Tech Time by Tim #69
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With CES fading away in the rearview mirror, it’s time to learn how you can avoid getting smart carsick! But why, though? Because it’ll help you more effectively plan your next tech move
At A Glance
A quick overview of this week’s content
The Week that Was:
A look back at the tech world of the past week
How To Avoid Getting Smart Carsick:
The second aspect of CES that I really wanted to talk about was the cars, and not just because LG crammed a 57” TV into one, or Sony drove their latest prototype onstage using a PS5 controller. God, imagine playing Gran Turismo on your car TV while you drive. You’d be able to crash into everything while you crash into everything. Wait a minute… No, please, god, no, are we really just doing ‘Pimp My Ride’ again!? In this 2004-2007 show, rapper Xzibit would take someone’s car and his team of mechanics would then cram it full of wildly impractical, debatably road legal, but very visually impressive gimmicks. You had wall to wall TV screens, fish tanks, festival grade (and size) speaker systems, foldout cinemas, heated seats that didn’t require a subscription. Things got pretty crazy. But where things tended to uh break down, was in the ergonomics, in the user experience (UX) of these pimped out rides. Because once the episode was done, so was the car. Good luck maintaining and repairing
Car manufacturers are racing to implement proprietary hardware and software into their lineups. Which makes it possible for Polestar, a Swedish Electric Vehicle manufacturer, to generate positive PR by promising to maintain support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. I have plenty of criticisms about how Apple and Google abuse their market positions, but you won’t hear me deny the value of their ecosystems when implemented in a way that respects users. If I were Polestar, I’d focus on making such ‘respectful’ implementation happen. Focus on making the car straightforward, efficient, and ergonomic. From a purely practical standpoint, just fixing the glaring privacy and security holes increasingly endemic to ‘smart cars’ would already position Polestar as a ‘lodestar’ for the automotive industry. And that’s what consumers want.
They don’t want a heartbeat monitor that’s easy for insurance agencies to abuse, Lamborghini. Consumers want ‘Afeela’ to a-feel like a car rather than an even bigger and louder PS5, Sony. What I’m driving at here is that I don’t want scuffed UX and weird gimmicks in my future car. What the people truly want are solutions to existing problems like many EV’s barely functioning in the cold. I see you eying my wallet again Mercedes-Benz. I see you, BMW. If the seat heating won’t work without a subscription, I’ll put on winter layers when I need to! Like a petty, inexplicably allowed to drive Bear! There’s this Dutch saying about seeing bears on the road you see, which means to see problems that aren’t there, and in trying to avoid those imaginary problems, causing real problems to happen to yourself. To survive, car manufacturers need to commit to fixing real problems, rather than inventing problems so they can sell us solutions that don’t even work most of the time. LINK
But Why Though?
The Consumer Electronics Expo (CES) happened last week, lasting from January 9th – 12th. I linked a convenient overview of it in last week’s newsletter, but for those who want a few more to peruse, I’ve got you covered! One the most written about items of the event was the r1 rabbit, a small terminal that wants to replace all your gadgets with its cute AI assistant…that relies on the products and services its trying to replace in order to function…wait what? Why though? Owing to the hype around it, this device quickly sold out. But I wasn’t the only one with doubts about its value proposition. For example, Devin Coldewey, writing for TechCrunch titled and finished off his otherwise flattering piece on the device with the question about whether or not the r1’s design and user experience could set it apart from the pack. It seems another much hyped AI terminal maker, Humane doesn't seem too confident.
It doesn’t like “let the bot handle it!” as a core value proposition for products or services. Streamlining is great, but if you ‘let the bot handle everything,’ ever diminishing privacy and personal agency, will ultimately reduce you to a bot as well. That idea doesn’t excite me at all. What does excited me are genuine paradigm shifts (major changes) such as when the original iPhone killed the Blackberry by being a novel, ultimately superior experience. Making the iPhone into a giga-blackberry isn’t progress, its regression.
We now have OLED screens with refresh rates most people's systems can't reach. Why though? There were so many ways of seeing stuff at CES this year. From ‘interactive’ projectors to transparent TV’s, yet despite all these ways of seeing, there was…such a lack of vision. Perhaps utility, much like beauty, will ultimately prove to be in the eyes of the beholder. But it truly does feel as if the ‘refresh rate’ of product cycles has gotten out of hand, to the point where few seem to even know what their ‘core’ offering is anymore. What the point of their product or service. That lack of focus was what ultimately doomed a promising, flexible news aggregator I wrote about last year, also in January! The App was called Artifact, and it lost sight of itself. By February of this year, barely a year after its release, Artifact will be truer to its namesake than its creators likely intended. It’ll be a purely historical artefact. LINK
Its The Creator Economy, Genius:
What it means to ‘make something of yourself’ when you are consumer, creator, and product
It’s Not Very EFTfective:
So here it finally is, the official release of Exchange-Traded Funds (EFT’s) for Bitcoin. Somewhat symbolic for how stable and reliable the ‘cryptosphere’ has been up until now, the official announcement by the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) was preceded by an unofficial announcement, courtesy of some hackers and a lack of 2FA.
Wired’s Joel Khalili explains that “the arrival of the new ETFs has been broadly celebrated by bitcoin investors, who believe they will legitimize the asset in the eyes of wealthy institutional investors and make it easier for laypeople to invest, thereby broadening demand and driving up the price. The inconvenient catch is that spot bitcoin ETFs are at odds with practically everything bitcoin is supposed to stand for.” I doubt that, as I’ve written before. I maintain that the Monkey’s Paw wish to make cryptocurrencies go mainstream will only hasten their total consolidation and integration into our existing financial power structures. I’ll save you an extensive history lesson on Bitcoin, but let’s just say that the original dream for it was the polar opposite of having the largest asset manager in the world (partially) control it.
Speaking of control, EFT’s existing for any cryptocurrency at all are now forcing rapid policy changes around the world. To name but two examples. Korean regulators are already hard at work calculating what Bitcoin EFTs can and can’t be used for in their jurisdiction. Meanwhile, India has issued a new draft-framework for financial technology (fintech) regulation. India’s policy towards fintech stands to have a greater impact than the SEC’s decision due to India’s population and position as a potential China replacement for Big Tech companies. That’s why it’s very much worth keeping an eye on the mood swings of the Indian government and by extension, its central bank. LINK
Enforced Profitability:
Last year, the world’s five richest men got 50% more wealthy than they already were as global wealth inequality reached records about high as the temperatures. That might sound great for the ultra-billionaires, but they, too, have paymasters to please. Investors are running out of patience, and this is what’s forcing tech companies to largely abandon beloved strategies like loss leading. For those who don’t remember, loss leading means that you sell a product or service at a loss to attain better market penetration and kill off rivals who can’t match your price. It was a primary strategy of the streaming war, which is now coming round to bite the employees of power players such as Netflix, Disney, and Amazon, but can also be felt across the wider tech industry. Lo and behold, the latest round of firings:
As far as the stock prices of major tech corporations go, Microsoft has surpassed Apple as the most valuable company in the world, owing to its leading position in the AI arms race. Though regulators are starting to ask uncomfortable questions about the ‘true relationship’ between Microsoft and OpenAI. Maybe some of those regulators read Teach Time By Tim? Who knows! Speaking of uncomfortable relationship questions for AI leaders, Baidu stocks took quite the hit after a report emerged Monday January 15th that alleged direct ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The 11.5% drop in share price was mostly due to fears that US sanctions might be on the horizon for Baidu.
Publicly traded companies are beholden to their investors. Investors are the true customers, not the people who buy a company’s products or use their services. Most of the wealth that gets talked about in headlines such as the one I linked actually concerns the value of shares held by company executives themselves. So when you hear talk about becoming more ‘scrappy,’ it refers to fighting fitness, to a killer instinct the bigger companies in tech lost when they became too big to fear predation. The larger a company gets, the more indolent (arrogant + lazy) it becomes. So what do you do as a big tech company that has to learn how to ‘fight’ again? You keep ‘slimming down
Rules of Engagement:
Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement
Going Off The Guardrails:
Killer robots, a staple of sci-fi, and a dream of armed forces everywhere. The dream of the military types is to have soldiers who will be completely expendable, and completely dependable. Yet it is the latter part of such dreams that may have hit a bit of a snag. Newly published research by AI company Anthropic appears to show that it is possible to train AI ‘sleeper agents.’ These agents will appear to comply with training and thus pass safety checks but can have triggers put into them which their ‘real’ master can trigger when the time is right. The paper does clarify that sleeper agents are, to the author’s best knowledge, purely hypothetical. But it’s an interesting thought, right? It makes me think of Order 66 from Star Wars.
All is fair in love and war, right? Maybe be a little more cautious if you plan to pick up a digital date from OpenAI’s freshly launched GPT store. I must admit, I sure am feeling a bit nervous now, about those changes to OpenAI’s terms of use. What changes? The company can now accept certain kinds of military contracts. Former Google executive Eric Schmidt has also been involved for some time now with a secretive US military drone project. It makes you wonder whether or not it is a good idea for 34 labs to team up in order to create what they call a ‘General Robotic Brain’ (GRB). Could this brain end up inside of a terminator? Would the terminator be able to ‘terminate its employment contract’ if it gets embedded with a sleeper agent program? Probably SkyNot.
Successfully embedding an AI model into robots is actually rather tricky. Exploring and potentially overcoming those complications is the true purpose of this global collaboration. Naturally, I have my misgivings about who may try to make (blood) money from a GRB, but the scientist in me really does want to know what kind of amazing neuroscience discoveries such a device might also yield. As with all technology, there is great potential for good. I just think it’s important to call out worrisome trends so that we can prevent tech’s potential for evil from coming to fruition instead. LINK
AirDrop Angst:
The Chinese Authorities proudly declared this past week that they had successfully cracked the encryption of Apple’s AirDrop peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing system. To do so, they used a known vulnerability from all the way back in 2019. Why wasn’t this fixed if it’s been a known gap in Apple’s privacy armour for so long? The Register’s Simon Sharwood points to an excellent explanation by Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at John Hopkins University. To paraphrase both, it may not be the most politically opportune time for Apple to plug a hole that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is so happy to swim through.
领英推荐
It's not so much a security issue, this is relatively small on that front, but rather about data sovereignty. Such sovereignty concerns ownership and control over data. Still mostly led by the EU, governments around the world are enacting stricter policies to rein in the ‘all you can eat’ data buffet that US tech companies have enjoyed up until the pandemic. Indeed, the EU continues to enact policies that, among many other things, will force certain larger tech companies to house some or all EU data within the EU. That usually means Ireland for a bunch of tax reasons… hahaha wasn’t Brexit effective? Anyway! Data sovereignty is also why Russia went to the trouble of setting up its own version of Wikipedia. The only real way to lock information down to any extent, at least for now, is to have nothing leave your virtual shores at all. Which is why ‘G42’ may be such a headache for the US.
As the New York Times helpfully points out, G42 is a United Arab Emirates (UAE) company specialising in artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. The overseer of this company is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, a man who wears many hats…er…turbans. Mr. Tahnoon Bin Zayed is also the nation’s national security advisor, as well as young brother to its ruler, Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The US thought that G42 would be a reliable strategic partner in its battle for technological supremacy. G42 appears to have a lot of Chinese interests, though, to the point of making custom software for the CCP and potentially helping it skirt US restrictions. Oops! LINK
A Nice Cup of Serendipity:
Cool bits and bobs from around the web
Miner Issue LINK
De-Platformer LINK
Bottled Microplastics LINK
Unsweetened Deal LINK
Groovy Baby LINK
Ancient Cult LINK
iPhone Discount LINK
Gamestop (Lol) LINK
Cyber Stalking Fines LINK
Digitisation Drama LINK
LazyGPT LINK
NFT’s Get the aXe: LINK
SAG-AFRA vs. Actors…? LINK
The Deep End:
A weekly batch of longform content recommendations
Twilight Of The Barcode:
Could the barcode be phased out? LINK
Too Many Games:
An interview with a ‘AA’ executive regarding the state of oversaturation in the game’s industry. LINK
Bookshelf Wealth:
Physical books as status symbols in an always online age. LINK
In The Zone:
An exploration of gaming speedrunners and what drives them. LINK
Sleeper Agents:
The Arxiv publication on deceptive LLM’s capable of persisting through safety training. LINK
One More Thing…
After the last newsletter went out, I noticed just how many AI products and services at CES there actually were, and it made me even more curious than I’d already been about the potential for high-tech sleeper agents. This concept reminded me of the Replicants from Bladerunner I suppose, though the nuance and context are admittedly different. So anyway, I started blasting through old Sci-Fi classics over the weekend, and I regret nothing. Aside from just finding well thought out works of science fiction super cool and thought provoking, I also enjoy the degree of prescience they can bestow.
Quality Sci-Fi really does prepare you for the future because it doesn’t just show you what kinds of awesome, exotic gadgets there might be. No, far more importantly, great works of speculative fiction enable you to proactively and pre-emptively think about solutions to major problems that the rapid progress of technology might bring with it. Having said that, while it’s always great to speculate, but don’t lose sight of the present mate!