AI and the Future of Work, Agent Intelligence, and Court Tech | TSG Ep. 1023

Hey everyone. Welcome to Tech Strung Gang. This fine Thursday, I have to apologize, we're probably a minute or two, maybe even three minutes late.

This seems to be a bad storm out in Silicon Valley. Yeah, uh, Sorry about that. Well, it's not your fault, John.

You didn't create the storm. I just wonder for an area that's so technologically advanced, why things go to have, can I lay you in On a can, can I lay you in on a secret? So go to these, uh, press conferences often, like, uh, Google io or what have you, even some Apple conferences.

Wifi is terrible at the events. Yeah, always Silicon Valley On the cutting edge. Yeah, always.

But, but no. Anyway, we've got a good show to talk about today. As usual, there's a lot going on in the world of ai.

There's also some security stuff and, and ugh, there's just so much going on in the world today. It's hard to just pick out three things. But we've got three, three topics.

We've got a five people panel. Let me introduce you to them. As I mentioned before, John is joining us, uh, on his phone today, unfortunately, because of the, the lack of technology out there in Silicon Valleys.

Um, joining John, we've got Gina Rosenthal. Gina, it's great to see. I, I'm digging that necklace, Gina.

Oh, thank you, Turkey. Yeah, beautiful. Oh, No, it's totally plastic.

It's just pretty, Oh, it's pretty. All right. Beautiful.

And then we've got, speaking of Pretty Ann a a whole award sans Valentine's Day background, but she here I Out of the cat, apparently she's Checking. Yes. Have little, yep.

I saw a tail anyway, but yes. And then back home in Seattle for now, our Fred, Fred, Wilma. Fred, how are you doing great, sir.

Doing great. Good. Well, gang, as I mentioned, it's, it's, uh, you know, it's certainly interesting times with every day seeming, seeming to top the day before.

Uh, let's jump right into things. We're gonna start off with a segment we call the AI doomsday, or the AI Jobs Doomsday Clock. It's part of a, an article that I had put actually two articles I put up on the back on this.

But Gina, what do we got here? You know, Jimmy, first of all, I have to say, I always appreciate the post you write. They have, uh, just lots of, uh, links and get me going on all of the research.

So that's what I did. I spent my morning doing that. Um, and I wanna say, first of all, when you kind of look at all the reporting on AI and jobs, there's a bunch of themes that come across.

There's studies being done already. Uh, lots of headlines as we know. But the biggest empire, uh, impact so far isn't really mass unemployment.

It's really seems to be the pressure on the early entry level work. So generative ai, and that's what we're really talking about when we talk about knowledge workers. This type of AI they're using as generative ai.

It's really good at the task that juniors used to do for us. Hopefully some of them still do. But, you know, first pass coding administration stuff, um, basic research, editing, drafting.

And so companies, because AI does a good job with all those things, are starting to hire fewer people at the bottom. Um, but it looks like, according to the research and headlines, that the, um, senior roles are kind of stable, even if they're getting more work dumped upon them. So some articles, uh, we're framing this as a broken career ladder.

Others argue it's not really that the jobs are disappearing, that they're being, um, re reinvented or, or recreated around AI and what AI can do and what now needs to be done. Um, but I gotta tell you, this all feels super, super familiar to me. Um, the first time I saw it, saw it happen was in 2002.

I was in my job for just 11 months. com crash and Y 2K, and then that led to outsourcing. And, um, I was, so, I was let go not because I did anything bad, or I was doing a bad job.

I wasn't at all, had a lot of responsibility, but I just didn't know enough how to contribute where the company needed me to contribute as the budget's tightened. So, um, it's always the entry level roles that are forced to go when all of a sudden companies need immediate value, they can get rid of that line of work. And it's, it's also what's happening with the AI movement.

And I saw it happen with my own agency, right? So in 2005, 25 last year, I, um, I, we had a really huge, uh, decline in clients. And a lot of it was because they bought into the hive that companies didn't, could do some of the role that, uh, agencies were doing.

And so it, that's what happened. So, um, the perception was enough to, uh, freeze decisions. And that means I've lived through two moments where perception was going faster than reality.

And perception is what changed the hiring. So I think the lesson is that we may not be in a doomsday scenario where all jobs are technical jobs are in, um, our information jobs are gonna disappear. But really what needs to happen and what happened the first time is that on-ramp to those different agencies disappeared before they figured out what should happen.

So maybe they can learn a little, and the doomsday won't be as bad if companies can sit back and say, okay, the real jobs that we need now involve involved this and that and the other thing. But instead of just deliberately and instead of getting rid of all the jobs at one time. So I think the dooms take clock is, is great hyperbole, but I think there's work that needs to be done within organizations that you are going to need entry level pipeline to careers.

You're gonna meet entry level pipeline to your, your systems. And it might not be the way we were doing things before, but this happened right after the web was formed. It probably happened right after the pricking for us was released too.

We gotta figure out what lot of Scribes Out work. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I have to keep unmuting myself.

Can I mention something? There's, there's this weird, uh, dichotomy between what we're seeing is this doomsday phrase, which is used quite often. And now I'm starting to see something called the AI Mirage.

So there was a study that was just done by an organization that looked at, uh, several thousand people across us, uk, Germany, and Australia. And what they were finding that there was a kind of a status quo in hiring the last three years. Um, and there's gonna be a delayed impact.

So, you know, we talked about these job losses. 75 million jobs across the us, uk, Germany, and Australia. But it's not gonna happen until 2028.

And until then, there's this, i, I guess this perception gap between the C-suite and the cubicle where, you know, the employees are optimistic. Um, they anticipate they're actually anticipate job creation rather than cuts, though, um, the productivity gains haven't shown up yet. So there's this kind of weird, uh, error that we're going through right between boom and bust.

And it, it makes for interesting times and, and really quite an anxious times, I think. Yeah, for sure. It's anxiety driven.

But I, I did like the one, um, blog post about what should you do. I mean, there's things you should do. You should be involved with ai, you should understand how AI, um, impacts your job and you should be working with it.

I mean, I work with it all the time. Um, how do you, how can you use it? That's kind of the concern I've had the whole time is how do entry level per people use it when they don't know what the jobs actually are.

So we need to really think about that and think about how to train user people coming into the workforce course, you know, give them free reign to do things with sidebars to keep 'em safe. But that's where come from. Yeah, we, I agree.

We talked about a study not that long ago on the show about basically how AI adoption was much higher among management than it was entry-level workers. So this fits right into that. I think that, I don't think the, the clock is ticking.

I think it struck midnight for already for a bunch of types of roles, especially in the creative realm. I don't think the divide is human versus ai. I don't look at it that way at all.

I think it's people who use these systems and shape these systems and the people that are shaped by them. And so the winners are not gonna be the replace workers. They're gonna be the workers who can replace themselves and shape the systems, use the systems.

You know, we're not crying for the elevator crank operator. We're not crying for the horse and buggy, uh, driver. This is part of evolution of humanity.

It just feels so fast that it's jarring to people because it is moving fast. But I would say as an SEO, I love it. It's been way more exciting to do what I do than it ever has since the beginning, because I can make changes.

I see the effects in days, whereas it used to be weeks and months. So I think it's exciting, but I'm also a person who surfs on the edge of emerging tech as is a habit. I chose a profession where I have to learn or I'm ineffective.

Not everybody is like that. And so this is going to be a sea show, uh, a sea change. It is a sea change, but not everybody likes the ocean, right?

I mean, that's just the way I see it. I agree. It's a couple of things.

So the, the Doomsday Clock article came out of a, well, primarily driven by a, an announce or an interview that the CEO for AI for Microsoft, they have a CEO just for AI over at Microsoft, made that within 18 months, virtually any job that takes place in front of a screen. So meaning on a computer. And I don't know if he means like us talking here on this Max headroom, I don't know.

But, um, but any job that, you know, basically you do in front of a screen, AI will be able to do. But it was more nuanced. He didn't say those jobs are gonna go away.

He said, you'll be able to use AI to do them. And to me, that meant that the Andy, your point, exactly. Those of us who embrace it and learn to leverage it to make ourselves more valuable, we'll be able to do more.

And I think that is the key piece of it. But I also, I think I wanna be realistic on the other side, right? To give some balance.

And, you know, that I agree with you because this is what I do. I do the same thing. But I also think that eliminating the, the junior jobs especially, and that is a financial decision, without having a, without allowing, putting in the, the on-ramp for people to get into an organization is dangerous to the organization because it does overwhelm.

And we've seen studies of that overwhelm the people that are mid and upper level career more experienced because they're picking up the slack for what, who the people who would've been there and driven things. So I, I think that idea of having, okay, what are the new jobs for Freshers when they come in and how do they do this? I think those, that's really important.

And there are some companies already trying to figure that. I think it was IBM or Intel had an article this week that that's exactly, they're, they're going on a hiring blitz for people just out of college so that they can, with jobs that are specifically designed with working in tandem with, with AI processes. So I, I think the perception, that perception that everything is gone when we are looking at it.

I mean, I'm looking at it from job perspective. It's very difficult to get a job right now in marketing. Absolutely.

Right. So it's really difficult to get a job. So you think of this perception impacting the hiring, then that means that it impacts jobs, unemployment, families.

Um, not having a job for a year will make you default on your house and all your loans and everything else. So it's like a really huge deal. People moving back in with their appearance.

So it's a big deal that impacts the economy. And so we have to do more than say, there's this doom today. All the jobs are gone.

Let's give hope not just to learn how to use ai, which we're gonna all have to do, just like everybody learn how to do email, but let's give hope. Okay? The thing you wanted to do that you went to college for four years, here's how you do it with ai, and here's how you get a job someplace.

And those jobs right now don't exist because I don't see the C-suite looking at, well, how do we bring people in to be this, to work with the AI processes to get to our end goals better? I had a, a trip to Starbucks, a trip to Starbucks earlier this week where the baristas were all listing off which degrees they had. Oh, yeah.

Which liberal arts I used to work, which liberal arts degrees they had. And I just felt, I felt very sad. My bar used to work at a, at a venture capital firm.

She, she was asking me what I do for a living. And I was mentioning this, and she told me she had just shifted over. You know, one of the things that I think the narrative has been taken over by Doomsday is the fact that some of the early adopters, or some of the high profile companies are announcing these just layoffs or, or changes in job, job functionality and changes in the workforce.

I'm thinking of Amazon and Meta. So that kind of overwhelms the storyline. You know, it doesn't address the vast majority of jobs and professions and industries.

So it kind of taints our viewpoints. So we think about, oh my God, massacre. You know, we live, we live in the tech industry, guys.

Yeah. And tech jobs are the spear of the point of this thing right now, especially, believe it or not, coding, right? The, the, the second article that I wrote about Matt Schumer's thing being a Comm Matt Schumer's essay.

And I encourage everyone to go read Matt Schumer's essay Being a common sense moment here is, is I, is really, it it is, it's heavy. You gotta take it in and you gotta think about it. But what Matt is saying is this is someone who's made a living a career in coding, and the game has changed.

The game has changed in coding, and it's not going back. Not to say that we're not gonna have people, you know, Matt's gonna have a job. Matt's a, uh, an entrepreneur.

Matt's gonna have a job. I, I wrote another article that just came out this mo morning, uh, um, I believe on Techstrong it about has AI reached its sixth sense moment? If you remember the movie, I see Dead People, right?

It was, it was based on a, a New York Times piece I read yesterday. A guy says, look, on the way from the subway, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, on my way home, I, I upload on my phone all of my notes and tell, and tell the ai tell Claude in this case to, to, you know, build an application based on it. And basically by the time I get home, the app's done, he said, it's not perfect, but it's 95% done.

He said, he is what he used to charge maybe $350,000 for. And he'd have to hire three full-time developers, a project manager, you know, a team. And he charged three 50 to deliver it in six months.

He now delivers in a matter of weeks with a $200 a month clause subscription. And while he's doing that, he says, this is where I got it from. He sees the faces of the developers and project manager managers who used to hire for these kinds of things and wonders what they're doing.

So I, I didn't wanna put, I see dead people, but I see dead roles. I see dead roles, I see dead org charts. But then what do you think is the replacement?

Where's the what? Because there will be a replacement, there'll be a different side. Yeah.

It's gonna be a different role, a different job, maybe a different comp formula. Um, but, but there will, there everything I'm hearing from our, my technical friends who code even friends who haven't coded in years and are now getting sucked back in because they can build anything they think right, really easily is sometime around November, December, the November release of Claude Code of Claude followed very closely by the Codex Release right then of AI of Che GP Che. GPT has been game changing.

It went from a toy to really the tool. And, and it's not going back. It's only getting better as, as I think it was in the Schumer article for him, the moment was when he realized that these ais are actually now riding their next versions.

Right? And so that's accelerating this, this snowball. Fred, there's, there's two things here that I think are interesting.

So all of us remember the, uh, 1900 World's Fair in Paris, right? Yeah. I think I was there.

I mean, I saw you there, uhhuh some salted popcorn, right? Mm-hmm. Uh, the Dynamo was released there, right?

And the dynamo at the time, right? We used to use steam and centralized steam and manufacturing facilities and whatnot else. And, you know, Faraday invented this thing 75 years before that optimized, you know, through this process of instead of using the centralized steam driven ability to run manufacturing and factories, there is an electrical current DC right through this electromotive force was used to build motors right into a decentralized fashion.

Right? And this decentralized fashion dramatically reshaped and set the stage for the industrial Relu revolution at the time, between 18 90 19 13, 19 15. All of that was an adoption period.

You had to take out all the new infras, all the old infrastructure, you had to reshape the factory floors, right? Distribution mechanisms like, you know, vehicles right? Start to change all of that stuff.

It's gonna take, you know, a window of time for all those things. And we have a very different problem space today that is not physical, uh, from the standpoint of what needs to change. But if you thought about agents and the behavior of this, it's in essence an analog for creating, you know, a digital dynamo that allows us to replace the way that we thought about SaaS or, you know, building software or all of these monolithic, you know, structures to now, you know, people that are not getting a job at Amazon are, are free to go build something for their community in the neighborhood, right?

And it's, it's their responsibility. It's no, there is no corporate mandate to be good at your job or develop skills. That's your job.

And now everyone also has the power to bring that to themselves, right? In this case. And so when you think about that, if we, if we thought about this as maybe a digital dynamo, this is a super empowering moment.

No, we don't all know where we're going. That's fine. But it's up to you and yourself and the ability to take what was once a centralized way of building software or, you know, doing SEO work or all the experts that, you know, charge ridiculous sums of money, right?

Software included, right? To, to build you something that really probably was a premium. Now isn't a premium.

And so the economy's gotta deal with it. Mm-hmm. Job force has to deal with it, skill sets have to deal with it.

But, uh, look, I, I think there's some amount of really healthy behavior here that leads to the next industrial revolution that we can, we can, we can bring to bear. I, I, I Think I, I agree. Yeah.

Fear, hold here, here holds us back. Fear holds back. I mean, the only, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself.

And I think it's a wide open vista, Gina, and I'll end this one here 'cause we're over time, Gina, to your point about the, the, where the next fresh is coming from. Mm-hmm. By the time they get to us, they're gonna be experts, right?

Because they're not gonna wait for us to teach them. They're gonna teach themselves and they're gonna run, and they're gonna go in directions we didn't think of, right? And that's okay.

Yes, it's really good. Yep. Hey, but we've got, we've gotta cycle through here to our next one.

And you know, it's great to have those lofty dreams. But right now, you know, last year, let's face it, agents sucked last year. But again, something's happened in the last, well, this mo mbot, uh, open cloth thing has really, you know, has this become the, the defining moment for the agent era?

Has this really made agents real, you know? And, and, and again, it goes from Ash, just a bunch of humans who are imitating this and animating it to this could be the end of civilization and everything in between. Fred, what, what's your take here?

Well, I, I, uh, I, first of all, I love your article. The overarching theme of this is how does this factor into your strategy? Rather than sort of like the, the beaconing of this new intelligence.

There's a million opinions on whether or not this is revolutionary or evolutionary or whether or not things like Claude bought, you know, open mt book. All of these things become the future of ai. All of that's interesting, but it's not super relevant to actually what's happening.

So when we think about the intelligence factor here, we've created Steinberger created, right? Who, who just got snatched up by open ai mind you, uh, it created a personal assistant in essence. And that personal assistant doesn't just relegate itself to my chat prompt.

It allows the opportunity to access all my communication channels, all my calendars, my email, my everything on my laptop in essence, and all the ways that I interact in the world. And the conversation around the intelligence of this really stems from a very clever way of utilizing context of persisting that context with files that can be influenced by, you know, uh, users that write some of these text files stored, and a fleet of subagents that can utilize shared memory to perform a bunch of things. Data in itself is really clever, very cool.

It's an evolution, not a revolution. There's all, all kinds of elements that have existed for a long period of time about how we do this. But the kicker behind it is because now we can emulate some of the behaviors that we normally perform, right?

The operational emails of this. And, uh, I can choose which, uh, models that I want to use, right? So I can appear more or less in this characterization by the persona I set, the models I choose, right?

The frequency by which I want to interact with things, but all of that communication feels intelligent because why? I can respond automatically on signal with Telegram or WhatsApp or whatever. I can respond an email, right?

It feels like someone is creating some intelligent answers that have an impact on how people perceive me or the business or the collective entity. There's a million risks associated with this, right? Shimmy, I thought your article was great.

Uh, I, I love the fact that we're having a conversation about this as a one level up, not just a dynamo statement. It is, as a digital leader in our, in our world today, how are we thinking about this application to the overall outcome and management of this business, all businesses, and the risk my businesses is going to pursue. And whether or not you have an AI strategy is not whether or not you've implemented ai, which I also thought was, was great.

And, and I think the question that I, I would pose for you guys is a lot of this is user directed, right? We get, you know, skills building and persistent memory and all this stuff we can help influence that. All of us right?

Could actively use this effectively today if we don't have, you know, quad bands or something else to govern that. The question mark isn't whether or not it's intelligent. It's the question mark is whether or not we are intelligent about using it.

That's a great way of framing it, Frank. That is it, gang. So John, let me ask you a question.

Okay? Yeah. I saw a headline yesterday.

I think Nvidia and Meta did yet another deal. Yes. Another, it's hard to keep track.

Yes. It's a multi-billion dollar deal. Building out infrastructure ostensible, well, not Just building out it's infrastructure for, for super intelligence agent Super, We're moving towards super intelligence.

The, uh, the, uh, holy grail that Zucker Zuckerberg's been talking about after expanding their super intelligence lab. Yeah. Depending who you talk to, we may or may never achieve that, right?

But my question, and it, I asked it in this, and there's another twin companion article I wrote on this, on Textron ai, and I'm gonna talk about it on Shimmy says this afternoon, at some level, is it necessary? Who cares if, if my agents could make me more money and, uh, let me be really crassy about it if my agents can make me more money? Is that enough?

Yeah, I mean, you, you, you put it well in the, in your, in your opinion piece. I mean, it's the, this idea, are we behind in ai? It kind of misses the whole point.

I mean, it's the wrong framing. It's basically can these systems through our use, produce measurable business outcomes inside our organization? That's all.

It really matters in the end. This is matter how smart they are. It's how efficient and productive they are.

And that, that's that. I think that's kind of one of the things that always kind of intrigues me is that we have these cost inter iterations of new models talk of super intelligence, a talk of attaining this utopia. It's like, why don't we just worry about being more productive and meeting what the customers want rather than cycling and over-hyping, like, like in our previous segment, Silicon Valley has a lot to answer to in terms of over-hyping what's happening versus the reality.

And, uh, they catch, they, they find themselves victims of their own hype and and they have to explain it away now. But I got another angle on this, Fred, I want to hear your opinion on. I'm gonna peel the, the onion back here and open behind the curtain.

Our producer for this show's young man named Taylor, Taylor Eubanks, Taylor Koka. And, uh, not only does he produce the show, but he's responsible for getting the LinkedIn and the, you know, all of the social media around the show and the announcements and everything that you might see that leads you to come watch Techstrong Guy. And it's a lot of work.

And he came to me today about how can we streamline this? And I said, you know what? Let's use Open Claw.

I want to download OpenCL. Go ask Chad or Claude or whatever you are using, or what's the best way to use Open Claw to achieve this, this, and that. He turned white as a ghost.

He said, wait a second. Should I get a separate computer to put this on? Mm-hmm.

Maybe I should open a different password manager account, not put any other passwords other than what we're going to need here. I don't know. I'm afraid I have my stuff in Dropbox.

Will it get into my Dropbox? Fred, from a security point of view, and we, and this is the other part of this, right? It's a Security Boulevard article.

Mal is MBO mt book, open core. You know, people are afraid, or at least may, and should they be afraid is, is it, is fear healthy? Don't Give it root, never give it root access number One.

That's always good advice, Anne, right there. I learned that the hard way too. But Fred, what do you say?

Uh, I i I think it's, uh, understandable fear. Uh, I think it is, uh, reasonable to, ooh, it means we've done our job over the last 25 years for you to be concerned about giving access of everything you have, all that, you know, which includes a vast number of accounts and tokens and whatever else, right? Maybe even your crypto, right?

Plus all your comms channels. And so does it make sense to be fearful? Sure, but only in the sense that like, I might not really want to jump out of an airplane, but if I'm trained to do it and I've spent time practicing doing it, I'll do it, right?

And it's the, the coaching through the fear of jumping off is really the more of the risk. And sure there's, you know, there's, there's a good idea to use different accounts. There's a good idea to maybe not keep all your critical data on, on this particular access point for this to clearly define guardrails and boundaries for what you want the tasks to do.

And I think for t in this particular case, there's an awful lot of acceleration he can gain from that perspective. And without the pure, you know, everything's gonna be hosed, right? And all of my, uh, valuable secrets, we'll turn up in super db on, you know, notebook and, and, and available for hire, you know, and, and those types of things.

And I think it's a great question to ask because there's a clear need. And by the way, this is exactly what that is meant to do. And even then, right, there's a healthy fear of what are the outcomes in, in essence, can I go back if it doesn't work, right?

Am I starting the doomsday clock right here for me, right when I go turn this thing on and you know, it installs on my laptop and whatever your flavor of OS is, and then suddenly it's paying attention to specific things. We're not just, you know, checking me in for my flight. And then I think there's a way to do it.

And certainly there's guardrails and boundaries that we know about security already, that if we thought about we're giving it to a five-year-old, we would make better decisions. We can do that. And we shouldn't be terrified about having a five-year-old.

I think that's healthy. Gina, what about you? What, because you're, you're usually cautious about this, right?

And you have a healthy respect for ai. Yeah, I'm cautious. And, and I think this goes back to the hype, right?

If we don't really understand how it's doing things, how can you be sure that it's not doing something you don't want it to do? Um, if you think about, please look at my entire laptop and make things so easy for me. Is that a great thing to do?

And my laptop, I would say no. And some of that is because I have not followed my own advice to lock my own laptop down, you know, and, and, and I don't know where it's gonna go. I have client, you know, things on my, on my different end points.

And, uh, so from a business perspective, you have to look even further. Do You know the lawyer? I'm gonna advise you to stop right there and get this, Uh, no.

Exactly right. So I mean, but that, I, I think, um, that's part of the reason for caution is especially if we look at, you know, you're talking about somebody that understands where all the different data is going, that why he's asking you the question, what is this really a good idea? Which was the right thing to do?

But what happens when people don't know if they have bought into the hype that we hear and they just let everything fly in the wind and hang out and, and see what happens. Um, some, that's not a good way to go either. So I think there has to be, and as, as much as I heard this early on, maybe a year or two ago, that you can't, uh, I think there's, I'm a huge proponent, proponent for digital, uh, education and digital literacy.

So if the things have changed so fast about how digital applications and things work, there absolutely is a need to layer on just, these are the basics you need to know about. If you go out and build an app and go all into ai, which you show totally should try, here are the things you're gonna want as your guardrails. So I do think we've done a really good job teaching people security over the past 25 years.

I think about all of the, uh, security training we've all had to take, and how is that, has that really been effective? Or is that a good thing or a bad thing? But it's definitely gonna make people think twice.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? So I think there needs to be somebody to come out on the, on the, just the, the normalizing things. This is a good thing if you take care of things, if you take care of your privacy, if you've done all the things we've told you about for 25 years, you know, so, uh, long way around it.

I, I, I think we have to be worried about security, especially, you know, when we started this whole thing out, I read a really interesting Reddit thread when I was looking into some of your articles. And you, you think about the models that have been built by the different companies and how they originated, they went to the deepest, darkest depths of the internet, which are horrible, really scary places to, to initially build these models. So that's why we have the, the kind of caution about what's actually happening here and is it a good or a bad thing.

Alright, we got a, we could talk about this one a lot, but we've gotta jump to our next one. A third segment today is the Supreme Court select software to shield against ethics conflicts. Sean, my first thought was, is it gonna shield us from seeing their ethics conflicts or is there something that you are gonna put on private airplanes that said, wait a second, Supreme Court justices came flag go down path.

I I, but go ahead. Away. Okay, so I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna upset you.

Sorry, Alan, but I'm gonna upset you. It's okay. So better late than never, I guess, right?

So the Supreme Court says they're gonna use this software to help their justices find potential conflicts of interest to modernize their, how I, how would I say, murky ethics protocols. So interesting and neatly enough, the Supreme Court is about 20 years late. Lower federal judges have used conflict check software since 2007.

And I, I think ProPublica has a lot to do with this decision. Maybe out of, uh, shame or maybe out of a threatens investigations, because we've got this long history in the last couple of years of this particular Justice Associate Justice Thomas and, uh, luxury travel that was unreported, um, relationships with wealthy donors, giveaways, things like things of that nature. So it's a lit I in a sense, they, they finally had to reach it.

It'll be interesting how they implement it and what it, whether it would lead to anything of any substance. But, um, yeah, Mike, who's not here, pointed this out to me. And I, I just, I was shocked how late they were to the party, but then again, I probably shouldn't be, and I'll leave it at that.

Would they check what their spouses are doing too? That might be conflict? Oh, I'm sure they, they may.

Well, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna presume, but I would hope so. I, I, I, I hope so. I don't know for a fact, but I think they would, Don't they have to do the ethics training like all of us do?

Yeah. Start the job? Probably not.

No, no. They seem to, they seem to run by different rules than the rest of us. And I'm trying to be diplomatic about this.

Um, yeah, there's a conflicts of interests that have been gone on for years. I mean, I, I even think I'm gonna negate myself. How about this Alan Abe Fortis?

Sure. You know, he got, he left. I mean, there were consequences for him in the sixties.

Well, I was gonna say that in those days, like, you know, this is similar to, I had a conversation, given today's political climate, you really think Richard Nixon would've resigned? Hell, no. It's a different world.

We, we seem more willing to put up with less than from our public officials. Um, but here's, here's, you know, no one ever accused me of being diplomatic. So let me, let me put it to you bluntly.

'cause it needs to be said. Hmm. Do you really think these justices are doing the things they're doing because they don't realize the ethics of it, or they just don't give a crap The latter.

So you don't have the greatest software in the world. Is it gonna help you? Algorithmic governance is better than nothing, which is, I would argue is where we are now.

Uh, I, I think it just paints a broader picture to me that no one knows how to legislate ai. And it's, it's gonna be slow, it's gonna be punitive, and there's gonna be, you know, a lot of things breaking before laws are put into place. I mean, I always point it, point it out because it just baffled me how, how much we've struggled with it.

But Section two 30. Yeah. Right, right.

How, how much did we nail it with that, and this lawsuit we talked about recently on the show with that young woman is putting it through its paces more than any legislative passed. Yes. Zuckerberg testified yesterday, interestingly enough, he testified yesterday at the same time that news came out that Met is working on a $65 million Super PAC donation to influence both parties over AI regulation ahead of the midterms or just in general.

So there's gonna be a, you talk about companies spending money on infrastructure, now, they're gonna start spending even more money on lobbying. And you're starting to see an Excel Anthropic just did this a couple of days ago. Open, I has already started.

And, but Meta's looking at both parties, they're trying to influence them from, from every angle, Right? But the positive here is the fact that we're aware of this, we know this. Mm-hmm.

We can discuss this, is it adds some light to it. Right? And so I I really firmly believe that the wicked flee when none pursue it, and I would argue, yeah.

And when, when Ai, you know, in terms of legislation, whatever these tools can be used to, to combat what it is that we're, we're in fear of, right? So, you know, there, the battle's not lost. It's just being fought.

I just think, you know, at least there's some awareness here that something needs to change with the Supreme Court because the faith in them is waning publicly. But I would argue we have, the way that I categorize where we are now as a society is we are in a low trust society. Yeah.

We could see the same press conference, we could see the same interview, and none of us can trust what was said. That's, that's a, that's a new thing. That's a relatively new thing that we're at this level.

Absolutely. You know, just quickly, I, I was out this weekend with some folks, and on that note, Ann, it's not just the news conference. We see, none of us believe or don't know what to believe on our social media feeds, on our, you know, what we're getting in our email boxes in all of our, you know, antenna that we receive and send information via whatever the medium it's all subject to.

Is this real? Mm-hmm. Right.

Between the fake videos and the fake news and the misinformation and the bombardment of it from a a million different places, no one can look at anything anymore and say, okay, oh yeah, that's, that's the fact. But that, I would argue with you, that's a good thing because many of us for a long time have looked at information that has come out from the major news sources and have not believed the information that they were giving. So I think part of that is good.

And I, I wish that more people would, everything that they look at, that they would question it and that they would go back to the primary source to see what was actually said and done If they can. I, I There more sources now than never two, you know, right. Gina?

I mean, before we used to have this, a limited number of sources that we trusted and think about Watergate and Vietnam and how we were gullible enough. And it's good to have, um, healthy skepticism. And I think there's so many news outlets.

I mentioned ProPublica among others that are doing work that unfortunately, I don't think some of the traditional media, many of 'em will do anymore or can do. They don't have the resources. Well, many of them are owned by big donors, not mentioning CBS or anything.

But Fred, what do you got? Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think the, the challenge that we have here is actually, uh, inverse in the sense that, uh, if what we're dealing with here is a complete lack of trust in the institutions we've established, yeah. That is the rule of law.

So when we think about whether or not it's relatable to what the latest trending spin is from, you know, X, Y, and Z, if you discount all of it, right, then you're uninformed. If you believe any of it, then you're going to be polarized. And the challenge isn't whether or not that's going, that happens.

That is the problem we have today, is how do you judiciously develop your own opinions. Historically, we had access to information not spin. And now, right, it is sort of a, a discourse and everything is op-ed and it may not even be, you know, human driven op-ed.

So my worry is more along the lines of no one's gonna have a good sense of what is right, what is real. And to your point, shimmy, like what is reality here in this situation? Maybe people turn off like the Truman Show.

Maybe people become so engulfed in this that we're no longer able to make up our own decisions about it. And that's been a conscious decision. I mean, the whole idea of flooding the zone with s**t, that's what it's about to have so much information out there.

Some real maybe, but a lot of it just manufactured and rage bait that we're overwhelmed with data and we're not sure what's information and what's just crap. That's right. I spoke about last week the in acidification of the internet as, uh, Corey TROs book is about.

Um, it, it, this is the problem. Anyway, I'll tell you another problem is we're outta time. So I, I gotta end this one.

I'm glad we made it through without Mike Ard, Mr. Mike, The man in the high castle's off doing something. But, um, Gina, John, and Fred, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for watching. Hey, quick heads up In about 90 minutes, I'll be doing my shim. He says, I'm gonna talk more about this.

Uh, uh, is AI smart enough? Without being intelligent, it'd be a good one. Check that out.

We'll be back tomorrow with more text on gang to end the week on a beautiful Friday. But until then, this Alan Shimel. Thanks for watching everyone morale out.