Ghost Murmur Rescue, Terafab Alliance & the Ghost Job Crunch

Hey everybody, welcome to the Techstrong gang, and as usual, we have an amazing assortment of innovations that some of which might be just too much to believe, but are indeed true. But joining us today, Jon Swartz. John, how you doing, buddy?

I'm good. Hi, everybody. All right.

Fred Wilmot, how you doing, sir? Fabulous, sir. Thanks for asking.

All right. And Gina, how are you today? I'm amazing.

I hope you all are too. All right. Awesome.

Well, I got to say, I never thought I'd be talking about this particular type of thing, but apparently when that airman went down in Iran, they used some sort of, I guess, I'm not even sure what it is, it's quantum magnetometry technology to detect a heartbeat in something they call Project Murmur that the CIA had built. But John, you wrote this story for us. What the heck is going on here?

Yeah. How do you say this? This is an interesting, cool, scary story that has a very happy ending, which is a rarity these days in tech or anything in life.

So during Monday's press conference, outlining the rescue of the second American airman that was downed in Iran, the CIA director alluded to some technology they used, and I think Trump did too, to a lesser extent, and eventually this was leaked to the New York Post and was verified by other news organizations. But the CIA, they didn't develop it, Lockheed Martin developed the skunk work project that they call Ghost Murmur, and it's basically long-range quantum magnetometry that literally picks up an electronic magnetic fingerprint of the soldier's heartbeat from miles away. So they used this to find out where this guy was, and in a sense, they were able to isolate his cardiac signature in the midst of a desert.

I think he was hiding in a crevice. Mm-hmm. And, the data that they accumulated was processed through this advanced AI software to filter out the background noise.

So they basically, as one official told The New York Post, here's a quote, "It's like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert. " And to me, this was great in terms of what they did in this military operation, but it also opened up a can of worms, which I kind of want to pivot to, and it kind of makes me wonder, do we use this for border security, hostage rescue, and normal uses in civilian life? It opened up the mind to all these possibilities, but amazing and scary at the same time.

Yeah. And to your point, Savannah Guthrie's mom is still out there, so why not use that to go find missing people, right? Fred, what's your take on this whole thing?

Is this for real, and just how serious can this get? Because ultimately, maybe there's no such thing as privacy anymore either. Well, I think wandering into the private, all the things that can be bad about this is probably an easy thing to do.

The really interesting part about this is that today, most of the time when people talk about this, quantum sensors, they're talking about things that have to be done at cryogenic temperatures, right? Mm-hmm. And so this use of diamonds and the understanding about being able to make this broadly applicable, in fact, mobile, in fact, enables you with very, very low noise ceiling, like in a desert where there's very few things, had a really positive outcome.

I think that's awesome and amazing. This technology's not brand new, but that kind of implication and application, massively new. We use this today for other things, and again, in much smaller fields, right, than the projected 40-mile radius or something along those lines, without getting specific, I guess.

But for things like mining and making semiconductor devices and other things that allow us to sort of get very specific, but also precise, right? And a lot of that proximity is much closer, right? We're talking about things like electrical currents of a heartbeat.

So the part that's really fantastic about this is the scale, the sensor sensitivity, and the signal-to-noise ratio that allowed that to do something like save somebody's life in this particular combat situation. So super amazing. Are there implications like absolutely.

Okay. That may be the CIA expressing an opinion about that. Well, this was the CIA's skunk work, right?

This is the project, long range, yeah. Hey, can I ask Fred something about this? Because yeah, you're right, Fred.

This is a concept that's been around, but so can you walk something for me through? So this relies on microscopic defects in synthetic diamonds? Yeah.

What exactly is that? Yeah. So basically, there's a thing called a nitrogen vacancy that lives in between atoms, right?

And so it creates sort of the harmonics of a sensor to be able to vibrate and in sense, use that capability to project. If you were to hit it with a laser, right, it would basically provide a sensor spectrum that would allow you to look and see where magnetic differences would fill that gap, in essence, right? So-The way to think about it in a simplistic sense would be like, I don't know if you remember that scene in "Batman" where the phone- Mm-hmm ...

turned into all of these devices. The theory behind that from an echo pulse, like a sonar- It's a Christian Bale. Yeah, that was the Christian Bale- You got it ...

"Batman" where they got all the pulses on the screen. Yeah, you got it. So the similar sort of echo location philosophy around this from a magnetic perspective based on the use of diamonds as opposed to the cryogenic strategy, which is much more complex, heavy, and requires very specific fundamentals.

So it's interesting because the notion of synthetic diamonds and use for this is something people are using for lots of other stuff. There's a lot of companies doing stuff here, but nothing like this. I have a question.

Where are the diamonds exactly? Are they in the pocket of the airman, or are they in some sort of application somewhere that we're using, and how does that kind of manifest? Right.

So you get your signature 1911 45 caliber ACP and your diamond. Right? Or deployment, just in case something should happen when you parachute up or eject out.

But, basically what's interesting to see, and I don't know how this would work in that particular context because it's pretty novel. But the philosophy about how the sensor works is clear. How that got wired into aircrafts with the power behind it in order to project all that other stuff, that's just super interesting to find out.

Don't know the answers to that, but would really cool to hear more details. " That's pretty cool. I think that's what the article said, right?

That they used the beacon he deployed, and they used heat-seeking technology to find him. So once they could get the range based on hearing the heartbeat, then they-- So it sounds like the application, the device that was looking was away, and they used every tool they had. For me, it kind of hits home, because my uncle is on the last known alive list from Vietnam.

So I would not want any- ... of his family to go through what my family has gone through. He was captured a month before I was born.

Wow. This is amazing for his family too. John, do you think that they're using this for military purposes?

Because we have been surprisingly lucky in our ability to locate certain foreign leaders at certain times, so maybe. Yeah. Isn't that interesting, right?

I was thinking about Venezuela. I was thinking, how did they do that? How could they pinpoint this person, or how could they pinpoint the exact location of somebody they want to take out in the Middle East?

And I wonder if the fact that they were ready to talk about it, because this was clearly leaked. So I wonder if they've used it before, and they've used it beyond military purposes, perhaps in locating people on the border. I'm not saying they have, but that always scares me.

The military use then bleeds into some, and I hate to use bad-- Sorry to use the word bleeds, but it melds into something else. And as long as they use it for rescue missions and certain type of military tasks, I'm totally okay with it. I'm just always nervous about a wider application of something like this.

No, I think it's reasonable- Our privacy ... to feel and think that way, John. What I would counter with, just to expand that thought, is you have commercial companies doing exactly the same thing.

With no requirements behind it, like the governance of the federal government. And so what I'm not saying is government's going to use everything for use its powers for good. But I would also say we've seen clear signaling from a lot of organizations, companies that are super well-funded, that have global reach, that have the same implications and less of which is being shared or talked about because- Yeah.

These are for the benefits of their organization or their customers, their partners, whomever. So that's totally fine. " And so- But we have to have that.

We have to have that because to get the regulation and the understanding of it, is for someone to think like that, like how do we protect our rights? I'm actually wearing one of my EFF shirts today. It's important to know how far this could take it, and without any kind of checks and balances, it could take it to a really dark place.

So I think it's important, number one, to understand how it works. Because I have questions too, like did they get the pilots to all get an EKG so they knew their individual signature? Mm-hmm.

And maybe, so my dark thoughts when you mentioned, okay, what happened down in Venezuela? Did they break into some medical stuff and get the signature? It's all about figuring out where that line can be, and there's probably going to be a dark place where that line is crossed in the name of national security.

Right. But let me also couple that with, again, commercial industry, right? If you think the federal government has that sort of remit, recognize that healthcare companies and insurers are collaborating together on things like the geolocation of your heart sensors to know whether or not you were the person that were the actual, were you in the house when the fire started, and whether or not they're going to validate your claims- Oh, yeah ...

without your consent in any of those cases. And that's something that you have to wear and can't take off maybe because you have leads attached to your heart. And so-The abuse of technology and power it's everywhere.

Rampant. Yeah. You know what's going to be really popular this Christmas?

Faraday jackets. They're going to sell like You're not wrong, dude. You're not wrong.

There's a thing where people have been talking about what does it look like to be faradayed, right, in that case. And with all of the different internet-enabled devices, with all of the ways that our signatures and electromagnetic radiation is emitted, there's a whole... We're copper top batteries, right?

So how do we quiet the noise? Yeah. I love it.

We're getting a bunch of those, and we'll put Textron on it, the whole thing . There's clothes. They sell clothes already to make you invisible, and I always am looking at the...

The makeup actually looks better, has started to look better, how you can apply makeup to block the face scanning thing. That is super cool. Gina, it's interesting you mentioned about your family in Vietnam, because that crossed through my mind about all the MIAs and- Yeah ...

kind of there's no resolution for folks decades later, 50 years later. And I think about the applications in putting minds to rest and coming to a conclusion on what happened to certain people. Anyway.

It would be awesome if that's possible, for sure. Correct me if I'm wrong, though. This thing does require an actual heartbeat, right?

So, you can't just find- Well, yeah. Now it does. Yeah.

But I'm wondering, going forward, what people will be able to do. In my uncle's case, that's been one of the rumors about his squadron, that they had seen them in certain places. And, I personally think I might have a bunch of Asian cousins.

I don't know, but it's getting kind of we're running out of time, if that's the truth, to find his heartbeat. So those guys are getting kind of old. All right.

Well, let's leave it there, but I suspect we'll be talking about this again in the future. And I know, John, you got to go catch a plane, so I'm going to let you run here. I do, and it's good seeing you all.

I'll see you tomorrow, Mike, on the show. I'll be back in the Bay Area. Have a great show.

Have a safe trip. See you guys in a bit. Thank you.

And we're going to shift the gear as well, and we're going to talk about, well, Elon Musk is back in the news again and has figured out some sort of an alliance with Intel to work on semiconductor chip packaging, and this will ultimately maybe bring two areas of expertise together. One is the folks who can build the chips, and the other is, well, if you look at Intel, the one thing that they're really good at is figuring out the packaging around things to make it, well, easier to manufacture and distribute in all kinds of different forms and functions. But Fred, as you look at all this stuff, is it me, or is it the pace of innovation at the semiconductor level just starting to get pretty rapid and amazing?

I think you're right. The pace is incredible, and if you look at all of the other challenges for water, power, componentry, the geopolitics of how we get chips, all of that stuff, and you look at what Elon Musk is trying to accomplish with the varied companies he's got, whether it's xAI or Tesla or SpaceX or what have you, the demand is absolutely real. And if we compare that to, say, the NVIDIA story, right, we recognize that there's an awful lot of things that if you're going to be able to compete in this, and it's a core fabric of that competition, you probably ought to have some alliances in there that are going to help make your chips available to you in areas that is not your core expertise.

So it's been interesting to see Elon partner here. The Terafab initiative basically suggests that the expanding trends for things like robotics and space flight and the other componentries, the satellite requirements, whether it's low orbit or mid-orbit, and all of the componentry is going to require more and more detailed fabrication. And also as a hedge probably, which requires some of the influx of direct talent and innovation into those spaces in that collaboration to help make sure that the design phase is also accounting for requirements therein.

So it's interesting to think about the foundry and partnership between these two because that is a major sort of pillar planted in comparison to, say, NVIDIA and AMD, and also the competitive and dynamic nature of the AI chip infrastructure market today. So I'm curious sort of the next steps of what this means both from the innovation perspective. Is this a long sort of overdue unlock for Musk?

Is this something that is the accelerant to pour on the fire? How big an impact and how soon will this have on the environment for acceleration and innovation? Right.

So Gina, they're talking about a terawatt of AI compute capability in Texas here for this. And I guess I'm wondering, can we engineer our way out of this AI dilemma that we've talked about many times where we have this situation where the entire supply chain is constrained from the metals that we're using all the way up to the people who are building the data centers themselves? But if we can get in at the silicon level and just change the economics of this thing, does the whole viability of the AI agenda look a lot more feasible than it might have looked last week?

Last week. It does change pretty quick, doesn't it? So I think one of the things is, it's interesting a couple points you brought up, but I like what Fred brought up, too.

We've got-One key player that has aggressively gone out to own the market in how the compute is going to work for AI, but they're not the only. That's Nvidia, right? But they kind of pushed aside Intel, which had their own issues with things going on, pushed aside AMD and the others.

Yes. But at the same time, all of these chip manufacturers have been trying to figure out they're not going to leave that entire wide-open market to Nvidia. They're just not going to do it.

There's going to be stuff coming out this year with those big chip manufacturers that are going to address the problem. So you have a choice in how you get that AI compute going, or however you want it. I think that's what Musk sees.

I don't think he can build a chip from the ground up. With all the other stuff he's going on, I'll be kind to him today. All the other stuff he's going on, does he really have the extra capacity to do that?

Because you look at the things that he has. He's got his robots, he's got his cars, he's got his rockets. He's trying to get to the moon now, maybe eventually to Mars.

Then he's got all the satellites that are going in constellations to provide that edge compute for the entire world. So he needs to partner with somebody who can get those chips going, and what I think he's trying to do is get the chips customized specifically to his hardware. So he doesn't have to worry about having this, that, and the other thing.

He's got the chips specifically honed in on what his hardware needs to do, and he's going to go from there. So Intel's probably like, "Heck yeah. We'll come in here, and we'll help you do all of that, and we'll groosey, groosey grow it," and they'll figure out how to do it.

I think we are five years out from seeing that. Maybe they'll put a rush on it. I don't know.

But if he starts with the Intel chips now, by the end of the year, we might see something. I don't know if we'll see a fab pushing out his particular chips, but I think it's going to be for his particular products. That's it.

He's not going to have something that he markets and sells to the rest of the world. He's going to make his robots better, his satellites better. He's going to get to the moon, going to do something about them ugly trucks.

So he's going to make those better, and we'll see where he puts it. I'm more worried about where the fab's going to go in Texas. We all got bets going that it's going to be in Bastrop, which is the county over.

And that county, I think, is just south of the big Samsung plant that is almost ready. I think that's probably up. But that thing, just to get the walls up and get the construction done, took three years, and they don't have a fab running yet.

So it'll be interesting to see how the operational part of that goes, and that's kind of, to me, where I see Musk. Sorry. Where I see Musk...

I think there's a credibility issue here in my mind, though. Yeah. You know.

The drivers of it. I'll do props to Elon Musk. Sometimes, he gets ahead of his proverbial skis and starts talking about things that don't exist yet, way ahead of time, and whether this kind of comes to fruition remains to be seen.

And Intel usually is reliable and steady eddy, but they too have a certain amount of, shall we say, desperation going on, where they're looking for that Hail Mary pass to become more relevant again in a conversation where they've essentially been overshadowed by Nvidia for several years now, and they're just kind of trying to figure out how to get back in the game. So I don't know. Fred, what's your take?

Does this feel real to you? Because there's another statement that says, well, necessity/desperation is the mother of invention, right? 100%.

I think this is absolutely a great opportunity for Musk's ventures to, I don't want to say privatize, but the question is, do you go out and buy Intel stock now because you know it's going to get acquired? The benefit is really significant. The other part that I think is important about the benefits isn't just that for Tesla or whomever- Yeah ...

under the Musk companies, it's also that it's domestic from a sourcing perspective as part of his initiative. So what does that do? Gina's living next to this problem space, so she's going to feel the power and the water constraints.

But it brings domestic jobs, it brings supply chain to the US, and it brings the totality of that cost down for the things that Musk will be building. So if we are all going to have robots, the conversation is, does this make that more fundamentally cheaper? Not Gina.

I'm happy where I'm at. Not having robots, Gina. Dogs are enough.

Dogs are plenty. So maybe not a robot dog, though. Mm-mm.

So my prediction, though, is we will see a series of similar announcements, probably involving Nvidia on one side and maybe TMSC on the other side, and they'll all lock arms with OpenAI and Anthropic and talk about the wonders of robots and physical AI. And this will be the start of a next wave of semiconductor innovation that maybe we don't see till the end of the decade in terms of it having a profound impact. But it looks like, to me, we are going to innovate our way out of some of these fundamental issues.

And Gina, I know whether or not you want a robot or not, it does seem like there's a lot of work to be done here, and there's a lot of room for innovation. No, I agree, and that's not a bad thing. But I'm not sure that the AI hype is what's leading the innovationI think the AI hype was the AI hype of, "Oh my God, we can do all this and we can get to ASI and AGI," and kind of more of a religious fervor pushing things forward.

I think that there's a lot of stuff that's in the pipeline coming from the chip manufacturers. It takes a freaking long time. It's a seven-year cycle usually to do any of this kind of stuff, from beginning concept to getting it there, from a concept of a feature, so for getting it on the shelf.

So we're at the end of one of those seven-year cycles. We're going to start seeing some of that innovation be real from the chip manufacturers. Then we have to wait for what those chips go inside of, the phones, the servers, everything that it goes inside of.

And a part of me feels like this was a great press opportunity for Intel and Musk for something that's just a partnership that's been in the works, and we'll see where he goes and what he does with it. It does not make sense for Musk to try to build his own chips. It just does not make sense because of what it takes to do it.

So I think it's more of a partnership, and this is where we're going, and the better the hardware gets at doing things, we'll start seeing innovation in things like storage, networking, our phones, those kind of hardware things. Then that will support all of the dreams and hopes and prayers everyone's had for AI, and we can actually put those chips to work, and we'll have the power to do it in a way that will make AI work for everybody. So I think we're seeing the hardware get all ready.

We'll start seeing that. And then on the end of it, because my question is, we just had this discussion about quantum and the cool things it can do. I really thought I would be an old lady in my rocking chair, done with all of this, so I wouldn't have to learn about quantum.

And now I don't think that's the case. I think that's coming faster than I realized. So that's the next thing that's coming, because all of this advancements in the chips, advancements in the hardware is going to open up for, okay, now we have the ability to start thinking about how do we power quantum.

Right. And to your point about that, when I look around at this, I see not only might it be quantum, but there are many types of AI models, and some of them haven't been applicable because they cost too much to do. But a lot of folks are talking about symbolic AI models that are more accurate and generate better responses.

And if I can put a chat interface in front of those, and I can reduce the cost of deploying them and distributing them everywhere, maybe generative AI is not the proverbial hammer looking for every nail. We're going to have a lot more diversity in our AI models and technologies. Fred, am I crazy?

No, absolutely right. And I think the real token on the board here is that when you look at the types of AI requirements for a car, for a plane, a train, a crane, and you look into what the opportunities are for robotics, whether it's robotic suits, it's robots themselves, it's dogs, it's whatever the case from a military perspective or non-military perspective. Those specific use cases are not trying to solve a broad Frontier Labs problem that foundation models are built for today.

They're not trying to assemble every GPU in a data center. It's distributed computing, and it's run in each of those environments to support each of those environments. So instead of the unlock code for how do I build a ginormous data center to do all the things, this opportunity allows all those specific devices.

And if you look at the technologies that Musk is sort of aligning here, you've got Hyperloop. Mm-hmm. Trains.

You've got SpaceX. Yes. Chips, space, satellites, all of this technology.

Then you've got Tesla, automotive. So in all of these places where you would think about the fragility of something like the chip manufacturing infrastructure that exists today, it's not being geared, Nvidia is not being geared to solve those specific problems. Yeah.

So really good exercise to make that palatable. And if it's not privatized by Tesla, then you know what else is going to be great about that? The open source models that have much smaller requirements and much more specificity now become available.

Instead of having to get a Mac Mini or, heaven forbid, you get that Nvidia thing, that's a pain in the a*s set up. But all of those pieces now become available to the common man. So a lot of really cool, if you vision cast a little bit, a lot of really cool opportunities there.

I agree totally with that. And it kind of makes me think back to the discussion we had last week about the data centers. You're looking at these data centers to be built out in the next five to seven years.

Are we going to crisscross with the ability to do just what you just said, and are these data centers really needed for what we need to move forward with technology? Yeah. That's the big existential question.

When does quantum photonics come in here and all this electron problem goes away? Exactly. I do think, I'll go out on a limb here, and I think that we are either already started or are on the cusp of what might become a golden age of semiconductor innovation.

Just think about what's going to happen in the next few years, and some amazing things are going to change the world we live in. All right. Excellent.

With that, I'm going to shift gears to our next topic because it's more near and present, which is what is going on with jobs? So on the one hand, you cannot, including on our own sites, Techstrong AI, you cannot go by a day without somebody writing an article about doom and gloom on the job front with AI. And yet, the latest jobs report suggests that you know what?

We're not seeing any kind of massive shift in increase in unemployment. Some people will complain that maybe it's a little stagnant in terms of hiring and firing, but other folks say, there's plenty of articles saying that the AI impact on theGDP and the economy has been a grand total of zero so far. So Gina, what is your take on what's going on with all of this?

Because some of these indicators are leading and some of them are trailing. So where are we in this in your mindset? I think nobody knows what the heck is going on, to be honest.

So I'm going to start with the jobs news. And if you look at the jobs that were created last month, it's all education, health services, leisure and hospitality. And then the next two big ones are transportation, warehousing, and retail trade.

When you get down to things like professional business services, 2,000 jobs added for the entire country. Information is minus 3,000, government minus 8, other services minus 9. So you look at the professional businesses are taking a beating, and they are taking it because of AI.

People are trying to figure out, do we do AI? Organizations are trying to figure out how are they prepared to move forward with AI. AI costs money to do, and the easiest place to cut, according to these articles even, is getting rid of people.

And I think people have bought into the whole idea that AI can do this now. We can replace some of our people that work with words, people that work in that information society with AI and we'll be fine. However, article's saying that's not the case.

Over-investing in AI is a problem, and getting rid of the people that need to do what they need to do. I really liked Alan's article where he talked about AI temples, which is what he's calling the data centers, which is pretty funny. Of course, his point is we have to lean into it, and that's kind of where I feel it is.

We're at a place right now, though, older professionals, I did not like this article. I didn't like the quote, so I'm glad John's not on to hear me say that. But older people, I have AI fatigue.

Everybody has AI fatigue. Let's just be honest. Everybody's trying to figure out, how do I use AI in my job to make sense of information and create something great?

And at the same time, you'll talk to people that have to use AI. I do product marketing. You'll talk to people who have to use AI in their job to keep up, or they've been mandated to use it.

You get outslop, and you have to go in there hacking like you were editing a junior person's blog post or whatever it might be, content. So we haven't gotten to the point where there are processes around AI that take advantage of the humans in the loop that have very serious technical training and understanding of the markets that they work in to help them apply that to what they're doing. No prompting is going to clean up dirty data and help you fix things.

It's a constant challenge, I can say from experience. AI fatigue, it was very funny, there was a quote in that article. The guy said, what did the dude say?

It's a 68-year-old content strategist. " I don't even know what that means, but I will tell you that tech fatigue has long been a problem. It's new something all the time that you have to learn, you have to keep up with.

We all love keeping up with it, but you get tired, and it's like, well, I'm just going to go grow corn instead of parking here on the forge. Yeah. And that's what I'm going to do.

So we're at this inflection place where the AI hype is starting to run thin. We're actually starting to see how to apply AI in different situations that we have. I think we're at a point where organizations are going to have to start figuring out what is that mix?

Especially for an information society, how can you use this tool that can reduce information so that it doesn't go too far, that the color is still added, that the company still is able to do new things with their information? I think it's a big old mess. I think I blame it on the hype people, and I think it's going to take another few years to straighten it out, just like we're talking with the chips.

That's what it is. Fred, I know you're deep into this, and correct me if I'm wrong about this, but let's just go into software engineering for a second as an example of what's going on with jobs. So we've seen this notion where we used to have what we call the pizza box teams, and it was basically the number of people who could eat a pizza could work on a thing.

So now those teams are getting smaller because there's more usage of AI. " So then they wound up having fewer developers, but more software engineers to sort through the massive amount of code that was being generated. Now, though, we're starting to see AI agents being created to manage the back-end software engineering process.

So is this some sort of continuum that we're on, and it just all depends on where you are on that spectrum? It does. And I think your adoption rate equals the value, right?

So it's a directly proportional line there. From the standpoint of what's available today, just from a software engineering perspective. So Anthropic released this thing called Mystic this week, advertently or inadvertently.

We've had teams and teams of people that have not found these vulnerabilities. So the reality of it is, it's not just optimization and speed from that perspective. There are actually moments here where there is coverage on thought that hasn't been applied.

And so I think when we look at that and we think about the economies of scale, does AI generate some slop in code? Sure. Sure it does.

But you know what? Developers do it every day. This is not a shocking, new state of occurrence.

And so, is the rigor we apply as a functional requirement to ship software any different? It shouldn't be. And the answer is, you go through a test and build and validate and verify as you do all the things, the same way you build software anywhere.

Do you need as many people to do it? No. So my question is, okay, so Gina, so their battery doesn't hold as much charge, and you've been in the industry for 40-plus years, right?

Maybe you just don't want to get on the next curve, and that might have some knock-on effects as what we see from the job rates on where people are doing that. If you look at sort of the monthly unemployment problem space, you would argue it doesn't demonstrate one way or the other, even with the economic chaos that's going on right now given geopolitics and so on. Mm-hmm.

And you would argue that the things that we're saying around AI are contributing to positive job numbers for places that we care, where we need more electricians. We need more folks that are doing construction work because we're building things. We need dot, dot, dot.

Are those folks using AI? 100% they are. Because it also makes the planning process better.

It gives them easier access and faster operation. A buddy of mine owns a construction company, and it's dizzying to me the questions that he asks me about how he can use AI for his benefit. So, I look at this like back to the point of these are examples of how the value chain of any business is amplified when used correctly with these characteristics.

I am much less worried whether or not it affects me personally. This is a requirement. I'm much less worried about whether or not it creates joblessness in some levels of this.

Your adoption is mandatory, and it's not because the job says so. This is the new humanity. And the requirements of your phone, the requirements of your car, your house, everything is going to be dictated by this stuff.

So kind of probably got to get on board, or you are going to go get a Faraday jacket and a Faraday house- ... and you're going to let them believe you. Do whatever you do.

Let's back it up a little bit. I agree. But let's remember that that's not been the approach of the hype.

And people that are not like us in it all day long, they see the hype and they've turned off. " And they were right. It wasn't good yet.

That's the hype speaking. So now we're left with this problem with, okay, and I'll talk about it from the other side of the spectrum, kind of the marketing, the business side of it. Now we're left with, well, what can it do?

And it's the same way. It can do a whole lot of stuff automagically. And it can do things where you can then go in and tighten it up as a person with the experience behind it to make it sound and look good.

But I can do things I couldn't have done three years ago with AI, and I appreciate it. But without a process, if you're in a large organization and there's no process to understand how do we do this, how do we move it forward, how do we keep it all in the same... That hasn't been done yet for the information side, which is really a bad thing for AI in general because the information workers are the one that create the data that gets used to train everything.

So it's kind of the biggest hurdle to getting anything started is this data that's produced or the people that know where it is and know what it is and know how to put it in the right context. So, I think there's some work to be done by organizations to figure out how do we use this inside our organization? How do we get our people to use this?

How do we do just like we did with the internet and email and all that? And it's going to have to be these boring, let-me-hold-your-hand. A big thing I've been talking about with the data centers is I finally get to tell everybody what I do and what I know, and I mean everybody because everybody needs to know.

This is where this stuff's coming from. It's going to be okay. Here's a way to look at it.

Here's the way to use AI in your common work. Don't we want to make sure everybody knows that we don't have to go and fix their AI like we fix their computer? I'm just throwing that out there.

So- I think that's a great point. What I would offer up, too, here is that when you look at sort of the broader impact today and you look at the harmonics of the time that this level of innovation has been around- Yeah ... really around, not generally around, really around, you are seeing in the Digital Directors Network, where we have a bunch of people that are all board certified to talk about certain things, governance, technology, AI, things like this.

The number of inquiries around adding AI capability to the board of publicly traded companies has risen almost 40% in the last year. So you're talking about an average age of 68 on these boards. So if folks at that age, maybe their battery doesn't charge all the way, who knows?

But you're talking about folks that have seen 40-plus years of industry. Yeah. And they're actively seeking people that have this capability to bring to the boards because it is a requirement, because it is part of what is going to make or break the economy of that business.

So I think you're getting that, but you make a good point, which is beyond the business universe, which has obvious implications. There's value chains that equal dollarsRight? The human part of this.

The me part of this. The you part of this. How do we know and when do we decide?

My daughter part of this. AI is the worst thing in the world. Why do you need to know everything about me?

Why do you get to understand and be on all my devices? Why do you- Yeah ... all of those things are reasonable at some level, but the requirements of making sure we understand the implications of using technology, there's no difference than when the dot matrix printer came out.

There's no difference when the internet was born. It just happened very fast, and now we're in that beyond the hype cycle into how do we accelerate up the curve. Right.

And we have to make it real, and I think we have to burn the hype down. Like let's get real. Let's nail it to the ground.

Let's help people understand, and let's lead everybody along the path, and let's not... I think everybody knows they have to understand AI because our lives are impacted. They understand that.

But helping them have a little bit greater knowledge of it, that's one of the things I'm working on right now. I think it's incredibly important that the common people know. Actually, I also like talking about citizeners, so I'm happy to be here.

I am still enthusiastic, but I will confess I suffer from AI whiplash, which goes something like this. In the morning, I'm going through the various stages of grief as I look at the change management issues of AI and what that means to everybody, and sometimes I feel like, as a writer, John and I were constantly writing what amounts to some form of obituary. Wow.

" Mike, you're right. There are various parts of the things that we do today that are, in essence, going to completely die out. And that's not wrong, it's just change.

Yeah. And change can be any number of things. And Mike, here's the thing, to your point, change control.

Okay? No one does this well. No one has ever really done this well.

The hallmark of a terrific organization operationally is they do change control pretty good. And so, now we've added a variable in here that is both going to accelerate what happens when you don't do it well, but also, gives you some of the operational automation that could really solve some of the problems on what this change control looks like. But guess what?

The stakes are super high. It's a double-edged sword and all of the great things that go with that. So it is really interesting to think about, and I try in this particular case, which is counter to my sort of stoic nature, to look at the opportunity, the glass half full, rather than the glass half empty, or that's actually just a digital image of a thing that's not really a glass anyway.

I'm going to leave it there, guys. I think you guys nailed it exactly, so it's just an adventure, and we'll see how it all turns out, because- Exactly ... I don't think any of us know where this all winds up at the end of the day.

Fred, Gina, thanks for sharing your insights as usual. Thanks. And thank you all for spending some time with us.

Please stay tuned for the replay of the Techstrong TV show, which has got some awesome stuff, and I think there's also some stuff about Tech Field Day and networking technologies that you should check out this week as well. With that, we'll all see you again tomorrow.