Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Kaleidoscope. I'ma's Voloshan and carac prices out this week, so I'll be bringing you the headlines of the week, including AI's black box problem and open Eyes push to infiltrate college campuses. And on today's Tech Support segment, we'll talk to four or four Media's Jason Kebler about the weird world of body scans and the future of TSA security.
Airplanes and airports in general are interesting because it feels like new technologies are like rolled out there before they're rolled out more broadly into society.
All of that On the weekend Tech It's a Spooky Day, Friday, June thirteenth. As I mentioned, Carras out this week, so we're going to dive right into the headlines, and a couple of big stories have been on my mind, both highlighting that as AI becomes more and more ubiquitous and as a rush to deploy it, we still don't fully
understand how these systems actually work. AI models are such a black box that even the developers who build them can't always explain or predict the behavior of their models, And this week, Axios released a detailed roundup of how leaders are simultaneously admitting this lack of knowledge while also
pushing for rapid deployment and implementation. Here's an example. Anthropic, while testing its latest model, Clawed four, gave the model access to corporate emails, setting up this fictional scenario where Claude knew that one it was going to be shut down and two that the engineer responsible for shutting it down was having an affair. In eighty four percent of cases when this test was run, the model attempted to blackmail the engineer, supposedly to preserve itself. And here's the thing.
Anthropic doesn't know how the new model chose blackmail as a tactic or how to prevent it from doing so in future, but Anthropic released the model. Now there is an accepted term to refer to this problem I that we don't yet understand the why of AI's behavior, and
that term is interpretability. CEOs of AI companies like open Ai Samultman and Anthropics Dario Amode have openly acknowledged that quote interpretability is an important problem to solve and that our lack of understanding about how these models work can pose significant risk in April, A. Mooday wrote that quote people outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our AI creations work. They are right to be concerned. This lack of understanding
is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology. The question to me is is there enough investment and attention going towards this problem versus the race forever stronger performance between privately funded companies. AI is being developed and implemented without meaningful guardrails, and that's something that US government is actively encouraging. In fact, President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill includes a provision for a decade long ban on states attempting to regulate AI,
either through new regulations or through enforcing existing regulations. Now the bill has been passed by the House and is being heard in the Senate. Changes are very possible because even Republican senators like Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marshall Blackburn of Tennessee have pushed back on this ban. Now, for those hoping humans will maintain control over AI, there is some potentially encouraging news coming out of Apple This week.
The company's machine learning researchers publish an academic paper with very buzzy title, The Illusion of Thinking. The paper studies reasoning models like open Aiyes three and deep seeks are one, which are models designed to problem solve. What the Apple paper found is that when these reasoning models are presented with complex logic problems, the models fail to solve the problems.
Mashable reports that in the study, reasoning models were given classic logic puzzles like jumping checker pieces into empty spaces, or the river crossing problem, the one involving a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain. This is a pretty simple test of a human's ability to problem solve, because once you figure out the rules, it's actually pretty easy to continue solving these problems even when they get more complex. But these reasoning models start to fail at
a certain point. So the big question is is this simply a bump in the road or is it indicative of a larger problem in how these reasoning models actually work. Which brings me to my next headline from the New York Times, Welcome to campus, here's your chat GPT. Because if critical thinking and logical reasoning skills are where humans still have an edge over AI, it's pretty reasonable to me. There are concerns about the rise of AI on college campuses.
Apparently Open Ai has a plan to integrate chatbots into every facet of student life, and they're calling the goal of this AI integrated higher ed quote AI Native Universities. A suite of premium services called chat gpt Edu is being sold to universities for faculty and students to use, and the company is promising AI tutors and chatbots that can do everything from conduct mock job interviews to quiz you before exams. Schools are getting in on the action.
California State University is making chatchipt available to more than four hundred and sixty thousand students. Duke University made its own AI powered platform called Duke gpt, and in June they began offering unlimited Chatchipt access to students and faculty. Even if a campus isn't striking a deal with open Ai. There's a marketing campaign targeting the handful and I assume it is a handful of students who aren't yet using chatchypt.
Many find this all deeply troubling, especially as there's new data and research to suggest that so called cognitive offloading I letting a chatbot write your first draft or think for you makes you measurably less able to problem solve yourself. On the other hand, recent grads are facing historically tough job market, especially in fields where AI is starting to
automate tasks like writing code. So these schools are trying to boost their students' prospects by providing them with AI tools and with the skills to make the most of the tools. So is this strange moment where we don't really understand how our lambs make their decisions or how using them affects our brains. But they're here, We're using them anyway, and we and they are adapting in real time.
As The Times puts it, quote open ayes pushed to AIIFI college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. I've got a couple more headlines for you, and one starts with an old idea brought to life with modern technology. About half of all people on Earth experience some form of water scarcity. But could that change if you drink the ocean. Desalination, the process of removing salt to create clean drinking water, has been possible for decades,
but it's the most expensive way to create clean drinking water. However, The Wall Street Journal recently spoke to three companies that are experimenting with an alternative method, a potential solution we've known about for years, but that is now being made possible by the improved functionality and lower prices of deep
sea roboots, under sea power cables, and other technologies. Basically, the old way of desalinating water involved pumping seawater to the surface and then boiling it to create clean water. The new way involves an underwater membrane that uses the ocean's natural pressure to filter out salt before clean water is then pumped to the surface. It's a method that could save significant energy and money. Sometimes innovation relies on
simple upgrades, other times it's all about competition. President Donald Trump's one hundred and seventy five billion dollar plan for a quote Golden Dome defense system has triggered a race between tech companies and defense groups. According to Financial Times, the idea is to create a space based system that can detect and destroy foreign weapons like missiles at launch. The Trump administration is called for quote non traditional contractors
to help create a system. Cue the competition between ten tech companies like Paneteer and Microsoft, and established defense contractors like Lockheed Martin. This all comes at a time when big tech companies like Meta are stepping into the world of developing military technology, and startup defense companies like Anderil are raising money at huge valuations ahead of plans to
go public. The Missile Defense Agency plans to award ten year contracts in an open competitive process, and so far the agency has gotten over five hundred responses to their request for information. After the break, we'll hear from four or four Media's Jason Kebler about the dreaded airport pat
down and its future high tech makeover. So for our next segment, we're going to dive into one of the more annoying parts travel, especially for anyone who flies frequently, airport security and the role technology.
Plays in it.
In response to nine to eleven, the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA was born. Ever since, TSA has been part of the flying experience here in the US, ensuring that passengers are safe and highly agitated, one plastic bin at
a time. If you're not one of about thirty percent of American fliers with TSA pre check, you know the drill put your personal items in a plastic bin, take off your shoes, put your bins through the conveyor belt where they will go under a scanner, walk through a body scanner, and then if you're unlucky or you've forgot to take a receipt out of your pocket, you might be pulled aside for an intimate pat down, which can
be pretty awkward. Over the years, there have been multiple upgrades to TSA technology, from more discerning luggage scanners to full body scans in place of metal detectors. But the latest idea from the Department of Homeland Security, well, I certainly don't see it coming. And here to tell us how virtual reality could forever alter the dreaded pat down process is four or four Media's Jason Kebler. Jason, thanks for coming back to tech stuff.
Hey, thanks for having me. So.
I'm always quite fascinated by airport so I spent a lot of time in them, and so when I saw your most recent piece with the headline TSA working on heptic tech to feel your body in virtual reality, I had to know more. What inspired the piece and what did you learn?
Yeah, I mean I think that since nine to eleven, TSA has been looking for ways to quote unquote improve.
The security process.
It's like one day you'll just show up at the airport and they'll have all new machines and it will be like a totally different process. And I think that airplane security and airport security is something that the United States really likes to spend money on, I mean, for sort of obvious reasons.
After something like nine to eleven. There's sort of the.
Security theater of it all where it's like, please take off your shoes, We're going to go through your bags. Sometimes you can bring liquids, sometimes you can't. It really feels like a roll of the dice. And so TSA has been basically researching this technology to give their agents virtual reality goggles and then haptic feedback gloves, and so haptic feedback is like where you wear a glove and
you can literally like feel in virtual reality. And so they've really designed this incredibly complex and seemingly like overkill a piece of technology where instead of doing a pat down, which notoriously can be very invasive, like that certainly is a problem, they're saying, well, people don't like those, so we're going to do a virtual reality pat down by using these like advanced sensors to detect the outlines of someone's body and see if they have like sharp objects
that they're trying to smuggle in, and then the TSA officer will be able to see that in their virtual reality and also like feel that in their haptic gloves, but without actually touching you. And so I don't know, I don't know how you feel about it. I saw it and I was like, this is this seems like overkill? And in some ways, it's like the clothes, right, there's that, and then there's also like nominally, like if someone is touching you, you can say I don't like that, like
stop doing that. But you know, in this case, they're literally creating like a three D scan of your body, and in some ways it's like possibly more invasive. I don't know, it's it's just like very weird technology. I think it's kind of uncharted territory.
What does it mean to feel when we're talking about haptic tech?
Yeah, so I've never done it myself. Like this technology does exist in rudimentary form, but as I understand it, it's like you're wearing a glove that has electronics in it, and like let's say you move your hand around, presumably some air pockets or some thing in there will activate so that your hand is feeling like a force back against it. That would simulate you actually touching something. I'm
trying to think of like analogies for what that might be. Like, I think maybe like a massage chair, Like imagine a massage chair that.
You wear, or a video game controller or a steering wheel that kind of rattles around and like moves your hands and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right.
So it's that and then the sort of like input data would come from all these sensors that would like project an image onto your hand, and then your hand would be connected to this VR system so it would track your hand around in virtual reality. And then you know, basically like put some physics in there where it says like okay, you're touching a table, you're touching a person,
here's what it should feel like. And that technology does exist where like handtrack in virtual reality, object tracking in virtual reality, that sort of thing. So really like the haptics is the new thing here and sort of making that happen in real time where a sensor array is grabbing all of that as you walk through security.
Use the word wild in your story, which I think is an appropriate one. You know this obviously a podcast. Can you give a visual of what this will look like? I mean the TSA agent wearing a headset, wearing these levels, because there's also some quite amusing cartoons or like visualizations that you're able to source in your reporting of what TSA imagine this will look like.
Yeah, so I want to stress that a lot of this comes from patent applications, which are you know, kind of like it's very very early. We don't know that if this technology is going to be deployed, whether it will be deployed, what it will look like when it's deployed. But in patent schematics and drawings, it's like they sort of imagine and hey, this is what we think it
could look like. And so in the information sheet, they have a TSA officer who has a computer strapped to his face like a VR goggles, and he's holding up a gloved hand, and then they have this diagram of a baseball, like they drew a baseball on a table, and then they have this, uh, they call it a glove, but it's really like a hand computer like it's like they took a touchpad and put it on someone's hand, strapped it their hand, and that is the haptic feedback glove.
And so.
It reminded me of that toy I had when I was a kid with all those little pins, the like metal pins where you could put your hand or face and.
It would do an outline.
Yeah, and so that's kind of what it's like, a digital recreation of that. They also have a diagram where a person is trying to smuggle in scissors around their chest, and so they have like a picture of scissors on someone's chest, and then they have a picture of their belt buckle and the hands are like right up on their waist and the diagram makes sure to say that it says, quote scan imagery obscured it due to proximity
to private body zone. And yeah, so this technology would like somehow obscure I guess, your private areas because they're conscious of your privacy.
But the idea is like you will stand facing a TSA agent. They'll be wearing a virtual reality headset, running their hands up and down your body but not actually touching you, and then both feeling on their hands and seeing in VR objects that maybe underneath your clothes.
That's what they're proposing.
And it certainly sounds like the TSA officer could be right next to you, but they also make it sound like they could be like in another room. For example, you'd walk through some sort of sensor system that would like scan your body in real time, and then the officer either could be there and would be like, oh, I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you, but they could also be in another room doing this sort of without you even knowing.
So how did you hear about this? And do you have the sense this is something that would actually be seeing in airports anytime soon?
Yeah, So it's interesting. The Department of Homeland.
Security, which oversees TSA, actually published a two page information sheet about this on its website. And I mean, I guess this is something that they do periodically where they're like, we have new research, come check it out, but they publish it like pretty deep on their website. And frankly, we have like a lot of nerds who read our articles and are constantly scanning for things like this and know that it's something that we would care about, you know.
We try to write about futuristic and weird technology, and so one of our readers sent it to us. I checked it out, and from that information sheet it said, like want to learn more, go check out these patents. Whether we see this in practice or not, I'm not sure. It seems pretty early, like I haven't seen video of this working, like a prototype or anything like that. It seems like it's more of a concept that they're working
on at the moment and our researching. I also think that honestly, like since nine to eleven, TSA has kind of dialed in the security screening process. I don't think it's anything that anyone enjoys. But we're not waiting for two hours at the security line anymore like we were kind of immediately after nine to eleven. As unpleasant as it can be, it's usually pretty quick. And so I don't know if we'll ever see this, but it is tech that they're researching.
And where does the money come from?
Is this?
Like do we know how long it? You know how much they've spent on it? Like what's the kind of the structural backdrop of this type of project.
Yeah, So the Department of Homeland Security has an Office of Science and Technology, but they don't say here's how much money we spent on this specific virtual reality haptic feedback remote sensing.
Is the Nintendo we of apod security basically, right.
Yeah, but I think it is important to sort of realize that we're in an era where a lot of government funding is being slashed for new technologies. And I'm not saying that DHS shouldn't be researching new technology, Like a lot of new technology comes out of agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, like the CIA, like the NSSA. But at the same time, like this feels like something that's a solution in search of a problem, I would say,
And so yeah, it's something to consider. Like we're slashing budgets for science across the government, but we're not really slashing budgets for the Department of Homeland Security.
Were increasing that budget if anything.
Yeah, I mean I did see on your reporting that I think they filed the patents for this technology in twenty twenty two, so I guess under the Biden.
Administration they've been working on it for a while.
I mean, this is not like a recent fancy, so that's kind of interesting. I Mean, some people say the whole VR is a solution in search of a problem, right, But like, what's the wider arc of leading edge tech for the miniature industrial complex.
Yeah, it's interesting because VR and the metaverse, which you know, associated technology, has been a massive flop.
Like it was the.
AI before there was AI, it was crypto before it was crypto. Like that, there was tons and tons of hype about VR being just around the corner and people using it for all sorts of things, whether to work, to play, to game. But interestingly, like one of the places where VR has actually been useful has been on the job training and for things like post traumatic stress disorder, exposure therapy for soldiers and things like that, and so the military actually has found some uses for virtual reality.
At the same time, DHS has been really interested in using virtual reality to kind of like see through things for lack of a better term, Like there was this project that Customs and Border Patrol tried to do where they wanted to use virtual reality goggles in a way similar to this to see through boxes in order to determine whether like counterfeit goods were being brought into the country. As far as I know, they're not doing anything like that. That was a project that has been around for many
years and was never deployed. There's been university research that was associated with the Department of Homeland Security where they wanted to use VR at the border to see terrorists, is what they said, but they never explained. Yeah, they
never explained like how that would work. But I do think that there was a period that is still going on but has largely been taken over by AI, where you would take any process that the government would do or that any business would do, and say, well, how can we add VR to this Because it's sort of the hyped new technology. We can seem like we're forward looking, and we can also maybe get some money to research something.
That makes sense.
Are there any other interesting airport tech stories that you've come across recently?
I need to do more reporting on this, but facial recognition is very very common at airports now. Global Entry, which is a customs and border patrol system where you don't need to show your passport if you've been pre vetted and are an American citizen, now uses facial recognition where you just get off the plane and they detect who you are and they say, welcome back to the United States. A lot of air lines are using facial recognition to just boord planes so you don't need to
show a boarding pass. And then TSA is also using facial recognition at the screenings, and these are all things that you can opt in or opt out of, but it's becoming a lot more commonplace. There was no real big announcement where it was like, hey, we're going to be using.
Facial recognition all over the airport. It was just sort of there one day, And like, I think there needs to.
Be more reporting on sort of where the technology came from, like where the initial photos that identify you are coming from, whether those images are being retained, that sort of thing. But this is all being done sort of in the name of convenience and streamlining the process. And I mean, I'll admit it is a lot faster to do some
of these things with facial recognition. But then you start worrying about like is that information being shared, how is it being shared, who's it going to, what privacy guardrails are there, And that's not something we know a lot about unfortunately.
Well, so the airport is a kind of interesting tech testing ground or petri dish because like the contract you sign implicitly or explicitly when you go to the airport is basically that you surrender all of your rights without
any questions asked. Right, So, once you're like going through security, you kind of accepted the premise that the Apple can do whatever it wants to you, right, and that includes rolling out technologies that you may technically consent to, but in reality like very hard to withhold your consent from exactly.
I mean, the only way to withhold your consent in some cases is to just not fly. And I think also airplanes and airports in general are interesting places where technology is rolled out. Because it's very expensive to fly, you sort of have this self selecting group of people who go through a security process. They're not bringing guns, they're not bringing knives. Like it's very safe. It's like
incredibly safe to be in an airport. And therefore you have like a kind of Petri dish of like transient people who are who are only there for a few hours. You can test new technologies on them. People are bored, and so they might say like, oh, here's like this new VR game or this new new thing that I can try out while I'm waiting for my flight. So like I've seen a lot of like new gaming tech at at airports and things like that. And I'm not
saying that it's all surveillance. I'm just saying that, like it feels like new technologies are like rolled out there before they're rolled out more broadly into society.
You know, we've reading these stories about how Newark Airport is running on floppy disks and there are these regular outages where air traffic control can't even see the planes. I think that's why I find it's one so fascinating, because it's like it's a perfect place where you have technology being used as a solution to a place where there is no problem, and then huge real problems that no one's interested in solutions for seeming Yeah.
Yeah, and air traffic control problem is one of just like standard human labor practices where it's like we're not training enough air traffic controllers, we're not paying them enough, they're very stressed. It's an incredibly important job where these stakes couldn't possibly be higher, and so you have this
like natural human burnout. And then you also have this situation where like handing over something like that to artificial intelligence or to like machine vision, or like you could see that being more efficient, but the technology clearly is not ready and a mistake is a life and death situation, and so you have like maybe some technological solutions that could come through there, but you're sort of budding up against as you say, like these really like old fashioned
problems of funding and treating workers correctly and you know, the pipeline of training them and that sort of thing. And so, I mean, I think that's a great observation.
Mail Re reported your story without crediting you, of course, but has this story traveled far and wide and what the response been.
It's been a lot of people saying this reminds me of teledildonics, which is technology that has been created to allow people in long distance relationships to have cyber sex while actually feeling it. And I mean it relies on a lot of these same technologies that we've been talking about. And so I mean, we actually do see this time and time again where sex tech and porn industry is quite ahead of where society is going. And you know that technology has been being worked on for.
Years by.
Let's say enterprising di I wires and now you have like similar technology being looked at by Department of Homeland Security, and so that's been a lot of the response so far.
Jason, appreciate taking the time this week.
Yeah, thank you so much. This is fine.
That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm os Voloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Domingez. It was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts but he phrased as I Engineer. Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join us next Wednesday for an episode all about biometric data, from shopping with the palm of your hand to donning multiple wearables.
How much should we really care about giving away all that personal data? Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com with your feedback, with your story ideas, with whatever you want to tell us, because we love hearing from you.