TechStuff Looks Inside the Black Box

my favorite trend to cover. It's about critical thinking. So yeah, this is another critical thinking in Technology episode. Now. In these episodes, I explain how taking time and really thinking through things is important so that we make the most informed decisions we can and so that we aren't either fooling ourselves or you know, allowing someone else to fool

us when it comes to technology. Though, I'll tell you a secret, using these skills in all parts of your life is a great idea because it can be really easy for us to fall into patterns where we let ourselves believe things just because it's convenient or you know, it reaffirms our biases are prejudices, that kind of thing. So if you use critical thinking beyond the realm of technology. I ain't gonna be mad. Specifically, I wanted to talk about a general category of issues in tech that some

refer to as the black box problem. Now, this is not the same thing as the black box that's on board your typical airplane. In fact, i'll explain what that is first because it's pretty simple, and then we can move on. First, the black box inside airplanes is typically orange. So right off the bat, we have a problem with nomenclature, right, I mean, you had one job black box. Actually that's that's not true. The black box has a very important job and it requires a couple of things to work.

But the black box, which is orange, is all about maintaining a record of an aircraft's activities in a housing capable of withstanding tremendous punishment. Another name, or a a more appropriate name really for this device, for the black box, is the flight data recorder. Sensors in various parts of the plane detect changes and then send data to the

flight data recorder, which you know, records them. If a pilot makes any adjustments to any controls, whether it's the flight stick or a knob or a button or a switch or whatever. The control not only does whatever it was intended to do, assuming everything's in working order, but it also sends us signal that is recorded on the flight recorder. So the job of the flight recorder is to create as accurate a representation of what went on

with that aircraft as is possible. The Federal Aviation Administration or f a A in the United States has a long list of parameters that the flight recorder is supposed to keep track of, more than eighty in fact, and these include not just the aircraft systems, but what was going on in the environment. So if a pilot encounters a problem on a flight, or in a worst case scenario, in the event of a crash, the flight recorder represents

an opportunity to find out what actually went wrong. You know, was it a malfunction, was it pilot error, was it whether the crash survivable? Memory units inside the heavy duty casing of the black box are really meant to act as a lasting record, So if the recorder is recoverable, it gives investigators a chance to find out what happened. But, as I said, that's not the black box I really wanted to talk about for today's episode, so I'm not

going to go into any more detail about that. Now, you could argue that the black box I want to talk about is sort of the opposite of what we find in airplanes, because in an airplane, the black box contains a record of everything that has gone on, and it can help explain why a certain outcome has happened. In technology in general, we use the term black box to refer to a system or technology where we know what goes into it and we can see what comes out of it, but we have no idea of what

went on in the middle of that process. We don't have a way to understand the process by which the device takes input and produces output. Now, in most cases, we're not talking about an instance where literally nobody understands what's going on with a device or a system. It's more like the creators of whatever system we're talking about have purposefully made it difficult or impossible for the average person to understand or in some cases, even see what

a technology is doing. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's not. So Maybe purposefully is being a little strong there, but that's often how it unfolds. Let's take a general example that has created issues with a particular subsection of tech heads, and those would be the gear heads, you know, the people who love to work on vehicles like motorcycles and cars and trucks and stuff, and what you might think of as the good old days, at least from the

perspective of d I Y technology. There's plenty of other things that were wrong back then, but in those terms, the cars systems were pretty darn accessible. The motorist would need to spend time and effort to learn how the car worked and what each component was meant to do, but that was actually in a evable goal. So with a bit of study and some hands on work, you

could suss out how an engine works. You know, how spark plugs cause a little explosion by igniting a mixture of fuel and air inside an engine's cylinders, How that explosion would force out a piston which connects to a crank shaft, and how that reciprocating motion of the piston would translate into rotational motion of the crank shaft that

could then be transmitted ultimately to wheels. Through transmission, you could learn what the carburetor does, how the various fans and belts work, and what they do you know where the oil pan is and how to change out oil and all that kind of stuff. What's more, you can make repairs yourself. If you had the tools, the replacement parts, and the knowledge and the time you could swap out parts.

You could customize your vehicle. You know, I've known a lot of people who have taken on cars as projects. They'll purchase an old junker and then they will lovingly restore it to its former glory or turn it into something truly transformational. And all of that is possible because those old cars had really accessible systems. They were relatively

simple electro mechanical systems. Once you understood how they worked, you could see how they worked or how they were supposed to work, and you could understand what was going on. Through that understanding, you could address stuff when things weren't going well. And that's how cars were for decades. But that began to change in the late nineteen sixties. But it really accelerated. Uh No, pun intended in the nineteen seventies.

So what happened well in nineteen sixty eight, leading into nineteen sixty nine, Volkswagen introduced a new standard feature for their Type three vehicle, which was sometimes called the Volkswagen fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred. There are a couple of names for it. These were family cars, and volkswagen Is intent was to create a vehicle with a bit more luggage and passenger space than their type one, which was

also known as the Volkswagen Beetle. The feature for these cars that I wanted to talk about was an electronic fuel injection system that was controlled by a computer chip, and the marketing for the this particular feature said that this quote electronic brain end quote was quote smarter than a carburetor end quote. Now, the purpose of a carburetor is to mix fuel with air at a ratio that

is suitable for combustion inside the engine cylinders. But an engine doesn't need exactly the same ratio of fuel to air from moment to moment. It actually varies. As a vehicle runs longer, or it travels faster, or it starts climbing a steep hill, or you know, lots of stuff, the ratio changes somewhat, and the carburetor manages this with a couple of valves, one called the choke, another called

the throttle, among other elements. But it's all mechanical and while it works, it's not as precise as an electronic system could be. And that's where the Volkswagen system came in. Volkswagen was pushing this as a more efficient and useful component than a carburetor. It would prevent the engine from being flooded with fuel and not enough air for combustion. It would handle the transitions of fuel and air mix

ratios more quickly and precisely. It was the start of something big, but were it not for some other external factors, it might not have taken off the way it did, or at least not as quickly as it did. Those other factors, as I said, were external, and there were a pair of doozies. One was a growing concern that burning fossil fuels was having a negative impact on the environment,

which turned out to be absolutely the case. Cities like Los Angeles, California, where getting around pretty much re buyers having a car, we're dealing with some really serious smog problems, and so organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States began to draft requirements to reduce car emissions. That would mean that automotive companies would have to create

more efficient engine systems. The other major factor that contributed to this was the oil crisis of the nineties seventies, which I talked about not long ago in a different Tech Stuff podcast. This was a geopolitical problem that threw much of the world into a scramble to curb fossil

fuel consumption because the supply was limited. The double whammy of environmental concerns and the oil crisis forced a lot of car companies to rethink their previous strategy, which was pretty much more power, make bigger, much fast, go go, go, go guzzle. That kind of is how they were thinking back in the day. Turns out that was an unsustainable option.

And if you look back, especially at American cars during the fifties and sixties, you see that trend of the engines getting bigger and more powerful, and that was just the way things were going until we started to see these external changes come in, and so more car companies began to incorporate computer controlled fuel injection systems. But this move also marked a move away from the design that made it, you know, harder for the d I Y crowd to work on cars. Working on a damaged carburetor

was one thing. Dealing with a malfunctioning computer chip was another. It didn't fall into the typical skill set of your amateur mechanic. And of course we didn't stop at computer controlled fuel injection systems. Over time, we saw a lot more automotive systems make the transition to computer control. Today, your average car has computer systems that control the engine and the transmission, the doors, entertainment system, the windows, and these systems are all individual and they have a name.

They're called electronic control units or e c USE. Collectively, they form the controller area network or can c a N. The connections themselves, the physical connections are called the can bus b US, and that's really just a way of saying these are the physical connectors that allow data to pass from one e c U to another. And there wasn't really like a central processing unit or anything. There

was no like central brain. It was more like ec use that depend upon one another would send relevant information to each other and not to anything else. So you know, if the door sensor is showing a door is open, it can send an alert to other systems so that

that information is is appropriately dealt with. Now, at the same time that these individual systems were evolving, so too we saw the rise of what would become the onboard diagnostic system or o b D, and the o b D keeps an eye on what's going on with the various systems in the car, and it sends notifications to the driver via dashboard indicators when something is outside normal

operating parameters. So let's say that this diagnosis computer picks up that there's something hinky happening with the fuel air mixture and it activates that pesky check engine light on the dashboard that gives you next to no useful information. The problem is that these days it can be challenging or sometimes impossible to figure out exactly what caused that check engine light to come on without the access to

some special equipment and expertise. The car systems have become so sophisticated that it could be a challenge to figure out what exactly has gone awry. Mechanics use devices called O b D scan tools, and these tools connect to the computer on board a car, and then the car

provides a an error code to the scanner. This, by the way, took a long time to standardize because you've got a lot of different car companies out there, and obviously there was a need to move towards standardization so that you didn't have to have fifty different scan tools and fifty different code charts to deal with all the different car companies. But the code corresponds to the specific

issue the O B D has detected. So not only do you need a special piece of equipment to diagnose what has gone wrong with the car, you also need to know the codes, or else you haven't really learned anything. If I get you know, a eight digit code, and I don't know what that code refers to, then I'm not really any better off than just looking at a

check engine light. On top of all of that, even if you know what is wrong, you might not be able to easily access the problem or fix it due to the level of complexity, sophistication, and computerization of vehicles. Not all cars, or motorcycles or or whatever are equal. Obviously, some are a bit easier to work on than others. Some require a lot of specific care though. For example, if you're driving a Tesla, chances are the amount of personal tinkering you're going to do on your car is

going to be fairly limited. Now I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's really challenging. So in general, we've seen cars go from a mechanical system or electro mechanical system that the average person can understand and work on, to a group of interconnected, specialized computer systems that are increasingly difficult to access. The cars have become a type of black box. This can be extra frustrating for gear heads who have actually an understanding of underlying mechanical issues that

could cause problems. They might even know how to solve an issue if they can just get to it, but they are finding themselves with fewer options in order to address underlying issues. Now, cars are just one example of technologies that have moved toward a black box like system. There are lots of others. But apart from making it harder to tinker with your tech, what's the problem. But when we come back, I'll talk about some of the pitfalls of turning tech into a black box. But first

let's take a quick break. We're back. So the car transformed from a purely electro mechanical technology to one that increasingly relies on computer systems. But the computer itself can also be something of a black box for people none the very early days of the personal computer. It was hobbyists who were ordering kits through the mail and then

building computers at home. Typically, these hobbyists had a working understanding of how the computer systems operated, you know, the actual way in which they would accept inputs and process information and then produce outputs. Before high level programming languages, programmers also had to kind of think like a computer

in order to program them to carry out functions. As computer languages became more high level, meaning there was a layer of abstraction between the programmer and the actual processes that were going on at the hardware level of the computer,

that connection began to get more tenuous. Now, I'm not saying that programmers today don't have a real understanding of how computers work, but rather that this understanding is less critical because programming languages, computer engines, app developer kits you know, software developer kits and so on, provide a framework that reduces the amount of low level work programmers need to

do in order to build stuff as software. For the average user, you know, someone who isn't learned in the ways of computer science, computers are pretty much black boxes. They work until they don't. You push buttons on a keyboard, or you click on a mouse, or you touch a screen, and you know, the computer does the stuff how it does stuff like how it detects a screen touch and then translates that into a command that is then executed to produce a specific result. You know, that's not important

to us. We don't care or need to know how that works in order to enjoy the benefits of it. So for us, it's just the way things are. You push that button and this thing happens. It just does. The black box of the computer system, which can be a desktop, a laptop, tab, smartphone, video game console, you know whatever. It just takes care of what we needed to do. That's not to say a computer is impenetrably a black box. You can learn how they work, and

how programming languages work and so on. Computer science and programming classes are all built around that. So while a computer system is effectively a black box to the average user, it wasn't made that way by design, and it can be addressed on a case by case basis, depending on the time, the interest of the individual computer user, and their dedication to learning. But sometimes people will set out to make technologies with the intent of them being black

boxes from the get go. These technologies are dependent in part or in whole on of view skating how they work, in other words, by obscuring it. Sometimes that's in an effort to protect an invention from copycats, the whole idea being that if you come up with something really clever, you don't want someone else to come along, lift that idea and do the same thing you are doing, but

selling it for you know, less money or something. But other times you might be hiding how something works, specifically with the intent to deceive. And now it's time to look much further back than the nineteen sixties. It was seventeen seventy in Europe. As the story goes, the European world had seen a great deal of advancement in mechanical

clockwork devices. At that point. Clocks themselves, often powered by winding a spring and keeping time using gears with a reliable and consistent basis that was much better than earlier methods. Even allowed people the ability to carry a time keeping device with them. Phenomenal Based on similar principles, various tinkerers had come up with toys and distractions that also ran

on clockwork, like gears and springs. Some of these were quite elaborate, such as figures that appeared to play musical instruments, and one of them was particularly impressive. It appeared to be an automaton that could play expert level chess. The figure, made out of wood, was dressed in Turkish costume, leading to it being called the Turk, or sometimes the mechanical Turk.

If you were to sit down to play against the Turk, you as an opponent, would move a piece and then you would watch as this mechanical figure would shift and move a piece of its own in response. And the Turk was a pretty good chess player. It frequently beat the opponents at face. Sometimes it would lose to particularly strong players, but it held its own pretty darn well. The man behind this invention was Wolfgang Fawn Kimplin, who was in the service of Maria Teresa, Empress of the

Holy Roman Empire. He had been invited to view a magician's performance in the court, so the story goes, and the Empress had invited him specifically and afterwards asked him what he thought, and allegedly he boasted he could create a much more compelling illusion than anything this magician did. Now, according to the story. The Empress essentially said, oh yeah, we'll prove it buster, and he was given six months to do just that. The turk was what he had to show for it in six months time, and it

reportedly went over like gang Busters. The wooden turk stood behind a cabinet, on top of which was the chessboard, and Kimplin would reportedly open the cabinet doors and reveal some gears and mechanics to prove that it was purely a mechanical system. In fact, the gears were masking a hidden compartment behind them, in which a human chess player was sitting inside, hunched over, keeping track of a game, using a smaller chessboard in front of them, and using

various levers to move the turk's limbs in response. Now, a lot of folks suspected that something was up from the get go, but you know, part of the fun of a magic trick is just not knowing what's going on. Some folks try very hard to figure out the process. I am not one of them. Others are just happy to be entertained by a very well performed trick. But in a way, the turk was a kind of black box. In fact, you could argue that a lot of magic

tricks pretty much fall into the black box category. The process is purposefully hidden from the viewer. If we could see what the magician was doing from beginning to end, all the way through and without any misdirection, then it would and be magic. We might admire the skill of the magician how quickly they were able to do things, but we wouldn't really consider it magical. So the output is dependent upon people not knowing the process the inputs

went through. Now that's not to say that you can appreciate a really good magic trick even if you know how it's done. One of the best examples I know of is Penn and Teller. They did a phenomenal version of the cups and balls routine where they used clear plastic cups and balls of aluminum foil to demonstrate how cups and balls works, and you can watch the entire time and even being able to see through the cups and see the moves they're being made, Teller does them

with such skill that it is truly phenomenal. It doesn't hurt that Penn is spouting off a lot of nonsense at the same time and misdirecting even as you're watching what's going on, I highly recommend you check it out on YouTube. Look for pen and teller cups and balls. You won't be disappointed. Now. The Turk, as far as I can tell, was always intended to be an entertainment, not necessarily something that was specifically meant to perpetuate some sort of hoax. You wouldn't call a stage magician a

huckster or a con man or anything like that. Their occupation is dependent upon misdirection and making impossible acts seem like they really happened, but always or nearly always with the implication that it's all an illusion or a trick of some sort. But not everyone is quite so forthcoming about the fact that the thing they're doing is done through trickery. For the scam artist, the black box creates

an incredible opportunity. As technological complexity outpaces the average person's understanding, the scam artists can create fake adjets and devices that they claim can do certain things and then count upon the ignorance of the average person to get away with it. Typically, the go to scam is to convince people with money to pour investments into the hoax technology in an effort to fund whatever the next phase of development is supposed to be, whether that's to bring a prototype into a

production model or to refine a design or whatever. But the end result is pretty much the same across the board. The corn artist tries to wheedle out as much money from their marks as they can before they pull up stakes and skip town, or they find some way to shift focus or punt any promises on delivering results further into the future, like that's the future me problem kind

of approach. Once in a blue moon, you might find someone who was just hoping to make enough time to come up with a way to do their hopes for real zes, or at least to simulate it close enough so that people are satisfied. That typically doesn't work out

so well. M. Thoromness. I'll get back to that. So let's talk about some examples of outright scams that leaned heavily on the black box concept, whether by having their supposed and actual operating mechanisms hidden or by obscuring how they really worked with a lot of nonsensical claims and techno babble. One historical scam artist was a guy named Charles Redheffer, who claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine.

If he had managed to do such a thing, it would have been a true feat, as it would break the laws of physics as we understand them. So let's go over why that is just pretty quickly. For perpetual motion to work, and thus for free energy in general to work, a machine would need to be able to operate with absolutely no energy loss, and for free energy, it would have to generate that energy in some way.

A perpetual motion machine, once set into motion, would never stop moving, you know, unless someone or something specifically intervened. But if it were left to its own devices, it would continue to do whatever it was doing until the last syllable of recorded time. To borrow a phrase from the Bard. Now, if we look at our understanding of thermodynamics, we'll see that doing this in the real world is impossible, or at least it would go against fundamental ways that

we understand regarding how our universe works. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy is neither created nor destroyed. Energy can, however, be converted from one form into another. So if you hold a water balloon over the head of a close personal friend, let's say it's Ben bowlen of stuff. They don't want you to know. The water balloon has a certain amount of potential energy. If you let go of the balloon, that potential energy converts into

kinetic energy, the energy of movement. You didn't create or destroy energy here, it just changed forms. So if you have what you claim to be a perpetual motion machine and you set it in motion, the energy you gave that machine and that initial point should sustain it forever and it would never have that initial energy change form into some other type of energy that could then escape the system and show a net energy loss for the system itself. Remember, the energy is not being destroyed, but

it can be lost in another form. This means that such a machine could not have any parts that had any contact with one another, which would make it a really strange machine. And that's because friction would be a constant means for energy to convert from one form to another form, in this case kinetic energy, the energy of movement into heat. Friction is the resistance surfaces have regarding

moving against each other. So if the machine has any moving parts at all, those parts will be encountering friction, which means some of that moving energy will be converted to heat and thus escape the system. So the overall system of the machine itself will have a net loss of energy. There will be less energy to keep it going, which means gradually it will slow down and ultimately just stop.

As a result, it might take a long time if the machine is particularly well designed, but it will eventually happen. You would need some form of energy input to keep things going on occasion, kind of like a little push. Imagine that you've got a a swing like a rope with a higher at the end of it. No one's in it right now. You would have to give that tire a little push every now and then to keep it swinging, otherwise it will eventually stop. But that means

you wouldn't have a perpetual motion machine. There are other factors that similarly make perpetual motion impossible. That the machine makes any sort of sound, then some of the energy of operation is going into creating the vibrations that make sound. Sound itself is energy, it's kinetic energy, So that would mean the machine as a whole would be losing energy through that sound. A machine operating inside an atmosphere has to overcome the friction of moving through air and the

list goes on. Moreover, if we could build a perpetual motion machine, we'd be able to harness it for energy, but only up to whatever the starting initial energy was to get it moving in the first place. Because again, energy cannot be created. We can build devices that can harness other forms of energy and convert that energy and to say electricity, But these are not perpetual motion or free energy machines. These machines are just collecting and converting

energy that's already in the system. We're already present, so they're not making anything. Reneffer, however, claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine that could potentially serve as a free energy generator. Now, if true, this would have been an astonishing discovery. Not only would our understanding of the universe be proven to be wrong, but we would also

have access to an inexhaustible supply of energy. Red Effort showed off what he said was a working model of his design in Philadelphia, and he was asking for money to fund the construction of a larger, practical version of his design. A group of inspectors from the city came out to check out how this thing worked, and they noticed something hinky was going on, even though red Haifer was doing his best to run interference and prevent anyone

from getting too close a look at the machine. The gears of the device, which was supposedly powering a second machine, were worn down in such a way that it was pretty clear that it was actually the second machine that was providing the energy to turn the quote unquote perpetual motion machine, not the other way around. So if we were talking about cars, this would be like discovering that the wheels turning were causing the pistons of the engine

to reciprocate in their cylinders. It's it's going the opposite way. So the investigators then hired a local engineer named Isaiah Lucas to build a similar device, using a secondary machine to provide power to what would be the perpetual motion type machine, and then they showed it to red Haifer, who saw that the jig was up and he hoofted out of town to New York City. He tried to pull essentially the same scam there, this time using a machine that was secretly powered by a hand crank in

a secret room on the other side of the wall. Uh, technically it was just a feller sitting there with a hand crank in one hand and a sandwich in the other, providing the work to turn this machine. Robert Fulton, a mechanical engineer of great renown, exposed the whole device as a fraud when he pulled apart some boards on the wall and revealed the man sitting there cranking away and Red Heifer fled again. Records of what happened next are sketchy.

It seems he might have tried to pull the Sang Dang scheme in Philadelphia again a bit later, but he disappeared from the historical record after reportedly refusing to demonstrate his new device. When we come back, I'll compare this to what I mentioned before a Tharaos before we chat about other concerns regarding the black box problem. But first

let's take another quick break. Okay, So, Saraos this is the biomedical technology company that was founded by Elizabeth Holmes, and she is currently awaiting a trial on charges of federal fraud in the United States. The trial was supposed to begin in August twenty twenty, but has since been delayed until one due to COVID nineteen. Now, the pitch

for Tharaos was really really alluring. What if engineers could make a machine capable of testing a single droplet of blood for more than one hundred possible illnesses and conditions, So rather than going through multiple blood draws and tests to try and figure out what's wrong, you could get an answer based off one little pin prick within a couple of hours. Maybe you would even be able to buy a theorophn nos machine for your home, kind of like a desktop printer, and that would allow you to

do a quick blood test at a moment's notice. Maybe you would get a heads up about something you should talk to your doctor about, preventing tragedy. In the process, you might learn that with some changes in your lifestyle, you could improve your overall health or stave off various illnesses. It would democratize medicine, giving the average person more control and knowledge about their own health and giving them a better starter point for conversations with their doctors. And yeah,

that's a great goal. It's a fantastic sales pitch, and it did get homes and theorophness a lot of interested investors who really wanted to tap into this because not only is it something that you would want for yourself. You could easily see that if this is possible, that business is going to be like the next Apple. It will become a trillion dollar company. Something that power full

would undoubtedly become a powerhouse. Now I've done full episodes about the Ainos and how it fell apart because spoiler alert, that's exactly what happened. The technology just didn't work. But I think a lot of what happened with Aaronis was

largely dependent upon naivete ignorance and wishful thinking. Our technology can do some pretty astounding stuff, right, I mean if you had told me in two thousand that by the end of the decade I would be carrying around a device capable of really harnessing the power of the Internet in my pocket and I would have access to it all the time, I would have thought you were bonkers. So if technology can do incredible things like that, why

can't it do something equally incredible with blood tests. The idea is that, well, we're already seeing this amazing stuff happen, why isn't this other amazing thing possible? And that is dangerous thinking. It a weights all technological advances and developments, and that's just not how reality works Moore's law, the observation that generally speaking, computational power doubles every two years has really helped fuel a misunderstanding about technology in general.

We extend that same crazy growth to all sorts of fields and technology when that doesn't actually apply, and it gives us the motivation to fool ourselves into thinking that the impossible is actually possible. That I think is what happened with Sarah. No. Nos, Now, I'm not saying Holmes

set out to deceive people. I don't know what she really believed was possible, but based on what I've read and seen and listened to, to me, it sounds like she figured there was at least a decent chance her vision would become possible, and so a lot of Saraphnoss activities, in personal opinion, appeared to have been meant to stall for time while engineers were working on very hard problems

to make the blood testing device work as intended. The further into the process, the more of the company had to spin wheels to make it seem like it was making more progress than it actually was. The company had raised an enormous amount of money from the investors, so they were beholden to them. They had also secured agreements with drug store chains to provide services to customers, so

they needed to perform a service. It had to show progress, even if behind the scenes things had actually stalled out. On top of that, you also have the reports of executives like Holmes herself living the high life and really enjoying incredible benefits of wealth because of the enormous investment into the company. So that plays a part two therein knows as operations were effectively a black box to the

outside world. It was meant to missdirect and give the implication that things were working fine behind the scenes, while the people who were actually there were trying to keep up the illusion while simultaneously attempting to solve what appeared to be impossible problems. At some point, based on how things unfolded, I would say that executives that THEOS appeared to be perpetrating a scam, not just you know, trying to maintain an illusion while getting things to work. They

were actively scamming people. In my opinion, maybe they were still holding out hope that it would ultimately work out, but that doesn't change that it was a classic case of smoke and mirrors to hide what was really happening, such as using existing blood testing technology from other companies in order to run tests while claiming that the results were coming from actual THEOS devices. But again, this is all my own opinion based on what I've seen and

read about the subject. A court will have to determine whether or not Homes and other is actually committed fraud. A lot of the technology we rely upon in our day to day lives is complicated stuff, and there are limited hours in the day. It's a bit much to ask anyone to become an expert on all things tech to figure out exactly how they work. Tech is also becoming more and more specialized, so you might become an expert in one area of technology and be completely ignorant

of another. That's not unusual because it takes a lot of time to become an expert at specific areas of tech. These days, they've become so specialized. But by overlooking the how we can make ourselves vulnerable to bad actors out there when it comes to technology. Maybe they are actively trying to pull the wool over our eyes, or maybe they're just simply misguided and they misunderstand how stuff works.

But either way, our own ignorance of how tech does and what it does, and the limitations that we all face based on, you know, the fundamental laws of the universe as we understand them, that all makes us potential marks or targets. That's where critical thinking comes in and plays a part. Knowing to ask questions and to critically examine the answers, and to ask follow up questions, and to not accept claims at face value are all important traits. Now, we do have to be careful not to go so

far as to embrace denialism. If we are confronted with compelling evidence that supports the claim, we need to be ready to accept that claim. I'm not advocating for you guys to just go out there and say that any and every claim is just bogus. That's not the point. I'll close this out by talking about something we're seeing unfold in real time around us, and that involves machine learning and AI systems. Now, if you follow the circles that report on this kind of stuff, you will occasionally

see calls for transparency. Those calls are to urge people who are designing these machine learning systems and AI systems to show their work, as it were, and to have the systems themselves show their work. It's not enough to create a system that can perform a task like image recognition and then give us results. We need to know how the system came to those conclusions that it produced. We need this in order to check for stuff like biases,

which is a serious issue in artificial intelligence. Honestly, it's a really big problem for tech in general, but we're really seeing it play out rather spectacularly in AI. Now i'll give you an example that I've already alluded to,

facial recognition technology. The U s National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted an investigation in twenty nineteen into facial recognition technologies, and it found that algorithms were pretty darn good at identifying Caucasian faces, but if they were analyzing a black or an Asian face, they were are less accurate, sometimes one times more likely to falsely identify somebody based on an image. The worst error rates involved identifying Native Americans.

So let's let that sink in, because when we talk about issues like systemic racism, we sometimes forget about how that can manifest in ways that aren't as intuitive or obvious as the really overt stuff. We live in a world that has cameras all over the place. Surveillance is

a real thing that's going on all the time. Police and other law enforcement agencies rely heavily on facial recognition algorithms to identify suspects and to search for people of interest, and if those algorithms have a low rate of reliability for different ethnicities, a disproportionate number of people who have no connection to any investigation are going to be singled out by mistake by these algorithms. Lives can be disrupted, careers can be ruined, relationships hurt all because a computer

program can't tell the difference between two different faces. That is a serious problem, and it points to a couple of things. One of the big ones is a lack of diversity on the design side of things. We've seen this with tech for a long time. There is a really critical diversity issue going on with technology. The people who are building algorithms and training machine learning systems are largely failing to do so in a way that can

be equally applicable across different ethnicities. Meanwhile, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union are calling upon law enforcement agencies to stop relying on technology like this entirely pointing out that the potential for harm to befall innocent people outweighs the benefits of using the tech to catch, you know, criminals.

A machine learning system trained to do something like identify people based on their faces needs to be transparent so that when a bias becomes evident, engineers can go back to the machine learning system and look and see where it went wrong, and then train it to eliminate the bias. Without transparency, it can be hard or impossible to figure out exactly where things are going wrong within the system. Meanwhile,

real people in the real world are suffering the consequences. Now, if we extend this outward and we look into a future where artificial intelligence is undoubtedly going to play a critical part in our day to day experiences, we see how we need to avoid these black box situations. We need to understand why a system will generate a particular output given specific inputs. We've got to be able to check the systems to be certain they are coming to

the right conclusions. Artificial intelligence has enormous potential to all mean how we go about everything from running errands to performing our jobs, but we need to be certain that the guidance we receive is dependable. That's the right course of action, And so I hope this episode has really driven home how it's important for us to hold technology

up to a critical view. It's not that technology is inherently good or bad, or that people are specifically acting in an ethical or unethical way, but rather that without using critical thinking, we can't be certain if what we're relying upon is actually reliable or not. I also urge,

as always that we pair compassion with critical thinking. I think there's a tendency for us to kind of assign blame and intent when things go wrong, and sometimes that is appropriate, but I would argue that we shouldn't jump to that conclusion right off the bat. Sometimes people just bad choices, or they are misinterpreting things, but they don't have any intent to mislead. So while I do advocate that we use critical thinking as much as possible, let's

be decent, nice human beings whenever we do that. If it turns out someone is truly being unethical and trying to deceive others, that's obviously a different story. But before you know for sure, I say we employ that compassion, and hopefully we are able to solve these problems before they have these real world impacts, because the consequences of those are dramatic and terrible and avoidable if we use

critical thinking. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Will be back with other new episodes that will probably touch on critical thinking, but they won't be, you know, completely built around the concept. But if you guys have suggestions for future topics I should tackle in tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a trend, a personality and tech a specific technology you want to know how it works, anything like that, let me know. Send me a message on Twitter.

The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.