[00:00:19] When I was a kid, there was a phrase called walk the dog, and it was a yo-yo trick. Now, in modern times, it's slightly different. We'll tell you about it. Happy to have you along, my fellow tech enthusiasts. I'm Sam Bushman. Jay Hill's with me, and we keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. We are TechGuys, talking about tech. This is TechWatch, brought to you by NetworkProvidersInc.com.
[00:00:44] When you want a partner when it comes to tech, think strategic, think security, think NetworkProvidersInc.com. By the way, on that website, you can also sign up for our newsletter and get tidbits and information that we send out to help you with your tech experience in life. We also have a free consultation so you can learn what we can do for you, and you can also watch and listen to the shows on that website as well, NetworkProvidersInc.com. Hi, Jay. Hey, Sam. Were you an avid yo-yoist when you were a kid?
[00:01:14] I wouldn't say an avid, but yeah, we had yo-yos, and I used to play with them, and I remember the walk the dog. Do you remember this? I do remember it, but I could never do it. I mean, I never spent enough time to pull it off. Anyway, the reason I bring that up, though, is then walking the dog became kind of an elderly thing. Hey, the old people in the neighborhood, they're always out there walking their dog and stuff like that, right? That's good for them. Get out and about. Yes, it is. Yes, but now, Jay, in the new AI world, my friend, everybody thinks they're losing jobs.
[00:01:42] In this case, there's a job offer for you. Okay, I'm sitting on the edge of my seat. All right, here it is. San Francisco startup offers humans $20 an hour to walk robot dogs, Jay. Walk the bot dog, right? That's pretty good. I mean. It's a San Francisco startup. What's this thing called? Dimensional Advertise? I guess it is.
[00:02:10] Or is it dimensional in their advertising jobs? They want to operate four-legged robots on four different testing routes. They say workers follow these designated routes, and they follow the safety instructions. Do you have to use a leash? Walks last four to six hours. Yeah, Jay, come on. No, I think maybe you're just monitoring this thing. Maybe there's a kill switch you have in your pocket on a little fob or something. I don't think you need a leash for a robo dog, do you? I don't know.
[00:02:39] They say the unusual assignment helps test the machines on city sidewalks under human supervision. So maybe you don't need a leash. Maybe it's just supervision. I don't know. Now, blind people probably can't work for this company. I don't think. But anyway, I just find this very fascinating that now you literally in California, you can be traded $20 an hour to walk a robot dog, and they're doing that because they want to gain experience,
[00:03:07] and they're going to take all this feedback, I'm sure, and make the dogs, I don't know if it's behavior-related or if it's how to access curb. I don't know what training details they're looking for, probably all of the above, how it can behave in society and interact with people. You know, the current real dogs would just run up to a person and whatever. These dogs need to be trained not to just jump on people or, you know, I don't know. Not to pee on fire hydrants. Or is it learning to stay away from training? Not to.
[00:03:35] So, you know, I think all of the training is in flux. How it behaves, how it walks, what it does, how it knows to stay on task and so on and so on. So will it have an AI brain in it? I don't know, but I assume so, Jay. I wouldn't make a career out of this, though. I think it's a very temporary position. Once they gather the data, you know, they're going to be good. Come on, Jay. Yeah. It might last several years, though. See, that's what people don't understand about tech. They think that tech just happens.
[00:04:03] And I just look at my iPhone and say, hey, even the new last, I don't know, five or six or seven generations of iPhones, so what, seven years worth, they haven't really changed much. I upgraded from a 13 to a 17, and now they have the 18s out. Everybody I talk to has the 18s. They're like, it's cool. It's better. That's because you haven't gotten a duo yet, Sam. I have some better battery life, and I have, you know, a little bit. It's good, but it's not great. There's nothing really super awesome or innovative. So it's starting to slow down a bit, and I submit to you that AI will do a similar thing, Jay.
[00:04:33] Yeah. Well, I don't think so, though. I think AI, like I said, I think we're at the tip of the iceberg. I think it's very immature in its stage, and I think we're going to see just revolutions of stuff. It leaps and bounds. You're right, but here's the problem. It's got to have red tape. How long will it be until society just lets these robot dogs run around the city? I don't know. It depends on how well they're trained by these people, I guess. Exactly.
[00:05:00] But all I'm saying is, you know, we hear about this tech, and I've repeated this over and over. Tech doesn't just magically appear rarely. Most of the time, it takes time to process, and things work out well, and we thought it would do this, but it doesn't, but it does that better than we thought. So it's going to take a long time. There's red tape everywhere. There's costs. So even if these dogs are available for the military, just say, maybe that's what they're for. I don't know. But how long will it be until you have your own electronic dog? I don't know. It depends on how useful they're going to.
[00:05:28] Is it going to roam around and protect my property at night or something? I don't know. I could see jobs for these things, and I know people are trying to do this already. But all that has to be worked out is what I'm getting at. I don't want another job, though, as a maintenance technician of robo-dogs where I've got to make sure I plug it in and charge it and flip it over because it fell over. No, hold on. You have to. You think it can. I mean, look at the vacuums. This is nothing more than a equipment. I know. That's why I don't have a robo-vacuum either because I could just grab a regular vacuum and vacuum the floor in 5, 10 minutes.
[00:05:59] You're going to have to babysit that baby. I know. You just are. I'm not one of those early adopters, I guess, Sam. Hold on. You'll plug it in, though. You won't have to pick up dog do. Well, no. I like that plan. So you know what I mean? But anyway, the bottom line is if you're in San Francisco, there is a job for you now. I don't think you can live on $20 an hour in San Francisco. That's a whole other topic. That's exactly. It might be a good college dog. If AI is everything everybody says, though, why don't we have AI monitor the dogs?
[00:06:28] I'm sure they are. Actually, they're doing both. But they want a human to be there because then. I understand. I'm just saying things change, but they won't change. I don't think you're going to have an electronic dog at your house anytime soon. It'll be several years. And we've got to define what is it going to do. Is it going to bark? Is it going to troll your property? Is it going to catch mice? I mean, what is it going to do? How about that? I don't think they're going to do that. It would be kind of cool. But I don't know. Why not? Rodent control.
[00:06:55] You'd have to empty out the stomach of the dog and stuff. Jay? Come on. No. No. It needs to go throw them in the trash or whatever when it's done. Dispose of them properly in the compost pile. It's got to kill them first, though. Or throw them in the trash. It won't do any good. Yeah. AI will have some kind of three laws against that about killing mice or something. All right. Well, people are in love, Jay. Do you want to tell us about this one? That never stops.
[00:07:19] Well, there's a Utah woman, Enola Johnson, who says that a man contacted her on LinkedIn in March 2023, cultivated an online romance. It claimed that he had traveled to Abu Dhabi for work and persuaded her to send money, including $50,000 for cryptocurrency. I mean, he must have been pretty debonair, I think. I guess so.
[00:07:44] Nine months later, she discovered the deception after losing, it wasn't just $50,000, Sam, after losing $850,000. How does a chick with this much money have such a hard time? Okay, that's a different topic. But Johnson says that she believes that the video calls that helped convince her were fake using artificial intelligence, according to an October 28 report.
[00:08:08] Her story reflects a broader criminal industry with groups of victims, people whose money is stolen and trafficked into scam centers and forced to commit fraud. Interpol has documented these operations and the use of AI-generated identities and deepfakes in romance scams. And usually this happens the other way around, you know, men with women, but I guess it's going both directions. But my goodness, if you have that kind of money, you should be able to get out and about and shouldn't have any problem finding somebody local who's real instead of getting duped by AI.
[00:08:38] Well, maybe so. And I want to talk about the red flags of this for a second. Absolutely. I think that what happens is people just get in their mind this hope for love, this desire for attention or what. I don't know what human traits that are emotional relate to this. You had to swim through a sea of red flags to send almost a million dollars to somebody sight unseen. That's exactly my point. Sight unseen. And you can say, well, I was deceived by the videos.
[00:09:06] And my response is, you know, I don't really even consider somebody too much of a friend until I've met them in person. Right. Not that I'm saying that people that I haven't met in person aren't friends. But, you know, the chance of me giving anybody even a thousand dollars if I don't know them really well over time, know that they're real, have met them in person or whatever. I'm not even going to give somebody a thousand bucks. Right. Okay.
[00:09:33] So what I'm saying is that people have got to just ground themselves. The other question I have is, does this lady have anybody around her that she would talk to that could have warned her? Hey. Yeah. Whether it even be just a chat bot for that matter, where it's like, hey, you know what? This isn't safe. I'm telling you right now there's red flags everywhere. I just don't understand how this really happens. Even chat GPT would have been like, hold on, pump the brakes here.
[00:09:59] See, she needs people in her life that are like telling her these things. And I don't mean to be critical of her. I'm not attacking her looks or her intelligence or anything. I'm just saying. I don't even know what she looks like. We should be our brother's keeper, though, in this sense. Neighbors should have known. Somebody should have had a relationship with her to where she would have confided in them and told them and whatever else. And whether somebody is a mass shooter and they go crazy or whether somebody is in love and they spend this kind of money or whatever else. We need to make sure that we have humans around people. We need to start ministering to people.
[00:10:28] I don't mean this to be a religious discussion exactly. But we need to really kind of consider how does this stuff happen? And we need to care about people in our society, our neighbors, our friends, and love on people and give people support and attention to where this stuff never happens, folks. I don't care how good AI is. This should not happen. I'm Sam. He's Jay. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. It's called Tech Watch. Brought to you by NetworkProvidersInc.com.
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[00:12:20] Ladies and gentlemen, if it seems to be too good to be true, the old adage is real. Even in the world, ladies and gentlemen, if somebody tells you they love you and they just can't see you or meet you or whatever else, but they want a bunch of money from you,
[00:12:51] they just know that there's something weird and odd about that, folks. I'm telling you right now. Big red flags, yeah. Giant red flags, massive red flags. And even if the money's not that big, even if it's like 50 bucks, 100 bucks, 500 bucks, it starts small as they gain trust. I wouldn't give anybody money that's overseas. Anytime it's international outside the country, that's a massive red flag in and of itself, Jay.
[00:13:14] Yeah, and if you do, right, if you're going to do that because for whatever reason, you better be giving it away knowing that you'll never see it again. Like, you better make sure in your heart that it's a gift because you're probably never going to see it again anyway. And so I don't know, even if you feel like, oh, I was scammed, you know, you could just chalk that up to whatever, tithe, charity, whatever you want to say. That money's gone, man. Don't give that with any hope of thinking that you're going to get that back or some kind of reciprocation.
[00:13:44] The likelihood of somebody being overseas and somebody that you've never met truly, honestly being genuine and needing money that will pay you back or that's honorable with whatever their ask is, is almost zero right there alone. Yeah. Now, I think I kind of feel like part of this scam is this person. And I don't know. I don't know all the backstory on it, but I feel like she thought now they did say that he was buying cryptocurrency. So maybe she thought she was making an investment and there was going to be some kind of return on this order.
[00:14:12] Don't care if you send money overseas to somebody you've never met. Yeah. And it's going to be a large amount of money. You can bet 99.99 out of 100 that it ain't going to go well. What she bought was expensive attention. That's it. And I wonder even how good the attention was. I mean, it must have been decent, I guess, but whatever. Anyway, weird stuff for sure, folks. The reason I spend so much time on that, though, is for you guys to understand. Don't get duped. Look, if it's too good to be true, it is. If it's fantastic, if it's a lot of money.
[00:14:42] Talk to people around you. Whatever you've got to do to slow down that impulse decision-making, do it. You've got to be really, really, really careful. And we need to be our brother's keepers. We need to look out for others, especially the elderly and the lonely, and make sure that they're not alone. Make sure they have people around them that are good neighbors, good friends, kind Christian people that will look out for their interest. So there's two sides to this. One is don't get scammed.
[00:15:08] But two, make sure you are a resource for people to support them if they're lonely or alone or elderly or whatever the case may be to where there's solutions. Google's AI is in the news again. And so is X's AI. They're creating more and more bots that do things on their own, Jay. And you've had a lackluster hurricane season on the East Coast, but the West Coast has had a lot more than you had. Lackluster. Blame it on. I liked it, man. It was pretty nice. It was on respite.
[00:15:37] Don't you want those hurricanes rolling in, Jay? No. We had a lovely hurricane season this year. The best one, really, in memory for as long as they have records. Anybody who lives on the East Coast, especially in the South, I kind of think they love that stuff. Or else they'd get the heck out of there, man. It's crazy. No. There are people that do like it. You know, they have hurricane parties and stuff like that. It's kind of like Florida snow days, right? The hurricanes coming through.
[00:15:58] But anyway, so Google has AI now that's improving what they call hurricane track forecasts. But they say, but storm strength still remains a challenge. So Google's what they call deep minds AI correctly forecasts hurricanes, especially this one that went to the Florida plan handle recently. And I guess the AI models pointed further west.
[00:16:25] First, the National Hurricane Center is incorporating AI guidance into its forecasts. But they say its official intensity outperformed deep minds. So they're finding that the best right now is the blend, Jay. You will. Forecasters continue combining or combining traditional weather models and human expertise with these models to create the best we've got so far. And at the end of the day, they're saying, hey, we've got better reporting than we ever have.
[00:16:53] But it's still we still think we can gain more ground. So I paid special attention to this, especially with this last hurricane. Hurricane Isaias came through and I was watching this. The NOAA models and the UK models versus they had some AI models were actually publishing this in a lot of news and stuff that was happening right before. Where you would see they would kind of highlight the AI models like, well, this is the AI model. Turns out, though, that the AI model, in my opinion, was more accurate. Now, the AI said that it was going to move west.
[00:17:23] Well, what actually happened? It made landfall and most of the damage was in Milton, which is west of there. So in a lot of ways, I think that the actual track in the AI prediction was better than most of the other models that they had. Now, so it didn't get the intensity right, but it did get the direction right. The intensity was where it said it was. Right. But it did get the intensity location correct, even though. Right. You know, it was pretty interesting.
[00:17:49] I'll say this on that one, you know, with one data point, it did better than all the other models. The AI model did on this last one. Well, all I can tell you is that iterative AI, along with human guidance and intelligence, we're going to get better and better and better tracking. This is one area where I really believe AI will be a blessing and a half, and I believe it'll make a ton of progress over the next several years. A hundred percent. Agree. All right. Let's talk about this scandal that just took place. You know, a lot of people believe blockchain is really safe.
[00:18:18] It's always on the blockchain. You can keep track of every transaction. It's all good. But it ain't so simple, Jay. No. Binance has halted withdrawals after 6.3 billion cryptocurrency theft. Reuters reports that hackers stole $6.3 billion from Binance. The exchange was suspended withdrawals, and they said that it would cover those losses. I don't know how they cover that kind of losses, but okay. Blockchain analysis from TRM Labs and chain analysis attributed the attack to North Korea.
[00:18:46] And Binance said that its own investigation has not identified responsibility, but apparently they're looking at North Korea. Yeah, I mean, that's some big funds for that little country. Amen to that. Anyway, the bottom line is they say they're going to pay everybody back from it, and they say they've halted most of it. So they got wind of it pretty quickly, but it's interesting to me how— I don't think that Binance could cover that kind of loss, but okay. Well, they say they can. Now, I don't know if it's true or not, or if they're going to, you know, they hope for partners that won't materialize. Time will tell. But all I'm telling you is this, folks.
[00:19:15] Don't think that these things can't be hacked or breached or anything else, because they can and they will, and it's going to get more, not less. Yeah, that's enormous. Remember who told you first, right? Indeed. All right. Another interesting thing before the end of the hour that we want to highlight, Jay. Instagram goes long. 90-minute videos from Instagram are taking whatever you want to call it at YouTube. Take an aim at YouTube. Like, they're trying to compete with YouTube, yeah. Yeah, so they're going to say, you can post up to 90 minutes now.
[00:19:45] They're testing this as a new features hub for horizontal videos. That means, you know, what we're usually familiar with is videos in landscape mode, not in portrait mode like TikTok videos are. Up to 90 minutes long. Yeah, so if it's mobile, it's usually vertical. If it's TV, it's usually horizontal, right? Exactly, right. This is for podcasters, comedians, and other creators. Viewers can jump from short reels in the portrait mode into full episodes, giving Instagram a bigger shot at YouTube's audience and viewing time.
[00:20:12] The U.S. will test this, marks a major shift in long-term entertainment with advertisers and revenue agreements under the development and exclusivity required. Everybody's trying to get on this because these things, reels, TikToks, you know, YouTube shorts, they're all competing with four eyeballs. And we're seeing network television and things like this taking a dive because everybody's doing a lot of this shorter form, instant kind of thing. Yeah, but this bucks the trend, Jay.
[00:20:42] The trend is for everything to get shorter and shorter and shorter. And this proves that people want longer form content. YouTube's cleaning up on it, and others want to get into the game. So it's a reverse of what the whole trend is to some degree. A little bit. But, I mean, I think that some people, it's different audiences, right? So if I'm in a doctor's office or something or whatever, I mean, maybe not there, but let's say I'm sitting in my car waiting for my wife to come out of an appointment or something. I'm going to probably get on, like, TikTok and just watch. It's almost like channel surfing. You can just scroll through things instantly.
[00:21:11] But if I'm sitting at a computer and I'm trying to, you know, figure out how to change the alternator in a van or something, I'm going to sit on YouTube and I'm going to watch long-form, widescreen videos or in-depth stuff or if I'm interested in researching a topic or something like that. That's the kind of thing that I'm going to go for. And I'll tell you that. Compare that to just television watching. Like, I don't watch any network television anymore. I just don't. I understand. So it is changing. It is getting shorter.
[00:21:38] But I'm telling you that we'll see how this experiment for them goes. It's huge for the gram, though, because the gram has always been about instant, small, tiny. And now they're moving into the longer space because they know there's a huge audience still there. I think they're just diversifying. I think they just don't want to lose to YouTube on that kind of stuff. And they're just saying, we're going to be all in and we're going to be your central portal, the same way Facebook was. I mean, you remember even just a couple of years back, Facebook, to some people, Facebook was the Internet. It was like that's their only interaction with the Internet.
[00:22:08] Yeah, it was AOL of the future. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. And Instagram, everybody wants to be like that. TikTok wants to be your store and wants to be your. Everybody wants you to be in their ecosystem and they want to basically supply all your needs. It's like resort. Exactly. But online and stuff. That's a great analogy. It's like a resort. You're exactly right. There's a company called Ripley, ladies and gentlemen. I think that's the name. And their CEO envisions a self-driving company.
[00:22:34] But with humans still making the calls, writes TechCrunch. The CEO. I'm John. I'm John. Anyway. Says that AI agents are transforming his company by handling routine work while employees focus on judgment, creativity, and deciding what actually deserves attention.
[00:22:58] And I think he's absolutely right about this is what the future is going to look like when it comes to this stuff. Jay, do you want to add to this here? Yeah. Well, he talks about he was speaking at TechCrunch and he described agents investigating support requests, gathering information from code and project records, and helping implement fixes after a person determined how to proceed. Mossad said employees now spend more time discussing ideas, planning software architecture, and choosing what to build.
[00:23:25] His vision puts human judgment at the center of increasingly automated operations, but his claim that agents change jobs rather than eliminate them reflects Replit's experience and his outlook. Not a guarantee for the broader workforce, but it is very interesting. So I do have to make a little bit of a – I want to be clear about the headline. So it says a self-driving. They don't mean a car, folks. No. What they mean is that the company will run by AI automated self-driving,
[00:23:53] but then humans will be at the helm of all these different things making these decisions. And that's why I say you can't just talk about an AI hours only AI. What does it take for the humans to be involved to make sure that it doesn't go off the rails and everything else? This guy is on to something. His vision puts human judgment at the center of an increasingly automated operations. But his claim is, hey, they're not going to eliminate humans. It's not going to happen.
[00:24:19] ChatGPT is predicting more automation, job disruption, and greater consequences when machines get it wrong. So everybody's on the same page about this. Don't dismiss all the humans so quickly. They'll have different jobs. But don't get rid of everybody is kind of the takeaway right now. How much that will have mojo, we shall see. Thanks for watching and listening. NetworkProvidersInc.com. That's where you can learn more about us. Make it a great tech day, will you? Hey, thanks.