October 21, 2024 • 42 mins
In celebration of Halloween, we take a look at an article from HowStuffWorks titled 10 Scary Modern Technologies. From drones to voices coming out of thin air, we peek under the big scary bed that is technology.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you, y'all? I'm working on an episode that's
still in progress. I wanted to get something to you
(00:25):
today while I still work on that episode, and I thought, well,
it's spooky season. I've got quite a few episodes of
tech Stuff that relate to spooky topics, and I thought
this would be a fun one. It originally published on Halloween,
October thirty first, twenty to eighteen. It is titled tech
Stuff's Spooky Halloween Spectacular and I hope you enjoy as
(00:50):
I revisit an article from my old employer, House stuff
Works ten scary modern technologies. Enjoy this classic episode of
tech Stuff, and I'll have a new one for you
on Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Either everybody, and Welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Jonathan Strictly, the executive vampire here at Hall Stuff Works Halloween.
If you're listening to this on Halloween otherwise, that was
the worst possible introduction I could have given for this episode, and.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I should feel badly about it, but I don't. Nope,
But in celebration of Halloween, we are going to take
a look at spooky tech, or you know, scary tech,
or at least some technology that could at least be
kind of creepy. See here's the problem I'm running into, y'all.
I've already done an episode about tech in Haunted House Attraction,
(01:53):
so that's finished. I already did one on ghost hunting
technology years ago where I gave a skeptical view of
what all that was about. And sooner or later, after
you do a few years of a technology podcast, you
start to run out of the fun stuff like that.
So for this episode, I turned to the house Stuffworks
(02:15):
website and I pulled up a classic article, which is
also always a dangerous thing when you're talking technology. But
this article is titled ten Scary modern Technologies. It was
co written by David Russ and my former editor and
Tech Stuff co host Chris Pollette. So get ready for
(02:35):
some tech that goes bump in the night, I guess.
And actually, to be more serious, the technology I'm listing
here does not fall into the supernatural or ghostly categories
at all. The technology represents stuff that could be unsettling
(02:56):
or at worst could cause massive enormous problem due to
overreach or unintended consequences. So there are some serious intreges
in here, even though I'm having a little bit of
fun with the presentation. So let us get started. Number
ten on the list hollow sonics and the audio spotlight system.
(03:18):
This is more in the creepy, unsettling vein technology that
focuses sound. That's what this is all about. It's focusing
sound into a narrow beam, which provides the opportunity for
ultra targeted sound for stuff like advertising. It's not necessarily creepy,
but it's not necessarily welcome either. But imagine that you're
(03:39):
walking through a store and just as you're passing in
front of a certain store item, let's say it's cookie
crisp cereal, and you start hearing a voice whispering to you, Hey,
that cookie crisp looks pretty good. It might seem really weird,
this little disembodied voice, And as soon as as you
(04:00):
get past a certain point, you can't hear it anymore.
You just have this experience as you're going through the store,
you keep hearing these targeted sounds in very narrow spots
and as soon as you're out of those spots, you
can't hear it. That sounds pretty creepy, right, Well, how
does it work well? According to the company, the secret
is in the size of the sound waves compared to
(04:20):
the size of the sound source. The company states that
if you have a sound source that is much larger
than the comparable size of the sound waves it's producing,
you get more directionality out of your sound so you
can focus it more like a beam. So if you
were to create loud speakers that are much much much
larger than the sound waves they're producing, and sound waves
(04:43):
can measure from a few inches up to several feet
in size, you could direct those sound waves in a beam,
more like a directional beam, rather than having them propagate
outward in all equal directions. But that would not work
very well for something like targeted adzing, because you would
have to have these enormous speakers perched behind the cheerios
(05:04):
and that would be very distracting. So this company has
gone with an approach that has these devices producing ultrasonic
beams of sound. Ultrasonic sound waves are very very tiny.
They're also normally imperceptible at least directly, they are imperceptible
to us. We cannot hear in this frequency. They do
(05:27):
have a very strong directionality as a result of the
way they are generated. So, according to the company, as
the ultrasonic beam travels through the air, the inherent properties
of the air cause the ultrasound to change shape in
a predictable way. This gives rise to frequency components in
the audible band which can be accurately predicted and therefore
(05:49):
precisely controlled. By generating the correct ultrasonic signal, we can
create within the air itself any sound desired. So, in
other words, it's the interaction of these ultrasonic frequencies with
the air itself that causes the ultrasonic frequencies to change,
and then you produce these audible frequencies. And because this
(06:11):
is all very controllable in a predictable environment, you can
produce whatever sounds you want. This is based off the
work of an inventor named Woody Norris. He demonstrated this
technology at a TED talk in the early two thousands.
Rather than generating the audible sound on the face of
the speaker as a traditional speaker would, where the speaker
(06:32):
is moving, a diaphragm in and out, and pushing air
around the ultrasonic emitter creates a column of the air
itself to act like a speaker, which is pretty nifty.
I'm sorry, I meant spooky number nine. DNA hacking. So
back in two thousand and three, scientists finished mapping out
the human genome. But that was obviously just the beginning.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
That's just.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
A long list of base pairs. Next came the work
to examine the genome closely and determine which base pairs.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
In the more than three billion.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Pairs that make up the human genome are responsible for
different stuff like our possibility of developing a disease, for example,
Because if you could determine that, and if you could
determine a way of changing that part of the DNA
so that it's eliminated, maybe you could make someone not
(07:32):
develop that disease. You could potentially wipe out certain diseases.
And beyond that, what about hacking the human genome so
that we can create designer human beings, human beings who
have traits that we considered to be superior. Now that's
the stuff of lots of science fiction and horror cautionary tales.
Stuff like Gatica saying yeah, but who gets to decide
(07:55):
what is superior and what happens to people who aren't
able to take advantage of that technology, and what happens
to the people who do take advantage of that technology.
There are a lot of ethical questions around it. However,
beyond that, there are other scary things to consider. DNA
hacking could allow for individually focused biological warfare. So imagine
(08:17):
that you're living in a world and someone can get
access to your DNA. Maybe they get a skin sample
or some hair or something. They're able to get something
from you that has traces of your DNA in it,
and they're able to analyze your DNA and see what
makes you you and look for any vulnerabilities. Maybe they
find out that you have a predisposed weakness to a
(08:38):
particular type of virus, and then they engineer a virus
to attack you specifically. That was actually the premise of
a twenty twelve article in the Atlantic, and that article
hypothesized a future in which the president of the United
States could be targeted and assassinated through the use of
a particularly nasty virus that was tailor made for the president.
(08:58):
Yikes or imagine more than that, maybe a widespread plague.
Les Stephen King's the stand engineered through a deep understanding
of DNA paired with a really crappy containment strategy. So
how realistic is all of that, Well, in a short term,
it's probably not terribly realistic. It's certainly pausible, but not
(09:18):
necessarily plausible. But it does require a deep understanding of
DNA and a means to manipulate it easily in order
to pay it off. We've seen some advances in those areas.
There are a lot more ways that we can manipulate
DNA than there used to be, but it's not exactly
easy to do. It's easy, yer, but that's a matter
(09:39):
of degrees. However, you can make a convincing argument that
it would not require too deep and understanding to cause
real harm unintentionally, and that would be a very difficult
argument to counter. And while DNA hacking could produce all
sorts of different futuristic results, we do already have a
culture of biohackers also sometimes known as grinders, who have
(10:02):
taken body alteration to new places. These folks are not
working on a DNA level. They're not changing themselves fundamentally
in that way. Instead they're doing alterations, you know, upgrades.
So one example would be there are people who have
chosen to have small magnets implanted under the skin of
(10:22):
their fingertips. So these little nubby magnets sticking out on
their fingertips. It's kind of weird, right, Well, what's the
purpose of that. Well, because of the effects of magnetism
and electromagnetism, they would actually be able to sense when
they were near magnetic or electromagnetic fields. So it'd be
kind of like Spider Man's spidy sense. They'd feel tugging
(10:44):
on their fingertips as they pass through it. So instead
of detecting danger like Spider Man would, you'd be able
to tell like whether or not electricity was flowing through
a conductor, for example, because you could bring your fingers
close to that conductor. Maybe it's some wires. You bring
a thing close and if you start feeling the pulses
from an alternating magnetic field, a fluctuating magnetic field, that
(11:09):
would tell you, oh, electricity, alternating current is flowing through here,
because I can feel it in my fingertips. That would
be something you normally would not be able to feel
so you kind of have a sixth sense due to
having these magnets implanted in your fingertips. And people have
actually done this. However, a word of caution. From what
I understand, these operations are pretty painful. They usually are
(11:31):
not done with anesthetic. There's not really a place you
can go that's medically licensed to do this because it's
not a standard medical procedure. As far as I know,
there are no accredited medical facilities that do it. I
think any doctor who did practice this would have the
(11:53):
danger of being barred from practice. So you're usually talking
about entrepreneuring body modify cation specialists, you know, like piercers,
who will do this kind of operation. And anytime you're
talking about introducing something foreign to the body, you're also
raising other risks like infection, so you've got to be
super duper careful about that kind of thing. In other words,
(12:17):
you're not gonna find me putting magnets under my fingertips
anytime soon. Number eight on the list cyber war who boy.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Well.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
The scenario of the article specifically lays out is an
all out cyber warfare attack where one nation targets another
nation's infrastructure, like its power grid system or water system,
and sure enough, the US Department of Homeland Security has
reported that there's lots of evidence to show that various
hackers have infiltrated critical infrastructure with such tactics like Russian
(12:51):
hackers and the things like power plants and gas pipelines,
and that's terrifying. And before that report had even made
the news, that was in twenty eighteen, security experts have
for years been warning that Chinese hackers have been infiltrating
American infrastructure. CNN reported on that back in twenty fourteen.
So this is not exactly a new story. It's a
(13:13):
continuing story that continues to be really problematic and concerning.
So the infiltration part is a reality. We know for
a fact hackers from other countries have infiltrated various systems.
There have been traces found of their activities, so we
know that there have at least been people snooping around
(13:34):
our systems. Whether or not they've installed anything to help
shut stuff down as another matter, but they've definitely been there,
and they appear to have been there from places like
Russia and China. That does not automatically mean that the
infiltration was state directed. In other words that it was
a government backed project, but that seems to be The
(13:57):
general consensus is that these were lifely the activities of
a state back group of hackers. What about shutting everything down?
Is that realistic? Well, it could be more challenging to do,
but not necessarily impossible. Many utilities have started installing self
healing systems. A self healing system isn't quite as cool
(14:19):
as it sounds like. It's not like it's Wolverine in
infrastructure form, but it does involve having a system that
when it detects problems automatically tries to reroute services to
get around those problems. So with a power grid, it
might be if a smart power grid system detects that
there's a short for some reason, or there's a break
(14:40):
in connectivity at some point, it may try to reroute
power to work around that as much as possible. That
could help confound a cyber warfare attack a little bit.
At least it might mitigate the impact of an attack,
though preventing one entirely maybe not. But then there are
also attacks on other systems, not just power grids and
(15:02):
water and gas, which are all scary enough. But there's
the evidence that showed Russian hackers were targeting election systems
in the United States leading up to the twenty sixteen elections.
I talked about this in a recent episode of Tech Stuff,
so I'm not going to go all the way through
it again. But the really insidious thing about those attacks
is they don't even have to be super successful to
be effective. If you can so doubt in the minds
(15:25):
of a nation's citizens as to the validity of any
given election, you have undermined the very foundation of that
nation's government. A government that doesn't have the confidence of
its population is on shaky ground and has to move
more and more towards totalitarianism in order to maintain power.
If you don't have any confidence that your system works,
(15:47):
then you don't have any confidence in your government at all.
So cyber war is something that is continuing right now.
It is actually happening. It is already in place. And
obviously I've given examples of how the US has been
the target of cyber warfare, but don't forget the US
has engaged in it too. We're not, you know, the
(16:07):
United States has not been just the poor victim in
all these cases. The United States has certainly played a
hand in cyber warfare activities. One example would be Stuck's Net,
the computer virus that was designed to sabotage uranium enrichment
facilities in Iran. So this is not something that everyone
else is doing and the United States is the victim.
(16:29):
This is something that everyone is doing as much as
they can and stepping it up as much as they can. Well,
we have a lot more scary technology to talk about,
but I need to have a sip of tea to
comfort myself, so let's take a quick break to thank
our sponsor. Number seven is the technological singularity. Now, out
(16:55):
of all the science fiction ideas I find particularly interesting,
this one ranks near the top of them. The singularity
refers to a general concept that could be brought about
in several different ways, but from a very high level,
the idea goes something like this. Imagine that technology has
advanced to the point that the newest stuff coming out
is already designing the next generation of stuff. And imagine
(17:20):
that the gaps between these generations are getting smaller and smaller,
and eventually you reach a point where the present is
defined by constant change, and that's the only way you
can define it, because things change so quickly. It is
almost impossible to describe the present in any coherent way.
That's how quickly everything is evolving. The thing that would
(17:40):
fuel this would be the emergence of superhuman intelligence in
most of the scenarios that involve the technological singularity. However,
that would not necessarily require just a computer AI. That's
one possible version is pure artificial intelligen that has superhuman
(18:01):
capabilities in processing information. This is your basic deep thought
from Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy or Skynet from the
Terminator that scenario. This would be a scenario in which
we humans have created an AI so powerful we are
unable to control it, and then it goes on to
redefine our world in ways that we could not anticipate
because we cannot operate on the same level as this
(18:23):
superhuman intelligence. But that is not necessarily the only pathway
to the technological singularity. Another way might be that humans
find a way to boost our own intelligence, and thus
we evolve beyond what we traditionally think of as being human.
We might do this through a deeper understanding of biology.
We could boost our intelligence that way, going back to
(18:44):
the concept of DNA hacking and things related to that,
or it might involve using technology to create cyborg like
beings where we merge with technology on some level and
with tech and biology working together, we boost our intelligence
to new level and achieve superhuman intelligence that way. So
bottom line, is this a possibility, Well, it beats me.
(19:07):
But there are a lot of super smart people who
are on either side of this issue. So some people
say the singularity is essentially a foregone conclusion. It will happen,
The only question is when will it happen. But there
are other people who say there might be some fundamental
barriers that were not likely to get over, and those
barriers will block the singularity from ever happening. One of
(19:30):
the frequent criticisms of various singularity scenarios is that a
lot of it rests on the belief that we're going
to see progress continue on a pace that's similar to
what Moore's law has observed with computer processing power, and
the thing is that pace may not be realistic or sustainable,
(19:51):
or even applicable to some technologies. So Moore's law applies
to the processing power of computers generally speaking, but it
may not apply to other elements that would be necessary
to bring about superhuman intelligence, because processing power by itself
is not intelligence. You also have to have the software side.
You've got a lot of other pieces that have to
(20:12):
be in place. However, if it is possible, it could
very well mean the end of the human race as
we know it today. Now that doesn't necessarily mean it's
the end of humanity entirely. It just may mean that
humanity will transition into something different, So it could be
a new beginning. It's not necessarily the end of everything,
(20:34):
but still spooky. Number six Google Glass, I mean that
was the number on the article Google. You remember Google Glass,
the augmented reality glasses. Back when Chris and Dave were
working on this article, Google glass was still a real thing.
(20:56):
It was poised to become an actual consumer product outside
of the relative small sample of bleeding edge adopters aka
glass holes. We were sometimes called that because I was
one of them. I had a pair of Google Glass.
The glasses were part augmented reality headset, part user interface
for the world around you. They included a camera which
(21:17):
could pull in information, and a bluetooth chips so the
glasses could communicate with a paired mobile device, and through
that mobile device, the glasses could also pair information like
GPS coordinates, So these glasses, while giving you potentially incredible
access to information about the world around you, could also
gather information about the world around you for the benefit
(21:37):
of Google. And suddenly this company could potentially access information
from cameras mounted on faces all over the world. And
the glasses also had microphones, because you know, you could
use voice commands to make your glasses do stuff. But
that also meant that in theory, Google could listen in
as well, not just see everything, but hear everything, which
(21:58):
raises some big privacy concer not just for the people
wearing the glasses, but for everyone around those people. And
Google makes money with information, so you would effectively be
generating product for Google to sell by wearing a pair
of those glasses and walking around everywhere. Google would be
the head of a big surveillance state, far more invasive
than a network of closed circuit cameras if such technology
(22:22):
was used unethically. And while Google Glass is now far
more limited in its rollout, you know you only see
it in a few industries. At this point, the company
Google is still very much in the business of knowing
where its customers are. In August twenty eighteen, numerous tech
journals reported on a study that was conducted by Douglas C.
(22:43):
Schmidt of Venderbilt University that say said that a stationary
Android phone running Chrome in the background would ping Google
servers with location data three hundred and forty times in
a twenty four hour period. Even if you turn the
location history feature off of the phone, the phones were
still sending location data back to Google, according to the study. Google,
(23:04):
by the way, has disputed the findings of this study.
Then there are the numerous personal assistant devices that are
out there, including Google Home, that also are always listening
for commands. And of course that's just Google. There are
other companies out there, like Apple and Amazon that also
have technologies similar to these. All of these could be
monitoring users and sending data back so that the companies
(23:27):
might later exploit that information for profit, usually to sell
you stuff to advertise directly to you. But that's still
pretty creepy, right. Even if the companies are not actively
exploiting that information, the fact that the data could be
transmitted and recorded at all is problematic, though again I
should say the companies generally say they do not record
(23:48):
user data in that way. So whew, that's a relief, right.
Number five drones. Drones are legit creepy. Many drones have
cameras mounted on them. That does allow potential filmmakers unprecedented
access and capabilities. Now, a low budget film can have
the equivalent of an expensive crane shot. It's a fraction
(24:09):
of what it would cost to rent and operate a
film crane with all the associated personnel, the safety features,
all that kind of stuff. You could reduce all that
down to an operator and a drone and it would
be much less expensive. But it also means a drone
operator who's using one of these devices could use it
to do stuff like peeping, super darn creepy, to be
(24:29):
spying on neighbors and stuff. That's just the consumer technology
version of drones that is already troubling. But then you
have to remember there's also tons of military grade drones
and they're being used to do everything from surveillance work
to active strikes on military targets. Weaponized drones, these drones
(24:51):
may be semi autonomous or completely under the control of
an operator who's potentially hundreds of miles away. They greatly
extend the surveillance case abilities of various government agencies and divisions,
from military to law enforcement. In the United States, Congress
passed a bill in twenty twelve giving the Federal Aviation
Administration or FAA, the authority to drop rules for commercial
(25:14):
and police drones in US airspace. The FAA hasn't been
super fast to share that information. That prompted the Electronic
Frontier Foundation or EFF to sue the FAA under the
Freedom of Information Act to at least share a list
of the public entities in private drone manufacturers that applied
to fly drones in the United States, as well as
(25:36):
thousands of pages related to license applications. But the FAA didn't,
you know, explain how those entities were planning on using
the drones. So that's a problem. Number four three D printers. Well,
I just recently talked about maker Bot, and maybe you
think the scariest thing about three D printers is that
they could lead to minor burns as you try to
(25:58):
deal with melting plastic. In fact, there are other things
to worry about as well, like fake ATM facades. See
back in twenty eleven, some thieves used a three D
printer to create a false front for an ATM terminal,
and they installed a skimmer on some ATMs, so unsuspecting
customers would come up and it would look like a
(26:19):
real ATM front that you couldn't necessarily tell immediately that
there was a projection on there that was a false front.
So they would put their their ATM card into this.
They would then type in their pin and meanwhile the
skimmer was actually scanning the data on the card and
(26:42):
recording it with the pen and allowing the thieves to
steal more than four hundred thousand dollars in the process.
And you know, all it took was a three D
printer to create that convincing ATM facade. In twenty thirteen,
a guy named Cody Wilson made headlines when he published
five else for his three D printed Liberator handgun, which
(27:03):
fired three eighty ammunition. That scared a ton of people
because it means that anyone who had access to a
three D printer and the appropriate materials could have the
opportunity to make an untraceable weapon. There'd be no background
check required because you just print the thing out. And
it also raised other possible problems if the plastic were
(27:24):
not of a sufficiently good enough quality. It could mean
that the printed gun would not contain the explosive reaction
properly when you fire the bullet, so it could end
up breaking apart in a person's hand, causing injury to
the person holding the gun. So even if the person
who had printed the three D gun did so as
kind of just a proof of concept and they're firing at,
(27:45):
you know, just a paper target, there's the possibility that
the gun itself could explode or fracture as part of
this if it weren't made out of sufficiently strong material,
and severe injury could follow. Cody Wilson, I should add,
has recently been in the news again. He resigned his
role as director of Defense Distributed, the company that he
(28:08):
used to promote the design and distribution of three D
principle gun files. It's unrelated to the gun side of things,
so that organization still exists and continues to push Wilson's
vision even without Wilson at the helm. I've got some
more spooky things to talk about, but I grow tired,
(28:29):
so I need the goal and drink some blood, and
by blood, I mean oh grade t I'll be right
back after this word from our sponsors. Number three driverless cars.
This is a.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Still a big worry.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Back when Chris and Dave were writing this, driverless cars
were still kind of coming out of the very very
limited testing situations. Google was the best known version. But
now we actually have some at least some rudimentary automated
car systems out there in the real world, like Tesla's autopilot,
(29:15):
which has contributed to some notable accidents, including a fatality.
Tesla has said that this system was not meant to
be used as a driverless car solution, but people have
still done it because you hear a word like autopilot
and you want to test it out. I guess so
(29:39):
that has been an issue. It has raised concerns that
perhaps this autonomous car technology is nowhere near ready for
full rollout, which I think most companies that are working
on the technology would say is correct. They're still working
on the tech to make it a reality. There have
been a lot of of a lot of stories published
(30:01):
about various problems, philosophical problems that you need to resolve
in order to make a consistent and predictable autonomous car solution,
one of them being the infamous trolley problem. The basic
version of the trolley problem is that you've got out
of control trolley. It's going down some tracks, and there's
(30:25):
a switch that will allow you to change the pathway
of the trolley. And if the trolley continues where it's
path where it's going now, it's going to collide with
a group of people. If you throw the switch, it
will change the direction of the trolley and it will
collide with one person. Do you throw the switch? If
(30:46):
you do nothing, then maybe you feel like I'm not involved.
Therefore my decision did not affect anybody. It just played
out the way it was going to play out. If
I throw the switch, is that I'm actively condemning that
other person to death? Other people would say no, by
not choosing, you've actively chosen to condemn the first group
(31:07):
to death. There are variations of this problem. Maybe you say,
all right, well you've got a choice. You can not
throw a switch, which means the out of control trolley
will eventually come to a stop, but everyone in the
trolley is going to die as a result of this accident.
Or you can throw the switch and the trolley will
hit somebody, but the trolley will stop and everyone who's
(31:30):
in the trolley will survive. So either you actively kill someone,
but everyone in the trolley lives. Or you don't do
anything and everyone in the trolley dies, but the person
who is just innocently crossing the pathway they live. These
sort of ethical problems are things that people talk about
and debate amongst themselves, but it turns out to be
an actual practical problem when you're designing autonomous car systems,
(31:53):
because eventually you have to build in some sort of
decision making system for a car in the event that
it encounters a non avoidable car accident, that all the
problems have aligned in such a way that there is
no possible outcome in which there isn't a car accident.
(32:14):
So what does the car do? Does it behave in
a way that preserves the life of the person writing
in the car? Does it behave in a way that
preserves the life of the people in the surrounding area.
There are a lot of tough questions to answer, so
MIT published a paper from a quiz called the Moral Machine.
This quiz was designed to find out what people thought
should be given priority in these situations, and it was
(32:37):
distributed globally across social media platforms. They recorded forty million
ethical decisions in total global preference had certain consistencies. By
the way, generally speaking, people prefer to spare human lives
over animal lives. So if you had an option where
you can make a choice, but this animal will die
(32:58):
as a result, or you can make it vo or
that human will die, people would say, well, it's a shame,
but I'd rather choose where the animal dies. Also, people
in general would choose to spare more lives rather than
fewer lives. So in my example with the group of
people versus the one person, more people would feel comfortable
with the one person losing their life as opposed to
(33:19):
the group of people. Also, people in general want to
spare children's lives more than adult lives, So this really
just showed people's preferences and ethical decisions. However, the study
authors stated that experts really should be the ones to
make the final call when designing these algorithms, that just
going by public preference alone may not be their best decision. However,
(33:42):
another thing to remember is that in twenty sixteen, thirty
seven thousand people died from car accidents. If driverless cars
can reduce that number year by year, if we can
find a way to make driverless cars more reliable so
that it reduces the overall number of fatal accidents. That
(34:03):
would be an incredible thing and it would definitely be
a good argument in support for autonomous cars. It is, however,
that there possible that there's a psychological barrier of a
machine quote unquote causing deaths, and that that could be
enough to screw things up, because while you might be
able to statistically state fewer people died because there were
(34:24):
autonomous cars, the fact that the cars were autonomous and
then people died has a psychological effect. You're thinking, oh,
it's a machine killing a person. Number two geoengineering, So
this is the use of science and technology to quote
unquote hack the planet. This is one of those ideas
that's meant to help counteract problems like climate change. So
(34:47):
the scientific consensus tells us, yes, there is climate change,
and yes it is largely due to human causes, chiefly
the increase of CO two in the atmosphere along with
other greenhouse gasses. So by creating technologies designed to capture
and sequester carbon dioxide so that it's not in the
atmosphere anymore, we could help slow or maybe even stop
(35:10):
the process of climate change. But the thing is, we
don't know for sure that some of these proposals would
work or what the other consequences of those actions might be.
One of the well, some of the proposed methods would
definitely have nasty consequences.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
We know that.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
So, for example, one possibility would be, let's put some
more iron in the oceans in order to spur algae
blooms to soak up carbon dioxide, which that could help
you could actually soak up CO two from the atmosphere. However,
that would also have a huge negative impact on the
(35:50):
ocean itself. You would create dead zones in the ocean
because of this algae bloom, and that means messing up
a really complicated ecosystem that lots of lifeforms to depend upon,
including life forms that aren't you know, directly in the ocean,
So you would have a ripple effect. Fittingly enough, since
we're talking about water, you could have die offs happening
(36:11):
other places in the world that are a result of this,
and you know, not even places where there are oceans,
So unintended consequences could be really, really nasty. Another tactic
besides trying to capture CO two is to find ways
to reflect more of the Sun's energy back off into
(36:31):
space without it getting absorbed by the Earth and then
emitted back into the ris's atmosphere. The message here is
that the cure could end up being worse or at
least just as bad as the disease, though in a
different way. And ultimately we'd be taking a lot of
potentially irreversible actions without a full appreciation of what was
going to happen. However, if we employ these responsibly and carefully,
(36:58):
it's likely that we could use them as part of
an overall plan to help reduce climate change. Experts warn
us that these are not magic bullets. These are not
going to miraculously reverse the course that we've seen over
the last few decades. They would at best be a
good additional strategy along with reducing our carbon dioxide emissions,
(37:25):
that would be our most important action to take. We
can't just assume that we're going to come up with
a technological solution that will allow us to continue to
behave the way we've been behaving and magically erase the
consequences of those actions. That's just not a realistic outlook
at this point. Number one on the list from Chris
(37:48):
and Dave was Internet surveillance, which kind of ties back
into that Google problem I mentioned earlier, but it goes
well beyond that. So Internet surveillance comes in all forms, right,
the social media we use, when we do our actions
on there, all of that's getting tracked. All of that
is going into various tech boxes based on our profiles,
(38:10):
so that we are encountering the ads that are closest
tied to our behavior, so that we have the most
the most incentive to click on those ads or to
act on them in some way, thus benefiting the company
that makes the social platform as well as the company
that's doing the advertising, and whatever company is ultimately in
charge of the product or service that is being advertised.
(38:33):
So there's that there are companies like Google that are
taking this to extremes, tracking all sorts of behaviors for
all sorts of stuff, so that whenever we're doing searches,
we're also getting served up search results that are catered
to us more and more, which in some ways is good,
you know, you're getting stuff that is more relevant to you,
and in other ways comes across as super creepy because
(38:57):
it means that there's this enormous corporation out there that
might know you better than you know yourself, and that's
kind of worrisome. But then you have other things like
the NSSA, which a couple of years ago is famously
revealed that the NSSA was tapping into all sorts of
different communication tools to spy on communications between lots of
(39:22):
different people in an effort to promote national security. But
you could argue it was also a huge violation of
people's expectation of privacy and that it also took almost
a presumed guilty approach and applied it to absolutely everybody
who uses these forms of communication, from cellular phones to
(39:46):
website traffic to all sorts of stuff. Then you have hackers,
either state back to hackers who are working to spy
on behalf of a government or independent hackers who are
just trying to gather as much information as possible to
exploit it. Maybe that information is your bank account, or
(40:08):
maybe it's your social Security number, it could be all
sorts of stuff, but ultimately they're doing it so they
can make money and they have no real concern about
what happens to you and your information. Information is valuable,
whether it's for a government to try and protect itself
or the citizens that it represents. Ideally, we would like
(40:29):
to at least se a government try to protect the
people it represents. Maybe that's being naive, or if it's
a you know, a corporation that's doing this in order
to make a profit, or a hacker that's doing this
in order to make a profit in an even more
unethical way than the corporations are. Information is valuable. It's
(40:50):
also a good reminder of why you should do stuff
like use VPNs when you can so that you can
protect your activities from prying eyes and not have to
worry quite so much about your every move being spied upon.
Don't use public Wi fi, especially to do anything sensitive.
You know, be careful, be responsible with your browsing activities
(41:16):
so that you limit the ways that you can be exploited.
I'm not saying don't make use of these various platforms
social media. I'd be a hypocrite if I did. I
use them all the time. Just know what you're getting
into and be aware of what could potentially happen. If
you're comfortable with those consequences, I say, you're all good.
(41:38):
If you're not, then you need to think about ways
you can change your behavior. Whether it's using VPNs or
backing off on using the Internet as much, or whatever
it may be, so that you feel you're using technology
to benefit you as opposed to having other people receive
a benefit because of you don't be used. In other words,
(42:01):
now as I say that, I think you should also
go to tea public dot com slash tech Stuff. We
got a merchandise store. It's awesome. You can go buy
stuff and every purchase helps the show. Again. Hypocrite, I know,
but that's why spooky. Hey guys, if you want to
get in touch with me and talk about how scared
you are after this spooky episode, you can go over
(42:23):
to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's our website. You'll
find all the contact information there. Check it out, and
I will haunt you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
(42:45):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you, y'all? I'm working on an episode that's
still in progress. I wanted to get something to you
(00:25):
today while I still work on that episode, and I thought, well,
it's spooky season. I've got quite a few episodes of
tech Stuff that relate to spooky topics, and I thought
this would be a fun one. It originally published on Halloween,
October thirty first, twenty to eighteen. It is titled tech
Stuff's Spooky Halloween Spectacular and I hope you enjoy as
(00:50):
I revisit an article from my old employer, House stuff
Works ten scary modern technologies. Enjoy this classic episode of
tech Stuff, and I'll have a new one for you
on Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Either everybody, and Welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Jonathan Strictly, the executive vampire here at Hall Stuff Works Halloween.
If you're listening to this on Halloween otherwise, that was
the worst possible introduction I could have given for this episode, and.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I should feel badly about it, but I don't. Nope,
But in celebration of Halloween, we are going to take
a look at spooky tech, or you know, scary tech,
or at least some technology that could at least be
kind of creepy. See here's the problem I'm running into, y'all.
I've already done an episode about tech in Haunted House Attraction,
(01:53):
so that's finished. I already did one on ghost hunting
technology years ago where I gave a skeptical view of
what all that was about. And sooner or later, after
you do a few years of a technology podcast, you
start to run out of the fun stuff like that.
So for this episode, I turned to the house Stuffworks
(02:15):
website and I pulled up a classic article, which is
also always a dangerous thing when you're talking technology. But
this article is titled ten Scary modern Technologies. It was
co written by David Russ and my former editor and
Tech Stuff co host Chris Pollette. So get ready for
(02:35):
some tech that goes bump in the night, I guess.
And actually, to be more serious, the technology I'm listing
here does not fall into the supernatural or ghostly categories
at all. The technology represents stuff that could be unsettling
(02:56):
or at worst could cause massive enormous problem due to
overreach or unintended consequences. So there are some serious intreges
in here, even though I'm having a little bit of
fun with the presentation. So let us get started. Number
ten on the list hollow sonics and the audio spotlight system.
(03:18):
This is more in the creepy, unsettling vein technology that
focuses sound. That's what this is all about. It's focusing
sound into a narrow beam, which provides the opportunity for
ultra targeted sound for stuff like advertising. It's not necessarily creepy,
but it's not necessarily welcome either. But imagine that you're
(03:39):
walking through a store and just as you're passing in
front of a certain store item, let's say it's cookie
crisp cereal, and you start hearing a voice whispering to you, Hey,
that cookie crisp looks pretty good. It might seem really weird,
this little disembodied voice, And as soon as as you
(04:00):
get past a certain point, you can't hear it anymore.
You just have this experience as you're going through the store,
you keep hearing these targeted sounds in very narrow spots
and as soon as you're out of those spots, you
can't hear it. That sounds pretty creepy, right, Well, how
does it work well? According to the company, the secret
is in the size of the sound waves compared to
(04:20):
the size of the sound source. The company states that
if you have a sound source that is much larger
than the comparable size of the sound waves it's producing,
you get more directionality out of your sound so you
can focus it more like a beam. So if you
were to create loud speakers that are much much much
larger than the sound waves they're producing, and sound waves
(04:43):
can measure from a few inches up to several feet
in size, you could direct those sound waves in a beam,
more like a directional beam, rather than having them propagate
outward in all equal directions. But that would not work
very well for something like targeted adzing, because you would
have to have these enormous speakers perched behind the cheerios
(05:04):
and that would be very distracting. So this company has
gone with an approach that has these devices producing ultrasonic
beams of sound. Ultrasonic sound waves are very very tiny.
They're also normally imperceptible at least directly, they are imperceptible
to us. We cannot hear in this frequency. They do
(05:27):
have a very strong directionality as a result of the
way they are generated. So, according to the company, as
the ultrasonic beam travels through the air, the inherent properties
of the air cause the ultrasound to change shape in
a predictable way. This gives rise to frequency components in
the audible band which can be accurately predicted and therefore
(05:49):
precisely controlled. By generating the correct ultrasonic signal, we can
create within the air itself any sound desired. So, in
other words, it's the interaction of these ultrasonic frequencies with
the air itself that causes the ultrasonic frequencies to change,
and then you produce these audible frequencies. And because this
(06:11):
is all very controllable in a predictable environment, you can
produce whatever sounds you want. This is based off the
work of an inventor named Woody Norris. He demonstrated this
technology at a TED talk in the early two thousands.
Rather than generating the audible sound on the face of
the speaker as a traditional speaker would, where the speaker
(06:32):
is moving, a diaphragm in and out, and pushing air
around the ultrasonic emitter creates a column of the air
itself to act like a speaker, which is pretty nifty.
I'm sorry, I meant spooky number nine. DNA hacking. So
back in two thousand and three, scientists finished mapping out
the human genome. But that was obviously just the beginning.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
That's just.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
A long list of base pairs. Next came the work
to examine the genome closely and determine which base pairs.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
In the more than three billion.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Pairs that make up the human genome are responsible for
different stuff like our possibility of developing a disease, for example,
Because if you could determine that, and if you could
determine a way of changing that part of the DNA
so that it's eliminated, maybe you could make someone not
(07:32):
develop that disease. You could potentially wipe out certain diseases.
And beyond that, what about hacking the human genome so
that we can create designer human beings, human beings who
have traits that we considered to be superior. Now that's
the stuff of lots of science fiction and horror cautionary tales.
Stuff like Gatica saying yeah, but who gets to decide
(07:55):
what is superior and what happens to people who aren't
able to take advantage of that technology, and what happens
to the people who do take advantage of that technology.
There are a lot of ethical questions around it. However,
beyond that, there are other scary things to consider. DNA
hacking could allow for individually focused biological warfare. So imagine
(08:17):
that you're living in a world and someone can get
access to your DNA. Maybe they get a skin sample
or some hair or something. They're able to get something
from you that has traces of your DNA in it,
and they're able to analyze your DNA and see what
makes you you and look for any vulnerabilities. Maybe they
find out that you have a predisposed weakness to a
(08:38):
particular type of virus, and then they engineer a virus
to attack you specifically. That was actually the premise of
a twenty twelve article in the Atlantic, and that article
hypothesized a future in which the president of the United
States could be targeted and assassinated through the use of
a particularly nasty virus that was tailor made for the president.
(08:58):
Yikes or imagine more than that, maybe a widespread plague.
Les Stephen King's the stand engineered through a deep understanding
of DNA paired with a really crappy containment strategy. So
how realistic is all of that, Well, in a short term,
it's probably not terribly realistic. It's certainly pausible, but not
(09:18):
necessarily plausible. But it does require a deep understanding of
DNA and a means to manipulate it easily in order
to pay it off. We've seen some advances in those areas.
There are a lot more ways that we can manipulate
DNA than there used to be, but it's not exactly
easy to do. It's easy, yer, but that's a matter
(09:39):
of degrees. However, you can make a convincing argument that
it would not require too deep and understanding to cause
real harm unintentionally, and that would be a very difficult
argument to counter. And while DNA hacking could produce all
sorts of different futuristic results, we do already have a
culture of biohackers also sometimes known as grinders, who have
(10:02):
taken body alteration to new places. These folks are not
working on a DNA level. They're not changing themselves fundamentally
in that way. Instead they're doing alterations, you know, upgrades.
So one example would be there are people who have
chosen to have small magnets implanted under the skin of
(10:22):
their fingertips. So these little nubby magnets sticking out on
their fingertips. It's kind of weird, right, Well, what's the
purpose of that. Well, because of the effects of magnetism
and electromagnetism, they would actually be able to sense when
they were near magnetic or electromagnetic fields. So it'd be
kind of like Spider Man's spidy sense. They'd feel tugging
(10:44):
on their fingertips as they pass through it. So instead
of detecting danger like Spider Man would, you'd be able
to tell like whether or not electricity was flowing through
a conductor, for example, because you could bring your fingers
close to that conductor. Maybe it's some wires. You bring
a thing close and if you start feeling the pulses
from an alternating magnetic field, a fluctuating magnetic field, that
(11:09):
would tell you, oh, electricity, alternating current is flowing through here,
because I can feel it in my fingertips. That would
be something you normally would not be able to feel
so you kind of have a sixth sense due to
having these magnets implanted in your fingertips. And people have
actually done this. However, a word of caution. From what
I understand, these operations are pretty painful. They usually are
(11:31):
not done with anesthetic. There's not really a place you
can go that's medically licensed to do this because it's
not a standard medical procedure. As far as I know,
there are no accredited medical facilities that do it. I
think any doctor who did practice this would have the
(11:53):
danger of being barred from practice. So you're usually talking
about entrepreneuring body modify cation specialists, you know, like piercers,
who will do this kind of operation. And anytime you're
talking about introducing something foreign to the body, you're also
raising other risks like infection, so you've got to be
super duper careful about that kind of thing. In other words,
(12:17):
you're not gonna find me putting magnets under my fingertips
anytime soon. Number eight on the list cyber war who boy.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Well.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
The scenario of the article specifically lays out is an
all out cyber warfare attack where one nation targets another
nation's infrastructure, like its power grid system or water system,
and sure enough, the US Department of Homeland Security has
reported that there's lots of evidence to show that various
hackers have infiltrated critical infrastructure with such tactics like Russian
(12:51):
hackers and the things like power plants and gas pipelines,
and that's terrifying. And before that report had even made
the news, that was in twenty eighteen, security experts have
for years been warning that Chinese hackers have been infiltrating
American infrastructure. CNN reported on that back in twenty fourteen.
So this is not exactly a new story. It's a
(13:13):
continuing story that continues to be really problematic and concerning.
So the infiltration part is a reality. We know for
a fact hackers from other countries have infiltrated various systems.
There have been traces found of their activities, so we
know that there have at least been people snooping around
(13:34):
our systems. Whether or not they've installed anything to help
shut stuff down as another matter, but they've definitely been there,
and they appear to have been there from places like
Russia and China. That does not automatically mean that the
infiltration was state directed. In other words that it was
a government backed project, but that seems to be The
(13:57):
general consensus is that these were lifely the activities of
a state back group of hackers. What about shutting everything down?
Is that realistic? Well, it could be more challenging to do,
but not necessarily impossible. Many utilities have started installing self
healing systems. A self healing system isn't quite as cool
(14:19):
as it sounds like. It's not like it's Wolverine in
infrastructure form, but it does involve having a system that
when it detects problems automatically tries to reroute services to
get around those problems. So with a power grid, it
might be if a smart power grid system detects that
there's a short for some reason, or there's a break
(14:40):
in connectivity at some point, it may try to reroute
power to work around that as much as possible. That
could help confound a cyber warfare attack a little bit.
At least it might mitigate the impact of an attack,
though preventing one entirely maybe not. But then there are
also attacks on other systems, not just power grids and
(15:02):
water and gas, which are all scary enough. But there's
the evidence that showed Russian hackers were targeting election systems
in the United States leading up to the twenty sixteen elections.
I talked about this in a recent episode of Tech Stuff,
so I'm not going to go all the way through
it again. But the really insidious thing about those attacks
is they don't even have to be super successful to
be effective. If you can so doubt in the minds
(15:25):
of a nation's citizens as to the validity of any
given election, you have undermined the very foundation of that
nation's government. A government that doesn't have the confidence of
its population is on shaky ground and has to move
more and more towards totalitarianism in order to maintain power.
If you don't have any confidence that your system works,
(15:47):
then you don't have any confidence in your government at all.
So cyber war is something that is continuing right now.
It is actually happening. It is already in place. And
obviously I've given examples of how the US has been
the target of cyber warfare, but don't forget the US
has engaged in it too. We're not, you know, the
(16:07):
United States has not been just the poor victim in
all these cases. The United States has certainly played a
hand in cyber warfare activities. One example would be Stuck's Net,
the computer virus that was designed to sabotage uranium enrichment
facilities in Iran. So this is not something that everyone
else is doing and the United States is the victim.
(16:29):
This is something that everyone is doing as much as
they can and stepping it up as much as they can. Well,
we have a lot more scary technology to talk about,
but I need to have a sip of tea to
comfort myself, so let's take a quick break to thank
our sponsor. Number seven is the technological singularity. Now, out
(16:55):
of all the science fiction ideas I find particularly interesting,
this one ranks near the top of them. The singularity
refers to a general concept that could be brought about
in several different ways, but from a very high level,
the idea goes something like this. Imagine that technology has
advanced to the point that the newest stuff coming out
is already designing the next generation of stuff. And imagine
(17:20):
that the gaps between these generations are getting smaller and smaller,
and eventually you reach a point where the present is
defined by constant change, and that's the only way you
can define it, because things change so quickly. It is
almost impossible to describe the present in any coherent way.
That's how quickly everything is evolving. The thing that would
(17:40):
fuel this would be the emergence of superhuman intelligence in
most of the scenarios that involve the technological singularity. However,
that would not necessarily require just a computer AI. That's
one possible version is pure artificial intelligen that has superhuman
(18:01):
capabilities in processing information. This is your basic deep thought
from Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy or Skynet from the
Terminator that scenario. This would be a scenario in which
we humans have created an AI so powerful we are
unable to control it, and then it goes on to
redefine our world in ways that we could not anticipate
because we cannot operate on the same level as this
(18:23):
superhuman intelligence. But that is not necessarily the only pathway
to the technological singularity. Another way might be that humans
find a way to boost our own intelligence, and thus
we evolve beyond what we traditionally think of as being human.
We might do this through a deeper understanding of biology.
We could boost our intelligence that way, going back to
(18:44):
the concept of DNA hacking and things related to that,
or it might involve using technology to create cyborg like
beings where we merge with technology on some level and
with tech and biology working together, we boost our intelligence
to new level and achieve superhuman intelligence that way. So
bottom line, is this a possibility, Well, it beats me.
(19:07):
But there are a lot of super smart people who
are on either side of this issue. So some people
say the singularity is essentially a foregone conclusion. It will happen,
The only question is when will it happen. But there
are other people who say there might be some fundamental
barriers that were not likely to get over, and those
barriers will block the singularity from ever happening. One of
(19:30):
the frequent criticisms of various singularity scenarios is that a
lot of it rests on the belief that we're going
to see progress continue on a pace that's similar to
what Moore's law has observed with computer processing power, and
the thing is that pace may not be realistic or sustainable,
(19:51):
or even applicable to some technologies. So Moore's law applies
to the processing power of computers generally speaking, but it
may not apply to other elements that would be necessary
to bring about superhuman intelligence, because processing power by itself
is not intelligence. You also have to have the software side.
You've got a lot of other pieces that have to
(20:12):
be in place. However, if it is possible, it could
very well mean the end of the human race as
we know it today. Now that doesn't necessarily mean it's
the end of humanity entirely. It just may mean that
humanity will transition into something different, So it could be
a new beginning. It's not necessarily the end of everything,
(20:34):
but still spooky. Number six Google Glass, I mean that
was the number on the article Google. You remember Google Glass,
the augmented reality glasses. Back when Chris and Dave were
working on this article, Google glass was still a real thing.
(20:56):
It was poised to become an actual consumer product outside
of the relative small sample of bleeding edge adopters aka
glass holes. We were sometimes called that because I was
one of them. I had a pair of Google Glass.
The glasses were part augmented reality headset, part user interface
for the world around you. They included a camera which
(21:17):
could pull in information, and a bluetooth chips so the
glasses could communicate with a paired mobile device, and through
that mobile device, the glasses could also pair information like
GPS coordinates, So these glasses, while giving you potentially incredible
access to information about the world around you, could also
gather information about the world around you for the benefit
(21:37):
of Google. And suddenly this company could potentially access information
from cameras mounted on faces all over the world. And
the glasses also had microphones, because you know, you could
use voice commands to make your glasses do stuff. But
that also meant that in theory, Google could listen in
as well, not just see everything, but hear everything, which
(21:58):
raises some big privacy concer not just for the people
wearing the glasses, but for everyone around those people. And
Google makes money with information, so you would effectively be
generating product for Google to sell by wearing a pair
of those glasses and walking around everywhere. Google would be
the head of a big surveillance state, far more invasive
than a network of closed circuit cameras if such technology
(22:22):
was used unethically. And while Google Glass is now far
more limited in its rollout, you know you only see
it in a few industries. At this point, the company
Google is still very much in the business of knowing
where its customers are. In August twenty eighteen, numerous tech
journals reported on a study that was conducted by Douglas C.
(22:43):
Schmidt of Venderbilt University that say said that a stationary
Android phone running Chrome in the background would ping Google
servers with location data three hundred and forty times in
a twenty four hour period. Even if you turn the
location history feature off of the phone, the phones were
still sending location data back to Google, according to the study. Google,
(23:04):
by the way, has disputed the findings of this study.
Then there are the numerous personal assistant devices that are
out there, including Google Home, that also are always listening
for commands. And of course that's just Google. There are
other companies out there, like Apple and Amazon that also
have technologies similar to these. All of these could be
monitoring users and sending data back so that the companies
(23:27):
might later exploit that information for profit, usually to sell
you stuff to advertise directly to you. But that's still
pretty creepy, right. Even if the companies are not actively
exploiting that information, the fact that the data could be
transmitted and recorded at all is problematic, though again I
should say the companies generally say they do not record
(23:48):
user data in that way. So whew, that's a relief, right.
Number five drones. Drones are legit creepy. Many drones have
cameras mounted on them. That does allow potential filmmakers unprecedented
access and capabilities. Now, a low budget film can have
the equivalent of an expensive crane shot. It's a fraction
(24:09):
of what it would cost to rent and operate a
film crane with all the associated personnel, the safety features,
all that kind of stuff. You could reduce all that
down to an operator and a drone and it would
be much less expensive. But it also means a drone
operator who's using one of these devices could use it
to do stuff like peeping, super darn creepy, to be
(24:29):
spying on neighbors and stuff. That's just the consumer technology
version of drones that is already troubling. But then you
have to remember there's also tons of military grade drones
and they're being used to do everything from surveillance work
to active strikes on military targets. Weaponized drones, these drones
(24:51):
may be semi autonomous or completely under the control of
an operator who's potentially hundreds of miles away. They greatly
extend the surveillance case abilities of various government agencies and divisions,
from military to law enforcement. In the United States, Congress
passed a bill in twenty twelve giving the Federal Aviation
Administration or FAA, the authority to drop rules for commercial
(25:14):
and police drones in US airspace. The FAA hasn't been
super fast to share that information. That prompted the Electronic
Frontier Foundation or EFF to sue the FAA under the
Freedom of Information Act to at least share a list
of the public entities in private drone manufacturers that applied
to fly drones in the United States, as well as
(25:36):
thousands of pages related to license applications. But the FAA didn't,
you know, explain how those entities were planning on using
the drones. So that's a problem. Number four three D printers. Well,
I just recently talked about maker Bot, and maybe you
think the scariest thing about three D printers is that
they could lead to minor burns as you try to
(25:58):
deal with melting plastic. In fact, there are other things
to worry about as well, like fake ATM facades. See
back in twenty eleven, some thieves used a three D
printer to create a false front for an ATM terminal,
and they installed a skimmer on some ATMs, so unsuspecting
customers would come up and it would look like a
(26:19):
real ATM front that you couldn't necessarily tell immediately that
there was a projection on there that was a false front.
So they would put their their ATM card into this.
They would then type in their pin and meanwhile the
skimmer was actually scanning the data on the card and
(26:42):
recording it with the pen and allowing the thieves to
steal more than four hundred thousand dollars in the process.
And you know, all it took was a three D
printer to create that convincing ATM facade. In twenty thirteen,
a guy named Cody Wilson made headlines when he published
five else for his three D printed Liberator handgun, which
(27:03):
fired three eighty ammunition. That scared a ton of people
because it means that anyone who had access to a
three D printer and the appropriate materials could have the
opportunity to make an untraceable weapon. There'd be no background
check required because you just print the thing out. And
it also raised other possible problems if the plastic were
(27:24):
not of a sufficiently good enough quality. It could mean
that the printed gun would not contain the explosive reaction
properly when you fire the bullet, so it could end
up breaking apart in a person's hand, causing injury to
the person holding the gun. So even if the person
who had printed the three D gun did so as
kind of just a proof of concept and they're firing at,
(27:45):
you know, just a paper target, there's the possibility that
the gun itself could explode or fracture as part of
this if it weren't made out of sufficiently strong material,
and severe injury could follow. Cody Wilson, I should add,
has recently been in the news again. He resigned his
role as director of Defense Distributed, the company that he
(28:08):
used to promote the design and distribution of three D
principle gun files. It's unrelated to the gun side of things,
so that organization still exists and continues to push Wilson's
vision even without Wilson at the helm. I've got some
more spooky things to talk about, but I grow tired,
(28:29):
so I need the goal and drink some blood, and
by blood, I mean oh grade t I'll be right
back after this word from our sponsors. Number three driverless cars.
This is a.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Still a big worry.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Back when Chris and Dave were writing this, driverless cars
were still kind of coming out of the very very
limited testing situations. Google was the best known version. But
now we actually have some at least some rudimentary automated
car systems out there in the real world, like Tesla's autopilot,
(29:15):
which has contributed to some notable accidents, including a fatality.
Tesla has said that this system was not meant to
be used as a driverless car solution, but people have
still done it because you hear a word like autopilot
and you want to test it out. I guess so
(29:39):
that has been an issue. It has raised concerns that
perhaps this autonomous car technology is nowhere near ready for
full rollout, which I think most companies that are working
on the technology would say is correct. They're still working
on the tech to make it a reality. There have
been a lot of of a lot of stories published
(30:01):
about various problems, philosophical problems that you need to resolve
in order to make a consistent and predictable autonomous car solution,
one of them being the infamous trolley problem. The basic
version of the trolley problem is that you've got out
of control trolley. It's going down some tracks, and there's
(30:25):
a switch that will allow you to change the pathway
of the trolley. And if the trolley continues where it's
path where it's going now, it's going to collide with
a group of people. If you throw the switch, it
will change the direction of the trolley and it will
collide with one person. Do you throw the switch? If
(30:46):
you do nothing, then maybe you feel like I'm not involved.
Therefore my decision did not affect anybody. It just played
out the way it was going to play out. If
I throw the switch, is that I'm actively condemning that
other person to death? Other people would say no, by
not choosing, you've actively chosen to condemn the first group
(31:07):
to death. There are variations of this problem. Maybe you say,
all right, well you've got a choice. You can not
throw a switch, which means the out of control trolley
will eventually come to a stop, but everyone in the
trolley is going to die as a result of this accident.
Or you can throw the switch and the trolley will
hit somebody, but the trolley will stop and everyone who's
(31:30):
in the trolley will survive. So either you actively kill someone,
but everyone in the trolley lives. Or you don't do
anything and everyone in the trolley dies, but the person
who is just innocently crossing the pathway they live. These
sort of ethical problems are things that people talk about
and debate amongst themselves, but it turns out to be
an actual practical problem when you're designing autonomous car systems,
(31:53):
because eventually you have to build in some sort of
decision making system for a car in the event that
it encounters a non avoidable car accident, that all the
problems have aligned in such a way that there is
no possible outcome in which there isn't a car accident.
(32:14):
So what does the car do? Does it behave in
a way that preserves the life of the person writing
in the car? Does it behave in a way that
preserves the life of the people in the surrounding area.
There are a lot of tough questions to answer, so
MIT published a paper from a quiz called the Moral Machine.
This quiz was designed to find out what people thought
should be given priority in these situations, and it was
(32:37):
distributed globally across social media platforms. They recorded forty million
ethical decisions in total global preference had certain consistencies. By
the way, generally speaking, people prefer to spare human lives
over animal lives. So if you had an option where
you can make a choice, but this animal will die
(32:58):
as a result, or you can make it vo or
that human will die, people would say, well, it's a shame,
but I'd rather choose where the animal dies. Also, people
in general would choose to spare more lives rather than
fewer lives. So in my example with the group of
people versus the one person, more people would feel comfortable
with the one person losing their life as opposed to
(33:19):
the group of people. Also, people in general want to
spare children's lives more than adult lives, So this really
just showed people's preferences and ethical decisions. However, the study
authors stated that experts really should be the ones to
make the final call when designing these algorithms, that just
going by public preference alone may not be their best decision. However,
(33:42):
another thing to remember is that in twenty sixteen, thirty
seven thousand people died from car accidents. If driverless cars
can reduce that number year by year, if we can
find a way to make driverless cars more reliable so
that it reduces the overall number of fatal accidents. That
(34:03):
would be an incredible thing and it would definitely be
a good argument in support for autonomous cars. It is, however,
that there possible that there's a psychological barrier of a
machine quote unquote causing deaths, and that that could be
enough to screw things up, because while you might be
able to statistically state fewer people died because there were
(34:24):
autonomous cars, the fact that the cars were autonomous and
then people died has a psychological effect. You're thinking, oh,
it's a machine killing a person. Number two geoengineering, So
this is the use of science and technology to quote
unquote hack the planet. This is one of those ideas
that's meant to help counteract problems like climate change. So
(34:47):
the scientific consensus tells us, yes, there is climate change,
and yes it is largely due to human causes, chiefly
the increase of CO two in the atmosphere along with
other greenhouse gasses. So by creating technologies designed to capture
and sequester carbon dioxide so that it's not in the
atmosphere anymore, we could help slow or maybe even stop
(35:10):
the process of climate change. But the thing is, we
don't know for sure that some of these proposals would
work or what the other consequences of those actions might be.
One of the well, some of the proposed methods would
definitely have nasty consequences.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
We know that.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
So, for example, one possibility would be, let's put some
more iron in the oceans in order to spur algae
blooms to soak up carbon dioxide, which that could help
you could actually soak up CO two from the atmosphere. However,
that would also have a huge negative impact on the
(35:50):
ocean itself. You would create dead zones in the ocean
because of this algae bloom, and that means messing up
a really complicated ecosystem that lots of lifeforms to depend upon,
including life forms that aren't you know, directly in the ocean,
So you would have a ripple effect. Fittingly enough, since
we're talking about water, you could have die offs happening
(36:11):
other places in the world that are a result of this,
and you know, not even places where there are oceans,
So unintended consequences could be really, really nasty. Another tactic
besides trying to capture CO two is to find ways
to reflect more of the Sun's energy back off into
(36:31):
space without it getting absorbed by the Earth and then
emitted back into the ris's atmosphere. The message here is
that the cure could end up being worse or at
least just as bad as the disease, though in a
different way. And ultimately we'd be taking a lot of
potentially irreversible actions without a full appreciation of what was
going to happen. However, if we employ these responsibly and carefully,
(36:58):
it's likely that we could use them as part of
an overall plan to help reduce climate change. Experts warn
us that these are not magic bullets. These are not
going to miraculously reverse the course that we've seen over
the last few decades. They would at best be a
good additional strategy along with reducing our carbon dioxide emissions,
(37:25):
that would be our most important action to take. We
can't just assume that we're going to come up with
a technological solution that will allow us to continue to
behave the way we've been behaving and magically erase the
consequences of those actions. That's just not a realistic outlook
at this point. Number one on the list from Chris
(37:48):
and Dave was Internet surveillance, which kind of ties back
into that Google problem I mentioned earlier, but it goes
well beyond that. So Internet surveillance comes in all forms, right,
the social media we use, when we do our actions
on there, all of that's getting tracked. All of that
is going into various tech boxes based on our profiles,
(38:10):
so that we are encountering the ads that are closest
tied to our behavior, so that we have the most
the most incentive to click on those ads or to
act on them in some way, thus benefiting the company
that makes the social platform as well as the company
that's doing the advertising, and whatever company is ultimately in
charge of the product or service that is being advertised.
(38:33):
So there's that there are companies like Google that are
taking this to extremes, tracking all sorts of behaviors for
all sorts of stuff, so that whenever we're doing searches,
we're also getting served up search results that are catered
to us more and more, which in some ways is good,
you know, you're getting stuff that is more relevant to you,
and in other ways comes across as super creepy because
(38:57):
it means that there's this enormous corporation out there that
might know you better than you know yourself, and that's
kind of worrisome. But then you have other things like
the NSSA, which a couple of years ago is famously
revealed that the NSSA was tapping into all sorts of
different communication tools to spy on communications between lots of
(39:22):
different people in an effort to promote national security. But
you could argue it was also a huge violation of
people's expectation of privacy and that it also took almost
a presumed guilty approach and applied it to absolutely everybody
who uses these forms of communication, from cellular phones to
(39:46):
website traffic to all sorts of stuff. Then you have hackers,
either state back to hackers who are working to spy
on behalf of a government or independent hackers who are
just trying to gather as much information as possible to
exploit it. Maybe that information is your bank account, or
(40:08):
maybe it's your social Security number, it could be all
sorts of stuff, but ultimately they're doing it so they
can make money and they have no real concern about
what happens to you and your information. Information is valuable,
whether it's for a government to try and protect itself
or the citizens that it represents. Ideally, we would like
(40:29):
to at least se a government try to protect the
people it represents. Maybe that's being naive, or if it's
a you know, a corporation that's doing this in order
to make a profit, or a hacker that's doing this
in order to make a profit in an even more
unethical way than the corporations are. Information is valuable. It's
(40:50):
also a good reminder of why you should do stuff
like use VPNs when you can so that you can
protect your activities from prying eyes and not have to
worry quite so much about your every move being spied upon.
Don't use public Wi fi, especially to do anything sensitive.
You know, be careful, be responsible with your browsing activities
(41:16):
so that you limit the ways that you can be exploited.
I'm not saying don't make use of these various platforms
social media. I'd be a hypocrite if I did. I
use them all the time. Just know what you're getting
into and be aware of what could potentially happen. If
you're comfortable with those consequences, I say, you're all good.
(41:38):
If you're not, then you need to think about ways
you can change your behavior. Whether it's using VPNs or
backing off on using the Internet as much, or whatever
it may be, so that you feel you're using technology
to benefit you as opposed to having other people receive
a benefit because of you don't be used. In other words,
(42:01):
now as I say that, I think you should also
go to tea public dot com slash tech Stuff. We
got a merchandise store. It's awesome. You can go buy
stuff and every purchase helps the show. Again. Hypocrite, I know,
but that's why spooky. Hey guys, if you want to
get in touch with me and talk about how scared
you are after this spooky episode, you can go over
(42:23):
to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's our website. You'll
find all the contact information there. Check it out, and
I will haunt you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
(42:45):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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