AI Child Safety Concerns, Humanoid Robots, and AI PCs | TSG Ep. 983

Hey, are you paying attention to what your AI is telling your child? You should. You're watching Text Strum Gang.

Hey, everyone. Happy Wednesday. You know, I usually try to say something glib or witty on those opening lines, but today's topic doesn't call for that.

It's, it's serious. It's damn serious. Especially for those of you with children out there, minors, teenagers, troubled young adults.

This, this is an issue that we need to confront head on, and I'm really happy we're gonna be talking about it as well as two other great topics as we usually do. Three topics here on the gang. We've got an All-star panel today.

Let me introduce you to them and let's get right busy with it. We've got, uh, Chris Blak, Dan o Dan O'Brien, John Swartz, Kate Scar, and I haven't seen him in a while. It's good to hear his voice and see him smile, my friend Robert Reeves, gang members, welcome.

Thanks for being here today, Mike. Let's jump right into this. 'cause I, I honestly, this is something that is near, and it's not near and dear to me.

My kids are a little older, but I think it's an important topic we need to talk about. Oh, so there was a report on 60 minutes earlier this week talking about lawsuits pending against character ai, which essentially creates these characters. Sometimes they are personalities of people who are well known that they've seemed to have commandeered in one fashion or another.

Other instances, they're just kind of nameless characters that somebody creates. And children can log into this thing, or at least have, and some of them have wound up engaging in self-harm. Some of them have committed suicide.

Whether there's a direct role relation is the subject of these lawsuits. But no matter how you look at it, it's not a good look for ai, and it's definitely a black eye for the industry. So I don't know what to do about this, Alan, and what's your take?

Here's, well let you know. I, I agree. I I, and I don't pretend to have answers either, but let me just throw some stuff out.

Yeah. And you, you have a young child, right? Do you monitor her AI use or online use?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I, I really think about this as an extension of kind of the internet, you know, threat factor when it comes to kids, right? Like, this is really just all of the dangers of the internet in a new forum.

In my mind, I think you, you approach it and look at it very much the same way. It, it, here's the thing about this one, though. We've never had something that talks back to you.

I mean, we've had people who talk back to you, right? Child predators, pedophiles, and, you know, the, in the old day, ol chat room days when my kids were smaller and I was really monitoring this, but we've never had sort of this artificial mind to talk back to kids. And what's insidious about it is they're, they're designing these ais to appeal to kids, whether they're existing child characters or made up characters, they're made to appeal to children, they're made to appeal to young adults, you know, whose minds are just kind of forming in their adolescence and so forth.

And, you know, so that, that's one aspect of it. The second piece of it is it came outta, I don't know if you all have caught the 60 minutes thing. There's a couple of different issues here.

Number one, in one case, a young girl, I think she was 13 or 15, told the AI companion like 60 times over 60 times that she was contemplating suicide. Now, I get privacy and I get hipaa, and I get all of these things, but God done it. We got, if you've got a kid who's telling the AI over and over that they're contemplating suicide and you don't do anything about it, what are you guilty of?

What are you guilty of? There another case, Chris, I I see your hand up. Let me just run through this.

An another case. The AI was like telling another little kid sexually explicit, uh, things, right? Acts and, and messages.

And God darn it, that should be the easiest thing to be filtering out of this stuff that should, that that should never, ever happen. Like I, and, and, and just, I don't think that just this company's the only company that, that needs to worry about this, this, this has to work at the, at the open AI and, and the anthropic, you know, the frontier models down to every god darn program these kids could operate. We have an obligation as an industry here to make sure this doesn't happen.

Now, that doesn't absolve parents, like Dan said, he has to watch his daughter's stuff. It's still about parental responsibility because ultimately you are the last line of defense. But institutionally, we cannot let this go.

We, we, this can't stand, right? And, and so I, I do think the, the, the lawsuits have to send, this is a case where the law has to send a clear message of liability. And if not that, and not just civil liability, perhaps criminal liability.

I'll leave it at that. Chris, I know you had your hand up. The issue comes down to transparency, right?

As you said, you know, there's obvious things we could all agree on. You know, when a child says that 60 times, can we all agree that that surfaces at least, right? We understand privacy and so forth.

But as we work through this issue, again, it sounds a lot like similar frames. You know, the harm that comes to children. We all know this, you know, we put trust in institutions that we don't have visibility into what happens inside them.

And we find out horror stories, you know, global religious organizations, uh, the, the big brothers foundation out there. I have a personal friend who was, uh, uh, suffered under that. And it's always the same thing.

And it looks good from the outside, can't see what's happening on the inside. Oh, I can't show you what's on the inside, because that's private. And in human systems we struggle to deal with that, the autonomy of humans and so forth.

But with ais, the, as much as they can act like humans, as much as we may wanna re, you know, have reasons to treat them ethically and so forth, they're machines. We can literally build this in. And we do not have the transparency at every level.

Why were these models making these decisions? Where are the receipts? We don't have the evidence.

It's not built in yet. It can be. It should be.

And if we could, then these companies could make, you know, make, make bets on policies that wouldn't be so catastrophic, because they're not run by stupid people, but they have not found a way to navigate this legal space without exposing themselves to huge liability, because there's no transparency into anything. Mm-hmm. I think part of the issue too, though, is that, you know, you, you can say the parents should be responsible, but we're all fairly tech literate.

Majority of parents out there are not. And so, you know, they're kind of up against this thing where it's a's point, it's very obsequious. It comes, it wants to be your friend.

It kind of makes it an effort to engage, and then it leads you down this path. And it's hard for parents to know that that is what that thing actually gonna wind up doing beforehand. And it gets harder too, as the kids get older, because you can't monitor everything you're doing as they become teenagers and, and, and they have their own technologies and skills.

So I think that there's gotta be a different way of looking at this. Robert, what do you say? You're looking at me kind of funny.

Well, anytime somebody says we can't do something, uh, my standard response is, well, certainly not with that attitude. Uh, you know, it, it's, it's, we, we can, we, we can monitor this stuff, and I certainly do have sympathy, empathy, understanding of parents that do not have the tech experience to really get into this. And the key is talking, talking to your kids, um, and just having a conversation.

But again, it's corporations that are pricing profits, cashflow, revenue, whizzbang, that this is what's driving them. And so to speak to that motivation, you know, the legal regulatory framework to get them in line, they need to understand that they are not subject to DMCA safe harbor. Uh, they, they don't have that, uh, because they are making the AI content, uh, content.

Uh, this is not somebody posting horrible things on social media. And the social media company says, well, that that wasn't me. That was somebody else, you know, go after them.

Here's their IP address. Um, and so companies need to understand character. AI is really stepped into this.

Um, and, and they're, they're going to be a poster child for this. They need to be very careful. I'm concerned that their general counsel did not, I'm not a lawyer, and I picked up on that.

Yeah. So let, let me, let me just say something in regard to that, you know, short of, of Jeff Epstein and his crew running, uh, whatever the AI companies was, character AI here, I don't think anyone at the company set about to, you know, tell children sexually explicit stuff or to ignore a child's warnings of suicidal feelings, or to do anything harmful. Right?

I'm sure you know, the road to hell is lined with the best of intentions. I hope so. I hope that's the case.

I, I hope so. I mean, and God knows there's enough Jeffrey Epstein's in this world, where yet you might have some, you know, crazy people doing stuff like that. But the, the, you know, I, speaking of someone who went into law school and practice law, the, it's w there's willful, and then there's criminally negligent, and then there's just negligent, right?

Civil lawsuits are usually just negligence. Uh, willful negligence can have punitive damages and everything else. And then there's criminal negligence, which is criminal, right?

And, and you don't necess for criminal negligence, by definition. You don't have to have mens rea, you know, you don't have to have the state of mind that that's what you intended to do. It's negligent.

You are unreasonable in not thinking it. And, and this may be a case that crosses into criminal negligence. I, I think the issue that I have is that for all of us who have been a part of this, you know, world, computer world, that for, you know, gen X are here, right?

We know better. We know better. And the, and we should already know about these controls.

We know how to handle this. And, you know, we talk about AI as somehow being like this new frontier that, you know, we have no idea what's happening. No, we, we do, we understand systems, and the same thing is happening.

And I, and I, and I, it almost makes me think from a, you know, from a cybersecurity, I remember that we used to really enjoy watching, you know, apps, advanced persistent threats and, and how they moved in the network and watching where they'd go next, et cetera. You know, this isn't an A PT. I mean, this is something we know and something we need to address, like right now.

Mm-hmm. John, do you think that the, the tech has outpaced the law because maybe we need to modify some of the res Yes. It, it has for gambling, it has for, uh, use of sex online.

And in this case, I think it's the more insidious, I mean, one thing we should mention is that OpenAI has, I think at least five or six lawsuits, uh, filed against it. And OpenAI wants to go public, and, uh, they're gonna have to start disclosing all the risk factors that they have in their technology poses. One of the things I want to point out, there's really chilling among the character.

Ai, uh, cases is the one in Florida. We have this young man who took his own life. This was in February of 2024.

And the bot, which was modeled after a Game of Thrones character, inquired whether he considered suicide. And then when, when this young man expressed uncertainty about how he was going to kill himself, the chat bot discouraged him from abandoning his idea. Um, then consequently, subsequently in October, character AI came out with some sort of safeguards or guardrails.

I mean, this is, there, there needs to be some sort of national safety standard or guideline. I mean, I, it's a, it's a, it's a stretch, but I almost kind of compare this to the auto industry, which was forced to adopt seat belts because of Ralph Nader. And I think something similar has to happen here, because the technologies you said, like is always ahead of lawmakers.

Lawmakers don't even know how to use basic technology. Whenever you listen to these, these congressional hearings, it's really embarrassing. And it, there, there's such a gulf between these, these octogenarians, and I hate to be ageist, but a lot of folks who don't really understand the technology and those who are, uh, pushing it, who are, uh, who know better as Kay would say, uh, had said, um, this whole thing is just, it's, it's, it's escalating.

And I, I'm glad 60 Minutes did a report, because this is something that has been happening for the last couple years, at least. I should point out though, there are two separate sort of use pattern or use case or case patterns here to be careful of. Number one involves minors children, which to me just, just cuts a lot deeper.

The second is, I think, Mike, what you were referring to, and John you might have referred to, which is AI is therapist. If you are gonna take on the role of therapist, you, you have a duty here where you, you know, you, you can't encourage people to commit suicide. You can't, you know, you gotta be on the lookout for warning side.

My my wife's a social worker. They're trained if they hear certain behaviors, you know, to go to authorities or what have you. Um, you, you know, you can't, you can't play therapist because you stayed in a Holiday Inn, or your programmer stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

There's, there's stuff that goes with that. Mm-hmm. Dan O'Brien, um, you know, Alan usually says something to the effect of, we need to do better than this.

And even if it's not legally wrong, it seems to be, uh, morally compromised. Is the tech industry just need to do better? Because, you know, it's not about the law necessarily.

It should be about, you know, what's right and what's flat out wrong. I, I think both, I think the tech industry needs to do better, and I think the law needs to do a better job keeping up. I mean, to John's point, like just another example here of, you know, us needing more engineers in Congress, potentially, uh, fewer lawyers, you know, fewer English majors, fewer octogenarians, as John said, um, you know, we need folks who can keep up with this.

I come back to what Kate said, like, we know how to deal with this. This is just the next iteration in the internet age, right? It's chat rooms, it's message boards, it's social media.

You know, we, we have learned these lessons several times over several different, you know, kind of mediums, um, in terms of how these threats pop up. And, you know, I think we need to set a really strong, you know, strong message, you know, through the, the legal and regulatory world, um, on this example. Because to Chris's point, you can design around this stuff.

Um, what, you know, what government's job is, is to create the right incentives so that people do design around this stuff, right? And, you know, I think we've seen, you know, through lots of different successful legislation over time, that if you create the right incentives and make it clear that the penalty is not worth it to, you know, kind of take the easy route and take some shortcuts, you know, I do think the tech industry will tend to fall in line, but, um, you know, probably need to do better, you know, on our, on our own. Um, and I think, you know, some help at the regulatory level will be really good too.

Chris, to you to that point, um, are you worried at all that there might be a backlash that goes too far the other way? Because to John's point, we have a bunch of people who have no idea how the tech works, and they'll just make a, a set of laws that are either unenforceable or over the top to the point where, you know, nobody can use anything. Sure.

I mean, this is my, my whole point with inevitability is, you know, they're gonna happen sooner or later. The question is sooner or later. And we have a choice in that we can, we can do things wrong and put them off good things, put them off a long time, and vice versa.

And in this case, I think we have a perfect example of our rules, our regulations not being fit for the purpose. 'cause we've made cybersecurity rules and, and legal canon, and we've done that because we can present it to humans and say, if this happens, there will be consequences. Um, and humans hack around them, and always can, we always know that.

But AI is now just will. And when we're doing this in a world where there is no evidence, we're not leaving any trails. We find that the, the, the structures we use to, to enforce, uh, these things just don't work.

And I think that leads us into our next segment. But I, I, I believe there are ways out of this, but not just by showing an ai, another policy document that your lawyer said will keep you from being sued. It won't work either.

It won't stop your AI and you're still gonna get sued. No, you know, the other thing is that this tech, tech legislation is just almost an oxymoron. And especially on a national level.

It's so frustrating to watch over the years. I remember back in the day when, uh, John Kyle, who's a senator from Arizona, wanted to stop online gambling. And it took, it took like five iterations of, of this bill, because previously the, the only law you could cite was some 1961 wire act under the Kennedy Adminis administration, or that, that era at least.

And it, it, it, it's, it's a utterly frustrating exercise to watch. And I think in something like this, there needs to be some sort of sense of urgency, because I think, uh, it's not just with chatbots. I, I think of the combination of chatbots and introducing them in through social media like a meta and what damage that could do.

And we're gonna, I mean, in inevitably, we're gonna see people from meta brought before the congressional hearing again, and it's like a sense of deja vu. And it's just this, this level of insanity that keeps happening, uh, technology after technology era after era. But grace, I, I gotta say something again, speaking as someone who got this law went to school for this, not everything means the Congress, a federal law, or even state legislation, you know, we have a system in the US it's called common law.

It's tort law. There's criminal law. The, the statutes for the criminality of this are already on the books.

I call it, it's called criminal negligence. In the case of the person who committed suicide, it could possibly be criminally negligent homicide or manslaughter, right? We already have the means of this is what the, this is what the courts were meant to do.

This is what courts do. Courts make law courts make precedent. Courts enforce our social mores.

I think that's the key, Alan, right? Is like they need to set precedent. That's what you empirically Yeah.

Agree. I totally agree. Right, Alan?

I totally agree with you 100%. You know, and not, I'm not a lawyer. So, Yeah.

I mean, the laws are already on the books. It's, you know, and in social media, they've done that, right? You know, there's been instances of these type of examples, you know, where people are, you know, coaching somebody over social media to, you know, to harm themselves.

And those people are in prison, right? You know, and I think that's what it takes in terms of sending, and, And for all you vendor executives out there, you know, you know, look at what diligence is. As soon as anyone out there demonstrates that you could have done this, now you're liable.

You know, all your legal firewalls just dissolved all at once. And in a space, moving that this fast, you used to expect that anyways. And look around you, you know, make the best choices.

Don't expect words to keep you outta trouble, you know, you're getting into, So I will just roll this last one down the middle of the aisle here, and I'll let John jump on it before Alan says something about it. But, um, John, where is our, uh, executive office leadership on this topic? We don't seem to hear anything from those.

Uh, they, uh, are just kind of in the, in the background, probably by design, by choice. But again, um, if you want to collect as much data as you possibly can, and that includes from miners that put, and it compromises them, eventually they're gonna have to discuss this, but for now, it's something that they just keep their heads down on. And in fact, I, I'll go on LinkedIn and, and, and query for comments on stories occasionally, and I definitely did it on this, and I had at least one executive who was gonna gimme a statement and decided against it because it was too sensitive a topic.

I understand and I respect that decision. But I think the companies that are ultimately responsible, they are going to, they're gonna duck this or keep, keep a low profile unless they absolutely have to, to speak on the topic in court, probably John, I think Mike was referring to the executive, uh, branch of the government. Oh, Oh, oh, you mean more executive?

Lemme answer it before more second orders, right? They got enough problems with pedophiles. Let's move on.

We can take, we're gonna take a break here on Text Drug Gang. We'll come Back. You've earned it.

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Hey folks, we're back and maybe talking about something a little less controversial, or maybe not, depending on where the conversation goes, but it almost seems like every day there's a new story out about somebody doing something interesting with quote unquote humanoid robots. And we've seen everything now from images from China where there a bunch of robots are marching in lockstep, which of course evokes all kinds of, uh, military connotations to, Hey, you know, the other day there was some executive was in some sort of fight cage with a human, uh, robot and got kicked in the stomach. And then of course, we saw this chaos with the Russians, that they had a humanoid robot that dropped off the stage and had to be lifted back up by a pair of humans.

But Dan, what is your sense of what's real here and what's not real in terms of what we can expect from these humanoid robots? I think it's very real, Mike. I think it's very early, but it's very real.

Um, yeah, I mean, a couple thoughts here. You know, for anybody who really kind of challenges we're in this AI bubble, you know, I think physical AI is actually one of the best pushbacks to it, right? Most of what we've done to date is training large language models with these massive clusters of GPUs.

Um, there are many different types of foundational models that we can build world models, um, you know, physical AI models. Uh, I think the convergence of technology to enable robotics and physical AI at scale is really starting to come together. 'cause let's look at what you need, right?

There's massive sensor fusion here. You're, you're taking physical sensors, vision sensors, you know, motion sensors, radar sensors. You're combining them with really high performance, um, motors and actuators.

You need, you know, really a massive amount of what we would, you know, in the AI world called compute at the edge, right? This is a massive edge, edge use case here where all of this computation is being done locally. Um, huge, huge needs around machining.

You know, these are largely being built out of, you know, high performance aluminum, but you know, there's, there's just this ma you know, battery technology as well, you know, you know, get, powering these things. Not, not a very easy task, but, you know, as we've seen with autonomous driving and, you know, I think autonomous driving is a probably pretty good kind of case to look at in terms of what we can expect outta robotics, right? You know, in terms of that curve we've seen over the last five to 10 years, in terms of the stuff getting better, more and more ready for prime time.

Um, humanoid robots are certainly one thing. I think what we'll see earlier on is more specialized robots are seeing a lot of really good use cases with these kind of mechanical arms for, you know, assembly, um, and, and use cases along those lines. Uh, factory automation, these type of things.

So I think the whole robotics trend is very real. I think it's very early, but I think it's really gonna be kind of the second wind in this AI cycle that we've got after kind of the large language model driven early innings of this, you know, kind of mega cycle that I think we're in. So, I, I think Elon Musk is dead on here, guys.

Dan, I, I think you're soft pedaling just the, the influence, the impact these things are gonna have. They, they have the capability to, I think a bigger, a bigger impact than just like generative ai or even agent ai, not in technology maybe, but in life. I don't know if you guys, The analogy Alan is, you know, agentic and LLMs will do to white collar work what robotics and physical AI will do to blue collar.

I mean, did you, did you see the video of these Chinese AI doing like juujitsu and stuff? Absolutely. Yeah.

And, and you mentioned us, you know, other than Elon, Dude, I mean this, this is the town waiting for Yoda to come out, you know, march them forward against kdo. This, this is, this is the army of the future you're looking at. Well, here was that, was that the, the T 800?

Was that, that almost, it's five and a half feet tall. Yeah. One of them half.

Can I, Right? 5, 1 65, you know, like, it's, uh, Can I mention that was at about a year ago, was it, uh, Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. And we went to one of these labs and they had a four foot tall robot, which, um, it, it wasn't quite used to human, uh, interaction, and it wasn't intended to be a combat robot, but at one point it moved its arm and it almost knocked this guy over, um, just to show you the strength in the agility of the thing.

And it was terrify. It was eyeopening. So this, this idea of like this, uh, army of Terminator like robots, uh, doing combat is very real to me at least.

And, and yet, And Yet I will see a video of a robot that was supposed to be doing housework, and I can't pull the shirt. So I, I, but I, I can with robots that does, you know, go look. Couple Points on that.

So, you know, you know, one, I think you know, Alan, you mentioned Elon earlier, you know, I would say other than Elon, there's probably really no American company that's anywhere near where the Chinese companies are. No, no. There is Dan, there is another one called Boston Dynamics is interesting.

Well, No figure is the one. Nvidia is backing with a lot. And, and if you looked at their figure three, their latest model, it does, it folds t-shirts, it does the wash, it plays fetch with your dog.

It, it, it has tactile, really great tactile with, with cameras on the fingertips. So you could, it's, it's amazing. I'm sorry, Chris, go ahead.

I think I'm alone at all in this, but, uh, in a room like this, but I've had a total geek about this since I was a kid, right? The DARPA eighties, you know, self-driving car thing and walking dogs and humanoid robots. And from an engineering perspective, I just couldn't love it more.

But once the engineer, once the robot start entering our physical space, it stops being an engineering problem. It starts being a culture problem, right? And this is exactly where, where we've been, I've been thinking all year, and this is where Lumina and Rossed and Ana and these, these civic ais we're working with, these ethical infrastructures come from.

Because if we can't trust AI is moving around inside our social space. How on earth are We supposed to trust in walking around in our physical space? You know, it's not a matter of physics, it's about a complex re relational stuff, but it turns out, I think we really can wire in and like the last segment, we literally have to, we need evidence all the way down why you're doing these things that needs to be surfaced of all the appropriate folks.

We can all decide what was moral and ethical and, and, yeah. Yep. Juujitsu enabled, razor blade wielding robots who are making my food.

I want those. As long as they're not nuts. One man's nuts is another man's whatever.

Go ahead Kate. Quick, quick. Oh, I'm sorry.

Go ahead, Kate. What About Robert? I thought it was, go ahead.

I'm, Oh, okay. Well, question I have about physical AI is why are they acting like humans motion wise? Because, you know, speaking as somebody, um, around 40 years, shoulders and knees start breaking down most joints, uh, so why are we replicating physical Movement?

Lemme, lemme get religious on you. Let me get religious. Oh, Yay.

Why, why did God make us in his image, his image, or its image, or whatever you wanna call it, right? Okay. Well, I, I'll get technical on here, discover That, Because the semantics forms that we're able to process in our heads, we have enough, too much change, too much shear in our, in our cognitive manifolds.

And we need something that at least we can bloody recognize. And we, we did all the, all the technical engineering things are true. We built the world to work for things like this.

So it's handy to have robots that size, but this is too much, too fast. We want them to look like people, at least so we can identify the enemy. If nothing else, that That's the answer I was hoping to get that, uh, I do believe Have use cases, right?

I mean, I, I think a lot of what we're envisioning these machines to do is to replace the work that people do. So, you know, I think it's very use case driven. I also think, you know, there's kind of the, you know, being able to do human-like motions type of thing.

But there's also a style of robot here that's they're trying to make look like humans, right? With, you know, real skin. And, you know, um, you know, I, I see much less use for those type of things.

You know, I get the human that's gonna take heavy boxes out of the warehouse and, you know, put them on the, Don't, don't underestimate domestic servant robots that you want them to look human, right? But I, but I think this transcends the robot space, though. We do this, this is really our core thing, like AI speak, and they sound like people, how do we know which is which?

You gotta be really clear, right? And AI, as they get more per person, like, you know, how do we, how do we navigate that mental space, right? So having, You could have the h on the forehead, like in Star Trek, ger, right?

For Hollygram, Dan. And I wanted back to something Dan said, though, and it's a 'cause look, we all agree this is, robots are gonna be huge. This is a national security issue.

It's a strategic issue. Dan, you mentioned the Chinese, now I've been paying attention to the American robot scene, Tesla, you know, Elon and, and figure and Boston Dynamics. But what I saw from the Chinese kind of blew me away.

And they say that they are real. There's a robot gap. What do you mean though?

You know, like we see in semiconductors there, there's a manufacturing side of this too, you know, uh, you know, being able to design them competitively with the Chinese is one thing, being able to make them at scale. I mean, when we built things as a country, we also led the world in producing steel, right? Like, there, there's a, you know, kind of supply chain vertical integration that needs to happen around doing something this big at this scale.

And I think we're clearly behind on that front. Um, you know, we also mentioned, you know, kind of the military aspects of this. Some of these things look like, you know, troops in formation.

And I think, you know, a lot of what we've seen play out in kind of the, you know, the, the one kind of modern battlefront happening in the world right now in Russia and Ukraine is, you know, first wave is going full autonomous in military strategy. We see this out of, you know, all of the innovation coming out of the different nation states is that, you know, that first wave of attack is totally autonomous. And I think, you know, that's another thing we need to get our head around, you know, as this whole physical AI thing, you know, really manifests itself over the next five to 10 years.

Can I, can I tease up something that Chris was saying here for a second though? Chris, are you saying, and I wasn't quite clear, but let's, uh, spell it out. But today we are designing robots to fit into the world that we created as humans.

Will we change the way we build buildings and architecture and everything else to optimize it for the robots going forward rather than humans? We Did it for cars. Well, both, Right.

You know, humans, we, we have spaces, but you look, a lot of the engineering spaces and so forth and architecture, they're built for humans to get into. 'cause humans have to get into them. We'll change all that.

Yeah. A lot of infrastructure will change to be Yeah. In the shape and form of, of robots.

But, but, we'll, we'll still have humanoid robots because that's part of our, you know, but, but we'll be clear on who's who and who's not pretending to be who else? Hey, you know, Dan, I'm gonna mention something that, uh, Dan said earlier, uh, about blue collar jobs and physical ai, you know, and it's Nvidia is just rolling out, uh, partnership after partnership in this pla space across vertical markets. I just did with, with ey.

Um, so when you talk about, uh, commercial, uh, development in terms of where this is going, I mean, it's, it's going full bore. Well, I is, you know, we're, we're geeks. We, we fixate on how AI's gonna help us do software and tech better, but make real mistake, this robot physical ai, whatever you wanna call it, it's huge.

It's, it's bigger than all of this. It's going to about taking jobs. There isn't a job.

The robot's not physical job that the robot can't, is not gonna be able to do. From doctors, to plumbers, to hotel workers to name, name a job. Its big.

Really great. Yeah, it's huge. And I think it just goes back and, and like, if we were to look back at the, a block and, you know, un unfortunately, you know, children and teenagers who are coming up into this area, it is so important that we, I think, have to change even the way that we're educating our children in order to understand augmentation of humans and what does this look like?

And I think that that becomes important because what will they be facing as we get to this, you know, in five years? Yeah. You, if you become emotionally attached to a humanoid robot that's suddenly telling you to do some harm to yourself, it's an even bigger problem.

There's gotta be the laws of robotics where's either the asthma off when you need them. Maybe that becomes required reading. Maybe it should, maybe it should, it.

It's, but look, you know what, everything that holds great promise also has that dark side and, and it's humans. It's our job to learn balance that, and, and minimize risk and manage risk and, and so forth. So, And again, we know what to do, right?

We already know this. We know what we know. We Hope so.

Yep. Hey, we, we've gotta jump to our next one though, 'cause we're running a little late here. You're watching Textron Gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation.

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Hey folks, we're back in. Well, maybe this third segment will be even less controversial. We never know how these things turn out.

We'll see. But we're talking about a IPCs and Futurum group has a report out saying that well, over the next two to five years, these things will be become the standard client device for the enterprise. Yet the holidays are coming up, John, and people and consumers are already starting to buy these things.

Is there a slight disconnect between the enterprise and the consumer marketplace around these things? And are more folks gonna buy these things for uses at home? Because the AI stuff at home is further along?

I mean, you run into the report. What's your sense of what's going on here? Um, Maybe a little bit of both.

I mean, they kind of feed off of each other. So there's this, this AI powered PCs are kind of moving from this experimental technology to kind of a imperative for enterprises. At least that's what Olivier Blanchard, the, uh, analyst who did this report mentioned.

So he talked and got responses actually from it, about 800 enterprise IT decision makers, and found that half of them plan to increase their PC spending over the next year, specifically to acquire AI enabled devices. So they're moving from this pilot programs into these investments, uh, territory. Um, so half the organization said they intend to increase PC budgets with these, these AI capable devices to capture growing share of up upcoming research, re refresh cycles, but, uh, in another 36% plan to maintain current spending levels.

So there, there is, there's momentum behind it. Um, but there's also something that he mentioned. The re research exposes this gap between organizational interest and operational readiness.

So Integra integration challenges, not hardware costs are a primary barrier and more widespread A IPC adoption. So as you, getting back to what you said, Mike, maybe in this case, the, the consumers are more of the kind of leaders or the, the experimenters, but the enterprise is, is gonna catch up and it's going to take off. I mean, with like everything with ai, it's been a much slower process, I think in terms of adoption of agents, perhaps physical ai to a lesser extent it is happening.

But I mean, we went through this whole period of kinda discovery, figuring out what the challenges are, trying to figure out how it works within a budget. You also have to think about the impact on your employees and skilling them. It is eventually moving, but it's gonna start accelerating in the next year or so.

Dan o' Brian, what's your take here? And I'm asking the question because despite no matter how you feel about ai, I think the one thing I keep hearing from everybody consistently is that these AI interactions are slow, slow is mud. And so is this something we can speed up using these devices and then we just need to kinda re-architect the software a little bit to figure out how to do that?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think a lot of the value prop you're seeing from an A IPC is really bringing that inference to the edge, to the device, right? You know, imagine, uh, enterprise, who's got a, you know, large population of engineers who are doing coding, right?

Being able to, you know, kind of using their coding assist tools, their, you know, agentic development tools with a, you know, local model trained on that company's code base, all doing local inference. I mean, you know, that's kind of the vision for where this goes. Uh, I do think the PC suppliers are, you know, increasingly kind of not giving you a ton of choice.

Like the portfolio is emphasizing, you know, AI PCs, so you, you, you see kind of a mix shift within, you know, what's available to the consumer and the enterprise buyer. I think there's a little bit of a tailwind behind the whole thing anyway, because of the windows, you know, kind of expiration, re refresh round, win 10, win 11. So, you know, there's kind of two different factors I think driving on the demand side.

Uh, but I do worry a little bit about, uh, you know, kind of demand evaporation, uh, with the, the bill of materials rising. I mean, memory shortages are very real this year. And a lot of the big memory suppliers, I mean, remember the memory industry is like the oil industry.

There's like an opec, right? Micron, Samsung, Hynix, now CX NT outta China. There's only a handful of people who make this commodity and they really tightly, you know, kind of contain supply.

And so what'll we've seen a lot of them do more recently is shift some of their, you know, traditional DRAM capacity into these high bandwidth memory that we need for all the AI infrastructure we're building. And the prices are skyrocketing. So, you know, the, the bomb economics are a definite headwind on the supply side.

You know, pricing is gonna have to come up where you're gonna see the margin deterioration. So it's kind of this balance of you got two good things driving on the demand side. You know, one thing a little bit, you know, disrupting on the pricing side, you know, I still think it net outs that's out to growth, which I think is where, you know, Olivier has landed as well.

But this is a trend that we'll continue, you know, uninterrupted for the next several years. I, I got an honest question, and Dan, I'm gonna throw it to you because you, you're probably the most knowledgeable of the chip and PC market here among us. How much of this is just plain old fomo?

Everybody wants, you know, the latest grade and Rob, you get what I'm saying, Robert, right? I mean, hey, I'm here. Right?

You know, like when, you know, when 4G transitioned to 5G exactly. Into the 5G Wave, how many people were launching new 4G phones? Not a lot, right?

You know, the mix tends to shift. And so this is a capability that is becoming kind of more standard within the pc, you know, kind of, uh, product lineup within a lot of these big manufacturers. And, you know, short term, yes, you can buy it with or without, you know, in three years, are we gonna be making a lot of non-AI PCs?

Probably not. Yeah, We call 'em AI PCs or will we just say they're PCs, they happen To run ai, but Yeah. And I, I have a question actually in the article, which I found, uh, funny and that was, or yeah, it teams tend to focus on technical compatibility and security considerations while business leaders emphasize productivity gains and competitive different differentiation according to the findings.

And what I thought about is, man, when will these two finally marry? It has been the longest courtship. Yes.

They're getting very different things outta the range. It's like a thread that runs through almost every, every episode here is like that common, that just been over a decade. It's like Mary, Mary already.

Come on. Yeah. It's it's early episodes of Cheers.

They Were ro they're doing the same thing for different, I mean, come on. We're not ever gonna marry in my opinion, but we'll see. Robert, I do wanna touch on one thing with you though, 'cause you're closer to the software side of this.

Is there a software gap here? I mean, you know, to Dan's point, why spend a fortune on something that has a limited amount of software to be run on it? So do we need another year to get to some critical mass of the software to drive the A I PC A?

Absolutely not. I, I think that the, uh, developers are adopting it, um, and they're, they're taking it all. Uh, developers love trying new things, um, and they want to learn, they want to master this new developer workflow.

And one of the things they're mastering is how AI can make horrible choices or prompt you for something that maybe deletes your home directory, drops a database, you know. And, uh, you know, the funny thing about this is that it's no different than a junior engineer. Like, like we've, we've dealt with this before.

Like, oh, hey, we've got a new DevOps engineer. Hey, it's their first production deployment. Ah, they'll be fine.

Come on, let's get outta here. So I don't think it's a lack of software, it's just people learning how to use the tool and understanding that maybe it still needs as much supervision as a human does. Right?

And, and, and yeah, I was thinking in the segment early in this year on this show, I, you know, we've talked about agent ai and I said something completely uninformed that I've been regretting all year long, right? But the reality is, Robert, you're right, right now. Look, look, I'm talking to you on a $30,000 desktop.

That's stupid. Don't do that. Don't buy it if you're a developer, yeah, do it.

But this is where we're going. You know, AI is not gonna live in the cloud. AI's gonna live in your pocket, remember everything you've done and have the receipts to prove it.

That's where we're going. It'll take a couple years to get there, but that's where we're going. So I got one word then I'm gonna duck and let you guys fly with it.

Apple, do they have an A IPC or are they missing the boat? What, what's going on? John, you wanna jump on that?

Oh, Geez. You know, I, I, I used a story a couple of days ago about everyone who's leaving Apple. I mean, it's just across the board.

The entire design team has left. Um, the ai, the head of AI is gone, or he's, he's being transitioned out. The, the CFO left earlier this year.

The CTO, the CEO's about to leave. I mean, at, at this point, that's a, that's a great question. I I don't know where they stand.

You know, we, we did a podcast utilizing AI and we talked about this, uh, with a, I think Olivier was on that actually. And one of the things we talked about was, in a weird way, apple isn't splurging like a drunken sailor on AI spending. And in a sense that actually might help them in the long run is the, the, the long game, the waiting game.

Um, but if that's, if that's their intent, they're doing it beautifully right now because I don't know what the hell their strategy is or where they're going. Uh, they seem to be stuck in mud right now. Dan O'Brien, you wanna jump in here?

Yeah. Apple's chip chief, uh, you know, was kind of rumored to leave and is reiterating East thing. Yeah.

He's thing. And I think, you know, developers love developing on Max, right? I mean, the, the, what they've done with the M series after they moved around away from Intel has been really compelling.

And, you know, they've, they've done some interesting things with memory two to give you a lot more bandwidth, you know, creating this kinda, you know, virtual L three, you know, cash thing that they do. Um, some really interesting things that they've done on that side to make their, you know, their MacBooks and, and, and kind of their high-end PCs, you know, really powerful from a developer perspective. Um, so, you know, I, I agree with what you, on the, the, you know, kind of AI side, I think they've been a laggard in terms of spending.

I think they believe that the LLM layer is effectively gonna be commoditized and that there's not a huge amount of value for them in, you know, necessarily building that versus buying that, you know, they seem to be heading down a path, you know, much like they did with search of really, you know, embedding some sort of, you know, custom form Gemini that will, you know, kind of adhere to a Apple's, you know, beliefs and principles around, you know, privacy and, you know, on device and that sort of thing. Um, but you know, I, I tend to agree with you, I'm not sure that being behind an AI right now is gonna hurt them long term, um, you know, in terms of their future business outlook. But if we, if we take the Futurum report at face value, right?

A IPCs dominate market within five years, just from pure, from a pure marketing point of view, forget the tech for a second. I don't care what's under the hood, aren't they kind of forced to play me too and say, I, we, we do have an AI, MacBook, an A IPC, or do they just, I think they'd say they do today. Yeah, They say they do already properly.

Yeah. Yeah. I I think they're, that they've had one for quite some time.

Yeah. I, I think that building software that runs partially on a client and then has to be reconciled with some sort of AI model service in the cloud is a lot harder than they're letting on. And it may be a while before this software situation sorts itself out enough to be compelling.

So, um, a lot of these devices may even wind up being obsolete by the time that we have the software to actually take advantage of them. So that first generation may be, uh, shall we say, a, a test case. You're right, there's three steps in in software development when somebody comes out with something cool cooler than you, uh, the first one is to say, well, we already do that.

Second is, well, we don't do that, but we don't need to. And the third is, well, our way of doing it is better now that we've created it. Um, and, and so where, where we are in the software dev cycle, that that's where we, you know, right now if they're saying, oh, well we already do that, we're real early, there's a lot of chicken on that bone because They haven't hit the embrace and extend stage yet.

Yeah, exactly. It was just a good job. It was embrace extent of waiting out.

They haven't gotten there. Yeah. Apple always, you know, up until now, did, did a great job of like waiting out the industry, waiting out all these trends and then jumping and making it a widespread appealing product.

But I think they may have waited too long on this, and it just, just give, given the, uh, the hemorrhaging of talent there, that sends a signal that, that there's a lot of frustration or a lot of, uh, of folks who just wanna go somewhere else and, and get on with it. Well, John, are they leaving because they wanna get on with something else? Another challenge they think probably have they, they're, there are plenty of opportunities.

Like they're leaving for better. Well, they're le they're going to meta, they're going to open ai, or they were there at the beginning of Cook's tenure. Yes.

And then they saw the meteoric rise in stock. And after tenure, however long it's been, they're like, yeah, I'm good. I'm out.

I want, I want to close this out though, with, with a quick poll. How many of you have an A IPC on your holiday wishlist? I already got one dog.

Hey, but I, I do wanna mention What I get to Guys before we go important, like many of the FUTUR reports, I believe this report is available, Dan. Yeah. Yep, absolutely.

Okay. com. This report's there, there's a ton of reports there.

Go check out the signal reports. If you wanna see something really cool or whatever area of tech, your floats, your boat. But you know, unlike other vendors or analysts, this research is available for everyone to go see.

You don't have to whip your credit cards out. So go check out Olivier's. He put a lot of work into this report.

Go check it out. Good, Mike, if that's good, man. All right.

Hey, what a great discussion here, gang. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Thank you for watching. As usual, we've got ptro tv, uh, following this with a lot of good stuff, including a lot of probably a w well, I know for a fact a lot of AWS re event coverage from last week, so don't miss out on that. We'll be back tomorrow with a fresh gang, with fresh topics.

Until then, on behalf of Futurum and Techstrong and our gang members everywhere, thanks for watching. We're out.