Tech News: Meta Wants the Internet On Your Face

Meta held its Connect conference this week and showed off some chonky augmented reality glasses, among other things. Plus, OpenAI shakes things up and DoNotPay agrees to, well, Pay.

 

 

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Episode Transcript

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. It's time for the tech News for
the week ending on Friday, September twenty seventh, twenty twenty four.

(00:27):
And as the great professional wrestler Shane Helms used to say,
stand back, there's a hurricane coming through. Because that's right,
folks here in Atlanta, Georgia where I am, we're in
the path of a hurricane, and out of an over
abundance of caution, and also from some gentle prodding from

(00:47):
super producer Tari, we've decided to write and record the
tech News episode on Thursday. Now. I usually put these
things together on Friday morning and then record them after that,
so this means there could be some fresh tech news
that doesn't make it into this lineup because Tari and
I were busy, you know, laying out sandbags or clearing

(01:09):
trees off the road or something along those lines. I
hope anyone else out there in the path of the
hurricane is safe and sound. I really hope you're all
safe and sound. Whether you're in the path of the
hurricane or not. It's just particularly stressful for those of
us who are looking at a big, old, massive storm
system rolling in. Anyway, let's get to the tech news first. Up.

(01:30):
Meta held its Connect conference this week and CEO Mark
Zuckerberg got up in front of the crowd, and he
was his usual humble self. He wore a T shirt
that read out Zuck out nil, which I have totally mispronounced,
but that's because I didn't take Latin in school. But

(01:50):
it is Latin for all zuck or all nothing. Typically,
you would actually see this phrase associated with Caesar, not Zuck,
and it often was associated with a particularly humble Renaissance
prince named Caesar Borgia, known for being a little bit

(02:12):
full of himself. I honestly think that Zuckerberg should sit
down with Francis word Coppola and the two of them
could have a nice long conversation about Hubris. Also, they
could talk about the Roman Empire, because the two of
them both seemed to be obsessed by it. I mean,
Megalopolis is proof of that. Yeah. Anyway, enough commentary and
shade from yours truly, So what went down at the

(02:35):
Connect conference. Well, perhaps the buzziest bit was about Meta's
prototype augmented reality glasses called Orion. Zuckerberg showed them off
and good gollie, they are bulky now. The Verge gave
them some praise. The Verge said, quote, they look almost
like a trendy pair of frames you could pick up

(02:58):
without all the tech inside. Quote. Personally, however, I think
they look way too chonky for that. They look to
me like the kind of glasses that you might see
in a comic strip where the artist drawing the comic
strip uses really heavy lines for stuff like that. The
glasses house led projectors, which can beam images to display

(03:18):
in front of your eyes on the lenses, and that's
what gives you the augmented experience. But they're not intended
to be consumer products just yet. For one thing, even
with the bulky frame, you still have to carry a
couple of peripherals for this tech to actually work. That
includes what is called a neural wristband, which apparently is

(03:40):
needed so that you can do some gesture controls. And
there's also a compute puck, which I'm guessing offloads some
of the processing requirements needed for the glasses to work.
I think that makes sense. We are not at a
point where you can miniaturize all these elements so that
they fit solely within the frames of some even chunky glasses.

(04:03):
It isn't quite slimmed down to a point where the
average person would vibe with it. I think I don't
think people would want to think, Oh, here are my
cool glasses, where's my wristband and my compute puck so
that I can use them. Plus, according to Casey Newton's newsletter,
each unit costs somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars,

(04:23):
which means it is certainly a non starter as far
as consumer tech is concerned. Meta did show off the
next generation of its ray band smart glasses. These don't
have the versatility of Oriyan, but they still incorporate some
smart technology and AR related features in them. Meta pointed
out how AI functionality means you can use these glasses

(04:45):
to do stuff like stay on top of your to
do list and that kind of thing. Metta also showed
off new VR headsets. In the quest line of the
one headset anyway, it's the Quest three S, and it's
intended to be kind of an entry point headset for
the VR space. It will cost two hundred ninety nine
dollars and ninety nine cents, so three hundred bucks. Meta

(05:07):
is ditching the Quest two and the Quest pro lines
of products, so now the choices are simplified to either
the Entry three S or the more expensive Quest three,
which now moves from being six hundred and fifty bucks
to five hundred bucks or technically four hundred ninety nine
and ninety nine cents. Zuckerberg also revealed that Meta is

(05:30):
introducing some AI generated content on Facebook and Instagram, which
sounds absolutely horrible to me. Why would I want to
go to these things and see stuff posted not even
by people I've heard of, let alone people I know, right?
Why do I want to see AI generated stuff? Maybe
I'm just missing the point. I wasn't at the conference.

(05:51):
Maybe if I were, I'd be like, oh, I get
it now, But right now it just strikes me as
kind of cold and pointless. Anyway, It's supposed to be
in a new section called Imagined for You, and supposedly
it will end up containing content the Meta thinks you
want or you need based upon your behaviors. So it's
supposed to be really curated and invented essentially for you,

(06:14):
which yay, I don't know. This doesn't strike me as
particularly good. Metta also introduced some AI impersonations of celebrity
voices in Meta AI, so if you wanted to chat
with a robot version of say John Cena or Aquafina
or Kristin Bell, then you could do that. The Kristen

(06:35):
Bell thing is particularly weird because not very long ago
Bell spoke out against meta mining user data for the
purposes of training artificial intelligence. But I guess she must
have hashed all that out because her voice has become
one of the options that people can choose when they're
interacting with the Meta AI. There were some other stuff
going on at the Connect keynote, including a revamp of

(06:57):
avatar design for Meta's various platforms, which includes the Horizon
operating system, which is what they use for VR. Meta
is still seeming to push to make the metaverse happen.
I think we need to tell Gretchen that, like Fetch,
the metaverse just isn't going to happen, or at least
I hope it doesn't. All right, that's enough about the

(07:18):
Connect conference, but we still have a little bit more
about meta. So Mark Zuckerberg sat down for an interview
with Alex Heath of The Verge, and among other things,
he stressed that research has failed to establish a causal
relationship between social media use and a negative impact on
mental health. Now, if you've been listening to my recent

(07:38):
episodes on tech stuff, you probably have heard me say
something similar to this, And that doesn't mean that there
is no causal relationship between the two, but we have
a lack of high quality studies that establish such a connection.
There may be correlation between poor mental health and social
media use, but that's not the same thing as causation.

(08:00):
I still think it's a big leap to go from
studies haven't really shown a causal connection to stating outright
that there is no causal connection. Those two things are
not synonymous. I don't think we can go so far
as to deny any causal connection, particularly since studies that
involve mental health are always tricky because isolating all the

(08:23):
variables in order to establish relationships between even like disturbing
behaviors and mental health, it's not always straightforward or easy.
Sometimes that stuff is really complicated. Now, Zuckerberg did say
that he felt meta can play a part in protecting
mental health by giving parents more controls relating to how
their kids are able to access social media, which is

(08:44):
at least a start. I recommend watching the whole interview,
which is both on The Verge and also The Verg's
YouTube channel. The interview itself is titled why Mark Zuckerberg
thinks ar glasses will replace your phone? But it's way
more than just about the arglasses, all right, And back
to that whole Kristen Bell thing, because it relates to

(09:04):
another story. She posted a message on Instagram which I
have seen going around a little bit now, and it's
one in which folks attempt to stave off meta crawling
their feeds for the purposes of training AI models. So
it's essentially just a variation of other viral messages that
people were posting to their feeds, either on Instagram or

(09:26):
on Facebook or both, and they were meant to prevent
Meta from doing stuff like selling their personal information for
the purposes of advertising. But like those cases, posting this
makes no difference whatsoever. It does not prevent Meta from
using your information to train AI. It doesn't prevent them
from selling your data for the purposes of ads or whatever,

(09:48):
or exploiting your data in any other way, because posting
that you're not giving Meta any permission to use your
data means nothing, and that's because the terms of service
already grant Meta all those permissions. The fact that you're
using the service, and in order to sign up for
the service, you had to agree to their terms of service,
which you're kind of grandfathered into. Like whenever they change it,

(10:11):
your agreement tends to be carried over into the new version,
which seems odd right, like it's the whole Darth Vader,
I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter
it further. But yeah, the fact that you have agreed
to the terms of service means that Meta has that
permission already, so denying it on your feed does nothing.

(10:32):
In fact, the only way to prevent Meta from exploiting
your data is to either totally delete your profile and
just leave the platform entirely, or set everything to private,
at least for the purposes of crawling for AI training.
Meta won't touch stuff that's set to private as opposed
to public, so your private messages to your friends and

(10:54):
stuff that is not available for Meta to use, but
everything else is fair game. All right, we've got more
tech news to cover before that, let's take a quick break.
We're back. Open ai is planning to restructure the company

(11:18):
and essentially ditch all pretense that it bears any resemblance
to the original concept for open ai. All right, some
explanation is needed here. So originally open ai was intended
to be a not for profit organization that would maintain
a high level of transparency while developing AI in a
responsible manner, and that it would openly share this research,

(11:40):
thus the name open ai. They said there was a
need that AI advancements had to be helpful and cause
as little harm as possible, and to be developed in
a safe way. But it turns out being a not
for profit organization means you don't make a lot of money.
You're constantly scrambling for investment into the organization so that

(12:02):
you can conduct your research because AI R and D
is really expensive. So this restructuring would mean that the
for profit arm of open ai, which launched several years ago,
would essentially cut ties to the nonprofit board of directors,
and previously that board of directors oversaw the operations of

(12:25):
the company. You might even recall that an earlier incarnation
of this very same nonprofit board of directors voted to
remove open AI's CEO Sam Altman from the company, though
the board would later reverse that decision and then essentially
that board dissolved and a new one took its place.
But this restructuring would remove that particular entity from open

(12:48):
AI's governance entirely coincidentally, According to Altman, a few high
level executives have left open Ai. Among them are a
pair of senior research executives as well as the company's
chief technology officer. She also left, and Altman says that
their resignations have nothing to do with the planned restructuring.
It's just coincidence. Maybe that's true, Julian Denistron, and I

(13:13):
apologize for butchering your name of Inside evs Rights that
a research company called aMCI Testing looked into Tesla's full
self driving feature to determine how reliable and safe it
actually is now. aMCI reportedly tested the feature in a
variety of different settings, from city streets to mountain roads,

(13:34):
and apparently these tests were at least fairly extensive, comprising
more than one thousand miles traveled in total. According to
the report, aMCI drivers had to intervene approximately once every
thirteen miles driven or else risk getting into an accident. Now,
to be clear, despite the name full self driving, the

(13:56):
feature actually requires Tesla drivers to maintain their attention on
the road and to keep their hands of the steering
wheel at all times. So, despite some arguably misleading naming
conventions here, Tesla has stated that FSD is not intended
to be a full proof autonomous driverless system, but aMCI
says FSD can still give drivers a false sense of

(14:17):
security and that the system can perform well enough to
make people believe it is consistently safe. However, the director
of amci's testing, a guy named guy or Gui Mangiamele,
said quote, you may watch FSD successfully negotiate a specific
scenario many times, often on the same stretch of road

(14:38):
or intersection, only to have it inexplicably fail the next
time end quote. Obviously, that would be a big problem,
since it might mean a Tesla owner could feel that,
at least along certain stretches of road, the FSD feature
is fully capable of handling the car's operation, and they
might let their attention wander once again. I think my
biggest problem with Tesla's approach is that the marketing conflicts

(15:00):
with the actual capabilities of the advanced driving assist systems,
and unfortunately, when that involves vehicles, that can lead to catastrophe.
Longtime tech stuff listeners might remember me talking about a
company called Do Not Pay Ages ago. This company is
known for doing a few different things, but one big
one is helping subscribers do stuff like fight parking tickets. Now,

(15:22):
some of those parking tickets are probably unfair and fighting
them can be pretty intimidating, and some folks often just
resign themselves to paying off a fine that they don't
actually deserve. So Do Not Pay offers to help people out.
And one way they do this, or at least that
they did do this, was that they were offering the
services of quote, the world's first robot lawyer end quote.

(15:46):
There's really a generative AI tool meant to help people
draft legal language in order to do things like fight
traffic tickets or to perform other relatively uncomplicated legal tasks
such as drafting a cease and desist letter. But according
to the US Federal Trade Commission or FTC, Do Not
Pay failed to test the generative AI tool and didn't

(16:09):
even bring on human lawyers to work on the tool's
design or to ensure that it was functioning properly. Do
not Pay has since agreed to pay a fine of
its own, a grand total of one hundred and ninety
three thousand dollars. I assume they're not going to follow
the instructions that their company name states. That would likely

(16:31):
not go over so well with the FTC. Do Not
Pay must also send messages out to customers alerting them
to the limitations of their services, essentially to say, hey,
turns out we can't guarantee that the stuff we produced
for you in return for your subscription actually is holding
legal water. That's a rough one. According to Russian news outlets,

(16:54):
Google has shut down the ability for people within Russia
to create new Google accounts, and further, there has been
a sharp reduction quote in the number of SMS messages
sent by the company to Russian users end quote. That's
according to the Register. This implies that Google is not
sending out two factor authentication messages to people in Russia.

(17:17):
So if you're signed out of your Google account and
you're in Russia, you might not be able to get
back into that account because you won't get access to
all the information you need in order to get into
your account. You won't get the multi factor authentication message.
As I record this, Google and its parent company Alphabet
have yet to comment on this story. Out of Russia,
or from what I can gather, the general belief is

(17:38):
that Google has escalated its withdrawal from Russia after having
to shut down numerous accounts within Russia that were spreading disinformation,
primarily about the war in Ukraine, while also refusing to
comply with Moscow's demands to remove certain other accounts that
the government has declared as illegal, and those are typically
accounts that frequently contradict the narrative coming out of the Kremlin.

(18:02):
So maybe this is Google making a conscious decision to
pull out of Russia entirely, which would be a real
blow to people in Russia who are dependent upon Google
services but have no control over what their government does
or doesn't do. California now has a law that requires
companies that offer access to digital media to use accurate

(18:27):
language for those digital goods, so for stuff like streaming
media for example. So in other words, if I wanted
to pay so that I could have the UK comedy
series Spaced in my online library with a service like Amazon, Well,
then Amazon would not be allowed to use language like
buy or sell regarding that transaction. Instead, the language has

(18:49):
to make it clear that what I'm actually doing is
I'm purchasing a license so that I can access Spaced,
but I don't actually own a copy of Space. And
that's to make it clear to consumers that ownership isn't
really that big of a thing in the digital marketplace
for a lot of companies, and that doesn't matter if
you're talking about music or films, or video games or

(19:11):
other digital products and services. Companies that failed to comply
with this law could be found guilty of false advertising
and face some pretty stiff penalties. Now, all that being said,
if a company does allow you to actually download a
digital file and there's no requirement for it to be
connected to some sort of online server or anything like that,
like once you purchase it, it is yours and you can

(19:33):
move it to whatever drive you want and access it
whenever you want, they can still use terms like buy
and sell because you are buying a digital file. That's fine,
but it's for the ones that license the access to you.
And this was kind of brought up because of some
recent developments. There was a case where Ubisoft deleted the

(19:53):
video game The Crew from player accounts. Ubisoft had already
shut down the online service for that game, and it
was an online only game, so you could argue that
once they shut down the servers, the game was effectively obsolete.
But gamers were still shocked to see the title getting
deleted from their library entirely because that seems to fly

(20:14):
into the face of the whole concept of buying something,
and that's how we got to where we are now.
This law is only going to apply in California for now.
It takes effect next year. And finally, speaking of Ubisoft,
the company is facing a potential strike as workers have
objected to the company issuing a return to office mandate
that would require staff to come into the office three
days a week. The union says it had been negotiating

(20:37):
for profit sharing for employees and after those talks broke down,
that's when Ubisoft issued the return to office order. So
things have now escalated into a potential strike situation, which
sounds similar to what's going on over at Amazon. Amazon
gave a five days a week return to office mandate
starting next year and now like ninety one percent of
Amazon's staff who were surveyed about this say they don't

(21:00):
like it, and I can understand that. But that's it
for the tech news for this week. I hope you're
all well. If you are in the path of a
devastating hurricane, please please please be careful, be safe, be
happy and healthy, and I will talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more

(21:25):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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