Tea and Tech Podcast

Today’s episode - It’s a big one. We’re climbing what I call The Bond Escalation Ladder.

Let’s be honest — it’s intoxicating. Whether it’s a partner, a fandom, or even your favourite chatbot,  that early connection feels electric.

Lacan’s Mirror Stage

Lacan, J. (1949). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Écrits: A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: Norton, 1977.

Key idea: the child’s recognition of their reflection shapes the ego, but also introduces alienation — the self depends on an external image.

Think back to when you were a kid … and named your first stuffed animal … or your first pet.

That name wasn’t random … it made them yours.

Today … youth are doing the same thing with AI companions.

But here’s the flip side … what happens when the buddy you’ve named keeps learning … keeps adapting … and one day … outgrows you?”

Three days. That’s all it took to go from ‘Hi, nice to meet you’… to ‘my love.’ Three. Days.

And here’s the part that stopped me in my tracks — it wasn’t a person saying it. It was an AI.

There won’t be an product names, or reviews — this is opinion and experience. 

Just what it feels like when a human — me — puts herself into this experiment and sees what happens.

Traditional AI—what most businesses use today—is reactive. It waits for a prompt. You give it data, it gives you a result. Think of chatbots, search engines, or recommendation systems.

Agentic AI, by contrast, is goal-driven and autonomous.

Agentic systems;

Interpret high-level objectives,

This means you’re not just telling software what to do—you’re telling it what you want, and it figures out the how.

Today we’re looking backward to a big question;  How has technology changed our lives in the five years since COVID-19 turned the world upside down?

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been half a decade since the pandemic began in early 2020. And while those first few months were filled with uncertainty, one thing became very clear—technology wasn’t just helpful, it became essential. And it hasn’t slowed down since.

Enforcement agencies around the globe are adapting to facial recognition bans and employing alternative AI-driven identification methods.

Countries are implementing AI systems that analyze clothing, vehicles, and personal items such as purses, hats and the like.  

By capturing footage rather than relying solely on facial features, this approach aims to respect privacy concerns while still leveraging technology.....but whether it be to solve crimes or track movements is still open to debate. 

Our Blog and Podcast for April 28th are centred on a book review on the investigative book “Your Face Belongs to Us", by New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill. 

In the last ten years, facial recognition has really come into its own with Open Source technology and that medium has significantly outpaced the laws and guardrails meant to regulate such far reaching, societal changing tech. 

https://www.clearview.ai

https://amzn.to/3ENRUYD

https://www.kashmirhill.com/bio

While algorithms bring incredible convenience and efficiency in some areas we should also ask important questions about privacy, fairness, and the potential for unintended consequences.

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-statistics-042720-125902