MSP [] MATTSPLAINED [] MSPx

The penalties for bullying and trolling should be obvious. But how should we be punished for pretending to be on holiday, or holding up everyone’s dinner for a food shot? Written on a tablet, these are Matt’s Social Commandments.

Who controls your mind? With mind-reading technology already showing incredible accuracy, is it time to ask who owns our thoughts?

Produced by Jeff Sandhu for BFM

Episode Excerpt:

You’re already making us sound like machines…
•We are machines.
•But we’re thinking, feeling, sensing and self-determining machines.
•We’re conscious.
•You can press a button or issue a command that will wake Siri or Alexa, but the best those devices are is a one-dimensional representation of who and what we are.
•We haven’t found a way to mimic or replicates that consciousness.
•Yet.

And now we can? This is another one of your killer AI shows?
•There will be plenty of AI.
•It’s weird, isn’t it?
•I talk about 3-D printing twice in a year and I have an obsession.
•We could literally rename this show Matt and Jeff talk about AI and nobody would bat an eyelid.

Or pulse a chip?
•Precisely. To answer your previous question, no we don’t have conscious AI.
•But strangely, and I expect somewhat creepily to some of our listeners, we can use AI in various ways to unlock the secrets of our brains.

Is this like tweaking your DNA in a garage? Something you can do because you can?
•One of the reasons we’ve been so preoccupied with creating humanoid robots is precisely because we have so little understanding of what makes us conscious.
•I’m going to stick with technology rather than philosophy today, mainly because my philosophy knowledge is probably equivalent of a 16-year-old who study selfies rather than philosophy.
•And at least with technology I can lie and makes things up and nobody will find out till later.
•Understanding the brain is a bit like decoding our personality or our sense of self.

The last frontier of medicine?
•I wouldn’t go quite that far.
•Our bodies still contain plenty of mystery.
•Like the appendix. Its only purpose seems to be to create excruciating pain and ruin family holidays.
•We’ve certainly become much better at the routine mechanical parts of medicine.
•If your car gets in an accident you can just pop down to the junkyard and that some panels off another wreck and you’re as good as new.
•Same with people. We can replace arms, legs and the wiggly bits that attach to them.

We can turn our insides into bak kut teh our insides.
•For those listeners who don’t know what bak kut teh is, honestly, don’t Google it you’re better off not knowing.
•It really stretches the definition of what food is and should be.
•Yes you make a valid point we can replace organs.
•We can even perform face transplants, which is incredible, odd and slightly frightening.
•When it comes to our brains were bit like mountaineers attempting to scale at peak for the first time.
•We’ve got maps that take us some of the way, but, on the whole it’s a maddening game of trial and error

All of which is taking us further away from machines that can read our thoughts…
•I’m Setting the scene, and that’s all.
•On Geeks we have to race through the stories. Here we can give them room to breathe.

Technology companies, like people, don’t always make smart decisions. When they make truly disastrous ones, those are the mic drop moments. Today’s show takes a leap through the Portal.

Produced by Jeff Sandhu for BFM

Episode Transcript:
What’s on your mind?
•Facebook. They’ve done something silly, again.
•And this time, it’s a genuine mic drop moment.

The Portal?
•Back in 2012 Mark Zuckerberg told the world that Facebook was not in the business of making hardware.
•Jump to October 2018 and FB is making hardware. Specifically, a voice activated communication screen that works rather like Amazon’s Echo devices.

To be fair, Facebook has been in the hardware game for a few years, since it bought over Oculus, the Virtual Reality specialist.
•Yes, but that was as much about bringing FB up to speed with VR in general.
•Not because the company wanted to become the world leader in moleman goggles.

The Portal device has been on the cards for a long time. Reports suggest it was delayed for 6 months.
•And the reasons for that delay are one of the reasons we’re talking about it today.
•Regular listeners will probably have noticed that we don’t pay much attention to gadget releases on this show.
•So gadgets have to be very very good or very very bad in order to grab our attention.

I’ll take a guess. The Portal is very very good?
•I think the Portal may end up belonging in category roughly alongside the Smart hairbrush we loved so much last year.
•For those of you who really don’t care about these things and who haven’t heard what Facebook is up to this week the Portal and that’s with a capital P, is a smart communication device, Bluetooth speaker, Home hub etc etc with a big screen.
•It’s essentially Facebook Messenger with a screen.

And it’s ugly? It’s slow? It doesn’t work at all?
•None of those things.
•One of the wonders of the particular age that we find ourselves in is that there are very few truly bad electronic devices.
•Yes, of course, you can find yourself in trouble if you opt for those generic brands but don’t meet international safety requirements and all that kind of stuff.
•By and large, anything that comes out of a reputable company is usually half decent in terms of build and design and functionality.
•But that’s not the same as saying you need it or it’s a good idea.

Today Matt & Jeff go back to basics to look at CRISPR and the Blockchain and ask: What are they and how do they work? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Episode Excerpt
You’re looking very decomposed today. Why’s that?
•I don't really spend much time in this temporal reality.

Of course you don’t. You spend most of your time propping up a bar and practising your lies. Why don’t you tell us about black holes?
•You are a little bit grumpy this morning, aren’t you? They aren't lies so much as alternative truths
•As for the black holes, It’s really very straightforward.
•You look at the velocity of the light coming from a dying star.
•Then you account for the friction of gravity, and the density of the planet’s gasses
•The you account for how they multiply as the star is pulled into the hole and the matter is compressed.

Did you just make that up?
•Yes. I’m very good at pretending to know what I’m talking about.
•Usually, if I'm speaking it's a fairly good indication that I'm lying.

Once again. An episode with very few expectations. Where would you like to start today?
•Gosh. It sounds like I've knocked all of the hope out of you.
•Should we start with CRISPR?
•We’ve been talking about genetic modification an awful lot on the show recently.
•Editing out the genes that create certain diseases, all conditions or hacking your body to try and create enhancements.
•And then on the show we keep saying that tools like crisper actually incredibly cheap.

If you don’t really understand what CRISPR is, then it doesn’t really matter how expensive it is or isn’t?
•Precisely. I’m sure a lot of people think that CRISPR is the part of the fridge where you store leafy vegetables.
•And you wouldn’t be wrong.
•It’s not the best analogy but we can use CRISPR to extend the life of things.

Why not tell everyone what it means?
•It’s quite incredible what we take for granted, isn’t it?
•We use this terminology all the time, and it’s become part of our lexicon, yet how many of us know what those initials stand for, other than sounding cool and futuristic?

Technology and a little bit of positive thinking could vastly improve your mental and physical state. How? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Show Excerpt:
On last week’s show we talked about technologies that are meeting evolution head-on and trying to tip the balance in our favour. This week we’re in similarly choppy waters as we enter the world of the mind. In particular, the mind of Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage, an environment so hostile that it has been known to drive MRI scanners insane. It’s time to Mattsplain.

You have another new word you want to introduce this week.
•It’s not specifically about the direction of the show, but while we’re on mental health issues.
•We’re all familiar with terms like sociopath and psychopath.
•Many of us work with one or the other. I know you do Jeff…

Are you talking about yourself?
•I still maintain that that doctor is the real psychopath, and he has no business diagnosing anyone.
•Would I be doing this show if you weren’t all my playthings?
•Not everyone can have empathy. Nothing strange about it.

Your new word?
•Ah. I was ranting again, wasn’t I?
•Yes, well we’ve been talking a lot about AI on the show for the last couple of years.
•So, as I was looking at the stuff for today’s show I was wondering if the AIs we are building and that will eventually build other AIs could one day develop mental problems.

Like the crazy AIs in science fiction?
•I just watched the new Emma Stone show Maniac which is partially about an AI suffering from depression and mostly about not very much.
•One thing we’ve talked about a huge amount, is how machine intelligence differs from human intelligence.
•But you have to wonder if one day there will be a bunch of algopaths, that’s my new word by the way, sentient machines with serious behavioural issues, seeking treatment.

Couldn’t we just reprogram them?
•As we’ve brought up on the show before.
•If we have self-determining machines, those machines may have many of the rights that we enjoy.
•So reprogramming might not be an option.
•I can imagine a future where there is a body of healthcare professionals, human or machine, that deals with the mental health problems of AI and algorithms.

Science is building an impressive toolkit that is enabling us to fight back against Evolution’s darker urges. How? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Episode Excerpt:
You made up a word for today’s show…
•Yes. We’re all about the clickbait on this show.
•Hold tight for 7 reasons why evolution will kill you.

Really?
•No, of course not.
•But we are talking about evolution. We're going to talk about the ways that Evolution targets us and some other ways in which we are starting to fight back.

You’re not going to talk about the giant ants again are you? I keep telling you that Them! is a 1950s B-movie not a documentary…
•You clearly don’t spend enough time on the Internet.
•Look at the way that the local wildlife population has survived the Chernobyl disaster.
•Is it really so far-fetched that radioactive tests after WW2 resulted in giant ants that roamed the New Mexico desert neighbouring towns?
•You’ve got to start thinking more clearly Jeff. Forget your obsession with the lamestream media.
•Take off the blinkers, open up your mind.

I’m not hopeful about today’s show. When Charles Darwin wrote the Origin of species, do you think he ever imagined, well, you?
•Darwin was oddly interested in finches and pigeons.
•My face is often recognised as kittens by AI but I think I’m probably a fair distance away from what he imagined as natural selection.

Does Unnatural selection exist? You may be a prime example.
•As with a lot of things in life: only in Star Trek.
•One of the early episodes of Star Trek TNG – Season two, I believe–featured a bunch of genetically altered children whose immune systems altered the environment around them and caused normal humans to rapidly age and die.
•And of course that’s the easiest way for one species to conquer another.
•Not with anything so complicated as war, but by infecting them with pathogens that they can’t fight.

In a world where money really does grow from trees, are we ready to throw it away and embrace a completely cashless society? Who controls the money if we do? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Wipe your feet and mind your head as we enter a universe where mindless code decides whether we live or die. A dystopia on your doorstep? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Show Links:
https://medium.com/iotforall/the-difference-between-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-and-deep-learning-3aa67bff5991

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/29/coding-algorithms-frankenalgos-program-danger

Excerpt:
About three months ago, Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage claimed that we will soon be living in the Age of Amazon. A world ruled by mega-companies who control every facet of global trade and our economic activity. Has he had a change of heart? Has the algorithm running his thought process short-circuited? To find out, we’ll have to let him Mattsplain.

Now, we’re not actually in the studio together today.
•No. Your new studios have this really amazing facial recognition software.
•And they won’t let me in. I’ve had this problem for years, but for some reason facial recognition software identifies me as a basket of kittens.
•So, I’m recording my side of the show from kulturpop’s bunker inside a dormant volcano.

So, you’ve changed your mind about Amazon and the mega corporations?
•Would you be annoyed if I started yet another episode by saying yes and no?
•I think it’s too early to say that I’m wrong about Amazon, just as it’s too early to say that I’m right.
•What I’d like to do today is introduce new variables into the argument, and listeners can draw their own conclusions from there.
•You mentioned algorithms in the introduction, and that’s really what I’d like to talk about today.
•The intersection of our digital world, these massive IT powered corporate colossi and the uncertain growing power of code.

This is something that you’ve come back to quite often this year. The idea that we’re under threat from machine intelligence.
•Yes. And thank you for not calling it artificial intelligence.
•It’s probably quite important to make a distinction here.
•We often use terms like artificial intelligence comma machine intelligence, Machine learning, deep learning and others, quite interchangeably.
•I’m not going to go into that side of the argument too much today.
•If you are a bit confused about the terminology, there’s an on medium.com by a guy called Calum McClelland called the difference between artificial intelligence, Machine learning and deep learning.
•It’s a quick read and a great primer.
•We’ll post the link with the podcast.

Why is it important that I didn’t call it artificial intelligence?
•Because we’ve had various people calling artificial intelligence threat over the last couple of years.
•Including one of our old friends, the man who likes electric cars and space rockets and makes weird comments about cave rescuers.
•If you’ve been following this show this year, you’ll know that it’s not artificial intelligence in itself that concerns me.
•It’s the fact that the AI or machine intelligence or deep learning – whatever you want to call it –
•It’s the fact that the systems we have now are not intelligent enough that worry me.
•Systems that we are releasing into the world that have an incredible ability to affect our lives but have no ability to reason or to question.

A bit like a robot army in one of those old 1950s B-movies?
•Yes. I’ve mentioned on the shows already, I’ve been reading a lot of Philip K Dick’s short fiction this year, which is absolutely breath-taking for its scope.
•You can see that a lot of it Is him indulging in thought experi

It’s Silly Season. The time of the year when the news goes on holiday. Which means it’s time to catch up on some of the really cool tech and science stories we missed like fiery webcams and livestreamed fatbergs.

Matt's Notes: This is the quiet time of the year for news and developments. It’s been such a crazy year that we’ve had a lot to catch up on. This week, I’m going back to some of the smaller stories, such as the discovery of a new shape, the scutoid, and its implications for building human organs. And why fatbergs, for all their colossal disgustingness, may be the cultural symbol of our times. On with the episode!

Transcript Excerpt:
Are we in the Mattsplained equivalent of a desert?
•That is normally the case most years.
•We get to a point where, sometime during July August and really isn’t anything to talk about.
•This is been such a tumultuous and topsy-turvy year that the stories have kept on coming.
•And as you said, this year I’ve had more to rant about than I’ve had time to rant.
•The silly season has been a chance to catch up.
•And as we doing on and off of the last few weeks I thought we’d catch up on some of the smaller stories and developments that have come out recently.

We have a topic, or topics, I suppose. That means it’s time to Mattsplain.
•Let’s start with some environmental stories.
•We don’t cover nearly as many environmental stories on the show as we probably should.
•One caught my eye this week was from the wildfires that are raging across California.
•The one that that Pres Trump says that because there is enough water fight them and the California fire service says comma Nonsense, of course there is.
•One of things things I can talk about on the show is technology doesn’t always get used for the purpose for which it was originally designed.

This is the story about Daniel Perez, who livestreamed the wildfire raging outside his home?
•Yes. Perez lives in a small town outside LA.
•When the police issued a mandatory evacuation order for the town, the last thing Perez did was to turn on his home security cameras and connect them to the Internet before driving over to a relative’s house in a safe zone.
•As the Flames reached the backyard of this house in the middle of the afternoon, the dead smoke activating the night mode on his camera, Perez was able to watch as the blaze was brought under control.
•What was really nice about the story was that once the place was under control, Perez notice that his door bell camera was capturing a fireman walking up onto the porch of his house.
•And is able to use the intercom to talk to the fireman, reassured him that the house was intact, that the flames had damaged garden but not the house itself, and Paris was able to thank the man and his colleagues for their hard work.

We often talk about our tech infrastructure being very delicate. This story shows another side, that it’s robust enough to work during a disaster.
•That’s the weird thing, isn’t it?
•Wildfire is a very very strange creature.
•I won’t bore you all the details of our story I read about to have a type of roof you have often determines whether or not your house gets burned out during world,
•I can only guess here, but I’m assuming that either the web coverage came along overhead cables along streets that were protected by the firemen or they were underground and similarly protected.
•And Not just the Internet, obviously the power was still running even though the town was surrounded by flames.
•And it’s not the first time this has happened. Back in 2016 another guy in the US watched his house burn to the ground over his WebCam.
•In this instance, I thought it was nice that somebody was able to thank the fireman in person for saving the home.
⠀

Are we heading for a one world order of powerful corporations? Will commercial brands dictate the popular culture of the future? It might not be what you expect. It’s time to Mattsplain.

Episode Excerpt:

As the world becomes increasingly wired, we often hear that culture is becoming more uniform and homogenised. Are we really heading for a one world order? Someone who’s not sure, but is pretty certain that it may not be the one world we imagine, is Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage. It’s time he Mattsplained.

Is it true you’ve had Jeff locked up for the crime of sarcasm?
•In a fake news world those of us with power can bend the judiciary to our will.
•Last week, Jeff said some horrible things about me. They may have been true but I choose to call them untrue.
•So, he’s way this week: I’ve had him locked up for a week to teach him to be more polite.

I assume this has some link to the show?
•You know what they say about assuming.
•But yes, there is a link.
•Nobody seems to know which way is up, right now.
•True is false. Green on red. Orange is not the only fruit.
•We are living in this weird and uncertain age where no one knows the rules.
•It’s like we’re futuristic and medieval at the same time.
•On social media, our lives are there for everyone to see.
•But IRL we’re walled up in castles, behind all kinds of physical and mental barriers.

How is this leading us to a one world order?
•Conspiracy fans are more than familiar with the new world order.
•That’s not what we’re talking about today.
•As you mentioned in the intro, people are starting to wonder whether Digital technology is actually pushing us towards more singular vision of the world around us, rather than allowing us to share and celebrate the differences of cultures around the world.

We’re talking Amazon and Facebook, rather than a sinister plot to take over the world?
•Precisely. Strange thing is, it’s possible that they could end up being same thing.
•No conspiracy, but power still concentrated amongst a handful of companies by virtue of their size.
•We did a show on Amazon and a few weeks back, in the company really is poised to become this global trade monolith.
•Along with the Alibaba group based in China, these two companies are starting to carve out a niche for themselves where almost all of our trade touches them at some point.
•Whether it’s an online payment, an app using cloud services or something we buy, it’s quite incredible the number of the companies and products we use in our daily lives that have some direct or indirect connection to companies like Amazon and Alipay.

But you’re not sure that this is where the future is heading?
•A lot of today’s show was actually a bit of a thought experiment.
•Usually when I do these shows I’m quoting from lots of sources, or at the very least a couple of websites.
•A lot of them to talk about today’s conjecture.
•That’s one of the best things about futurism, you look at the information you have today, he hope that you handle on what’s going to happen tomorrow and use that to project or predict what’s going to happen in 10 or 50 or 100 years time.
•So I can’t cite any particular studies to back up what I’m about to say,
•but if I’m on track, I think a lot of people Will be researching this very soon.