AI Diplomacy Risks and Sports Analytics Transformations | TSG Ep. 932

Hey, there. We're in a New York state of mind. You're watching Textron Gang.

Happy Friday in another busy news week, especially in New York where we have UN Week Climate Week and the Ryder Cup this weekend. I'm Jon Swartz, your Silicon Valley correspondent, but I'm in the big Apple this week visiting my daughter in Brooklyn and covering some news from UN week and the Ryder Cup. Alan and Mike have the day off, though I suspect Mike is puttering around Long Island at the Ryder Cup.

Joining us is always a lovely panel of our guests and want to introduce them in no particular order. There's the great Stephen Foskett, Gina Rosenthal, and Ira Winkler, our cybersecurity Ian. Yes.

Um, so we're gonna start off with something that I know I sense a little skepticism from. Um, our, our panel, and I love it. Um, it revolves around this AI diplomacy, this, there's something called the AI Safety Connect, which was convened among a hundred high level participants during the, uh, UN General Assembly to address what organizers describe as an urgent need for global AI governance frameworks.

Um, their thesis is that the quarterly pace of AI breakthroughs has created systems that are more powerful, AgTech, opaque, and difficult to control. And this has heightened concerns about unintended consequences and deliberate misuse of AI technologies. They, in a sense, are so alarmed that they think that with AI systems advancing at unprecedented speed, we need the same kind of international cooperation that governs nuclear security or climate change.

Now, I know Gina and I, I'm pretty sure Ira and Steven, you all have opinions about this and I'm just gonna open it to the floor. So I will start and let me talk about things and I'll take a step back, talk about general. What happens is you have an issue and then you have a company that organizes events and put things on and says, oh, let's convene a bunch of leaders in the field and we'll go ahead and try to be the leader in this and address a problem proactively.

And then what they do is they bring in a whole bunch of people who just want to add AI to their resume in this case and start to say, we are now AI governance experts because why? It's a soft topic and nobody knows a different thing than the fact we are experts, except of course, for the few experts we're not gonna involve. We are gonna invite some experts who we like and who are friendly, and who will go ahead and give minimal credibility to our people, but not talk badly about us.

In the meantime, highlighting the fact that these people can't tell the difference, I will politely say the difference between generative AI and agentic ai, just for example, or frankly might refer to AI as a one in many cases. So these organizations start fluff to make money off of something like they'll have fundraisers who now support their efforts and these organizations who support them just make money off of these fundraising efforts saying that you're now a sponsor for this group of world leaders who now will go around adding AI governance to their speaking topics when they charge 20 to $50,000 for a keynote talk. I'll leave it there.

So, Gina, you did a little res you did, you did a little research into some of the individuals behind this. I thought that was interesting. Maybe you could share that with us.

Well, Yeah, of course. I mean, the whole idea, if we're gonna do ai, the first thing you look at is the data and can you trust the data? Where did the data come from?

We don't even know most of that stuff except for the wide world internet. So of course, I looked at the board that this organization has nobody of color that obviously of cover of color. I'll say that, which is, and nobody that you would know.

And I thought it was very interesting. I just checked on my phone. Again, there's no real readout of who these leaders were that came to this conference and this convening of world leader.

Who were they? And did they include the people that we see on both sides? So we, they include the doers who are actually, and have been CR involved with HPC and machine learning and deep learning, and now we call all that ai.

So, and the people that have been raising the flag about here's what's gonna happen if we don't, um, think about the unintended consequences. So you, you have this group of leaders that are not doers. They are exactly how IRA said they are talkers and they have their own companies, and they've been doing AI for a couple of years.

And so they are now bringing together the experts. Who are the experts Are we talking about? You know, one of the things that I think is really important we stopped talking about is the global sell.

So Gina, the interesting thing to me was that in fact, there are some doers involved in this. Um, the, the initiative, the, uh, uh, uh, AI safety, uh, connect is backed by what's called the Future of Life Institute, which sounds like something from the sixties where you get a sit around and, and, and meditate. But instead, it's actually a, um, reaction to the development of ai.

Back in the previous decade, the Future of Life Institute was organized by, uh, an MIT professor and so on. Uh, the co-founder of Skype, uh, the one of the researchers from DeepMind, a lot of these people are actually really interesting experts. Um, I should point out that another one of the founders of the Future of Life Institute was somebody named Elon Musk, who I, I, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that guy.

Um, previously this institute was well known for authoring, uh, letters and reports, uh, warning of the dangers of AI and the dangers of artificial gen, general intelligence. In fact, uh, the FLI actually proposed a halt on, uh, development of AI in an open letter that was co-signed by Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak and other folks and all of the, and, and so those are some of the people that are, that are behind this. Now, another aspect here, the one of the founders of this AI Safety Connect is a guy named Cyrus Hoes, which he, he's not really well known, but he's the co-founder of Stability AI that dev generated, that created stable diffusion, that AI image generator a few years ago that everybody was going nuts about.

Um, so we do have some interesting, uh, people in here. My question when reading things like this, whether it's the Future of Life Institute or the AI warnings about artificial general intelligence or this safety initiative, is, um, how can you be, I don't know, Elon Musk and co you know, co-sign a letter warning of the dangers of developing artificial intelligence and then walk away and go generate giant AI data centers? I mean, how do you reconcile that if you are the guy who created stable diffusion or you know, the guy who created DeepMind and you're warning about artificial intelligence?

Yeah, you reconcile, sorry. You reconcile that with the fact that these people are just creating fluff. You know, you can say, we've gotta put a moratorium on ai.

AI is just math. These are mathematical formulas. You can't tell people, don't implement math in computers because that's all computers.

And these are just different formulas. The question is what you're doing with it and how are you applying the, where are you drawing input from might be a concern, and what are you doing with the output? Those are the issues that may be AI provides a more robust concern that other things, but generally, I mean, when you, these people come up with fluff for all this thing, yes, it's like these things sound good.

And I don't think these people who put like a little bit of money or their name because they convinced 'em, it sounds prestigious to join. Elon Musk probably had zero involvement with this thing. I don't know about that.

And so, so it Sorry, I'm sorry. You could go ahead. Uh, I'm sorry, I I cut up to cut on you, but I, I remember that I take it back.

Okay. These people are so-called doers, but I remember that paper and, and what that paper's all about, even the future of life, if you think about what does that stand for and what does it mean, and Elon Musk has talked about this a lot. Um, their, their main purpose people that are some of these types of people is to get to a GI and to get to a SI, they want to be to the point where we're past all the machine learning and the machines can do it themselves, and they're as smart or smarter actually is the, the criteria for that than humans are.

And part of the concern, and part of the commentary around that paper when it came out was, okay, they want us to stop, but they're the ones that are gonna run these consortiums, run these groups, and influence the politics. So they're the only ones that will be in the business of delivering a GI and a SI that that race to get that first is what this is all about. And that's even more dangerous than what I thought it was, because here you do have all the global self left out.

All of, I don't see anybody from Africa involved you and people that have material right now just with the machine learning part of this, um, issues and safety issues around how we're dealing with ai, not even part of the safety discussion. So the safety discussion may not be what we think it should be, but it's a safety to maybe guardrail and make sure we get to a GI as fast as possible. I believe that is the goal.

And I, I remember when that letter came out, Regina, I think you and I were speculating that maybe one of the reasons that Elon signed on is because his company was behind and they wanted to put a roadblock in front of some of their competitors in hopes that they could catch up. 0 that talks about life under artificial intelligence. Um, he, along with the Future of Life Institute, is also the scientific director for the Foundational Questions Institute, which again, oh, who names these things anyway, um, which is a big proponent of the effective altruism movement, if you guys are familiar with all this stuff.

So essentially what we have is the Silicon Valley ai, uh, I don't know, mentat, uh, pushing their Silicon Valley AI mindset to the United Nations in the guise of AI safety, when really what they're pushing is this sort of weird techno utopian future vision that I think a lot of people are pretty worried about. Yep. I, Yeah, well, there's a comment.

Can I just ask one quick, quick question? Yeah. Um, so I, I'm so skeptical of these types of movements or initiatives, and I just want before I, we, we can ask just a quick answer, but does this amount to anything, um, especially with no real regulation in the US to speak of involving ai, or is this just a, a publicity stunt?

Let me, because your question is what I was gonna say, because there are two things that these type of organizations do. Number one, they just create a bunch of fluff to get sponsorship to keep the people who run the organization in little to organize fancy meeting and traveling around the world. Yep.

The other thing sometimes they do is they get organizations who wanna go ahead and push governments or regulation or something, and then they like these type of organ, like lobbying, organ lobbyist type of thing, then try to tie themselves to something, give them money and take the legitimacy of a hundred world leaders and push their own agenda forward. So this could be one of the two, frankly, at this point, given the whole influence of the UN at this time, it's more fluff than anything else. If they wanted to really do something useful and drive things, they would just buy congressmen and, uh, you know, and like donate to like a, a presidential library or something, instead the un that's probably one of the least effective places to try to get movement here.

But I think the thing is, and the danger of this is that when they're at the un, when there's a World Congress convened, they also have the ability not just to attend this Congress and they attend this conference and figure out what to do, they have the ability to meet the lawmakers and influence them and persuade them to fund what they're doing. And then that funding turns into the legislation and the legislation turns into harmful things that are only gonna be good at protecting this idea that a GI are bust. That that's what society needs or society, the, the effect of altruism movement, their main thing is society must live into the future for eons.

No, no matter mankind, right? No matter who gets hurt in the process. So, no, no.

That's why there's no looking right now at, okay, how are black skinned people being impacted by, um, facial recognition and how dangerous it is? And that's not looked at and seen. It's like, no, we've got to make sure that we have the machines that can do everything for us and we'll figure it out.

Then even you had, um, the OpenAI CEO saying, I don't know how we're gonna make money off of this. I'm gonna wait till we get a GI and then I'm gonna ask it and it's gonna tell me 42. So, you know, it's, this is this whole mindset and they know that they have to control the government.

This is a way to meet the government to understand even if they don't meet with the right people, they can meet with their, um, their representatives and understand the process and get into that process and that workflow and, and change the workflow so it suits them and it, and it, and this will go through faster. I wanted to say just real quick too, that the one outcome of this was, uh, lost it. A global risk and AI safety preparedness.

Um, so I'm gonna look into that a little bit more. Maybe this will be a nice blog post or LinkedIn post. But, um, the other thing is, is if they're able to get the, the, the idea of risk and what that means, change to suit them before all the normal, you know, people that are aren't really caring about this right now, um, people get to know about ai, they will define it, and that's the road that will go down.

So it is, it's just like ai, it's bad information going in to steer one way, and, and we need to watch it really carefully. Yeah, I don't wanna sound like that crazy guy in the meme with like the strings and the corkboard and the, and and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Um, but as Gina's pointing out, when you're evaluating these things, you basically have to try to figure out what's the mindset and the motivation of the people behind it.

And I, I, I, I completely agree with you Gina. The goal of this is to influence the law and the direction that world leaders are gonna have a, across the, across the entire world. Because, you know, you can make the United States pass a law that does this or that, you know, with some influence like Iris suggested, uh, you know, some influence, uh, maybe you can make the, make their, but what they're trying to do is, is basically influence the global conversation.

And that's why I think that it is valid to look at who's behind this, who are these people, what are their motivations? Because that will tell us more about what they're trying to do than sort of the fluff that's on their website about AI safety. Because to, to be honest, if you look at the website for this, I think most of us could get on board with the message that they have to say.

The challenge is, is that really what they're trying to do? Maybe it is, maybe these people have turned over a new stone or maybe it's a more nefarious plot. Well, on that nefarious ending, I think we should move on.

Uh, we'll, we'll be back in a moment. We're gonna talk about tele crime and, uh, I guess I, I can't wait to hear what IRA has to say about this, especially this is tied around the UN general assembly. So, and I expect Steven to give us our, his best Allen and impersonation, and that's coming up next.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. So, as you might have heard, the UN General Assembly is meeting in New York this week, and just before the meeting there was a report that the Secret Service and the FBI have busted a massive, well, I I guess you could call it a hidden telecom network, uh, not just in New York, but all around New York, basically multiple locations with literally hundred thousand SIM cards in these SIM servers. And, um, they, they dismantled this network.

They've been making a lot of press about it. Uh, but the questions remain about sort of what is this thing? Was it related to the UN general assembly at all?

And, um, why did they announce this now? So Ira, this is your area. This is something that I know that you love to talk about.

Um, what is this telecom secret Telecom network? So basically what this type of thing allow, it uses the generic infrastructure of the telecom network, but puts kind of a sub infrastructure in there and there's a lot being made out of, oh, this was, they, they announced it right before the UN General Assembly. This thing has likely been built over possibly a decade, but definitely over years.

And the thing is that the criminal underground at all these people, this helps them do a lot of things, lessening the chance, not preventing the chance of surveillance. And these type of networks do allow for communications among criminals and things like that. So it benefits them to put networks like this in place all over the place.

There was a whole bunch of talk right around the UN general assembly. They said they discovered this network back in August. I don't think criminals would've built this network over the course of a decade to just go ahead to sabotage an escalator in the un the way people are making the sound like.

And so, you know, that is for a proverbial red herring simultaneously, you know, then they say like, there's no offense to your tech strong writers, but they say within a 35 mile radius of the un. You know, that's just kind, I mean, What percentage of the, of the population lives there, right? Yeah.

I mean you're, you're talking that's the New York metropolitan region for the lack of a better way of phrasing it with tens of millions of people in the vicinity. Well, or 10, you know, more roughly 10 to 20 million people. And so what's going on is this seems like this is a criminal underground network.

They make a big deal. Oh, car drug cartels are using it. It's like, yeah, criminals are going to use this.

A foreign nation has used this. Yeah, foreign nations are gonna use it. It's likely, it's, I, I won't say likely, but possible even US services are using this network to, to some extent, frankly the FBI probably had to go ahead and investigate this and figure out, wait a second, are we infiltrating this watching bad guys do bad things?

Because a lot of times what'll happen for intelligence purposes, you find out about these underground networks and you just use them for intelligence gathering purposes, which is likely what probably happened as well because they were probably monitoring these things to pick up activities. 'cause it could have been much more useful. Like for example, oh what was the one on the criminal website that Silk Road, they let Silk Road continue for a period of time just to go ahead and monitor the criminal activity.

So it would've behooved them to keep watching these things. And this was at a point where I guess they theoretically got enough information or thought they dried out the information they could get and then took it down. Now the fact that this could theoretically because, um, be used for damage and people need to understand this does have the ability, the size of the network would have the ability to be a denial of service attack because you could use all these hundred thousand sim cards to theoretically overwhelm individual towers or whatever.

And that can happen at certain critical times. But I think people are, you know, this is probably just a criminal infrastructure that criminals put in place to support their activities with lower likelihood of monitoring. And they have these all over the country, I would think now they're probably gonna start to abandon them because now their FBI has indicated they know about them in other areas, which means if I was a criminal, I would think, hey, they're gonna be monitoring what we're doing on these networks, which is probably what they have been doing for months at this point.

I was gonna say, it's, it's, it's interesting, some of the other articles I read that were more in depth said that the, the reason they found it a few months ago was they were investigating all the doxing of, uh, some of Trump's when Trump went into office, it was mostly Republican people that got docs. Like one of the articles I read said, um, Marjorie Taylor Green, well, Specifically they were, there was a swatting attempt against That, right? Yeah.

I'm sorry, swatting, not doxing. So, uh, Mar they'd swatted Marjorie Taylor Green's house saying somebody called from this network saying, I've killed my girlfriend and I'm about to kill myself and try to talk me down. But basically what they do is they, what swatting is is they make a phone call to nine one one and send 9 1 1 to your house and hoping they'll come bust your door down and make a big ruckus.

So, um, and it was lots of people on Trump's team got, um, swatted from this network. That's why they started investigating it. So it was definitely, they said the things they did say is it was nation state.

Um, lots of people that they knew that they were already watching had been communicating through these, these servers. And one of the things, I guess Ira, I don't know details a lot about networking. That's my new phase of life.

But, but um, they say they can change the phone numbers all the time. So that's one of the reasons it's great for criminals is you got all these SIM cards, but then you can just use electronically. You know, you don't, I'm not on, you're putting it in a phone, you're putting it in the server and you can just change phone numbers all the time and hide your tracks and do your criminal business as you need.

Yeah. I mean, it is an incredibly helpful criminal tool and, you know, the fact that they are able to keep something, 'cause it's a lot like, um, uh, what was the name of the ransomware gang that took down hospitals? Because likely what's happening is that, um, much like that, uh, I get, there's so many gangs that come and go between silk roads and everything, but much like what happens is some criminals probably just put this together and then some idiot starts to do stupid things like doxing politicians with it.

And that is how things get exposed. That's why, for example, you know, like the ransomware gang I'm thinking of like that they license out their ransomware software and infrastructure that somebody all of a sudden says, oh, we're gonna do a hospital and ripple a hospital system, and then all of a sudden it brings attention to them and then they get mad and p**s, you know, and p**s the people off. And then they have to cut these criminals off of the network.

And this case, they, the ransomware gang, somebody knows what it is off the top of their head, I'm sure just had to change their name, which is the worst case in this case. Somebody does stupid childish things like swatting. 'cause there is really no benefit to it, per se, from a criminal perspective except to be annoying and things like that.

The way it sounds like it wa it was executed and that things like that uncover the entire criminal infrastructure because they are gonna investigate and, and frankly, I don't care which political side you're on, that was flat out wrong to do something that gets people killed. Yeah, exactly. And luckily they investigated it.

And this is what uncovered, and this is really what happens where somebody pulls strings where they use these things like criminals use these things for infrastructure purposes, support and everything in ways that don't attract attention. It's kind of like using the major roads and not attracting attention by not driving like an idiot. You know, on the other hand, somebody decides I'm gonna take my, you know, truck full of drugs and drive 150 miles an hour up I 95, that will compromise the whole network.

And this is what's happened here that likely this infrastructure put in place, which has nothing to do with the UN general assembly Yeah. Has been uncovered because of people who just wanna do stupid things. Could it be used for nefarious purposes, you know, to cause damage?

Like articles wanna imply the answer is yes, but fundamentally it'll allow criminals to hide their activities, to change cell phone numbers to make it more difficult for law enforcement to track them. And the good or the bad is however you want, like on which side you're on. Somebody did something incredibly dangerous attracting a lot of attention, which allowed this network and likely others in place to be discovered.

You can see, like it all like to think about is like, you know, I'm watching only murders on the building in the building right now, and of course watching all of the Marvel stuff about Hell's Kitchen, and all you can think about is those back rooms. Like, why did you do this? Why do you know how hard it's gonna be for us to build up another sim farm in the tri-state area?

Somebody's getting intro. Well, is it gonna be hard? I mean, so, so it's funny, this story, um, reminded me.

So yesterday, um, this, I read this story, uh, I started off the day recording a podcast with, uh, Commvault, I was with you where they were talking about with, with Gina, where we were talking about How, Um, these criminal ransomware gangs have become ransomware companies. They're effectively real companies with profit and loss and presidents and a, you know, all this kind of stuff. They're basically, I don't know, dark side companies.

And then I was, um, listening to the, uh, Infoblox presentation at Security Field Day and Infoblox was pointing out that there are criminal DNS providers Yeah. And basically a criminal Bitly that registers like 75,000 domains a year in order to be able to serve ransomware links and those are businesses too. And then I read this story and like Iris said, my mind immediately jumped to this is not nation state hackers or ransomware gangs or s Swatters, this is a business.

Somebody created a business that was, you know, telecom network, you know, black dark telecom for hire and, and all of these things. I mean, gee, we live in a world where there's basically an evil Economy. So is it is, so this is very fascinating to me.

So these organizations set up like a proper business where they have like a chief operating officer of the dark web, or I mean, how, how does this, how can you just maybe go a little bit over that's That's what it sounds like. Yeah, so like, well, And just for, oh, sorry. Just for example, the ransomware gang, I said they basically have software developers that write ransomware and then they have other people who like focus on, you know, the delivery of ransomware and stuff like that.

They put the infrastructure together and then they license it out. This is crime as a service. And the thing is this, I'm sorry, ar I keep doing that to you.

I'm Go ahead Gina. No, that's Okay. I do it to you too.

Okay. Um, and, and so part of this, if you think about ransomware, the delivery, the most effective mechanism is to trick people into click in a link. So that's done through marketing.

So all the marketing tools that we use, this, these companies, literal companies that run this as a service, they are using AI now because like, one of the easiest ways to notice if it was okay, I think this is probably not a clickable thing because the English is all wrong. They use AI to write all their messaging, all their, or all of they can learn, um, they can learn someone's voice and how they would act and how they would say things so they can, you know, when they're really spearfishing, they can get that email down to sound exactly like the person they're impersonating. They probably use this networking infrastructure that got taken down to do all of these activities.

Um, and what's interesting to me is like, that's what I think probably happened is we're talking about this, whoever got jumped on here to do this swatting, um, blew up their thing. Probably was just got the, as a service networking that they provide. And I wonder what happened to them.

I'm really wondering if somebody already took care of Well, Some somebody might mess you up. Yeah. If you did.

If you mess with the criminal with gang, but You'd be, yeah. So I mean, you'd be surprised they're not, I mean, the criminals are not gonna enforce, they're probably p****d off that they found this. And frankly, there's probably a half dozen other networks just like this throughout the New York metropolitan region.

Yeah. In fact, that's actually one of the things I, I, let's leave it with this. Um, part of the article in Wired was an interview with somebody, uh, who's familiar with the FBI and they said, this isn't the largest network that they know of, and it's not even the largest one they've busted.

So you may be impressed, I'm impressed by the scale of this thing, but it really isn't anything compared to what all is out there in the evil, criminal, dark economy. Mm-hmm. So thanks very much.

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So we've just talked about the ways that criminals are using technology to really change the game around crime. Well, there's another kind of crime out there and that's cheating at golf. Uh, let's talk a little bit about, uh, wait A second.

Let's, let's talk a little bit about this. There are a bunch of data and analytics companies that are trying to apply IQ or AI to improve, uh, their chances at winning golf, uh, like the the Ryder Cup and so on. Uh, John, uh, start us off here.

What, what do we know about these evil criminal golf Masterminds? Oh My god, Steven. Yeah, you stole my lead.

Damn you. Um, so about any event, so the Rider Cup is taking place this weekend and AI is gonna be everywhere. There are five major technology partners.

There's Cap Gemini, S-A-P-H-P-E, Motorola, and T-Mobile. One of the most interesting aspects to me is the influence of ai, as you said, and data analytics in particular on the competition. And I talked to the CTO of the Ry Cup Europe team, and he basically told me something that kind of blew my mind.

He's saying that there are basically no limitations to what they can do in terms of using AI by the coaches or the captains to, uh, assess shots, weather forecast, which include wind distance to a, a whole or, uh, what club to select. And, and, and it's interesting to me because in other sports, like the NFL in particular, everyone plays by the same rules in terms of their use of of ai. Um, they're limited in what they can do.

But then again, the NFL is a very socialist, like, like organization in the golf, golf world, you can't even wear a watch. You can't wear a smartphone and you can't have anything on your person as a golfer. Now we have this new kind of elements where maybe the Team Europe has an edge.

I don't know, I don't know what the US team has in store, but it opens up this possibility, as you said, to cheat. And I, and I, and I, it's funny, the more I, I talked to him, I, I also asked this guy and he laughed, but he told me it's true. He is like, when do caddies get replaced by AI agents or robotic physical ai, where they are your, um, advisor.

The caddies is just as important as the golfer. And so they're gonna get smarter in a certain way. So maybe the golf gets better, but then again, it becomes an arms race.

And this has happened throughout all major professional sports. Back in the day, long time ago, the Dallas Cowboys actually had an advantage over a lot of other teams because they used computers at the time to assess, uh, drafts and players and free agency. Uh, you also had an F1.

It's, it's rampant. But I also think in baseball, it goes back to Moneyball and the whole idea of the Oakland A and maximizing efficiency. So I think this is what's happening with golf, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

We were not, we're not gonna see it. It's not gonna be obvious, but we'll probably find out later after this weekend. I, I, I wanna start, I I wanna respond to that first by just pointing out that I was being flippant.

I don't consider this cheating. Oh, I, I think you're Onto something though. And these are not criminal masterminds.

Uh, basically these are people using technology to try to improve their game. Well, this, and as you said, that is something that happens in all sorts of sports. And by the way, I'll just point out that baseball, major league baseball yesterday announced that they're gonna do, um, a robo ump.

They're gonna have appealable balls and strikes next year in Major League baseball using, uh, AI and, um, and, and, and sensors. So, uh, IRA, Yeah, so this, the, what gets me is that this is a conversation. What should be the news story is that okay, they're using better mathematics and computer technology to improve a golf game.

Like you mentioned with Moneyball, where they started to implement basic statistics, which is really, I mean, frankly, AI is just more advanced statistical algorithms. And, but they've been using this at, like, I, I worked with some people a while back who like back in the 2000th timeframe, the Sports Performance Institute like P three and things like that, who analyzed people like baseball swings and were doing motion sensors to see how they do that, to get them to figure out how to perfect their swings. And in this case, with the golf and taking advantage of like, okay, the poorer golfers who can't use the same algorithms and it's gonna be widely available probably to sell to anyone unless some golf golfer is gonna tailor and have hire his own people, which is unlikely these same algorithms are gonna be available to everyone.

Like what's the wind direction? And they're gonna have little sensors on their golf caddies and store their bags and everything. And I could see this as, I mean, I'm kind of like, let's clap and let's applaud.

And if golf thinks this is too much of an impact, yes, they can start to make rules. Like, for example, who would've thought that headsets into football helmets? You know mm-hmm.

Where the coaches are calling the plays. I mean, you're saying literally Yeah, they, if there's, If There's Ever, if there's ever a sport though, that is incredibly regulated to the point where it's kind of a**l in terms of their rules, it's golf. But just to go back and I'll let, I'm sorry Gina to interrupt, but I'm just, just to, to go back to this, one thing I didn't mention is that it's also gonna be a fan experience.

Evidently there is going to be dynamic merchandise inventory so they don't run out of certain types of goods in, because at these golf tournaments, they sell a ton of merchandise. People who go to these events buy and, and, and so this, this way, they're gonna increase the sales as well. And I think the broadcasters gonna be using ai, although I'm not quite sure how they're gonna do it.

I mean, I, there's gonna be a day where an AI replaces announcers all together. That's just inevitable. Oh, sorry, Gina.

That's not gonna happen. I don't believe that. I think they'll enhance the, there's no way you'll get rid of announcers, but that's an argument for another day.

But like, how much of this has already been implemented or has been used on historical data to create video games? Because I know I've been to conferences and they've had, and I haven't gone, but I've stood with my guy friends and like, all right, what's happening? 'cause I don't understand golf.

But, um, yeah, there's like, they, you would swing and it would tell you this and that the video game would tell you like, what, where's the wind coming from? What's the humidity? Like, all the stuff.

And, and that's how you would try, how is this different except that it's real time on the day of versus using historical machine learning to, to create a really realistic game. Yeah. And, and as Ira points out, I mean, AI is just statistics.

That's all it is. You know, generative AI is just a whole mess of statistics, um, all munged into one. And that is no different.

I was actually listening to an interview the other day with a professional chess player, and he was talking about how playing chess these days is completely different than it used to be because of the advent of computers and advanced statistics. And he said that basically, um, any player today would absolutely wipe up the board with any previous player because they have access to all this training and statistics that have been gathered and, and processed and that it's transformed the whole game. And that's very true of, of, of many other sports Formula One racing.

Uh, as you mentioned, I mean, you know, baseball, but I, I do wanna point out one thing that's kind of interesting. So I'm a big baseball fan, and the whole Moneyball thing, it was a very big, it was a great competitive advantage for the Oakland A, but it rapidly ran outta steam. I'm not sure if you guys know about this, but today there's actually a big backlash against Moneyball.

Yes. What happened was it changed the game Book I'm reading In the wrong direction. I'm using a book to prop my, my laptop up.

The book is Jane Levy's book about what's wrong with baseball. And part of the problem with what's wrong with baseball is that baseball's beauty. I think Steven and I, and I will agree was it's unpredictability.

Anything could happen. There, there, there was a saying that every time you went to a ball game, you saw something you'd never seen before. What analytics ha in a sense has done is made it a very predictable sport where, uh, athletes are taught these launch angles of their swings.

They have a certain philosophy about hitting with two strikes. It's still to hit a home run because it's hard to string hits together because the pitching's so good. In other words, baseball's become just the, the very antithesis of what made what we loved about it.

It's so predictable. It's either a walk, a strikeout or a home run it scenes. And it, it, and Moneyball was fed into that and it kind of, kind of made it a bland sport.

It made it a longer, a longer game is definitely, so, um, yeah, there are consequences. Yeah. But the cons, I mean, I mean, I just have to say the consequences are, 'cause what this allows things to do is to make every element, like every piece of a game, whatever it happens to be, allows you to perfect it more.

So in the case of Moneyball, like you're saying, for example, it allows an individual batter to know how to micro tune their batting. It allows pitchers to micro tune things, how they pitch, throw things. But, But, but one, one of the problems in sports is that athletes actually perform better when they don't think, and that sounds weird, but they act, they react.

I mean, that's, that's who they are. That's why they're great. And, and when you, when you drum something into them about a certain way to play under certain circumstances, they don't, they forget how to play the game and they don't know how to perform other aspects of it.

And that is a major problem with baseball. Oh, one thing I should also mention is that with this data, and nobody Knows how to burnt anymore. Oh, that's, no one knows how to field or how to run the bases throw to which base.

But, um, there are 15 data points, free, shot free, uh, golf shot under these, this, this analytics. And that's, that's gonna escalate, by the way. So, uh, to IRA's point, you are perfecting these are, these athletes have never been better, they've never been better trained, but I think almost in a sense they become robotic.

And I think you see that not just in baseball. I think you see it in, in football, and it can becomes like vanilla and bland, and they're all kind of stealing and repeating what each other does. So There's ai Slot sports Is what you're saying.

It's not just marketing fighting, it's in sports too. Yeah, true. Well, As any, as any fan, as any fan, uh, who's watched, um, sports recently knows too, there's a lot of impact, you know, in terms of the fan experience, whether it is the, um, scourge of gambling statistics that are everywhere, or whether it is the absolutely asinine, uh, predictive statistics that appear on screen.

Apple, by the way, Apple's coverage of every sport is the worst about this because they put little percentages in the corner of what's gonna happen next To next. Well, I it's one team beating the other or whatever the result is. Yeah.

It's just nonsense that ESPN does this on their app all the time, and it is maddening because one team will go from a 87% favorite to the a, a 13% favorite based on one play, you know, so it's like, what's the point? Um, but, uh, yeah, sorry. It's just, I I don't, I don't know.

I Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.

Thanks so much. Th this it's a, it's an interesting conversation. I think, um, ultimately what's gonna happen is that it's, it's gonna be all about the athletes and some of them are gonna be able to use this technology and be greater than they ever could be before.

Uh, some of them are going to, uh, use this technology wrong and it's gonna derail their careers. And ultimately the, uh, the escalation of technology in golf and in other sports is going to, uh, change the game in some fundamental ways. And we'll see where that works out.

So, um, thanks a lot for, uh, joining us here for Textron Gang. Um, before we go, I do wanna point out that, uh, we are live with Security Field Day here on Techstrong TV today, uh, yesterday and today. And we will be broadcasting, uh, if you liked these security stories.

Uh, we're gonna be broadcasting presentations from security companies, and you'll be able to catch recordings of that on the Tech Field Day YouTube channel, as well as the Textron TV app. John. Hey, uh, thanks everybody.

You were all great today. This was a fun conversation. I love when people interrupt one another, that means that we are exchange No, what disagreements over talking.

You Know, I, I disagree with that, John. Hey, stop it. Um, but you know, I I, no, I, and, and you brought up the idea about cheating in golf, but in a sense, cheating in sports is like very common.

You're always looking for the edge. And it goes back to the days of the 1950s with the, the people spying out of the center field, center field wall, you know, and, and relaying, or our Houston Astros banging a garbage can. Something as low tech as that.

So, um, it was fascinating conversation. I'm, I'm glad there's a lot going on in New York and I think you all did an excellent job of laying it out. And, um, we want to thank the audience for watching Techstrong Gang, and, uh, we'll be back Monday.

A and Mike should be back by then and, uh, have a great weekend.