Tech News: The US Infrastructure Bill Introduces Some Tech Problems

passed a one point to trillion dollar infrastructure bill. Now, for a bill to pass in the United States, it has to pass by vote both the Senate and the House of Representatives in Congress before then being signed into law by the President. Now, the House is not set to vote on this until they come back from recess. That always makes me imagine a bunch of Congress people

out on the playground. Anyway, my point is that, you know, with the Senate passing the bill, the House still has its part to play, so changes can still happen to the language in this bill, So nothing is set in stone until it actually passes and then the President has

to sign it into law. Now, the bill that the Senate passed includes five fifty billion dollars of news spending, which is what puts it at the one point to trillion dollar mark total, and that includes stuff that you'd expect, like investment in roads and bridges that kind of infrastructure, or building out more rail systems for both freight and passenger trains, or building up more transit systems for various regional areas, that kind of thing. But there are some

bits that we should mention beyond that. For example, there's a seven point five billion dollar budget for building out charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. Now you're probably aware there is a very hard push to transition away from internal combustion engine vehicles that depend upon fossil fuels. In fact, there are states that are really pushing to make sure that you know, no new internal combustion engine vehicles are

sold in those states after a given year. But in order for this to be practical, we actually need the infrastructure in order to juice up electric vehicles that will replace all the internal combustion ones over time. Also, just as a reminder, these bills don't outlaw internal combustion engines. It's not like you know, in twenty thirty it'll be against the law to own a gas powered car. It's just that all new vehicles will need to be electric. And of course we also have to address how we

generate that electricity. If the electricity comes from a power plant that's burning fossil fuels, if it's a coal powered power plant, then we're kind of shifting the problem to a different point along the chain. But anyway, that's one part of the bill. There's also a sixty five billion dollar budget to expand broadband internet access, something that is

sorely needed in many parts of the United States. There are lots of communities here in the US that have little to no access to broadband and considering how much of our interactions with society now depend upon having a reliable connection to the Internet, particularly during times of crisis like the pandemic, that's a huge problem. It It creates an enormous divide that puts these communities at a severe disadvantage. But there are also a few items in that Infrastructure

Bill that could surprise you. For example, one element one amendment in the Infrastructure Bill places are requirement on car manufacturers in the future, and according to this measure, car companies will have to in opreate a passive system capable

of detecting blood alcohol levels in drivers. And the idea here is that the vehicle itself would be able to tell if a driver were under the influence, if their blood alcohol level exceeded the legal limit, and if that were the case, the car would not start, so the car would not allow the driver to actually operate the vehicle. Now, a lot of people have raised objections to this for various reasons, and I can I can get behind several

of the reasons for those objections. Now, I am absolutely against drunk driving, but I also happen to know that tech isn't infallible. There are a lot of ways that this requirement could have unintended consequences. For example, car companies will have to figure out the system that can detect a driver's blood alcohol level and ignore everyone else in the car. So let's say you are a designated driver and you're going to give a lift to your friends

and they've had a few too many. But you are designated driver, you are sober, and you're doing this so that your friends stay safe and they can still go out and you know, drink or whatever. The system in this car would need to be able to tell that you are sober, even if your friends in the car are all inebriated. So a passive system that's analyzing, say the alcohol content detected in the air would somehow need

to differentiate between you and your passengers. False positives could cause frustrating and potentially dangerous consequences, and false negatives would be even worse, of course, if a system failed to pick up on the fact that a driver was intoxicated. I think this is a case where we see politicians leaning on a technological solution to a social problem, but the tech isn't quite up to the task to do it, and that means the solution really isn't a solution at all.

And because the bill specifies a passive system, something like a breathalyzer wouldn't qualify because that's an active system. You must actively blow into a breathalyzer to use it, So a passive system would need to monitor alcohol levels without any like direct input or action from the drivers. It just seems like it's asking an awful lot of technology, and I'm not sure tech can actually deliver. The bill builds in a little time for car companies to actually

do this, which is good. I mean, car companies have their production plans set out years in advance, so with the way the language of the bill is or the way the language of the amendment is formed, it would mean there'd be a range of at the earliest to to start incorporating this kind of technology. That date is there just in case the tech being mandated is found to not meet the criteria of being reasonable, practical, and appropriate. None of that. I mean, I guess practical covers it.

But you know that doesn't sound like effective is among the three. Maybe practical is supposed to cover that. Another element in the Infrastructure Bill relates to cryptocurrency specifically, the bill includes requirements to report cryptocurrency transactions for the purposes of taxing them. After all, I mean, you've gotta pay for this one point to trillion dollar bills somehow. There are a few different ways of doing that. You could raise existing taxes, which tends to be a pretty politically

unpopular move. People aren't crazy about that idea. You could shift money from some parts of the budget to a different part of the budget. But this also tends to be politically unpopular because it usually means some senator or other sees money that would go to businesses that are

in their constituency diminish. So you'll see senators fight for certain things, not because they think that the thing they're fighting for is right, but rather the thing they're fighting for represents money that would be going to their state because the industries that represent that that particular element are located in their state. It does get very political. Another thing you could do is try and find loopholes that

are in the tax code and close those loopholes. And that would allow the government to collect taxes on stuff that previously it couldn't but perhaps should have been able to. And that's kind of where the crypto part falls, this idea that there are these transactions that should fall into uh, you know, taxable income, but often don't unless they exceed ten thousand dollars. However, the language in the bill, in this crypto amendment is ambiguous, and that worries a lot

of crypto investors. Now, some of that worry might be coming from folks who are trying to use cryptocurrency as a means of evading taxes, and uh, you know, you can't really take their arguments and good faith right there trying to circumvent an actual, you know, law, that's not fantastic.

But others are concerned that because of that language, which talks a lot about brokers, and defines a broker as quote any person who, for consideration, is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person. End quote is pretty vague. It sounds like that could cover pretty much everyone in the crypto ecosystem, at least for proof of work cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. So

let me explain. Let's say you've got a fraction of a bitcoin, right, You've got like point zero zero whatever one bitcoins, and you want to use this fraction of the bitcoin to purchase a brand new television from a merchant who happens to accept bitcoin is payment. So you make your transaction. You pay the required amount of bitcoin to the merchant, and you hand over your digital currency or essentially sending a digital certificate that transfers from you

to the merchant. But this transaction has to be verified. So this way, the merchant knows for sure that the digital currency they're receiving is legitimate, that it's a real transaction, and that actual value is being exchanged. So the transaction process is part of bitcoin mining, transactions clumped together in blocks.

Every ten minutes or so, a block is ready to be verified and then once verified that that verified block goes to the end of the blockchain and becomes the most recent block in the blockchain, and that's the chain of transaction blocks that stretch all the way back to the beginning of bitcoin. Bitcoin miners compete to essentially solve a very hard math problem that will then serve as

the verification for that block of transactions. So in this scenario, would that mean every single bitcoin mining operation can count as a broker? Would it only be whichever bitcoin minor actually got the math problem correct first? I mean, that would kind of make sense. The reward for solving the math problem is some bitcoin, and I could definitely be taxed. But then you also have the issue that, you know, bitcoins a global cryptocurrency, the United States does not have

jurisdiction over the entire world or anything like that. So it gets messy, is what I'm saying. And the fear is that the vague language in the bill will make it difficult, if not impossible, to execute the law properly without lots of unintended consequences. And this is the kind of stuff you see when after a survey you find out that more than all senators had never even heard of cryptocurrency before. Ignorance of technology often becomes an issue.

Not Just to be clear, I'm not in favor of tax evasion, just like I'm not in favor of drunk driving, and I do think there needs to be some sort of system in place to close off loopholes that allow, you know, wealthy people to get even more wealthy at

the expense of pretty much everyone else. And you really do have to be wealthy to be a cryptocurrency minor and effective one anyway, because the hardware you need in order to be competitive is very expensive, and the power bill to supply all that equipment with electricity is also expensive.

So I don't necessarily disagree with the motivation for these amendments in this infrastructure bill, like I think they're coming from generally a good place, but I do worry about the actual language itself and how that will manifest in the real world. And it's always kind of chaotic when politics tries to catch up with tech. We've got a couple more stories to cover, but before we get to that,

let's take a quick break. We're back, and if you've been listening to tech stuff for a while, you've heard me talk about the issue of bias. When it comes to artificial intelligence. Bias influences AI to favor one set of outcomes over others. Now, it's not always a bad thing,

mind you. It really depends upon the application. But when it comes to stuff that relates to say, someone's appearance, or their ethnicity or something along those lines, bias usually turns out to be a pretty bad thing to have in your system. Well, Twitter recently held a competition among developers and hackers, and at the heart of it was

Twitter's photo cropping algorithm. Now, if you've ever browsed Twitter, you've likely seen that there were photos in the Twitter feed are cropped and clicking on the photo opens up the full image. So the crop to photo access kind of like a preview and it gets all images to fit within Twitter's you know, established parameters for what photos

should look like in the Twitter feed. But these photos, obviously they have to be auto cropped because there's just no way that Twitter could employ humans to do it manually. That means Twitter needed to design and now rhythm that would make decisions on where and how to crop photos so that they fit within Twitter's interface. And that meant there was the possibility that this algorithm would have certain biases that might favor, say, white faces over black faces.

In fact, users in twenty suggested that this was happening. So Twitter's competition was all about inviting people to examine the photo cropping algorithm and look for signs of bias in a bug bounty, and it would reward people for the discovery of flaws in the system. This, by the way,

is a pretty responsible approach in my opinion. I mean, of course, it would be best if the algorithm didn't have bias to start off with, but failing that, opening things up to a wider audience of critics and hackers creates the opportunity to isolate and address bugs quickly. At def Con, which is an information security conference held each year,

lots of hackers go to it. The award for best performance in the bug bounty went to a person who found that Twitter's algorithm preferred faces that are quote slim, young, of light or warm skin color and smooth skin texture and with stereotypically feminine facial traits end quote. And I love how this hacker actually put this to the test. The hacker created a again, a g N, a generative adversarial network to create computer generated images of human faces.

So again does this well? Again does anything by essentially having to AI systems two machine learning systems. One of those is in charge of generating something, so in this particular instance we're talking about computer generated images of faces. The other one attempts to figure out which stuff that's being fed to it is real versus computer generated, So in this case, what images were created by a computer and which images are just photos of people? And over time,

both systems get better at their jobs. So if the detector is figuring stuff out much more frequently, then you feed that information over to the generator, which then adjusts how it goes about generating stuff and tries again. And then as the detector's success rate falls, it tries to adjust how it, you know, analyzes images and gets better

at it that way. So, over thousands of trials of pitting these two systems against each other, you start to create more convincing computer generated images of faces um And in fact, you can create them so convincingly that if you were to look at a series of pictures, you probably wouldn't be able to tell which ones were real photos of actual people and which ones were just computer generated.

Some other hackers also found other elements of bias. A one found that the algorithm had a negative bias towards people with white or gray hair, which means, before too long, you all won't be seeing any photos of me on Twitter, and that another one found that the algorithm would favor English text over Arabic text whenever those would appear in an image, like it would crop out Arabic text, but

it would keep in English text. So that was an issue, and Twitter really took the right step here, in my opinion. We've seen other companies like Amazon really doubled down on denying that there's any kind of bias problem in systems like facial recognition technology, but Twitter instead accepted the criticism and then invited people to really drill down and find the issues, which ultimately, you know, could lead to Twitter

creating better algorithms with less bias. So in my opinion, it was a great job for Twitter and an even better job to the hackers who found those bugs and

really gross. News NBC reported that a company called Teleperformance, which supports tons of other companies including Apple and Amazon and Uber, has instituted a particularly draconian practice for employees in Colombia, so Teleperformances employees essentially do contract work for these other companies, often handling sensitive data in the process. And because of COVID, Teleperformance has shifted many of its offices around the world from going into the office to

a work from home policy. But in Colombia, employees were required to sign new contracts that included clauses that allowed Teller Performance to install cameras inside the homes of those employees. Now why would it do this well to make sure that the employees were doing their jobs right, and also to make sure that no unauthorized individuals had access to the company's computers. But think about this for a second.

I'm sure most of you would object to your boss telling you that they want to set up a camera in your home so that the boss can monitor you as you work from home. Add to that the fact that for many people, living space is limited, so their office might also be their bedroom, and you have serious

privacy violations going on right there. Generally speaking, I am opposed to all the monitoring software and hardware that is in use to quote unquote guarantee productivity because I don't think it serves much purpose beyond being oppressive and invasive. I think it's far more demoralizing to employees than it is helpful to employers. And in this case, this issue goes above and beyond. I don't think there's any real

defense for it. According to Interesting Engineering, a website where I read about this, Apple and Amazon have said that they did not request this particular kind of scrutiny for their work. But Uber was a different story. Uber did opt for this level, with the company defending the decision saying that contractors are working with sensitive customer information and the risk of that info getting out to someone else is prompted Uber to request the higher level of employee surveillance,

to which I say, this system is broken. I have one other big story to cover, but before I jump on that, let's take another break, all right. Finally, in an ongoing story that I really wish would just conclude already, we're seeing misinformation campaigns about COVID surge here in the United States, while at the same time we're seeing case

numbers on the rise. And why is this a tech story? Well, it's because the misinformation campaigns are heavily relying upon social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter in order to spread the misinformation and to convince people to not follow the guidelines that scientists and doctors have come up with, which

is making a bad problem monumentally worse. We have variants like Delta and Delta plus and Lambda, and these are virulent enough and resistant enough to vaccinations to occasionally cause breakthrough COVID cases. Now that's not always the case, and you are better protected if you're vaccinated, but the point being that these variants can break through vaccinations in certain cases, and yeah, on the whole, these cases tend to be far less severe than those for people who are unvaccinated

and then get COVID. The vaccinated cases tend to be much more mild with their symptoms, but still not good, and it's still creating more opportunities for the virus to mutate further and more variants to arise as a result of it, and vaccination rates in some parts of the country, like my own state of Georgia, are still far behind where they should be. The New York Times reports that misinformation campaigns about COVID and COVID vaccines increased significantly over

the last couple of months. According to Signal Labs, false information about vaccine effectiveness increased by four hundred thirty seven percent over the summer. Now, some of these campaigns originate from Russian troll farms, which are not just pushing out they're not spreading misinformation, they're pushing out disinformation outright lies.

Then you've got people who become banner carriers. They pick up this this falsehood, and then they spread that falsehood further, and they promoted and they give it more credence, and the consequences are beyond awful. Obviously the worst consequence is that more people are getting very sick, and some of

these people are dying. Right For the unvaccinated, it's awful because they're being they're they're getting information that are telling them not to get vaccinated, which drastically increases the chance that if they get COVID it will be a serious case and that they could in fact die. A lot of the ones, even the ones who who will survive, are ending up filling up hospitals, particularly here in the Southeast.

That means that in regions like my state, where again at a point where hospitals are at capacity or over capacity. That means anyone experiencing any kind of medical emergency is in much greater danger because of a lack of medical capacity to treat them. So even if you're totally safe, let's say that like I'm staying home, I'm isolating, I'm not going out. I'm not you know, uh, exposing myself

to the possibility of getting COVID. But I take a spill and I fall down my stairs and I break my legs, there might not be any way for me to get to a hospital in good time. I could be suffering for quite some time before anyone can treat me because all of the local facilities are over capacity. That's a real issue. And that's that's a minor one, right breaking your legs bad, but clearly there are much more serious medical emergencies that could arise where people would

not be able to get the treatment they need. It also means that for all the people who did their best to stay safe, you know, the folks who went and got vaccinated, the people who are wearing masks and who are socially distancing, they're going to have to continue to do that or potentially become part of the problem.

And there is so much quarantined fatigue out there that a lot of people who up to this point have been being super careful are just not willing to do that anymore because they feel like it's a punishment, right, Like they did everything right, but they're being punished for it by being told, hey, you have to keep doing this. Meanwhile, there are these other people who refuse to accept any kind of accountability, who are going out and doing all

the fun things without wearing a mask or anything. And I understand that that feels monumentally unfair, and it is hard for me to condemn people who have that reaction. I mean, in full disclosure, I have even gone out to be with friends and a few isolated cases, and we did take precautions, but it still was more risky than just staying at home. Like I could have just stayed at home and that would have been safer than going out, even with all the precautions we were taking.

But you know, the situation is not going to magically get better just because we wanted to. The virus doesn't care if we're being denied the chance to go out and live our lives. The virus doesn't care about anything

other than spreading. So meanwhile, we have these bad actors and we have people with wishful thinking that are spreading inaccurate stories about the disease and vaccinations, and that continues to take hold, and people continue to get sick, and our medical system continues to be overtaxed, and people continue to feel demoralized. Politicians continue to struggle with how do they handle this situation. Things will not magically get better

just because we want them to. On a related note, here in Georgia, our politician Marjorie Taylor Green once again found herself suspended on Twitter. Previously, she received a twelve hour suspension for spreading misinformation on the platform. This time she's received a suspension that will last a full week for repeatedly violating the platform's misinformation policies. In this particular case, she was posting misinformation about COVID and vaccinations on the platform.

Um she continues to be a worse of misinformation about those issues. So when our own leaders are taking part in the misinformation campaigns, it can get a bit hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But to my listeners, to all of you out there who have gone to get vaccinated, who wear masks, who have sacrificed so much in an effort to try and be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Thank you, Your sacrifices are meaningful. Even if the people you're sacrificing for don't realize it or acknowledge it, it is meaningful, and I, for one, deeply appreciate the fact

that you have gone to those lengths. To those of you who have not been vaccinated, please get vaccinated, please, because as we are seeing the those who are not vaccinated are really suffering the most, and that the ripple effect means that we're going to see more variants arise as the virus has more opportunities to mutate, and that's going to place hardship on everyone all over again. And we've already lost so many people. We need to stop that.

And to everyone else who falls somewhere in the middle, be safe, make good choices, use critical thinking and compassion and equal measure, and we'll get through this. It's going to take longer than it should have because there are far too many actors in this who either deny reality or outright want the worst outcome for us and are pushing those narratives. But we can get through it. That's it for this news episode. I know that was very soap boxy at the end of it. I know some

of you get really fed up with that. I'm not going to apologize for it, because I care too much about you guys. I care about my listeners, not whether or not you download my show. If you choose to never download another episode, fine, I understand. I still wish you well. I care because I don't want people suffering. I don't want you to get sick. I don't want anyone you love to get sick. I want us to be able to put this very dark chapter in the past.

With that, let's wrap up. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in tech Stuff, please reach out to me over on Twitter. The handle we use is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again, really Sion. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.