[00:00:19] AI continues to take center stage, moves from experiment to infrastructure. Is Jeff Bezos just a contrarian or is he right? Fox in the news, so is Roku in the Dark Ages when it comes to IT, all coming up. Happy to have you along. I'm Sam Bushman with TechWatch. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. Jay Hill's with me. Welcome, sir.
[00:00:45] Hey, Sam. How's it going? Fantastic, my friend, except for I don't really want a Digital Dark Age coming. I kind of like the Digital, Jay. Some people are warning that it may be coming. There may be issues. And there's some legitimate things. Do I think it'll happen exactly? Is it foreboding? I don't know. But there's some good points to this that there could be a problem with the way we're saving data right now. Should we start playing the Jaws music?
[00:01:15] Yeah, exactly. There's a video that kind of plays it, that kind of makes the point. We'll play it and talk about it. Here it is. In two days, humanity creates more data than has ever existed up to 2003. And data really important? Who knows? Who cares? But according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, we are sprinting directly into a digital dark age.
[00:01:44] With SSDs, servers, and hard drives holding your entire life? It rots. Bit rot and format obsolescence means our media degrades within a few decades. People who build the Internet's plumbing warn that your grandkid won't be able to open a single file you saved today. They'll just have terabytes of corrupted files to sort through and a wish that their grandparents print out some of their family photos. All right. There you have it.
[00:02:07] So when we talk about a digital dark age, we're really not talking about everything going black or no tech or anything like that. What we're really talking about is the preservation of data, right, Jay? That's right. The archives. What are we going to have? If you save something on, especially now, these SSDs and things that are just holding a static charge that degrades over time. I mean, we have this problem with the old CDs that you would burn, you know, but you try to run some of those. Say you did some in 2000.
[00:02:37] You know, you've got kind of a 30% chance now that they don't work. In another 20 years, it'll be... Well, and we move from technology to technology as part of the problem. Whether we can preserve the technology we've got or not is one discussion. But the next discussion is we change technologies, too. So think about right now you store everything on your hard drive. You used to store things on FTP sites. Now that's all gone. Now you store everything in the cloud. You store everything with S3 servers or whatever equivalents out there in the cloud.
[00:03:03] And then they've got hard storage or frozen storage and then live or whatever you want to call it, storage. And they have all these different versions. And, you know, technology will change so fast even if you could store it. And even if you didn't have BitRot or lack of device support or whatever other issues, the question becomes will you even be able to access it from a technology point of view? Because technology changes so fast. So there's a lot of issues confronting this very topic, Jay. That's right. And I think the only true way to do it right now, if you really have stuff, let's say your family photo album,
[00:03:33] because it's a good example of where you have data from long ago, you know, 20, 30, maybe more than that, maybe 50 years. And across the spectrum until now even continuing to add to it, right? Exactly, yeah, with current modern-day stuff from just yesterday. The only way to do that properly is to put that in something like a Google Drive or Dropbox or somewhere where it's constantly being refreshed. That means you constantly are paying money to keep that data fresh.
[00:03:59] It's constantly moving from old drives to new drives and being duplicated and replicated and put together. And as soon as you die or you stop paying for that, you're going to lose that. That's going to stop. Even if you've got a local drive, you know, say it's on an SSD. In some old computer, your Dropbox is backed up to it. You're going to lose that, though. Eventually, in 20 years, that SSD will stop working.
[00:04:24] Well, and if you're not cognizant, too, even if they duplicate it, replicate it, do all these different things that you're talking about, refresh it, whatever terms you want to call data integrity, whatever you want to say. How do we know that they're not, you know, eventually duplicating and replicating and refreshing corruptness, too? We don't know that unless you check out the data or have some way to analyze and, quote, load up and run that data, whatever it be.
[00:04:47] Play a file, look at a doc, whatever it be, with whatever technology we're using, you don't even know that that'll be true necessarily, factually speaking, unless you have some kind of a live test that you can prove it's really viable still, right? That's exactly right. And it's very true. I mean, I have photos in a Google Drive that go all the way back into the 90s. And there are, I've seen a couple of photos where there is some degradation. Somehow it's missed a bit or it's lost something.
[00:05:15] And so half of the screen will be like green and you could see that in JPEG artifacting when data hasn't been kept exactly right. Now, this is only maybe two or three photos out of literally tens of thousands. But still, you can see that happening. Well, hold on. It's two or three photos that you've noticed this on out of the tens of thousands. That's also correct. Through all of them, you don't even know. And I'm not trying to contradict you as much as I'm trying to say this is what I mean.
[00:05:39] The more the data set becomes larger, the bigger the files we deal with, the more those are unknown realities, right? Yeah. And it only takes one bit out of just trillions upon trillions to flip to ruin something. So it's a legitimate concern. And I just thought it was interesting that we should bring it up that people are talking about long-term archives. Microsoft came out with this glass cube that you could, you know, laser etch in a 3D array. And it's supposed to be good for 10,000 years.
[00:06:07] But I think that we need some kind of storage that's like that. I mean, how do you read that? I don't think so. In 10,000 years or even 50 years or 100 years, how do you know even if you have this awesomeness, how do you know we won't have technology that's so much greater than it? We don't have any players or readers or accessors. I'm using that as a weird term. Accessors of that, whatever it be. How do we even know we'll even have one of those? Like, it's hard to find a DVD player right now, isn't it? Yeah. It's fair point. I'm not saying you can't get one. I'm not saying you can't get a DVD player. But what I'm saying is I don't have one.
[00:06:37] If you gave me a DVD tomorrow and said, Sam, can you play this? I'd be running around my house trying to go. You have one. You have a laptop or something. Don't you? Nope. I have a DVD player in a desktop. Actually, I do. Stored in the bottom of a box somewhere. I think I have an external USB DVD player drive that I can plug in. But here's the point. It's only been 510. You carry on equipment. It's only been 5, 10, 15, whatever years since that was pretty much viable technology. What happens in 30? You won't have one. Right.
[00:07:05] So anyway, I'm trying to make this point that this 10,000 year, whatever it is, legacy laser stuff of 5,000 years ago, don't tell me you're going to be able to access it. Make something that'll last 100 years. I mean, that at least will go through a couple generations, right? Anyway, and so even printing things out on paper doesn't last. What people need to understand is this world doesn't last. It's very hard unless you etch something in gold or whatever plates or, I don't know, brass plates or some kind of preservable.
[00:07:34] And even that gets iffy. And so all I'm telling you is I don't think that we need to focus so much on preserving everything and think about out of all the data we're creating, what did that report say? In two days, we create more data than everything up to 2023. Exactly. I'm not 2003. 2003. Yeah. Okay. So think about that volume of data and how much of that do we really need to preserve? So let's say Jay has 10,000 photos.
[00:08:00] I guarantee if you look through all your photos now, instead of 24 photos on a film roll that you could take, now you take 10 photos of every photo you really want, right? I don't do that, but I know. I know, but that was the old advice, but we don't do that. That's what people do. Yeah. You're right. I understand, but people still do it. Or instead, they take, what are those other photos that are kind of, it takes a series of quick photos, what's that called? Burst photo. Okay. Or live photo. You're talking about live photos. Live photo, burst photo, whatever you want to call it.
[00:08:28] The point is it creates a little teeny kind of film where you get four or five and that way if somebody blinked, you still got the one right after it instantly or whatever. Anyway, all I'm trying to get as how much of that data do you really need? If you go through your 10,000 photos, how many of them would you really keep and want Jay? All of them. No, you wouldn't. Cause you'd look back and you'd say, you know what? That one was taken 33 years ago and it was on a bad camera. And it's just not that good of a photo. Jay. Those are the best photos though, Sam. Come on. Okay. So just on my iPhone alone. See, that's your perspective. Not the perspective of most people though.
[00:08:58] So listen, just on my iPhone, this doesn't include my Google drive, which has old cameras and everything else all gathered just on my iPhone. Meaning I've taken on this phone or maybe a previous phone or two, um, 38,625 photos. And I don't think you need all those. I think a candid eye in two generations, cause that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about Jay. He's dead now. We're not talking about Sam. He's gone in three generations. How many of those 38,000 photos do you think they'll really want? Oh, probably 27,000. You think? Yeah.
[00:09:29] Wow. I don't know if they'll be able to handle 27,000 photos. I don't know. I don't know what they'll do with 27,000 photos though. How can you even use those in any meaningful way? I don't know. But just imagine if you could like, look back at your grandfather's life. How can you use them in any meaningful way? Lots of ways. Like what if you're building a history, writing a biography, or you just want to learn about things from the past. Then you need someone to take those 38,000 photos and boil them down to like a thousand photos of the best ones. Oh, that's what AI is for, Sam.
[00:09:59] There you go. So use AI. Anyway, I'm just trying to get at, I don't know how much preservation we need. So I don't disagree with the point that he's making in this idea that we're going to hit a dark age because of corruption and the inability to preserve data. He's right about that. Where I would take him on is to say, you know what? 90% of that, I'm glad we lose. We don't need it. How do we preserve the rest is the real question. How do we decide what to preserve and then how do we preserve it? That's in my opinion, a greater question. We'll finish on this topic.
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[00:12:19] We're talking about a prediction of a digital dark age coming, and I don't really see it to be as big of an issue as they want you to believe. It sounds ominous. And I think they've got some genuine concerns about data preservation. I think it's vital and viable to be concerned about all that. But at the same time, I kind of wonder how much of what we really think we have that we really need. Jay's got 38,000 photos on his phone right now. How many photos do you think you have total, Jay? Everywhere. Probably 50,000, I would say.
[00:12:49] Maybe more. Maybe 60,000. Wait, does that include my wife's photos? Because she's got probably double that. Well, let's just talk to Jay, or we could talk about your family. Just say your family. And when you say 50,000, you're telling me you have two-thirds of your photos that you've ever created on your phone? Yeah. Because the reason why is Apple, since I switched to Apple, let's see, this would have been in 2014, 2012 maybe, or something like that. Probably 2014, 2015.
[00:13:20] It rolls those photos over every time you upgrade a phone. So I've gone through probably three or four Apple phones. Yeah, and before that, you didn't. But so either way, plus you're like the people of, you know, hey, from the whole world to 2003, there was a certain amount of data. And now in two days, we create just as much. So it's a lot of that principle at the helm as well. Absolutely. But let's just say your whole family, 100,000 photos. Yep. I think that's fair. And I'm just asking you, honestly, take two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten generations.
[00:13:47] That would be anywhere from now to 200 years or something, 300 years, whatever kind of thing. Forget the 10,000 years that Microsoft pretends they're talking about. They're just up in the night in terms of their, I mean, they're crazy. They have no concept of reality, in my opinion, when they discuss this. But take that and say, you know, hey, seven generations later, four generations later, what are they going to do with 100,000 photos? Because remember, those are grandpas, great-grandpas, great-great-great-whatever numbers, grandpa's photos.
[00:14:17] They're not dad's photos, mom's photos, that generation's photos. They've got 10 million photos, Jay. Right. Exactly. And so how valuable are your 100,000 photos going to be? Now, if you say, well, we want to do a history of Jay and his wife and his lovely children, and they're awesome, and we want to, that's great. But you don't need 100,000 photos. In fact, that makes it almost impossible to even extract the best of it. Right.
[00:14:43] It would be better if Jay would drop it down to 2,000 photos of really the best of the best of the best of the best, and then preserve that. And then actually, they have something they could literally possibly go through in their lifetime, right? Yeah, you're probably right. All right. So how do we do that? That's the real question coming out of that. But just so you know, Fox is in the news. Are you a Fox fan, Jay? Am I a Fox fan? Not really. You better become one. I hear that they are purchasing Roku, but. And they're taking over your Roku player.
[00:15:13] I mean, what do I watch Fox on? I don't have Fox. I don't have like Dish Network or whatever. Hold on. You're a Roku player? I do have a Roku TV, so I will now. Okay. So you have a Roku player, and Fox is coming up. Headline Fox is brokering or planning a $22 billion power grab, reshaping the future of television. Fox is no longer content to just sit by and produce news and sports programming. No, sir.
[00:15:39] By purchasing Roku, Fox is moving to control both the content that Americans watch and the platform that you watch it on. The deal combines Fox News, Fox Sports, and a bunch of other stuff. And they say that it'll be Roku's presence, which means Fox presence in over 100 million U.S. households. And they say it'll become the largest player by viewership.
[00:16:09] The move signals a dramatic shift in media. Anyway, basically, everybody wants to become a gatekeeper. As people kind of, you know, decouple or cut the cord and get rid of cable and everything else. They're trying to make moves, and that's why things are shifting so quickly. Fox gains direct access to viewer data, advertising technology, and the smart TV operating system in this move, reducing its dependence on cable distributors, et cetera.
[00:16:37] And Roku's expected, they say, to remain an open platform carrying competing services. But the acquisition raises questions about, hey, how much preferential treatment will Fox get? In short, Fox isn't just buying a streaming company. It's buying an ecosystem and will be involved in deciding how America watches television.
[00:16:59] Fox is making a major strategic bet on free and instead of ad support, or I should say free and ad supported streaming rather than relying on paid subscriptions, et cetera. And it's a big deal, Jay. It is. And I'm sure Fox probably has a paid subscription, but I don't know anybody that pays for it. I mean, you see people paying for Paramount or paying for HBO or whatever. These things, you never hear of Fox's, if they even have one, a subscription. So I think they're buying into it.
[00:17:28] I think they're paying, what is it, $22 billion for this? Yes. So that's a lot of money. I mean, that's like, sure, it's got stock options and some other stuff that they pay out. But that's a big gamble, I think, on Fox's part. But it is a big move. And Roku's been the leader. I mean, we've been talking about Roku for as long as this show's been going on for many years now. Almost, yeah. Yeah. All I can say is this. You know, Fox is making a bold move. That's true. But the question is, I think that Fox has got a point.
[00:17:57] And this is something you and I have brought up over the years on this show, too. So we're getting subscription burnout, Jay. We're just getting, I just can't pay for another. And so Fox is kind of betting, saying, hey, you'll support ads more than you'll support rolling out more cash. And we're going to bet there. We're also going to bet that these players are so embedded in so many households. And we're going to bet we can bring programming. And especially if we bring our programming alongside other people's programming, we feel like it'll put us in the driver's seat in the sweet spot.
[00:18:25] And I tend to think Fox is right. They might be. I mean, I'm sure they've studied it a lot more than I have. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. But don't you agree, though, that you're getting subscription burnout? Yeah, everybody is. I don't even have that many subscriptions anymore. I have, you know, Amazon Prime. I've got, I think, Paramount because it's through Walmart Plus. It's like included. So there's two. What else do I have? I have a Netflix, but I don't pay for it. It's like one of my son's Netflix account.
[00:18:55] Okay, so you're stealing Netflix. Don't say that on the air. Yeah. I'm just kidding. Well, no, I mean, he just hasn't logged in. But you've got a lot of prescriptions, subscriptions compared to your parents' day. I mean, you've got your cell phone. Do you have a backup for your cell phone subscription, Jay? Do you include my watch on my cell phone plan? Yeah. So, yeah. But I mean, that's like visible. Do you have a backup, though, for your cell phone? Do you back it up to Apple? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So an iCloud subscription. Where do you have your 38,000 photos, my friend?
[00:19:25] Well, I have a Google subscription. I've got an Apple iTunes or iCloud or whatever subscription. So what you're telling me is compared to your grandparents, you have a ton of subscriptions. I've got an Audible subscription for books to listen to. So let's say I'm trying to think of all the subscriptions. All right. I have to pay insurance on my car. Does that count? Well, there you go. So all I'm telling you is that we have a lot of subscriptions. People are getting burned out. They're just going, man, this is too much. I can't take it anymore. I agree.
[00:19:54] I feel that way all the time. I don't know what to do about it except for to say Fox is betting that you're not going to take on more and more subscriptions, that you're going to do more of wanting to say, hey, I don't care if there's some ads, I'm going to have to live with that. And I actually do use. The industry is just getting too greedy, right? I do use some of those services that are like that Pluto TV, which is just all ad supported. Tubby is another one. I don't use them a ton. I mean, I've used them before a couple times a year or whatever. It's not like I use them every day or anything. But sometimes you go to look up a movie.
[00:20:24] You have a subscription to ChatGPT, don't you? I do. Yep. Okay. I have a subscription to Canva. I have a subscription. There's a lot of things. Yeah. It's just crazy. And so I think that people are getting burned out. And so I think that whether we move totally to the Fox model, I don't think. I think that both models are going to survive for quite some time. But I do think Fox is betting on a sweet spot. Fox is going to come out with some kind of Fox Plus subscription. Like I said, if they don't already have it, and I just don't know about it,
[00:20:53] once they get this momentum, I think there's going to be a premium. There's no reason for them not to have something that cuts out the ads and you pay extra for it and you get some insider or whatever. Of course. It would make sense for them, too. That's the way of the business world, and that's kind of what's happening. Anyway, I find it very interesting. But the world's changing, and I think a lot of people believe that all the jobs are going away because of AI, Jay. And believe it or not, Jeff Bezos contradicts the AI job loss sphere.
[00:21:23] He's predicting that there'll be labor shortages. I guess it went to a Paris tech conference where he kind of made this claim, and everybody kind of went, what? What do they call this thing, Viva Tech? The Viva Tech conference in Paris, yep. Yeah. He basically expressed this divergent view. Or view, I'm sorry. He says everybody kind of is thinking that all the jobs are going away. He doesn't think so at all. He says amid widespread concerns,
[00:21:51] 53% of Americans, according to this Reuters survey or whatever, believe that, hey, artificial intelligence is going to get rid of all my jobs. Everybody's worried about it. Jeff says no. Bezos' optimistic perspective on AI challenges, he says, hey, AI is going to augment the workforce rather than diminish it. What do you think of that, Jay?
[00:22:15] Well, I think in a related story, there is where people are saying that it's remote work, not AI, that's hitting young grads. The rise of remote work, not artificial intelligence, explains most of the recent jump in joblessness among young college graduates. Employers say that they are filling work-from-home jobs with experienced hires rather than fresh grads because of the difficulty of training someone over a long distance.
[00:22:45] It's hard to train people over a long distance, Jay. Right. And so they're looking for experienced people. There's a lot of experienced people out there, especially, you know, sometimes, say, people that are 40-plus or 50-plus that might have gotten passed over, they're filling those jobs and letting them work remote from home. And they're saying that unemployment among graduates under 29 rose 3.1% before the pandemic to 3.7%, even as the rate for older seasons workers slipped.
[00:23:13] The findings push back a popular theory that AI is wiping out entry-level roles, though the authors caution that this change would be, could change as technology spreads. And, you know, that field's completely dynamic. But it is interesting that it's not always just, oh, it's easy to blame AI because it's the hot thing. But there's a lot of factors and a lot of variables there. Yeah. So one of them is AI. Another one is people hiring people offshore. If I basically say, I want to create a company. I want five U.S. managers.
[00:23:41] I want 50 Filipino people that'll work for a quarter of the cost, you know, a fifth of the cost. And I'll have my, you know, American five managers manage those 50 people. And then I'm going to use AI to fill in the rest. Now I've got literally 55 people at my company. Oh, I better make it 49 because the government will penalize me if I go over 50. All right. I want to get rid of a few of the, but the few of those guys are gone. Now I've got, you know, 40 Filipinos and five Americans and AI and I've got 45 people. So I'm under the 50 limit.
[00:24:11] I dodge all that. I offshore this. I AI that. And now I've got this company where it might've in the past taken me 100, 200, 300, 400 employees to run this thing. And I got it. Exactly. The new reality. The question is, how do you become one of those Americans that are in some key positions? And then how do you find jobs that are in a different space? Maybe you should try to find out how to preserve our data. That ought to be a good job for somebody. It's for the pickings. And there'll be a gazillion just like that in different ways.
[00:24:41] I'm Sam Bushman. He's Jay Harrison. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. Network providers, Inc. dot com. NPI tech guys dot com. Hey, make it a great tech day. Hey, will ya?