I
as actor of of c NET, hadn't mentioned he had
heard something about it and gave me the heads up
and so put on our list of things we had
to check out. I'm so glad because I'm so excited
about this one. Yeah, this is a General Financial which
is a long term care insurance company. And you might think, well,

(21:12):
why are they at ce S. I mean, it's and
what exactly is long term care insurance? Well, it's insurance
that you would in our into you would hold a
policy for in order to get reimbursed for long term
care for people who cannot care for themselves, typically the elderly,
but not necessarily just the elderly, but for services like

(21:33):
assisted living, so feeding and bathing and dressing and that
sort of stuff. That these are services that you have
to pay for. Well, this kind of insurance gives you
a reimbursement, a daily reimbursement, and it's it's a really
important idea, particularly with a growing aging population, but it's
also a tricky one to talk about with younger people

(21:54):
to get across. Uh, you know what it's like to
go through these experiences, right, I mean people they just
think they're going to be young and strong forever, or
even if they're thinking about the like a parent that
they might be caring for, it's still an experience that's
so far removed from their own personal experience. It's hard

(22:14):
to have that kind of sympathy, right, And frankly, this
isn't something we usually want to think about, so sure well,
and and also it's this kind of issue of sympathy
and empathy with any kind of patient is is a
huge issue in the medical industry and it's been luckily
getting increased attention in the past couple of decades, but
no one has really come up with a really good
solution for it yet. Um, you know, like a hazard

(22:36):
that most human people want to be sympathetic to the
plight of of their of their fellows. Yes, at least
in the abstract sure, hypothetically, Um, but you know a
like like like you said, like, it's hard to understand
what people are going through if you've never had any
kind of similar symptom and be there are unfortunately groups
of people that society is sort of trained to disbelieve

(22:57):
about their symptoms. Women and the elderly and picular are
two groups that numerous studies have indicated received less medical
care for equal symptoms reported. So, since society is a
really hard thing to change, especially quickly, it's it's really
cool that that work is being done to fix part
a of this equation, being able to to to let

(23:20):
people better sympathize. Yea does, folks, And that is through
this project. Yeah, it's actually called the aging experience. So
how do you how do you convey what is an
abstract idea into a real, actual experience for someone who
otherwise would never have these symptoms that often come along
with aging. A rapid aging drug that would be one

(23:41):
way of doing it, but sadly not necessarily reversible. A more,
uh perhaps a kind way of doing this is to
simulate it. And to do that, gen Worth turned to
a company called Applied Minds. All right, Now, Applied Minds
was founded in two thousand by a couple of four
or Disney imagineers. So these were engineers who really thought

(24:04):
outside the box in order to create stuff. And one
of those two, Brand Farron, is still with the company,
and in fact I got to meet him. He was
the person who led the UM the demonstration that I
was part of. I was actually put into this piece
of technology, which was an exo skeleton. Now, when we
talk about exoskeletons, we are normally talking about technology meant

(24:24):
to increase your ability. Power you up so you can
lift throws or at least walk, right, Like, there are
the exo skeletons that are designed for people who have
lost mobility and I've learned to walk again. That sort
of stuff. Not the case with the aging simulator. Uh,

(24:45):
it was actually meant to to diminish your physical capabilities
rather than enhance them. Now. I even got to to
do the whole demonstration. I got to put the whole
thing on. There's actually a video up. If you haven't
seen the video, you can go to Forward Thinking and
check it out. And if you look like like iron
Man in this thing, a very doughy iron Man, Yeah,

(25:06):
I was. I was very aware of how tight those
straps were. Um, but it was. It was an interesting experience.
And so it consists of a helmet which has a
heads up display, actually has two cameras mounted on the
outside so where your eyes would be, so you get
the stereoscopic vision. Uh. That feed is fed directly to

(25:27):
monitors inside the helmet. And there's no latency that I
could detect, which is fantastic because if there's latency, that
means when you turn your head, you know, there's a
delay between when you turn and what you see. Right.
It's the thing that makes people puke when they're using
bad VR, right right, Yeah, so kind of like feeling seasick. Yeah,
aren't exactly. Yeah, your brain is like, um, your body

(25:51):
is going through one thing, but your senses are doing
something else. So we're just gonna dump everything in your
stomach right now, all right, guys out because I'm not
sure what to do. So, if this is supposed to
simulate the debilitating effects of age or disability, shouldn't it
have had some latency to kind of make you feel
even worse. No, because they said specifically that they didn't

(26:14):
want people to become nauseated and they didn't want to
simulate actual pain. Is that those were the elements that
are not part of the experience because they want you
to be able to have a have sort of a
logical reaction as well as promotional one. Sure, sure, well,
but they did alter your your vision in a couple
of ways. Absolutely. Yeah. This is the fact that it

(26:34):
was a video feed meant that they could interrupt the
signal from the cameras to the monitors in different ways.
So uh. At one point they gave me tunnel vision,
So the periphery of my vision started to close in
and close in and close it until I only had
a small window that I could see through, and even
that was blurry, very disorienting. They did the opposite, where

(26:56):
I had a blurry section in front of my vision
and the peripheral as a little more clear. They also
ended up giving me the experience of having a cataract
in one eye by my right side got all milky
white and I couldn't see through it very well. Um. Also,
they kept on cranking up the thing as the demo
was going on for that section, So while it would

(27:18):
first be disorienting, it would get progressively worse as that
as that section of the demo went on, and I
would start thinking, like, you are going to reverse this right,
because I'm not able to see anything. This is kind
of terrifying. Now, did they also have you like doing
tasks or running through an obstacle? Course, I'll get to that.
So next they put the head helmet also has headphones,

(27:39):
so they can mess with your hearing. Right, there's an
external microphone that picks up all the audio and feeds
it into the headphones. But they can also change that.
So they introduced to nitis, also known as the ringing
of the ears. If you've ever been to a loud
show and you had your ears kind of ring up
for a little while after that, sometimes it doesn't go away.
Sometimes you can develop chronic tonitas and it will be

(28:01):
there forever, and you might be able to take some
medication to help mitigate it. But it's always there. I've
experienced tonitis on more than a few occasions, being being
the fan of punk rock than I am um, but
fortunately don't have it as a as a chronic condition.
But this was I mean, I was very familiar with
the experience when they started playing it. Immediately I said, oh,

(28:22):
it's tenitas. He's like, yep, you're absolutely right. They also
started to muffle my hearing, so they didn't cut it
off entirely, but they started cutting out the base and
high notes that are high pitches that I could hear
um and or actually they started to blur out the
middle ones too, so I was starting to get hard
to make out what was being said, Like I could

(28:44):
hear that someone was talking, but I couldn't easily understand them. Oh,
and they gave me the experience that I'm sure you
guys have heard about where they fed my own audio
back to me on a couple of milliseconds delay, and
then they tried to make me say stuff. So I
started talking like this because hearing yourself on a short

(29:07):
delay starts to mess with your ability to form words.
If anyone's ever had like a really bad uh sinus
infection or something like that, you might have experienced something
to that extent where where just your your ears are
not functioning quite the way I've I've recently recovered from
a very bad sinus infection, which is why I bring
I've had it happened before when recording stuff, and uh

(29:29):
had my own feed kind of coming back in to
my headphones where it was on that short delay, and
I thought, I've got to fix this because otherwise I'm
not gonna be able to talk at all. And then
you won't even think it's a Jonathan's Trickling show, because
come on, but I know, right, it's a show that
John Than's on and he didn't talk. That's not right. Uh.

(29:52):
So then the other piece of this, obviously is the
actual body, the exoskeleton body, which weighed forty pounds by
the way, strapped snugly, and several locations across my body,
uh and uh, at all the major joints, so my
shoulders and my elbows, my hips, and my knees, there
are motors that can increase torque at those joints so

(30:13):
make it more difficult for you to move. And they
had me do things like reach up and pretend like
I'm climbing a rope, and then they started to lock
up my shoulders and elbows, so it suddenly became much
more difficult. And in the Kuda Gras they had me
walk on a treadmill, So that was the part where
it wasn't an obstacle course, but it wasn't treadmill. And
so I'm walking at a decent pace for someone who's

(30:35):
wearing the Exo skeleton, which already restricts your movement a
little bit. It's not like it's not like I could
go jogging through the c E S Show floor wearing
this thing. But then they started to lock up my
hips and my knees. It was really disorienting when they
only did one side that, because then I could move
like I think it was my left leg I could
move freely, but my right leg was locked up and

(30:57):
so I was lurching around quite a bit. Um And Yeah,
it was a really interesting and enlightening experience to go
through that and and feel what that was like, and
so to think to them be able to extrapolate that
experience in and think about other people going through that,
it does create more of not just a sense of awareness,

(31:19):
but one of empathy and sympathy for for people going
through that situation. Um, and I thought it was absolutely
a phenomenal idea, not just for that compassion, which I
think is incredibly important, but also you could potentially use
this for engineers who are developing products for the elderly. Uh.
And in fact, they had said that they had had
some developers for apps interested in having them come out

(31:43):
with an exoskeleton so the developers could experience it themselves
because they're trying to develop apps meant for senior citizens,
and by actually experiencing these things, it may change the
way they think about the presentation and interaction of those
ups because now they they've actually understand yeah, what the

(32:04):
what the need is exactly because you know a lot
of problem times you know, not a lot of times,
but sometimes engineer set out to solve a problem but
it turns out it was the wrong problem to try
and solve. And having this personal experience means it's more
likely that they would actually hit the target they're aiming for.
And I thought that was really an interesting thing. And

(32:26):
the Applied Minds folks, by the way, super nice. They
sat down and chatted with us, and they were really
passionate about what they did and so it was really
encouraging to have that conversation as well. Uh and not
just like, um, you know sometimes when you go to
c e s you encounter people who are perfectly nice,
but they are pr people who have been hired to

(32:47):
represent a booth. But these were folks who actually worked
for the company, and so they had a real sense
of investment, right. It wasn't just your job to stand
there and not a gun for higher type thing. Yeah,
so that was really cool. Another thing, of course, this
show is sponsored by Toyota, so you did spend a
bit of time checking out some of the concept cars. Yeah, yeah,

(33:08):
concept cars and also just the underlying technology. Uh. So
Toyota's big thing was they went into more detail about
their one billion dollar investment in artificial intelligence. Actually made
a really good point that I had not I had
not really thought about in a in a concrete way,
which is that they mentioned, you know, AI autonomous car

(33:29):
technology is at a point right now where your standard
driving like you're under your standing standard scenarios. It's pretty good.
Like it's we have seen the demonstration that that technology
is pretty mature. It's when you get to the outliers,
the weird situations that don't happen all the time, but
can happen things that you don't necessarily anticipate as a programmer.

(33:51):
That's when you have to start saying, well, that's where
we have room to improve in AI. And uh. It's though,
one thing I do think I remember us discovering in
previous discussions about you know, what do you do in
these weird scenarios come up in an autonomous car? We've
often found that it's a surprisingly effective solution for most

(34:12):
cases to just reduce speed and come to a halt. Yes, yeah,
for most most of the time, that would be probably
the best approach. I mean, if you're talking about just
a small percentage of autonomous cars on the road, it
could still be dangerous depending upon like if you're on
highway and you're moving on highway speeds, it could still
be dangerous, But generally speaking, that seems to be the

(34:33):
the best course of action. Like it, it's just surprising
how far that simple strategy will take. Sure, But as
they were pointing out, they were saying what they wanted
to do was develop AI that could encounter a new
situation and react appropriately to it, even though nothing had
ever been programmed specifically in the AIS programming to deal

(34:55):
with that situation. And so that's that's a hard problem.
That'sn't that's a hard AI problem that has implications well
beyond the auto industry. But that's one of the things
they're going to really be focusing on in these AI centers.
But they also talked about things like the connected car,
which is a lot more simple to grasp. Right, So,
connected car on its simplest form, it might be a

(35:16):
vehicle that has an entertainment system that streams various stuff
from the Internet into your car, or it may be
able to give you real time updates on things like
weather or traffic, or the kind of thing that we
already have these days where your car will will connect
to your phone when you get in and start playing
whatever music right here. Yeah, your phone becomes the conduit

(35:36):
and your car is really just connecting via Bluetooth or
maybe a plug to use to utilize your phone is
almost like a modem um. Now, what if you don't
want it to automatically play your music when people get
in the car for fear of embarrassment, Uh, download things
other than smash Mouth, I guess about don't tell me
what to do, Lauren. I only listen to awesome music,

(35:59):
so I don't know what. I have no frame of reference.
We need to make a embarrassing music exoskeleton for me
to be in so that I can understand. Look, I'm
I'm all about I'm all about my uh my various
uh my, various punk rock bands, garage rock Lawrence Welk.
I mean I'm all about that. So I don't understand

(36:20):
this embarrassment stuff. Uh No. But at any rate, the
connected car could go much beyond that, right, You could
have actual connected car that can communicate with smart home technology.
And in fact, that was a lot of what we
saw on display at ce s Ford in particular. Yeah, yeah,
they they announced. Did they announce or did they just
show off their their contract with Amazon? They they had

(36:42):
essentially they talked about it a lot that it was interesting.
At the Ford booth they had a car, like a
big like kind of muscle car on display that was
really pretty. But I don't think I had any connection
to the connected car concept. For the connected car stuff,
they had walls that had information about how the Amazon
Alexa integration was going to work, but still a pretty

(37:04):
interesting idea. So Alexa's that that voice concierge system that
works with Amazon's Echo product. So if you've ever seen
the Echo, you can get that put in your home
and you can you can do something as simple as
asking Echo, Hey, what's the weather going to be like tomorrow?
And it will tell you yeah. Yeah. It looks a
little bit like a like a paper towel roll. It
just kind of hangs out and like does stuff for you. Yeah.

(37:26):
And but you can also connect it to things like
you're smart lightbulbs if you have them. You can say, uh, Alexa,
dum the lights and it will do that automatically. Or uh.
In this case with the car, you could say Alexa,
start my car and it could actually start your car
in your driveway which might be down. Yeah, so now

(37:48):
can your can your connected car connect to your hover Butler?
That's what I would imagine you could actually do that. Yeah,
however Butler bring my jacket out to the car for me,
or hover Butler detects that you're experiencing road rage and
hides in preparation for you getting home, or takes defensive measures,

(38:08):
or just puts on the smooth Jazz so that cocktail
lowers the lights a little bit. You know, Hover Butler
is allowing you to experience a cool down period. Uh.
This chillout period is is sponsored by Hover Butler. Um. Yeah.
So so Alexa could also allow you to do things

(38:30):
like have your car interact with your home in the
sense that like let's say you leave your house, you
get in your car, and you could even have it
set up where you use Alexa to maybe lock the
smart blocks on your house or or arm the security system,
or change the lights or turned down the air conditioning
or or open the garage door for all that kind
of stuff. So it's it's just meant to try and

(38:52):
create the sort of seamless experience you would have from
moving from your home to your car and back again.
That kind of stuff. Uh. And we saw some of
that all so with other systems as well, not just Ford.
Volkswagen had the Buddy bu d D dash lowercase E.
That's their concepts electric van. Yeah, the Buddy sponsored by

(39:15):
Polly Showing. Yeah by Day so Buddy Buddy. Actually I
thought I thought Buddy. I thought Buddy looked pretty nifty. Honestly,
I liked the design. But it's a concept car, so
it's never going to hit production, we might see some
of the technology work its way into other vehicles. You
could also point out Volkswagen had a really uh compelling

(39:39):
incentive to show off at an electric vehicle in after
the which I believe we're our last episodes before the hiatus.
Right when we were talking about the you and You
and Me, Joe and uh Ben and Scott of yeah,
that was kind of awkward. We didn't know those were
going to be our final episod it's before a hiatus.

(40:02):
We would have we would have said, sorry, we're gonna
be on poles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry about that, folks.
But it was also interesting that that beyond talking about
electric vehicles and connected cars, there was also a a
weird conversation going on on the show floor about the
battling concepts of personal ownership and a fleet of vehicles.

(40:26):
So I would argue that a lot of the connected
car concepts are partially the car companies trying to create
incentives for personal ownership, right like the because because you're
talking about interacting with your home, you're not going to
have a third party car service that you're going to
have allowed to connect to your home. That seems like
that's a bad idea. Though you may want a third

(40:49):
party car service that connects to your smartphone or something
like that. I would really be hesitant, especially anything that
would allow you to control security systems. Oh of Yeah, so,
I mean smartphone makes a little more sense because if
it's not in the car, then they're not likely and
it's not like they're gonna flash the drive of your
phone while you're in the vehicle, at least I hope

(41:10):
they wouldn't. Um, so that if they did, that would
be bad because they'd have a copy of your smartphone.
And then next thing you know, your lights are going
crazy and you're thinking it's a poulter Geist. No, it's
your Uber driver who's ticked off that you give him
a bad rating driving by your house. Um. But then, yeah,
as we talked about in our driver List Taxi episode,

(41:30):
what a lot of a lot of forward thinkers in
the auto field these days are seemed to be looking
at getting fewer cars on the road. Yeah. Yeah, So
that means that some companies are already looking forward to
that as a potential pathway, and one of them was
probably the most mysterious company going into c S, which

(41:51):
is Faraday Future. Faraday Future is a kind of an
Internet startup. What what what do you get if you
mashed up an internet startup with a car company? Um,
kind of this upstart company? That is that not sort
of what Tesla is A little bit Tesla, Tesla, I
would argue, is a little closer to your traditional car
company than Faraday Future is, but not by much. I

(42:13):
would say Tesla, certainly, for lack of a better term,
paved the road for Faraday Future. I tried to come
up with something else, but my brain locked on the
pun Um they beat a path. Yeah, there you go,
and so Faraday Future, uh kind of kinds following in
those in those uh in that in the wake of Tesla,

(42:34):
I would say, But Faraday Futures approach was to show
off a really interesting and weird looking concept race car
called the f F zero one. And when you look
at this thing, it's a very weird, uh design. I mean,
the physical appearance of this car is striking to the

(42:54):
point where if you when you first look at you think,
how the heck do you get in there? Like? Is
that a car? Is that about mobile? And my batman,
is it just a prop? Is it actually possible to
get inside that? Thing it was. To be honest, it
was a fancy prop Yeah. I mean by concept car
they mean like I don't think it was drivable. Yeah,
and they certainly weren't. They were. They were there to well,

(43:16):
the whole idea of doors are so the past century.
The whole idea was how can you grab a lot
of attention, particularly in an area where you have all
these established parties. Right, so you've got Toyota and four in,
Volkswagen and Kia and Lexus and all of these companies
having a presence there. How do you get noticed? And

(43:36):
they designed this incredibly weird looking race car, and uh,
the cool thing they had to show off wasn't really
the race car. That was just to get your attention,
get you in the door. They were showing off their
variable Platform Architecture or v p A, which is kind
of their their concept of car design moving forward, vehicle design,

(43:57):
I should say, because it's not just cars, it also
involves trucks, SUVs, and it's a it's a modular concept, right, Yeah.
You start with a basic chassis that can be modified
to be longer or shorter depending upon what kind of
car you want to build, and then you have a
modular battery design, so they designed their batteries to be interconnected,
and you add more batteries if you need more powers.

(44:19):
So an suv would have more batteries than a subcompact car.
A race car would have a lot of batteries because
you need a lot of power very quickly, right, big
suv exactly, or a truck, anything that requires a lot
of torque or a lot of speed would need more batteries.
Anything that was like a just a basic get around
town kind of car would need fewer. Uh. And because

(44:39):
you could change the shape of the chassis really the
length of the chassis and the number of batteries there,
it meant that you could develop these vehicles very very quickly,
at least in concept. And in fact, the race car
went from sketch to physical thing in eighteen months, which
for cars is no time at all. I mean usually
you're talking about five of her six year cycles to

(45:02):
bring a car model out right to show it off,
and they plan on having vehicles ready by which is
pretty aggressive. Yeah. I've I've heard I have heard it
referred to on the internet as vaporware a few times.
I've seen I've seen that a lot I don't know
that I would go quite so far as to call

(45:22):
it vaporware. I would certainly say they have tons of
challenges in order to make this a viable uh company
in that space. I wouldn't go so far as to
call it vaporware yet. I think that might be a
little too cynical. But they the cards are stacked against them, right,
They've got that we cut out for them, those plucky kids. Yeah. Now,

(45:44):
fortunately they also have very deep pockets because they're getting
funding from Chinese company and the two to billions of dollars.
So when you got billions of dollars behind you, then
you can afford to take some risks and uh, it'll
be really interesting to see if these risks pay off.
And one of the things they talked about specifically was
that the cars they make may never be used for

(46:06):
personal ownership. They may end up being the company that
makes cars specifically for fleets of autonomous vehicles. And they
mentioned that beyond just the modular approach with the batteries,
beyond the ability to change the chassis, they could also
change up the drive train and they could incorporate autonomous technology,
so you could end up with an electric vehicle that's

(46:26):
autonomously controlled or as autonomous control, and it's just part
of a fleet service like uber or lift, and this
could be the company that does it. Man, I kind
of hope that the I want to ask the car
stuff guys about this one, because I'm curious to see
how how people who have a very people who have

(46:47):
very strong opinions about about models of cars. You know,
you know people you know could car people are always
talking about like, oh, man, did you see that sixties
seven flirt Burt? And you're like, oh, yeah, the sixties
seven was the best flirt that ever flirred Burden and
and people get so excited about it. So so I
wonder I'm gonna I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna pretend
you said Cadillac, but yes, you know this classical you're saying, like,

(47:12):
is this to them what it would sound like to
us if somebody were like, wouldn't it be great if
all food was just in little kill form? Exactly? So
I can tell you I did an episode of Tech
Stuff and had Scott on the show. This was the
infamous ambush Scott episode where I had him on the
show and they said, all right, Scott, I'm gonna hit
you with a scenario. I want to hear your reaction.

(47:34):
I said, imagine that it's it's you know, maybe twenty
years in the future where this autonomous technology is truly
mature to the point where it is demonstrably better than
human performance, and at that point they outlaw human drivers
and all personal car ownership is pretty much a thing
in the past two and we all just rely on
vehicles that arrive on demand and autonomously take us to

(47:56):
our destination. What do you think And did it? Did
his head just fall off? You could hear the moment
his heartbroke. It was it was audible. It was like
the sweetest dude. I did apologize to him in a
subsequent episode, text there will be driving approved zones. Come on, now,
you'll only be able to turn to the left, but

(48:17):
it'll be there. Uh, that's a race car joke. So
at any rate, Yeah, it was. It was interesting to
see a company that was head on saying this is
the way we think the future is going to be,
because obviously the other car companies, I mean, that's a
that that's that's a discussion that I don't think most
car companies are ready to have. Yeah, So it was

(48:37):
really interesting from that perspective. And uh, you know, of course,
there were a lot of other things that were on
display at CES I didn't really cover here. Oh the
smart up. I totally forgot about that. I wanted this
whole thing. Let me, let me, let me just give
you a quick smart up. Yes. So we were talking
about the real sense technology and the ability need to

(49:00):
detect mood. This was a facial recognition software that also
could detect like how happy are you? And it would
look at your make a grown man cry not gonna
sit there and go into rolling Stones quotes for the
rest of this episode. No, it's it would look at
one of us. It would look at your yea one
of the three it would look at. It would look

(49:22):
at your eyes and look at your smile and try
to judge if you were sincerely happy or if you're
just like grimacing. It could also, uh, it would try
to determine your gender and your age. So I stood
in front of it to see what it had to
say about me. That's sort of a gun freaking years

(49:43):
and perhaps coincidentally, my happiness rating dropped significantly after the
forty five that popped up on the screen. This is
going to be really useful for like if Ciri wants
to know if you're gas lighting her, well, I was, no, Siri,
I'm serious. See, I thought it was great. I want
to know where the tofudi stand is. Imagine that you

(50:05):
imagine that you're running a hip club and you're like, okay,
but if this thing figures out you're older than twenty eight,
you are out. You don't get to go in, or
you have to be happy before we allow you into
the store. And I thought, well, this could be a
weird future, right where you suddenly have a different like
it's not just it's not just authentication or verification now,

(50:28):
it's are you happy enough to come inside? If you're not,
then you need to go and rethink your life a little.
Oh see I would but all the places where I
hang out, I think that it would be like are
you depressed enough to come? It would be like are
you happy? You need to go somewhere? Have you today?
You're right listen here Mary Sunshine. You might need to
turn it around and go somewhere else. So anyway, this

(50:51):
this was just kind of a quick overview of some
of the cool tech I saw there. Uh, there was
so much more there. I mean the Eureka Park section,
which is really the very small startups that have Usually
it's it's largely software based these days, but there's some
that have physical products too. That was amazing. But by
the time we actually hit that part of the show,

(51:13):
we were all burnt out. And it got to a
point where after we walked down five rows of the stuff,
we realized that we couldn't name a single thing we
had just walked past because we were we were now
just going through the motions. And that's when we called it, like, Okay,
we're not unless something really hits us over the head
with how amazing it is, we're not going to even

(51:33):
understand what we're seeing. And and shout out to your
to your coworkers who went went out there, and Jason,
our boss, was there too, and between between the four
of us we were able to do a lot. We
got I think four episodes of forward Thinking shot as
well as I think six how Stuff Works Now videos

(51:55):
and I recorded a tech stuff episode while I was
out there. Says a lot of work, but yeah, we'll
try to throw up links. We've we've been posting links
to things as they've come up on on Twitter and
on Facebook, but we'll try to do more of that
or go back and check them out. And you, guys,
we just recorded an episode of Forward Thinking, a whole
new episode, and we'll be recording a whole another new episode.

(52:18):
Just record the next one. So and with that in mind, guys, uh,
if you are happy that we're back, let us know it,
because validation is something I'm constantly seeking. You can let
us know on Twitter, on Google Plus, on Facebook. We
are f w thinking. Search fw thinking on Facebook to
find us because we don't have the fw thinking domain there,
but if you search, we pop right up. You can

(52:39):
leave us a message there. You can email us f
tow Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com let us
know if there's any particular technology you're interested in, or science,
or just a question about what the future might be like.
Throw that in there. Do you have any other comments,
We'd love to hear them, and we will talk to
you again really soon. For more on this topic and

(53:03):
the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com. Problem
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