Week In Tech: Would You Rather Live in a World with No Privacy or No Crime?

Guys from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is tech stuff. I'm mos Voloscian and I'm Cara Price. Today We've got two big stories to break down for you. First, could China unseat the US in more than just AI and catch up in pharmaceuticals too? Then inmates phone calls with loved ones are being used to train AI that then monitors their behavior.

Then we'll tell you about a few other stories that caught our eye this week, like how the UK police want to cross reference CCTV footage with government databases, and how the youngest female self made billionaire made all her money. Finally, we discussed giant blueberries and why the company is selling them is valued at a billion dollars.

Then on chat to me, there was concern, you know, when two nuclear armed states are on the brink that way, that this could escalate and explode not just regionally but internationally.

All of that on the weekend Tech. It's Friday, December twelfth.

Hello Cara, Hi Ahs, do you follow art Basil.

I've never been Miami, I know, but I'm fascinated from Afar. It's like the most hype.

It is the hype beast event of any time in human history.

Last time it broke the internet was with the like twenty million dollar banana. That was last year or two years ago.

Probably was for you offensive. It was very offensive. So let me ask you a question. Have you seen the robot dogs I have?

Okay, robot dog?

Would you like to describe them a little bit? What you saw?

Okay? So you remember the Boston Dynamics dogs. Yes, they were these sort of uncannily dog like robots that kind of pranced a little bit like like not like the accidents, like what are those greyhounds like little greyhounds great guns? So imagine robot baby prayhounds with very raalistic masks that depict teche billionaires.

You described it perfectly.

Well together in a kind of pen.

That's exactly right. So it's an odd group of people dogs in this pen. It was Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and also a dog of the artist people who created the dogs. The masks that you were talking about are made by a special effects artist, nam Landon Meyer, and they are these hyper realistic faces. Is exactly face exactly like human faces.

So I saw the images, but I didn't really know what is this all actually about.

So basically people wanted to make the point that it used to be that we saw the world interpreted through the eyes of artists, but now Mark Zuckerberg and Elon in particular control a huge amount of how we see the world. So he wanted to show that basically they are the cultural conduits of our time.

And what do they do apart from run around the pen?

So this is what I love. So they run around the pen, but when you watch them, you can kind of see them, what's the word that I'm looking for, shitting out pictures that are in the style of the artists that they are depicting or the tech bro So, for example, the Andy Warhol robot dog will produce an image that looks like a silk screen, and Picasso's is cubism, Elons is black and white, and Zucks, to quote people looks like the metaverse.

Wow, So are they are the dogs? Are they taking photos of stuff they're seeing in the audience and then turning them into works.

Of arts works of art? That's correct, but the actual dogs themselves are selling for one hundred thousand dollars each. Imagine just having someone in your house and they're being a little Elon musk dog running.

Around taking photos of your guests and then pooping them out crazy. I gather though, that the Bezos dog is not for sale and doesn't poop. That's because he's King of the Teche Brothers.

That's because he's king of the tech Bros. I just thought it was an interesting story to start with because I think that People is making an interesting point.

It's a tech Burrows world. We just shouldn't it.

This is me high fiving them.

Yeah.

And also, I mean, look, so people really shot to fame during the height of the NFT craz That's right. He sold one a single NFT for I think sixty nine millions dollars.

Which speaking of something that Bess could shot out that amount of money.

And I believe some of the images that the dogs poop out our NFTs that you can also buy. And People, as you mentioned earlier, is also one of the dogs. So I think he's poking fun at himself and his ovre a little bit absolutely right here too. And I mean you could say this is absolutely grotesque and.

People are paying money for it.

On the other hand, the guy is a master capturing people's attention, getting the hype cycle, and forcing people to talk. When was the last time you saw an article in page six questioning how the tech oligarchs made us see the world through their filter.

He did it, He did it, He did it.

Good on you people. Yeah, I'd like to move on now from big tech to big farm and specifically take investments in and around pharmaceuticals. A while back, I read this piece in the Ft which asked the question why is AI struggling to discover new drugs?

Because why is AI struggling to find new drugs?

Well, that's a good rually tell me. I didn't really realize this until I read the ftpiece. Obviously, I'm fully aware of all the investment in AI drug discovery now, but it turned out there was kind of a first wave in the like twenty thirteen to twenty seventeen period where hundreds of millions of dollars was invested, And the kind of period when you would normally expect a drug to come to market is about ten years.

So if my math is right, we should be seeing like a whole bunch of new drugs come onto the market now.

That's right, But we're not and according to the Ft, there's a few reasons for that. One is money. Essentially, these companies couldn't bring their product to market quick enough to keep raising money to keep their companies alive, and

Right, right, right, So it was more of a funding issue. Ultimately, I think it.

Was a funding issue and also a technology issue. I mean, don't forget Back in the day, the AI tools were nowhere near where they are today, So you basically have to choose one problem and develop a specific AI to tackle it, whereas now you have these broad AIS that can tackle multiple problems simultaneously. So basically, according to the Ft, the decade long clock kind of got reset in the aftermath of the chetchipt moment two twenty twenty three, twenty

Wow to see, Yeah, that's very interesting.

I read another piece in the Ft, also discovery. I love the Ft and I guess I love drugtor Sorry. The question this piece asked is will the next blockbuster drug come from China?

Well, that's really interesting. So there's almost like a parallel arms race in pharma and AI with China.

And the INTERSETXT and you can kind of see American farmer companies begin to make very substantial investments in China. For example, Novo Nordics, the company who developed a zepig, paid a Chinese company up to two billion dollars to

So how are they doing this?

Well, I mean, it's kind of that thing where the government says this is a priority, and also we'll just cut through all of the red tape required, will make trials easier, will make recruiting for trials easier, will approve the construction of new facilities in days rather than months or years. They basically said, this is a government priority to become a leader in pharmaceuticals, and therefore we will remove absolutely every obstacle, whether it's financial, whether it's regulatory,

So what does this mean for the US?

Exactly? Well, these Chinese drug makers are now developing drugs two or three times faster than most other countries. They're still a long long way off. Like the twenty largest farmer companies in the world don't include a single Chinese one. The top ten are very much dominated by the US. But you know, it's another area where strategic competition is starting to make itself known. And crucially, one in four generic drugs consumed in the US, like tylan Nol has

So as I want to bring you a story that really pissed me off, which is not something that I share all the.

Time year that's time I heard you say something that yeah, sure, well you.

Know, my therapist says, I'm not quick to express anger. But this is this was actually a story I read and I felt like viscerally angry about it. So it's from the MIT Technology Review and it's about how private prisons are now training AI on prisoner phone calls.

What does that mean?

You know, when you make a phone call from prison, there are two companies that essentially allow you to do that.

And they charge you like a lot regions.

So it's a huge amount of money.

That's right for the privilege or someone even say, the human right of being on to talk to your family.

That's exactly right, do you know how big this business is?

I know there's a despicable number of people in cost raids in the US.

The inmate calling system is a one point two billion dollar business.

Just the calling system, that's correct.

The story focuses on a company called securest Technologies. They're one of two companies that specialize in the prison phone system. The thing that really caught my attention in this article is that Securist has been investing in voice recognition products since twenty nineteen and AI products since twenty twenty three, which means they've been training their own lms on these phone calls.

So they own the basically the whole batch of recordings and can use it for whatever experiments they want to run.

I mean, the experiment that they apparently are running is building large language models that are going to help law enforcement track and basically predict ifs are going to happen on the basis of what people are talking about in their prison phone calls. It's surveillance on a level like you know, you think about panoptic power, and this is like the panopticon having another reason to be a panopticon. Yeah, so we know that llms are being piloted in certain markets,

Do prison advocates, I mean, there was a potcast. They hate it.

They hate it. A woman named Bianca Tileck from the organization Worth Rises, I think set it really the best, which is she said, there's literally no other way you can communicate with your family. Not only are you not compensating them for the use of their data, but you're actually charging them to collect their data.

Yeah, I mean it does kind of stick in your crawl a bit, doesn't it.

It sticks in my cry, you could say, yeah, I mean what infuriates me is that if inmates want to communicate with the outside world, they have to play within this system. Like they don't have a choice of how they're making phone calls, and so while they're informed that their messages are being recorded, they aren't informed about how this data is used at all.

Now, do you think the reason this story strikes us both is because we are such sort of empathetic people, or is it because in some sense it's a grotesquely magnified pastiche of the experience of being a citizen in the twenty first century.

I do think that yes, this is a magnified version of a surveillance capitalist state that we all live in, that we experience on a daily basis giving away data for free.

I guess the difference is that we technically theoretically can use duc dot go instead of Google and not right.

We have tools that help us dog GPN.

We have a choice which most of us don't exercise.

Choice within our non choice exactly.

Whether this is like, you know, well, your choice is not to communicate. I guess yeah.

And it's just I understand I suppose I understand the need to stop human trafficking, for example, or I have the understanding that it's important to stop you know, drug trafficking, or you know, a legal contraband coming into a prison. This just seems like the easiest, most crass way to possibly surveil people.

I also think, you know, it's such an easy thing to productize and say, like put these super predators in prison listening on these on their calls, and then this infallible technology AI tool will tell you who's the baddest of the bad And it's just like really, It's.

Also like, is this where we need to be applying AI tools? Like that's I just feel like money?

What about rehabilitation?

Rehabilitation programs? Precisely so, while I don't think twice about accepting cookies or giving away my data, I do at least have the choice to care without completely cutting myself off from the outside world.

Yeah, if I think you make a good point, which is like you can support the goals of law enforcement, like we don't want human trafficing all these things you've mentioned, and still have questions about this pick particular technique. I mean to me, the kind of framing question which we're going to come back to after the break in the story I'm going to tell you is philosophically, would you rather live in a world with no privacy or in a world with no crime?

That's a good question.

We're going to come back to it, and we're also going to talk about the world's youngest female self made billionaire and why people are getting addicted to giant fruit and we're back. Do you know the phrase one nation on the CCTV.

I know the phrase one nation under God.

That's one nation on the CTV was another contemporary artist who was the People of the.

Pre NFT era Banks Banks c Yes.

This phrase was graffited by banks outside London Post office in two thousand and eight. According to conservative newspaper in Britain, the Telegraph, the UK could be on a path now to becoming one nation under AI enabled CCTV thanks to a new proposal from the Labor government.

Say more about this.

So, according to Telegraph, which is not a fan of the Labor government, less sweet and just put our cards on the table. Yeah, Labor is proposing that police be allowed to compare photos of crime suspects from CCTV doorbells and dash cams against facial images on government databases, including the passports of forty five million Britons.

What yeah, So why are they proposing this?

Well, it comes back to the story we were talking about before the break, right, Like they're proposing this because they say that having CCTV cameras everywhere in Britain which are hooked into the mainframe of the passport photo database will allow it to be possible to stop crime in real time, to take sexual predators off the streets before

Well, very similarly to what we were saying is that when prisoners consent to make phone calls that are being recorded, I can't imagine that they are thinking these recordings will be used to train lllms.

And there's all these problems of bias in these facial recognition systems, which we start talking about. What we've talked about it to a blue in the face, but haven't really been addressed or properly addressed, which is, if you're a person of color, you're much well ke's be misidentified. But again there's this like technological logic where because it's

Right exactly exactly?

You know, there's just there's so many ways to turn this into a system for extreme evil.

I think, and we saw it happen with Wigers, with the weaker minority in China, Like it can happen very easily. It's not like it hasn't happened easily. There was an entire system that the Chinese government had called ijop, which is essentially to collect data from tons of sources that are being used by average Chinese citizens. So it's it's not crazy to imagine.

No, I mean, I think it's you know, the irony of this whole story is ten years ago we were saying, oh my god, China has built this surveillance stage and official recognition of our life. I'm not awful. It's just an ironic moment where our political systems are under so much strain that we have this aspiration to things that filled us with horror alto recently.

Yeah, so let's have a question for you. How many female billionaires can you name?

Is Nancy pelosia billionaire? You know there's a fund you can use to track Nancy Pelosi's trades and make them yourself.

Really, Oh, I have never seen that on the train.

Okay, but but Nancy Pelosi did not.

Nancy is definitely not one I trolling. So this week I was trying, like I was trying to think, like, who's a female billionaire? Who's a female billionaire? And I was thinking about it because the world has a new billionaire and she just happens to be the youngest female self made billionaire to date.

Wow.

And for the sake of our show, she works in technology.

Wow. I'd love to have her own who is?

She told me we should we should have her on. Actually she's really interesting. So last week, you know, we talked about polymarket, which is the online prediction market that continues to kind of discuss me. But the woman who is now a billionaire co founded poly Market's competitor, which, as you know, is caw she that's.

Correct, which sounds like a breakfast here like used to eat called kashi.

But I remember Cashi made me so ill. You would eat Cashi. I love that cereal. So Calshi is similar to poll Market in that people can make bets on everything from you know, sports, to elections to the weather. But unlike poly Market, which was crypto based, Cawshi is based in the US dollar and received approval from the

You sounded like doctor Eva in Austin powers four million dollars. Interesting. So cow She recently caught my eye because they announced a partnership with CNN. That's right where Cina is basically gonna broadcast caw she live predictions on things which are going to happen, which some people within CNN were pretty upset about, because you know, the idea of of of journalists becoming sort of jockey and like, you know, odd to make Betty.

What is that called insider trading that potentially called.

It sounds like it could be. I want to know more about this female founder who is she? What's her name?

Her name is Luana Lopez Lara and her co founder is named Tarik Manser. She's trying nine and Luana's backstory is like something out of a Russian spy novel. She was trained as a professional ballerina in Brazil extreme discipline, and even turned pro in Austria for nine months, but then she was like, I'm out of here. I don't want to be here anymore, and went to study computer science at MIT, and that's where she met Tark Wow.

And they founded this company, Kalshi together.

They did I like this from a piece that I read about it that he basically noticed that she was sitting up front in class and was like, that's the girl who's going to be a billionaire. Yeah, exactly. But according to their website, both Luana and Taric worked at financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and observed that many financial

That's interesting you mentioned I think half joking that Polymarket disgusted you. But we talked about this last week in respect to people betting on like you know, the outcome of Russia Ukraine battles over individual.

Towns and Zelensky sue.

But I said to you then, which I will repeat now, like, yes, that is in a very poor taste. But to what you just told me, it democratizes the types of bets that government and banks in a sense already make and just makes them very visible in consumer facing.

That's right. There is a little bit of a like let's take on the man energy to this whole thing. I just think the story is really interesting because when you think of tech billionaire, what do you think, like, what's the model? Right? Man and sometimes boy for me, yeah, but you don't think of woman or girl, not to

And also to your point about Calshi and Polymark, I mean, these are two of the most valuable private companies or very extremely valuable private companies that are not AI companies. They're both valued, I think are over at ten billion dollars. Yes, you want to know another unicorn that's been promising around place my subconscious. It's a company called Fruitist, who make giant fruit.

It's so funny. There was a I don't know if you ever saw this, but it's there's these kind of bougie bodegas in New York City and there was a strawberry. Oh yeah, I was astonished at the cost of this strawberry.

It was a strawberry I think nineteen dollars something like that, single strawberries.

And what that tells me is there's a market for it. But whatever, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Well, you want to talk about.

Founder of Fruitists actually directly pushes back on what you've just said and said what I'm doing has nothing to do with champagne strawberries. But let me read you the headline from Fortune. Ray Dadio is backing a one billion dollar blueberry unicorn that sells berries nearly the size of golf balls. That's this huge. I want to live in.

The fact that we can report on big fruit in the same breath as companies literally using large language models on the basis of prisoner phone calls. Is where technology is truly the craziest world to where we.

Have the poorest taste of anyone in the world.

Possibly.

So when I first saw this was, oh my god, they made GM fruit wrong. These actually normal fruit, but super optimized by data. They've bought farms around the world. They've used AI to basically totally optimize the production, distribution, storage, etc. Of the blueberries. Founders Steve mcgamy has said, quote they actually pop when you bite into them.

So we have gotten to a point in our culture where we literally can't stomach having any uncertainty around a blueberry like we need we need to actually use data to make sure that our blueberry is perfect exactly.

That's exactly. And it's not just blueberries. There are raspberries and blackberries in development, and Fruits has stuck a cherry deal in China.

I don't even know what that means.

To your point though, about consistency, that is exactly the goal. Ceomagami refers to ending the problem of quote berry roulette, meaning no more inconsistency in berriers. And we can laugh. But fruit is sales have tripled in the last year, so to passing over four hundred million dollars. The company was considering going public, but with tarists they decided to pause that.

Can I just ask a question, where do you buy these fruit like everywhere like Whole Foods? But is the brand called fruit Ist or are they.

Say fruit is but actually they it doesn't. It's not like the nineteen dollars strawberry. It comes in regular packaging. I see. So you can get like a pack of like golf ball sized blueberries which is like eight dollars for ten, let's say, which is still expensive, but it's different from nineteen dollars for one. You know.

I think one of the interesting things about this piece to me, and people have been writing a lot about this visa VI restaurants and menus, is that like GLP ones and Maha culture have really influenced what people demand in terms of the products that they eat or buy.

One hundred percent. So and this is you know you're seeing from Ceo mcgami's hymn book here because he said these are not berries to go on your muffins or your oatmeal. These are stand alone, snackable, berriessable berries. All other snack categories are seriously down since the launch of mpig and buried I think up so, yeah, I like these stories that have all the different Yeah, all the different things we talk about come together in a golf ball size blueberry that pops when you bite into it.

So this interview was shared over a million times. I was seeing the interview itself just going completely viral within twelve hours. Then my producer sent me a message saying that this is the fake version of the interview.

What do you mean? I thought she recorded an interview.

She did, but the interview, not just the person's responses, but her questions were both deep faked.

What terrified me is the fact that these deep fakes have become better and smarter. For the last seven or ten years, we've been hearing about deep fakes, and what they could do to society and you know the impact it's going to have. But I suddenly saw something that, frankly, if you didn't know my voice, if you didn't know me, and if you didn't know my mannerisms, you would think that that clip was.

Real and it wasn't any old interview that was being deep faked. Yalda's original conversation was with the sister of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, and he's been in jail since twenty twenty three on charges of corruption that his supporters say are all politically motivated, and the conversation was about that and how he's being treated in jail. The way it was manipulated, however, was much more provocative, much more potentially dangerous, and that's what went.

Viraltions that I had asked her had been completely changed, fabricated, manipulated. The focus was aggression towards India and an attack on the Army chief Arsimunir of Pakistan. And I think what was terrifying is the fact that we know that India and Pakistan went essentially to war in May. They went head to head following a terrorist attack in Kashmir. There was concern, you know, when two nuclear armed states are on the brink that way, that this could escalate and explode,

This is what experts have been warning us about for years, that deep figs can be used to actually escalate tensions and break down trust between people and their leader. I mean, you think about we have a US president who reposts deep fakes all the time.

Well, that's right, and we've become accustomed, i think, because of our president, to viewing deep fakes as kind of memes on steroids or comedy. Yeah, and almost a little bit desensitized to the kind of threat that people have been mourning of for years, that they could be used

So how did she actually rain in the deep fake interview?

Well, it's a bit of a to do, but she was able to use her platform to indeed ring in.

The way that I dealt with it was first of all, putting a post up on my social media saying that this deep fake is fake and it's AI generated. That also got picked up. I also did some interviews on sky News platforms. They ran the original and the fake version, and I talked around it and clarified. But I think what is terrifying is the fact that this really does test our democracy, journalism, our work, and how we're going to have to deal with things in the future.

This is quite a dramatic story of the intersection of humanity in AI and not something that most of us encounter in our everyday lives. But we do want to hear about your everyday lives and your interactions with technology. How are you using chatbots, how you're interacting with synthetic media. Anything you can share with us about how your life is being changed in real time by your interaction with new technology is what we want to feature on this show.

Will feature your stories and we'll send you a free T shirt.

That's it for this week for tech Stuff.

I'm care Price and i'mos Voloshian. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by Me, Carol Price, Julian Nutter, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katria Novel for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Behid Fraser and Jack Insley mixed this episode. Kyle Murdoch wrote out theme song.

Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We want to hear from you.