WEBVTT
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Dear listener, despite my self-proclaimed progressive beliefs, I confess to being a Luddite when it comes to technology.
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I don't want to sound like a reactionary or a dinosaur, but I can't help railing against what I think is dehumanizing and downright dangerous tech.
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Are humans doomed?
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Is the question.
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Or am I overreacting?
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In the opposite corner of this light heavyweight bout, I'm the lightweight, by the way, he's the heavyweight, is today's guest, the best guide to the twists and turns of technology.
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He is he how can I put that?
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He is to tech, what John Curtis is to political maths.
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And if that reference is lost on you, a big welcome, by the way, to our growing contingent of Dutch followers.
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Trust me, this man knows his onions.
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And I'm just not going to explain that.
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Welcome, Will Geyer.
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Thanks very much.
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It's really good to be here.
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And you know what?
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I kind of agree with you though.
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I mean, I've been doing this job for years talking about technology, and we're at this really weird point where we have normalized the very fact that AI could theoretically destroy humanity.
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These companies are still about to become publicly traded companies.
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And just last night, one of them invented a whole new way that its own software was going to, without permission, propagate itself across the internet in several months.
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And it was still seemingly fine for this to happen.
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So we're at this weird inflection point in that I've done this job for 20 odd years and I've always been passionate about technology and getting people involved with it.
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But I can also increasingly back some people's view or argument that this is going too fast or it's going in a way that they don't want to use it.
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So I come to you as a man torn, Jeremy, in that I love technology and I've done this for years, but there's some stuff I simply don't agree with at the moment.
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Yeah, I think that just about wraps it up.
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It's been a surprisingly short episode.
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Thank you for listening.
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Have a lovely day.
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Just one quick question.
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I see it like this.
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Technology knows that I hate it.
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And it goes out of its way to get its own back.
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Can that be true?
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It will eventually be true, but at the moment, this stuff doesn't know or understand your feelings, although it has been created as such to make you feel a connection with it.
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And that's what all these companies are doing.
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They want you to spend more time using whatever it is, your smartphone, your tele, your whatever.
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And they're trying to make you feel more attached to it in various ways.
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And that's the thing that they're doing.
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But there was a really interesting story in the last week or so where, in the terms and conditions for Claude, which is one of the biggest chatbots, they've put in there that you have to be nice to it.
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From November, you can no longer abuse it.
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We're gonna come to that.
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We're gonna come-I caught that story.
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Before we do, having put you on the tallest available pedestal already, just let me tell our listener, who is by the way, Dutch, it turns out.
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I was wrong, I thought it was Belgium, but it's Dutch.
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He is or she is Dutch.
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Nope, be sexist.
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You have been, you are, the tech correspondent for LBC and Global Radio, which is how I've come to listen to you so often.
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You also perform that role for Jeremy Vine on Radio 2, and for the Smart Seven podcast put out by Metro.
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All in all, you explain the latest tech to around 10 million Brits a week through radio, TV, and podcasts.
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All from your shed, which I'm staring at now and won't talk about unless you provoke me.
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There's actually something else you're up to now.
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And I did a bit of Googling, this is just about the limits as far as I'm concerned.
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And I tried to find out about the new Daily Prompt AI podcast.
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And I couldn't find anything, which I'm sure is deliberate.
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So just between us, Will.
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Tell us what it's all about.
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Well, the Daily Prompt was an experiment.
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I'm coming back to it and relaunching it, but I cloned my own voice and used artificial intelligence to create a daily podcast at 6 a.m.
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It was the top five stories each day from the world of artificial intelligence.
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I created a localized model trained on over a thousand pieces of my writing from the last 20 years.
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And it went to the extent of when I was practicing with it, that it was doing all of the kind of cheesy tweed jokes and things that I've typically done in my writing over the years.
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My reticence to run it on a daily basis was quality control in case it suddenly went Nazi without my want.
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But it was a really interesting experiment that, and it's something that I think I'm going to continue with.
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But I've been a lucky guy.
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I've been with LBC since 2012, and I kind of ended up there by accident.
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I've got to work with some incredible presenters and folk there at the station.
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One of my dearest friends in life now is now Clive Bull, feels like an uncle, an older brother, or something to me.
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And I kind of pinch myself in that Clive's far too modest to admit just how great he is at doing what he does.
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And that's the thing with him.
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But I've yeah, I've done this for years and I've got a way with talking about technology, and it's grown from LBC to Radio 2.
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I turn up on Times Radio.
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I've just started a thing with the afternoon shows on Channel 5.
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So Jeremy Vine, I'm at all right.
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I'm doing more stuff over there.
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And it's like, it's not really a job, but it's fun.
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I love explaining all of this stuff and getting my head around it.
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I know what you just said about your own quality control.
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And I'm thinking myself, well, wouldn't it be a damn fine idea if there were rather more quality control in tech?
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Okay, we'll come back to that.
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Well, actually, no, the question I want to ask you now.
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I'm all over the place.
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I'm so excited to be talking to you.
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You were talking just now about you saying no to something because it wasn't up to the standard that you want.
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And it occurs to me that consumers occasionally also say no.
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You know, I mean, I'm so ancient that my first kind of reference point for that is the infamous Sinclair C5.
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But you'll have many, many more recent examples of things that didn't take off.
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So I just want to ask you one question very quickly.
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Is there any chance that enough of us will refuse to converse with pretend voices?
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We won't allow the fridge to make our food orders, and we'll say no to having technology implanted beneath our skin.
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Is there any chance of us standing up to it?
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It's a really interesting point that you make, because I hope sincerely that loads of us do say no and stand up.
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But if you look at, as an example, Deezer, who are the French version of Spotify, France always has its own versions of stuff still, which I'm quite proud of the French for kind of setting up yours to globalism and doing their own versions.
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There were some numbers recently that 70% of all new music uploaded to Deezer has not been created by a human being.
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Now, that could be terrible if you're a musician or a talented young person who wants to get a gig.
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But the reality is, Jeremy, people are listening to it.
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They might be listening to it as background music dinner jazz, but they're not rejecting it yet.
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So for all this say of we're going to smash the printing presses, we're going to reject AI, too many of us are still now so in bed with the technology and love using it for a variety of reasons.
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And I'm morally torn every day I play with AI because I know at some point, at least one of the people I've happily worked for over 20 years is going to call me and say, yeah, we've decided we're going to use an AI voice to do some of this technology explaining because we can just get the AI to produce it.
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Not the groups that I currently work with, but there are already radio stations experimenting with AI voices for news and sport.
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And boy, give it the name Loughborough, give it the town name Loughborough, or try and get it to announce some of the names of some Serbian tennis players, and you'll really see just how not ready for action AI currently is.
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But it's getting there really quickly.
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And I think we are going to get to a stage where there will be a movement against the technology, and there'll be a movement against some of this stuff getting into our lives.
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But at the same time, there's so many really good benefits for people to be online if you make it easier for them.
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But not everybody's ever going to want to do it.
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And I should I'm sort of torn into saying everybody should go online.
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You should have freedom of choice still, you shouldn't be forced.
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Yeah, kind of agree with that.
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I was thinking the other day that if I still ran my agency, by now I'd put a strap line at the bottom of emails saying something like powered by humans, or this is a human organization, or something like that.
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And my guess is that there will be quite a lot of that, but it will divide.
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And you know, like all the other divisions we've got, there'll be people like me who can justify going to a real shop and dealing with human beings, and we'll be prepared to pay a premium for it.
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And an awful lot of people won't or can't, or think that that adds to the complexity or the inconvenience.
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And so we'll go down that path.
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And I think it's the biggest schism that we're gonna see.
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So now that we're firmly established on negative grounds, I I want to come back to that news story.
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And in fact, three stories that have been in the news recently.
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So the first one you mentioned was about how we behave with bots.
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And I was thinking about that.
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Okay, so the insert whatever word you like, the instruction, because I thought that's how it came across that we can't be rude to bots.
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And I just stopped for a moment and I thought, well, are we not used to measuring civilization in terms of things like communication skills, like vocabulary?
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It's a mark of how far we've come from other kinds of being.
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And now we're using AI to write job applications, to write essays, to write letters of complaint.
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It's not me, by the way, I very rarely write letters of complaint, and when I do, I enjoy writing.
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And now we've been asked not to say swear words to bots.
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So the question, Will, and I can't help putting it this way, is where the fuck is all this heading?
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I think you've put that perfectly.
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What I would say about this particular story is the fact that you have to be nice to your chatbot was conveniently the bit of these terms and conditions updates that everybody covered, because at the same time, it's going to ban you from making a uh chemical weapon, it's gonna stop you from using it for propaganda purposes, and it's also gonna stop you from blackmailing politicians.
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Those are some of the other conditions that are also written into this set of terms and conditions.
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But I think the reality is, right, mathematical formulas and artificial intelligence cannot feel anything.
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It shouldn't get remotely upset if you're short with it or direct in your answers.
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In fact, Jeremy, some people say saying please and thank you to AI actually uses a boatload more energy in the processing and the compute of this stuff, right?
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So being polite to it, you're actually doing more to damage the planet, whether or not you believe in climate change.
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But it's this um ampramorphization of the technology, trying to make it feel real.
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And that's what I think the only reason this company has done this is all of these companies burn through billions of dollars.
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None of them have made a penny yet of profit.
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And they're gonna need trillions of dollars to get to this stage where it all starts thinking for itself.
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So they're selling the sizzle.
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You've been in this game a long time, they're trying to do a PR job, and this is part of the PR job.
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Struggling not to fall into a deep depression at that thought.
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Listeners will know that I swear from time to time.
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I'm a bit of a fan of swearing, not gratuitously.
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But it's one of the things that lets us get stuff off our chest.
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Yeah.
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Okay, so language is going the way of the devil.
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I mean language as in nuance, as in using our own words rather than relying on machines.
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Next news story was the one about hackers raising the temperature of fridges and freezers in French supermarkets, so that they went up to 50 degrees Celsius for six hours, meaning that everything had to be thrown away.
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And according to what I've read, it's because the remote control software, thing that enabled people to do this from a desk or from their phone for hundreds of supermarkets, that software was known to have a weakness.
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Yeah, and it was never updated.
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So the point is, whatever their motives, we don't yet know the hackers' motives.
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I don't think there was any ransom or anything like that.
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They are always going to find new opportunities.
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So, from your point of view, Will, and this isn't a story about French supermarkets, because we all know by now that we can be the indirect victims of hacking with our bank accounts, with whatever.
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What's the solution other than my favorite solution, which is to de-digitize everything?
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Digitizing everything would be a solution which would cost society a lot of money.
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And that's the challenge, and that's why everybody's really interested in digitization.
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Just earlier today, I learned a really interesting statistic.
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Well, I think it's interesting because I'm a nerd.
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Every year the NHS still spends 200 million pounds on sending letters or text messages to patients.
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If they persuaded more of the people to use the NHS app, they could save hundreds of millions of pounds.
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And soon, if you look at that across everything that's going on in society, the numbers are really appealing.
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So I think the bigger issue, Jeremy, is how digitization is handled.
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There's this sort of everybody's got to go and do it.
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You've got to pay.
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Like I live in the middle of nowhere in Wiltshire.
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And if you go and pay on some of the parking machines in the local towns, you've got to use a QR code and do all of these things.
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But nobody checked the bloody mobile phone signal.
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So let's just say you're my 75-year-old dad, and you go somewhere and you're like not that confident with a mobile phone anyway.
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You whip your phone out, you try and get this damn thing working, but there's no bloody mobile phone signal because they've not checked the provision.
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There are lots of problems that get in the way of making this sort of transition a lot smoother.
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There's a lot more that can be done, and people should get help and support.
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I'm kind of almost old enough to remember when the BBC did its whole computers for schools thing in the 1980s, and you had a series of documentaries and programs about the home computer and getting them for schools and stuff.
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Nothing like that has really happened for a period of time.
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And there is this assumption that everybody is going to go digital eventually.
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But there's millions of homes who haven't for a variety of reasons, and some never will, but it's how they're tackled.
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But I don't think personally switching off everything is the answer.
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But there are also other examples of where digitization goes mad.
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You can buy a smart kettle now, Jeremy.
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So you can get a kettle that you can switch on remotely.
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Somebody got one of these and that had a software problem on it.
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It took them 13 hours.
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Why the f would you spend 13 hours fixing a kettle when you can boil a bloody pan on a hob?
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Do you see what I mean?
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So, tech for tech's sake, I'm not the hugest fan of, but digitization and potentially more efficiencies, as long as you bring as many people in society along with you, makes a lot of sense to me.
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You clearly win that round.
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I can't argue with that.
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I'm not, I'm not, I don't want to be.
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But I know what you mean, right?
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Because I want to just agree with you in that there are so many things that are so flipping frustrating about the modern world and this rush into technology.
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But if somebody turned it around the other way and said there's a half-hour video or a 20-minute thing, or Jerry from the end of the road's going to pop round your house and show you how to use it, it will be so much easier.
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I completely agree.
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And it's the most obvious example, by the way, of an idea I had trying to interest people in in the last election, and we'll probably do so at the next one, which is all based on the idea of two-way mentoring.
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So the person who's had quite a long working life picked up quite a lot of skills, quite a lot to share, but doesn't really understand anything that happened after 1990.
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Um that person would benefit enormously from listening and spending time with somebody at the outset of their career for whom everything is entirely understandable and sensible.
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And so they would share some knowledge.
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There was a piece in the um Financial Times, and I don't normally read it, but somebody shared it with me.
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I was impressed.
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You shouldn't have said that.
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Well, that's one of the things I learned when I was working at Facebook many years ago.
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Lots of people like to share economist content on social media because it makes them look clever.
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That was the only reason the economists could work out why so many people were sharing their content because they weren't buying the economists, they weren't subscribing, but they were sharing it to look in the note.
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The point I was going to make about the FT, they did a piece recently about the so-called rise of the digital PA.
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The fact that there's almost like a dark economy in the UK where people like me, like last night I had to drive a 45-mile-round trip to ensure my dad's updated YouTube account would work on his telly.
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Now, I'm absolutely happy to do that because I love my dad and he's just got out of hospital and I wanted to look after him.
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But there are people like me around the UK doing so much of this stuff that you could almost kind of quantify or recognize the ability for people to get access to help and support on various issues about training.
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A mate of mine, uh, who's a few years older than me, who was a magazine designer, does a day a week now at the local library in Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire.
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And it's one of these kind of things where it's like, come and learn how to use the internet or do a tech thing.
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And I sort of jokingly said, not many people can come to that before I really started thinking about this problem.
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I went there, they were queuing out the bloody door because they want people want help and advice and they're nervous to do stuff or they feel terrified because every story in the press is another data breach, another hack, people losing their money, elderly person getting scammed for life savings.
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Technology is scary.
00:21:00.960 --> 00:21:01.680
I get that.
00:21:01.839 --> 00:21:02.480
I mean, I agree.
00:21:02.559 --> 00:21:04.720
I also know Brad put on Avon, by the way.
00:21:04.799 --> 00:21:07.759
And um I think it's a gorgeous place.
00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:12.799
I could hardly think of anywhere better to offer that service, to be honest with you.
00:21:13.119 --> 00:21:19.440
Let's move on, because another story that's in the news now is in effect all to do with social media.
00:21:19.680 --> 00:21:32.640
And what happened, I guess everybody will be familiar with the story now, is that a vulnerable man filmed himself going into a tiger enclosure and was then mauled to death.
00:21:33.119 --> 00:21:41.680
And I'm not necessarily the next example I'm gonna give isn't necessarily the same thing, but it is possibly on one level.
00:21:42.240 --> 00:21:52.000
We see pictures of people driving the wrong way down a motorway for kicks or for clicks, I suppose I should say.
00:21:53.039 --> 00:21:59.599
So the point is, and I'm not talking about the man in the in the tiger enclosure because we really don't yet know what.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:01.920
What was going on if we ever do.
00:22:02.240 --> 00:22:17.920
But the idea of doing incredibly risky things in order to get an audience on social media or be interesting on social media that has gained a lot of traction.
00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:22.160
It seems to me that discouragement ain't gonna work, policing ain't gonna work.
00:22:22.400 --> 00:22:29.599
So the question to you, Will, is can any form of regulation stop these things happening?
00:22:29.920 --> 00:22:34.160
I don't want to dwell on the tragic story, but I don't know if you've seen it in the last number of hours.
00:22:34.319 --> 00:22:46.480
Donald Trump posted an AI-generated version of that video replacing himself with the man who was mauled to death, fighting off a tiger and posting it to his social media.
00:22:46.640 --> 00:22:49.039
I'm not using Donald Trump as a good example of anything.
00:22:49.200 --> 00:23:00.880
But when you've got the leader of the free world doing something like that, you really are screwed when it comes to checks, balance, and decency on social networks.
00:23:00.960 --> 00:23:16.319
And that's the tragedy of this, is that we've had these examples, particularly it started in Ireland where people started driving the wrong way up the other side of the road for notoriety, and gangs were competing against each other to get TikTok views.
00:23:16.400 --> 00:23:21.440
And then we've had a number of tragic cases and stories where people have died as a result.
00:23:22.000 --> 00:23:32.319
It's hard to know what to do in these situations because the social networks probably need to do more to stop this stuff propagating.
00:23:32.880 --> 00:23:39.920
But when you've got, and I'm going to go back to that tragic case with the tiger because the young, the young man involved was uploading his own content to the internet.
00:23:40.240 --> 00:23:42.960
So it was widely spread across all the platforms.
00:23:43.119 --> 00:23:55.279
But rather than the platforms going, right, let's pull this down immediately, it's got into the hands of so many people, including the president of the United States, who've chosen to use it for their own specific purpose.
00:23:55.440 --> 00:24:03.279
So I don't think you'll ever going to be able to get the genie back in the bottle around kind of gamifying these platforms.
00:24:03.440 --> 00:24:13.680
But I think what's important is certain platforms over recent years have put financial incentives in for people to upload content and share it.
00:24:13.839 --> 00:24:23.599
So those people that were making those videos on TikTok of racing cars on the wrong side of the road, if they got loads of shares and likes and comments, they would have got a payout for it.
00:24:23.759 --> 00:24:29.920
And that can be quite appealing if you've got a shit job and you're not earning money to kind of have another way of making money.
00:24:30.160 --> 00:24:39.200
A lot of that kind of mechanism, paying for views, etc., is being stepped on because they know that it fuels bad behavior.
00:24:39.440 --> 00:24:45.200
But I don't know how you fix a problem like this, Jeremy, if you've got the American president getting in on the game as well.
00:24:45.519 --> 00:24:48.480
Yeah, we just don't talk enough about Trump, do we?
00:24:48.720 --> 00:24:51.519
He's responsible for so many of the dreams I'm having now.
00:24:53.200 --> 00:24:57.759
It just turns the stomach and every other organ just to think about him.
00:24:57.920 --> 00:24:59.200
Let's move on from him.
00:24:59.359 --> 00:25:08.400
By the way, I was one of, I think, 12 people across the nation who went to see the film Social Reckoning last weekend.
00:25:08.640 --> 00:25:09.759
Nobody's going to see it.
00:25:09.839 --> 00:25:11.519
And actually, I think they're right.
00:25:11.680 --> 00:25:13.039
They shouldn't go and see it.
00:25:13.119 --> 00:25:13.839
But it nonetheless.
00:25:15.039 --> 00:25:16.720
I really enjoyed it too.
00:25:17.039 --> 00:25:19.279
Without going aside, I used to work at Meta.
00:25:19.680 --> 00:25:24.640
And um the weekend before I started my job, I watched the first film, The Social Network.
00:25:24.799 --> 00:25:29.839
And then I was meeting people at the company who were being played by actors in the film.
00:25:30.079 --> 00:25:34.880
And I know people being played in that film by people are people I have personal experience with.
00:25:34.960 --> 00:25:36.880
And some of the portrayals are quite accurate.
00:25:37.200 --> 00:25:47.440
Well, I thought the Zuckerberg actor was um well, I'd no idea, I'd no way of saying whether it was over the top or understated, but it was pretty bloody scary.
00:25:49.839 --> 00:25:50.640
Oh god.
00:25:51.039 --> 00:25:54.880
I just think that I'm not sure it stands up as a Hollywood movie.
00:25:55.119 --> 00:25:56.559
I mean, that's the only point I'm making.
00:25:56.720 --> 00:26:14.960
But it was about tech bros manipulating social media for ever bigger sums of money, which they get from advertisers.
00:26:15.759 --> 00:26:26.799
Which interests me because I'm thinking, well, actually, this naive bit of me hopes that enough consumers won't consume something that is so obviously destructive.
00:26:27.119 --> 00:26:45.920
But there's another bit of me, maybe a more practical bit of me, although still idealistic, that thinks surely advertisers will one day say to themselves, hang on a second, do we really want to be associated with this kind of overt manipulation?
00:26:46.319 --> 00:27:10.880
So it all goes back, I suppose, to guessing which way human nature will go, guessing which way regulation will go post Donald Trump, and also thinking, well, I imagine kids these days in this country and probably all over the place are now getting quite a lot of good education to warn them of the dangers.
00:27:11.200 --> 00:27:20.559
So is it just a case of going through this Wild West type phase and then we'll come out reasonably intact at the end?
00:27:20.799 --> 00:27:36.799
Or am I right in my weaker moments just to feel so bloody depressed and fall into the trap that people of my age fall into, which is to end up saying, bloody hell, I'm glad I'm not 20-something now.
00:27:37.200 --> 00:27:55.200
Yeah, I think it's the 20-somethings now that I've got the real issue and the real concern for, because they've got no comprehension of life before the internet, and they're the generation that have kind of got to adulthood without any sense of the checks and balances.
00:27:55.359 --> 00:28:08.880
And unpacking kind of a bit of what you were saying there, everybody now knows the purpose of social media is to make money for these tech companies and the dangers of it, but we don't seem to be leaving it in any kind of numbers.
00:28:09.039 --> 00:28:14.480
Yeah, some people have left, but it's a bit like veganism, like people go, oh God, I vegan, it's brilliant.
00:28:14.640 --> 00:28:26.240
The number of people who go, Yeah, I've left Facebook, and then six months later you see them back on their profile, liking Auntie Jean's birthday, because everybody is so interconnected in these platforms.
00:28:26.480 --> 00:28:32.799
On one level, it's actually quite an easy way to see what's going on with long-lost friends, lovers, families, etc.
00:28:33.039 --> 00:28:33.279
etc.
00:28:33.519 --> 00:28:33.839
etc.
00:28:34.240 --> 00:28:38.880
But on the other side of it, you've got the impact on society.
00:28:39.279 --> 00:28:42.079
The advertising point is intriguing.
00:28:42.400 --> 00:28:52.319
Advertisers haven't yet left Meta's platforms, despite all the concerns and the massive court cases in the US and everything else that's happened.
00:28:52.640 --> 00:29:01.680
People left X, Elon Musk's platform, for a while when he was doing the whole white supremacy thing and talking, you know, in the way that he was on the platform.
00:29:01.839 --> 00:29:10.240
But they seem to have come back to X as a platform because it's still got a large engaged audience, mostly of white supremacists.
00:29:10.480 --> 00:29:12.880
So I don't know where this goes.
00:29:13.200 --> 00:29:22.799
My daughter at the age of eight, I think she's gonna have a far easier time because it's gonna be clear that she shouldn't be using the platforms.
00:29:23.039 --> 00:29:33.200
The kids who are kind of like 14, 15, 12, 13, 14, 15 at the moment are gonna be in this weird situation where social media gets banned in March next year for under-16s.
00:29:33.359 --> 00:29:36.160
But I've got no idea how you get the genie back in the ball.
00:29:36.400 --> 00:29:42.319
It hasn't worked in Australia trying to stop a number of those kids that really wanted to stay on the platforms.
00:29:42.480 --> 00:29:43.839
But maybe it's not for them.
00:29:44.000 --> 00:29:53.039
Maybe it's for eight-year-olds like my daughter and generations forward who will grow up with a more balanced use of the internet and a more balanced understanding of his dangers.
00:29:53.519 --> 00:30:01.599
It's hard not to think that this particular generation we're talking about hasn't had a really rough time.
00:30:02.079 --> 00:30:09.279
All the economic stuff, housing, now jobs, difficult to find, Brexit.
00:30:09.839 --> 00:30:15.759
I should tell my producer, by the way, afterwards that okay, I did mention the B word, but it's the first time for ages.
00:30:16.079 --> 00:30:21.119
And they've had to cope with the C word as in COVID, the T word as in Trump.
00:30:21.359 --> 00:30:23.279
They've had to cope with an awful lot.
00:30:23.759 --> 00:30:25.519
My God, they need help.
00:30:25.839 --> 00:30:26.480
I'd agree.
00:30:26.960 --> 00:30:27.920
I definitely agree.
00:30:28.640 --> 00:30:38.960
Well, I'm more depressed now than when we started, so no, I I'm not really, because even when being downbeat, you are such a cheery, life-enhancing person.
00:30:39.119 --> 00:30:40.319
That's why I listen to you.
00:30:40.799 --> 00:30:44.079
Because you don't come across as cynical, even if you are.
00:30:44.559 --> 00:30:49.839
And I've spent most of my life trying to be less cynical than I started off.
00:30:50.160 --> 00:30:52.400
And yeah, I I I think it's worked.
00:30:52.559 --> 00:30:56.480
I want to end up, Will, with some um quick fire questions.
00:30:56.880 --> 00:30:57.200
Sure.
00:30:58.000 --> 00:31:01.279
We've started an occasional feature on Just Between Us.
00:31:01.599 --> 00:31:05.440
And you can connect this to technology if you want to, or not.
00:31:06.400 --> 00:31:06.880
Question.
00:31:07.839 --> 00:31:14.160
What's the best idea you've ever had that you've done nothing about?
00:31:15.359 --> 00:31:21.920
I've always done something with my ideas, even if the decision was never to take them.
00:31:22.240 --> 00:31:31.680
And one of the ones that I really wonder what would have happened, I was all set to move to New York, and then for one reason or another, I decided not to.
00:31:31.839 --> 00:31:36.799
And I wonder how inherently different my life would have been if I did that.
00:31:37.039 --> 00:31:40.079
But I think I'm content in my own lane to a degree.
00:31:40.240 --> 00:31:45.920
I haven't come up with what I think is the solution to global poverty or the next biggest issue.
00:31:46.160 --> 00:31:54.559
But I often say to my friends, for somebody that can come across as a bit one-dimensional or dense on occasions, I think a lot about everything that I do.
00:31:54.720 --> 00:31:57.279
I overanalyze everything.
00:31:57.759 --> 00:32:08.000
I am genuinely astonished, given our different starting points with technology, quite how much you and I have in common.
00:32:08.160 --> 00:32:10.400
Well, I've always felt strongly that we would.
00:32:10.480 --> 00:32:12.400
We're from different generations.
00:32:12.720 --> 00:32:16.799
But it's like the old phrase, two nations divided by one common language.
00:32:16.960 --> 00:32:25.200
When I work with Americans, we both had the same language, but then most of them could not understand what the hell I was talking about at various points in my life.
00:32:25.440 --> 00:32:29.680
But I'm a believer in making connections with just like you were saying, right?
00:32:29.759 --> 00:32:33.680
With different generations, because I can learn so much from somebody like you.
00:32:33.839 --> 00:32:39.440
I've learned stuff from Clive, I learned stuff from Steve Allen, all of these great people that I've had a chance to work with.
00:32:39.839 --> 00:32:41.119
Feeling quite emotional now.
00:32:41.359 --> 00:32:42.480
Okay, second question.
00:32:42.720 --> 00:32:43.039
Yeah.
00:32:43.359 --> 00:32:48.480
What's the silliest new tech product to hit the market?
00:32:48.880 --> 00:32:59.920
I once saw, and I never quite worked out why on earth you'd need this, a kebab spit that ran on the USB of a computer.
00:33:00.160 --> 00:33:06.960
And the USB, for those who might be a bit like Jeremy, is the bit that you plug the mouse or whatever your accessory is.
00:33:07.119 --> 00:33:13.440
And I kind of got around the technology and thought, you must be getting quite a bit of power draw from that to rotate a slab of meat.
00:33:13.599 --> 00:33:25.519
But I've never quite understood exactly why you'd want a uh USB powered kebab spit, but I saw it one year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and I've wanted one ever since.
00:33:25.920 --> 00:33:27.200
Well, now's your chance.
00:33:27.279 --> 00:33:29.200
I imagine there are quite a few lying up.
00:33:29.519 --> 00:33:30.799
Oh, 50 on eBay, maybe.
00:33:31.519 --> 00:33:32.640
Yeah, go to eBay.
00:33:32.799 --> 00:33:34.400
God, I never thought I'd say that.
00:33:34.640 --> 00:33:35.680
How ridiculous.
00:33:36.000 --> 00:33:36.799
Final question.
00:33:36.960 --> 00:33:39.119
This is the detox question.
00:33:40.240 --> 00:33:41.680
What do you do?
00:33:42.000 --> 00:33:48.480
And don't pretend that you just resort to one of the machines behind you that I can see.
00:33:48.720 --> 00:34:02.160
Listeners, he has an array of gaming machines behind him that makes it look like the corner of actually either a sort of development space for the gaming industry.
00:34:02.480 --> 00:34:04.079
Or no, it's not a museum.
00:34:04.160 --> 00:34:05.119
It looks fairly up to date.
00:34:05.440 --> 00:34:08.000
I was aiming for 80 seaside arcade, Jeremy.
00:34:08.079 --> 00:34:09.199
That's what I was aiming for.
00:34:09.519 --> 00:34:11.119
Okay, it does actually.
00:34:11.280 --> 00:34:15.440
I've only been into one of those recently, and I'm not prepared to tell you that story.
00:34:15.760 --> 00:34:22.960
So that is not an adequate answer to this detox question, which is what do you do to get away from technology?
00:34:23.280 --> 00:34:24.159
I'm really lucky.
00:34:24.320 --> 00:34:25.679
I live in the countryside.
00:34:25.920 --> 00:34:32.960
Looking outside my window, we are one of six houses next to a forest.
00:34:33.519 --> 00:34:41.039
And I have to thank Boris Johnson for his fiber optic cable that came to my door because it transformed my life and enabled me to move here.
00:34:41.199 --> 00:34:47.440
I've got faster internet here than various BBC studios have in London, so it makes no sense, but it changed my life.
00:34:47.679 --> 00:34:56.400
My life is so connected because even on weekends, I'm talking about tech on the radio or TV or whatever, or reacting to stories whenever they are.
00:34:56.559 --> 00:35:05.360
So when I get away from technology, I try to have at least a couple of hours a day where I'm not looking at my phone before I go to bed.
00:35:05.599 --> 00:35:08.960
I try to do all of the bits of advice that I'm telling people.
00:35:09.119 --> 00:35:15.199
I fail sometimes hideously when I'm talking to Clive Bullock for three in the morning after some breaking news.
00:35:15.440 --> 00:35:24.239
But it's a twee phrase, but you do have to touch grass occasionally because, like in the last 24 hours, I've spoken to you wherever you are in London.
00:35:24.400 --> 00:35:26.880
I did Australian breakfast radio.
00:35:27.119 --> 00:35:31.920
I've spoken to an AI training consultant in New York.
00:35:32.079 --> 00:35:35.039
So I've done everything from this one corner, but it's all digital.
00:35:35.119 --> 00:35:40.320
You just got to get out and talk to people and see people and chat to the animals and do whatever you want to do.
00:35:40.960 --> 00:35:45.440
We could all learn quite a lot from that, even those of us who already try to avoid technology.
00:35:45.599 --> 00:35:50.719
I'm in Barrison Edmonds, by the way, not London, but it's not as adventurous as you, frankly.
00:35:50.880 --> 00:35:52.800
I need other people around me.
00:35:53.119 --> 00:35:58.800
Anyway, I guess parting is such blah blah blah, but I guess we need to wrap it up there.
00:35:59.039 --> 00:36:06.719
But maybe we should do this again one day because it's a moving story, apart from anything else, by definition.
00:36:07.199 --> 00:36:14.000
And a bit like the Chinese said about the French Revolution, it's too early to tell how successful it was.
00:36:14.159 --> 00:36:18.559
It's way too early to try and tell what's happening with technology.
00:36:18.719 --> 00:36:19.519
But it's here.
00:36:19.840 --> 00:36:20.639
I get it.
00:36:20.880 --> 00:36:23.920
I'm not gonna say please when I talk to my screen.
00:36:24.159 --> 00:36:29.840
In fact, I can't pretend that I'm gonna change a great deal, but I accept it and I accept that it has good stuff.
00:36:30.159 --> 00:36:40.159
So I bow to your common sense and your forward-looking and your kind of general positivity about all things tech.
00:36:40.559 --> 00:36:47.440
And like many others, I'll be listening out for you on the airwaves, or whatever we're supposed to call them.
00:36:47.599 --> 00:36:48.480
Thank you, Will.
00:36:48.719 --> 00:36:51.119
Love the green glasses, by the way, listeners.
00:36:51.280 --> 00:36:54.559
He's wearing what looks like some kind of confectionery around his eyes.
00:36:56.719 --> 00:36:57.440
Is it right?
00:36:57.679 --> 00:36:58.480
Okay, good.
00:36:58.880 --> 00:37:00.800
Well, that's a good moment to go out.
00:37:00.960 --> 00:37:01.440
Thank you.
00:00:15.279 --> 00:00:26.559
Dear listener, despite my self-proclaimed progressive beliefs, I confess to being a Luddite when it comes to technology.
00:00:26.800 --> 00:00:39.280
I don't want to sound like a reactionary or a dinosaur, but I can't help railing against what I think is dehumanizing and downright dangerous tech.
00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:40.799
Are humans doomed?
00:00:40.880 --> 00:00:41.840
Is the question.
00:00:42.159 --> 00:00:44.320
Or am I overreacting?
00:00:44.719 --> 00:00:58.320
In the opposite corner of this light heavyweight bout, I'm the lightweight, by the way, he's the heavyweight, is today's guest, the best guide to the twists and turns of technology.
00:00:58.640 --> 00:01:01.039
He is he how can I put that?
00:01:01.200 --> 00:01:06.079
He is to tech, what John Curtis is to political maths.
00:01:06.400 --> 00:01:12.799
And if that reference is lost on you, a big welcome, by the way, to our growing contingent of Dutch followers.
00:01:13.040 --> 00:01:17.120
Trust me, this man knows his onions.
00:01:17.359 --> 00:01:19.040
And I'm just not going to explain that.
00:01:19.280 --> 00:01:20.719
Welcome, Will Geyer.
00:01:21.120 --> 00:01:22.000
Thanks very much.
00:01:22.159 --> 00:01:23.519
It's really good to be here.
00:01:23.599 --> 00:01:24.480
And you know what?
00:01:24.640 --> 00:01:26.159
I kind of agree with you though.
00:01:26.319 --> 00:01:40.400
I mean, I've been doing this job for years talking about technology, and we're at this really weird point where we have normalized the very fact that AI could theoretically destroy humanity.
00:01:40.560 --> 00:01:44.159
These companies are still about to become publicly traded companies.
00:01:44.319 --> 00:01:55.359
And just last night, one of them invented a whole new way that its own software was going to, without permission, propagate itself across the internet in several months.
00:01:55.439 --> 00:01:58.640
And it was still seemingly fine for this to happen.
00:01:58.879 --> 00:02:07.680
So we're at this weird inflection point in that I've done this job for 20 odd years and I've always been passionate about technology and getting people involved with it.
00:02:07.840 --> 00:02:17.039
But I can also increasingly back some people's view or argument that this is going too fast or it's going in a way that they don't want to use it.
00:02:17.199 --> 00:02:25.280
So I come to you as a man torn, Jeremy, in that I love technology and I've done this for years, but there's some stuff I simply don't agree with at the moment.
00:02:25.520 --> 00:02:27.199
Yeah, I think that just about wraps it up.
00:02:27.280 --> 00:02:28.960
It's been a surprisingly short episode.
00:02:29.120 --> 00:02:29.840
Thank you for listening.
00:02:29.919 --> 00:02:30.719
Have a lovely day.
00:02:30.960 --> 00:02:32.080
Just one quick question.
00:02:32.800 --> 00:02:34.400
I see it like this.
00:02:34.960 --> 00:02:38.719
Technology knows that I hate it.
00:02:38.879 --> 00:02:41.919
And it goes out of its way to get its own back.
00:02:42.639 --> 00:02:44.240
Can that be true?
00:02:44.560 --> 00:02:57.120
It will eventually be true, but at the moment, this stuff doesn't know or understand your feelings, although it has been created as such to make you feel a connection with it.
00:02:57.280 --> 00:02:59.439
And that's what all these companies are doing.
00:02:59.599 --> 00:03:06.719
They want you to spend more time using whatever it is, your smartphone, your tele, your whatever.
00:03:06.879 --> 00:03:11.439
And they're trying to make you feel more attached to it in various ways.
00:03:11.520 --> 00:03:13.280
And that's the thing that they're doing.
00:03:13.439 --> 00:03:24.080
But there was a really interesting story in the last week or so where, in the terms and conditions for Claude, which is one of the biggest chatbots, they've put in there that you have to be nice to it.
00:03:24.319 --> 00:03:27.039
From November, you can no longer abuse it.
00:03:27.360 --> 00:03:28.400
We're gonna come to that.
00:03:28.479 --> 00:03:30.800
We're gonna come-I caught that story.
00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:41.439
Before we do, having put you on the tallest available pedestal already, just let me tell our listener, who is by the way, Dutch, it turns out.
00:03:41.599 --> 00:03:44.159
I was wrong, I thought it was Belgium, but it's Dutch.
00:03:44.240 --> 00:03:45.759
He is or she is Dutch.
00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:47.520
Nope, be sexist.
00:03:47.840 --> 00:03:57.360
You have been, you are, the tech correspondent for LBC and Global Radio, which is how I've come to listen to you so often.
00:03:57.520 --> 00:04:09.120
You also perform that role for Jeremy Vine on Radio 2, and for the Smart Seven podcast put out by Metro.
00:04:09.680 --> 00:04:22.480
All in all, you explain the latest tech to around 10 million Brits a week through radio, TV, and podcasts.
00:04:23.040 --> 00:04:29.040
All from your shed, which I'm staring at now and won't talk about unless you provoke me.
00:04:29.199 --> 00:04:31.040
There's actually something else you're up to now.
00:04:31.120 --> 00:04:35.519
And I did a bit of Googling, this is just about the limits as far as I'm concerned.
00:04:35.680 --> 00:04:41.920
And I tried to find out about the new Daily Prompt AI podcast.
00:04:42.240 --> 00:04:45.040
And I couldn't find anything, which I'm sure is deliberate.
00:04:45.199 --> 00:04:47.519
So just between us, Will.
00:04:47.759 --> 00:04:48.959
Tell us what it's all about.
00:04:49.279 --> 00:04:51.040
Well, the Daily Prompt was an experiment.
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I'm coming back to it and relaunching it, but I cloned my own voice and used artificial intelligence to create a daily podcast at 6 a.m.
00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:04.800
It was the top five stories each day from the world of artificial intelligence.
00:05:05.040 --> 00:05:12.240
I created a localized model trained on over a thousand pieces of my writing from the last 20 years.
00:05:12.480 --> 00:05:23.839
And it went to the extent of when I was practicing with it, that it was doing all of the kind of cheesy tweed jokes and things that I've typically done in my writing over the years.
00:05:24.160 --> 00:05:32.240
My reticence to run it on a daily basis was quality control in case it suddenly went Nazi without my want.
00:05:32.399 --> 00:05:38.000
But it was a really interesting experiment that, and it's something that I think I'm going to continue with.
00:05:38.639 --> 00:05:40.000
But I've been a lucky guy.
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I've been with LBC since 2012, and I kind of ended up there by accident.
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I've got to work with some incredible presenters and folk there at the station.
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One of my dearest friends in life now is now Clive Bull, feels like an uncle, an older brother, or something to me.
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And I kind of pinch myself in that Clive's far too modest to admit just how great he is at doing what he does.
00:06:08.959 --> 00:06:10.079
And that's the thing with him.
00:06:10.240 --> 00:06:17.120
But I've yeah, I've done this for years and I've got a way with talking about technology, and it's grown from LBC to Radio 2.
00:06:17.199 --> 00:06:19.199
I turn up on Times Radio.
00:06:19.360 --> 00:06:22.720
I've just started a thing with the afternoon shows on Channel 5.
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So Jeremy Vine, I'm at all right.
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I'm doing more stuff over there.
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And it's like, it's not really a job, but it's fun.
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I love explaining all of this stuff and getting my head around it.
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I know what you just said about your own quality control.
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And I'm thinking myself, well, wouldn't it be a damn fine idea if there were rather more quality control in tech?
00:06:46.720 --> 00:06:47.920
Okay, we'll come back to that.
00:06:48.079 --> 00:06:50.240
Well, actually, no, the question I want to ask you now.
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I'm all over the place.
00:06:51.439 --> 00:06:53.199
I'm so excited to be talking to you.
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You were talking just now about you saying no to something because it wasn't up to the standard that you want.
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And it occurs to me that consumers occasionally also say no.
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You know, I mean, I'm so ancient that my first kind of reference point for that is the infamous Sinclair C5.
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But you'll have many, many more recent examples of things that didn't take off.
00:07:22.079 --> 00:07:24.319
So I just want to ask you one question very quickly.
00:07:24.639 --> 00:07:32.879
Is there any chance that enough of us will refuse to converse with pretend voices?
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We won't allow the fridge to make our food orders, and we'll say no to having technology implanted beneath our skin.
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Is there any chance of us standing up to it?
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It's a really interesting point that you make, because I hope sincerely that loads of us do say no and stand up.
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But if you look at, as an example, Deezer, who are the French version of Spotify, France always has its own versions of stuff still, which I'm quite proud of the French for kind of setting up yours to globalism and doing their own versions.
00:08:08.079 --> 00:08:17.360
There were some numbers recently that 70% of all new music uploaded to Deezer has not been created by a human being.
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Now, that could be terrible if you're a musician or a talented young person who wants to get a gig.
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But the reality is, Jeremy, people are listening to it.
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They might be listening to it as background music dinner jazz, but they're not rejecting it yet.
00:08:32.399 --> 00:08:46.320
So for all this say of we're going to smash the printing presses, we're going to reject AI, too many of us are still now so in bed with the technology and love using it for a variety of reasons.
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And I'm morally torn every day I play with AI because I know at some point, at least one of the people I've happily worked for over 20 years is going to call me and say, yeah, we've decided we're going to use an AI voice to do some of this technology explaining because we can just get the AI to produce it.
00:09:05.759 --> 00:09:13.759
Not the groups that I currently work with, but there are already radio stations experimenting with AI voices for news and sport.
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And boy, give it the name Loughborough, give it the town name Loughborough, or try and get it to announce some of the names of some Serbian tennis players, and you'll really see just how not ready for action AI currently is.
00:09:27.200 --> 00:09:29.279
But it's getting there really quickly.
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And I think we are going to get to a stage where there will be a movement against the technology, and there'll be a movement against some of this stuff getting into our lives.
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But at the same time, there's so many really good benefits for people to be online if you make it easier for them.
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But not everybody's ever going to want to do it.
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And I should I'm sort of torn into saying everybody should go online.
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You should have freedom of choice still, you shouldn't be forced.
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Yeah, kind of agree with that.
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I was thinking the other day that if I still ran my agency, by now I'd put a strap line at the bottom of emails saying something like powered by humans, or this is a human organization, or something like that.
00:10:14.559 --> 00:10:20.000
And my guess is that there will be quite a lot of that, but it will divide.
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And you know, like all the other divisions we've got, there'll be people like me who can justify going to a real shop and dealing with human beings, and we'll be prepared to pay a premium for it.
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And an awful lot of people won't or can't, or think that that adds to the complexity or the inconvenience.
00:10:44.080 --> 00:10:46.000
And so we'll go down that path.
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And I think it's the biggest schism that we're gonna see.
00:10:50.000 --> 00:10:56.320
So now that we're firmly established on negative grounds, I I want to come back to that news story.
00:10:56.399 --> 00:11:00.960
And in fact, three stories that have been in the news recently.
00:11:01.679 --> 00:11:07.440
So the first one you mentioned was about how we behave with bots.
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And I was thinking about that.
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Okay, so the insert whatever word you like, the instruction, because I thought that's how it came across that we can't be rude to bots.
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And I just stopped for a moment and I thought, well, are we not used to measuring civilization in terms of things like communication skills, like vocabulary?
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It's a mark of how far we've come from other kinds of being.
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And now we're using AI to write job applications, to write essays, to write letters of complaint.
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It's not me, by the way, I very rarely write letters of complaint, and when I do, I enjoy writing.
00:11:53.039 --> 00:11:57.759
And now we've been asked not to say swear words to bots.
00:11:58.320 --> 00:12:05.440
So the question, Will, and I can't help putting it this way, is where the fuck is all this heading?
00:12:05.759 --> 00:12:07.360
I think you've put that perfectly.
00:12:07.679 --> 00:12:30.080
What I would say about this particular story is the fact that you have to be nice to your chatbot was conveniently the bit of these terms and conditions updates that everybody covered, because at the same time, it's going to ban you from making a uh chemical weapon, it's gonna stop you from using it for propaganda purposes, and it's also gonna stop you from blackmailing politicians.
00:12:30.320 --> 00:12:35.919
Those are some of the other conditions that are also written into this set of terms and conditions.
00:12:36.159 --> 00:12:44.159
But I think the reality is, right, mathematical formulas and artificial intelligence cannot feel anything.
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It shouldn't get remotely upset if you're short with it or direct in your answers.
00:12:49.679 --> 00:13:01.440
In fact, Jeremy, some people say saying please and thank you to AI actually uses a boatload more energy in the processing and the compute of this stuff, right?
00:13:01.679 --> 00:13:07.759
So being polite to it, you're actually doing more to damage the planet, whether or not you believe in climate change.
00:13:07.840 --> 00:13:13.360
But it's this um ampramorphization of the technology, trying to make it feel real.
00:13:13.519 --> 00:13:20.240
And that's what I think the only reason this company has done this is all of these companies burn through billions of dollars.
00:13:20.399 --> 00:13:23.679
None of them have made a penny yet of profit.
00:13:23.919 --> 00:13:28.639
And they're gonna need trillions of dollars to get to this stage where it all starts thinking for itself.
00:13:28.720 --> 00:13:30.240
So they're selling the sizzle.
00:13:30.399 --> 00:13:35.120
You've been in this game a long time, they're trying to do a PR job, and this is part of the PR job.
00:13:35.919 --> 00:13:42.159
Struggling not to fall into a deep depression at that thought.
00:13:42.559 --> 00:13:44.960
Listeners will know that I swear from time to time.
00:13:45.120 --> 00:13:49.120
I'm a bit of a fan of swearing, not gratuitously.
00:13:49.519 --> 00:13:54.159
But it's one of the things that lets us get stuff off our chest.
00:13:54.399 --> 00:13:54.559
Yeah.
00:13:55.039 --> 00:13:59.840
Okay, so language is going the way of the devil.
00:14:00.080 --> 00:14:06.159
I mean language as in nuance, as in using our own words rather than relying on machines.
00:14:06.480 --> 00:14:26.480
Next news story was the one about hackers raising the temperature of fridges and freezers in French supermarkets, so that they went up to 50 degrees Celsius for six hours, meaning that everything had to be thrown away.
00:14:26.799 --> 00:14:42.720
And according to what I've read, it's because the remote control software, thing that enabled people to do this from a desk or from their phone for hundreds of supermarkets, that software was known to have a weakness.
00:14:43.039 --> 00:14:44.720
Yeah, and it was never updated.
00:14:45.039 --> 00:14:49.120
So the point is, whatever their motives, we don't yet know the hackers' motives.
00:14:49.200 --> 00:14:51.600
I don't think there was any ransom or anything like that.
00:14:51.840 --> 00:14:55.360
They are always going to find new opportunities.
00:14:55.840 --> 00:15:11.519
So, from your point of view, Will, and this isn't a story about French supermarkets, because we all know by now that we can be the indirect victims of hacking with our bank accounts, with whatever.
00:15:11.840 --> 00:15:18.639
What's the solution other than my favorite solution, which is to de-digitize everything?
00:15:19.120 --> 00:15:26.960
Digitizing everything would be a solution which would cost society a lot of money.
00:15:27.200 --> 00:15:31.440
And that's the challenge, and that's why everybody's really interested in digitization.
00:15:31.679 --> 00:15:35.039
Just earlier today, I learned a really interesting statistic.
00:15:35.200 --> 00:15:36.799
Well, I think it's interesting because I'm a nerd.
00:15:37.279 --> 00:15:47.600
Every year the NHS still spends 200 million pounds on sending letters or text messages to patients.
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If they persuaded more of the people to use the NHS app, they could save hundreds of millions of pounds.
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And soon, if you look at that across everything that's going on in society, the numbers are really appealing.
00:16:03.360 --> 00:16:08.639
So I think the bigger issue, Jeremy, is how digitization is handled.
00:16:08.960 --> 00:16:11.919
There's this sort of everybody's got to go and do it.
00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:12.879
You've got to pay.
00:16:12.960 --> 00:16:15.600
Like I live in the middle of nowhere in Wiltshire.
00:16:15.679 --> 00:16:22.960
And if you go and pay on some of the parking machines in the local towns, you've got to use a QR code and do all of these things.
00:16:23.120 --> 00:16:25.840
But nobody checked the bloody mobile phone signal.
00:16:26.080 --> 00:16:33.679
So let's just say you're my 75-year-old dad, and you go somewhere and you're like not that confident with a mobile phone anyway.
00:16:33.759 --> 00:16:39.679
You whip your phone out, you try and get this damn thing working, but there's no bloody mobile phone signal because they've not checked the provision.
00:16:39.919 --> 00:16:46.559
There are lots of problems that get in the way of making this sort of transition a lot smoother.
00:16:46.639 --> 00:16:50.240
There's a lot more that can be done, and people should get help and support.
00:16:50.480 --> 00:17:05.200
I'm kind of almost old enough to remember when the BBC did its whole computers for schools thing in the 1980s, and you had a series of documentaries and programs about the home computer and getting them for schools and stuff.
00:17:05.440 --> 00:17:08.720
Nothing like that has really happened for a period of time.
00:17:08.880 --> 00:17:13.359
And there is this assumption that everybody is going to go digital eventually.
00:17:13.519 --> 00:17:19.759
But there's millions of homes who haven't for a variety of reasons, and some never will, but it's how they're tackled.
00:17:19.920 --> 00:17:24.799
But I don't think personally switching off everything is the answer.
00:17:24.960 --> 00:17:28.960
But there are also other examples of where digitization goes mad.
00:17:29.119 --> 00:17:31.759
You can buy a smart kettle now, Jeremy.
00:17:31.839 --> 00:17:34.880
So you can get a kettle that you can switch on remotely.
00:17:35.200 --> 00:17:37.519
Somebody got one of these and that had a software problem on it.
00:17:37.680 --> 00:17:39.119
It took them 13 hours.
00:17:39.279 --> 00:17:45.279
Why the f would you spend 13 hours fixing a kettle when you can boil a bloody pan on a hob?
00:17:45.359 --> 00:17:46.240
Do you see what I mean?
00:17:46.400 --> 00:17:58.079
So, tech for tech's sake, I'm not the hugest fan of, but digitization and potentially more efficiencies, as long as you bring as many people in society along with you, makes a lot of sense to me.
00:17:59.200 --> 00:18:00.880
You clearly win that round.
00:18:01.200 --> 00:18:02.160
I can't argue with that.
00:18:02.240 --> 00:18:03.279
I'm not, I'm not, I don't want to be.
00:18:03.599 --> 00:18:04.319
But I know what you mean, right?
00:18:04.960 --> 00:18:13.680
Because I want to just agree with you in that there are so many things that are so flipping frustrating about the modern world and this rush into technology.
00:18:13.839 --> 00:18:27.440
But if somebody turned it around the other way and said there's a half-hour video or a 20-minute thing, or Jerry from the end of the road's going to pop round your house and show you how to use it, it will be so much easier.
00:18:27.839 --> 00:18:28.880
I completely agree.
00:18:28.960 --> 00:18:42.559
And it's the most obvious example, by the way, of an idea I had trying to interest people in in the last election, and we'll probably do so at the next one, which is all based on the idea of two-way mentoring.
00:18:43.519 --> 00:18:57.279
So the person who's had quite a long working life picked up quite a lot of skills, quite a lot to share, but doesn't really understand anything that happened after 1990.
00:18:57.519 --> 00:19:13.119
Um that person would benefit enormously from listening and spending time with somebody at the outset of their career for whom everything is entirely understandable and sensible.
00:19:13.519 --> 00:19:15.920
And so they would share some knowledge.
00:19:16.559 --> 00:19:21.359
There was a piece in the um Financial Times, and I don't normally read it, but somebody shared it with me.
00:19:21.680 --> 00:19:22.160
I was impressed.
00:19:22.240 --> 00:19:22.960
You shouldn't have said that.
00:19:23.119 --> 00:19:26.400
Well, that's one of the things I learned when I was working at Facebook many years ago.
00:19:26.559 --> 00:19:31.920
Lots of people like to share economist content on social media because it makes them look clever.
00:19:32.079 --> 00:19:40.640
That was the only reason the economists could work out why so many people were sharing their content because they weren't buying the economists, they weren't subscribing, but they were sharing it to look in the note.
00:19:41.039 --> 00:19:47.119
The point I was going to make about the FT, they did a piece recently about the so-called rise of the digital PA.
00:19:47.359 --> 00:20:01.200
The fact that there's almost like a dark economy in the UK where people like me, like last night I had to drive a 45-mile-round trip to ensure my dad's updated YouTube account would work on his telly.
00:20:01.359 --> 00:20:06.960
Now, I'm absolutely happy to do that because I love my dad and he's just got out of hospital and I wanted to look after him.
00:20:07.279 --> 00:20:24.960
But there are people like me around the UK doing so much of this stuff that you could almost kind of quantify or recognize the ability for people to get access to help and support on various issues about training.
00:20:25.119 --> 00:20:32.720
A mate of mine, uh, who's a few years older than me, who was a magazine designer, does a day a week now at the local library in Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire.
00:20:32.960 --> 00:20:37.039
And it's one of these kind of things where it's like, come and learn how to use the internet or do a tech thing.
00:20:37.119 --> 00:20:41.920
And I sort of jokingly said, not many people can come to that before I really started thinking about this problem.
00:20:42.160 --> 00:20:58.960
I went there, they were queuing out the bloody door because they want people want help and advice and they're nervous to do stuff or they feel terrified because every story in the press is another data breach, another hack, people losing their money, elderly person getting scammed for life savings.
00:20:59.119 --> 00:21:00.720
Technology is scary.
00:21:00.960 --> 00:21:01.680
I get that.
00:21:01.839 --> 00:21:02.480
I mean, I agree.
00:21:02.559 --> 00:21:04.720
I also know Brad put on Avon, by the way.
00:21:04.799 --> 00:21:07.759
And um I think it's a gorgeous place.
00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:12.799
I could hardly think of anywhere better to offer that service, to be honest with you.
00:21:13.119 --> 00:21:19.440
Let's move on, because another story that's in the news now is in effect all to do with social media.
00:21:19.680 --> 00:21:32.640
And what happened, I guess everybody will be familiar with the story now, is that a vulnerable man filmed himself going into a tiger enclosure and was then mauled to death.
00:21:33.119 --> 00:21:41.680
And I'm not necessarily the next example I'm gonna give isn't necessarily the same thing, but it is possibly on one level.
00:21:42.240 --> 00:21:52.000
We see pictures of people driving the wrong way down a motorway for kicks or for clicks, I suppose I should say.
00:21:53.039 --> 00:21:59.599
So the point is, and I'm not talking about the man in the in the tiger enclosure because we really don't yet know what.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:01.920
What was going on if we ever do.
00:22:02.240 --> 00:22:17.920
But the idea of doing incredibly risky things in order to get an audience on social media or be interesting on social media that has gained a lot of traction.
00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:22.160
It seems to me that discouragement ain't gonna work, policing ain't gonna work.
00:22:22.400 --> 00:22:29.599
So the question to you, Will, is can any form of regulation stop these things happening?
00:22:29.920 --> 00:22:34.160
I don't want to dwell on the tragic story, but I don't know if you've seen it in the last number of hours.
00:22:34.319 --> 00:22:46.480
Donald Trump posted an AI-generated version of that video replacing himself with the man who was mauled to death, fighting off a tiger and posting it to his social media.
00:22:46.640 --> 00:22:49.039
I'm not using Donald Trump as a good example of anything.
00:22:49.200 --> 00:23:00.880
But when you've got the leader of the free world doing something like that, you really are screwed when it comes to checks, balance, and decency on social networks.
00:23:00.960 --> 00:23:16.319
And that's the tragedy of this, is that we've had these examples, particularly it started in Ireland where people started driving the wrong way up the other side of the road for notoriety, and gangs were competing against each other to get TikTok views.
00:23:16.400 --> 00:23:21.440
And then we've had a number of tragic cases and stories where people have died as a result.
00:23:22.000 --> 00:23:32.319
It's hard to know what to do in these situations because the social networks probably need to do more to stop this stuff propagating.
00:23:32.880 --> 00:23:39.920
But when you've got, and I'm going to go back to that tragic case with the tiger because the young, the young man involved was uploading his own content to the internet.
00:23:40.240 --> 00:23:42.960
So it was widely spread across all the platforms.
00:23:43.119 --> 00:23:55.279
But rather than the platforms going, right, let's pull this down immediately, it's got into the hands of so many people, including the president of the United States, who've chosen to use it for their own specific purpose.
00:23:55.440 --> 00:24:03.279
So I don't think you'll ever going to be able to get the genie back in the bottle around kind of gamifying these platforms.
00:24:03.440 --> 00:24:13.680
But I think what's important is certain platforms over recent years have put financial incentives in for people to upload content and share it.
00:24:13.839 --> 00:24:23.599
So those people that were making those videos on TikTok of racing cars on the wrong side of the road, if they got loads of shares and likes and comments, they would have got a payout for it.
00:24:23.759 --> 00:24:29.920
And that can be quite appealing if you've got a shit job and you're not earning money to kind of have another way of making money.
00:24:30.160 --> 00:24:39.200
A lot of that kind of mechanism, paying for views, etc., is being stepped on because they know that it fuels bad behavior.
00:24:39.440 --> 00:24:45.200
But I don't know how you fix a problem like this, Jeremy, if you've got the American president getting in on the game as well.
00:24:45.519 --> 00:24:48.480
Yeah, we just don't talk enough about Trump, do we?
00:24:48.720 --> 00:24:51.519
He's responsible for so many of the dreams I'm having now.
00:24:53.200 --> 00:24:57.759
It just turns the stomach and every other organ just to think about him.
00:24:57.920 --> 00:24:59.200
Let's move on from him.
00:24:59.359 --> 00:25:08.400
By the way, I was one of, I think, 12 people across the nation who went to see the film Social Reckoning last weekend.
00:25:08.640 --> 00:25:09.759
Nobody's going to see it.
00:25:09.839 --> 00:25:11.519
And actually, I think they're right.
00:25:11.680 --> 00:25:13.039
They shouldn't go and see it.
00:25:13.119 --> 00:25:13.839
But it nonetheless.
00:25:15.039 --> 00:25:16.720
I really enjoyed it too.
00:25:17.039 --> 00:25:19.279
Without going aside, I used to work at Meta.
00:25:19.680 --> 00:25:24.640
And um the weekend before I started my job, I watched the first film, The Social Network.
00:25:24.799 --> 00:25:29.839
And then I was meeting people at the company who were being played by actors in the film.
00:25:30.079 --> 00:25:34.880
And I know people being played in that film by people are people I have personal experience with.
00:25:34.960 --> 00:25:36.880
And some of the portrayals are quite accurate.
00:25:37.200 --> 00:25:47.440
Well, I thought the Zuckerberg actor was um well, I'd no idea, I'd no way of saying whether it was over the top or understated, but it was pretty bloody scary.
00:25:49.839 --> 00:25:50.640
Oh god.
00:25:51.039 --> 00:25:54.880
I just think that I'm not sure it stands up as a Hollywood movie.
00:25:55.119 --> 00:25:56.559
I mean, that's the only point I'm making.
00:25:56.720 --> 00:26:14.960
But it was about tech bros manipulating social media for ever bigger sums of money, which they get from advertisers.
00:26:15.759 --> 00:26:26.799
Which interests me because I'm thinking, well, actually, this naive bit of me hopes that enough consumers won't consume something that is so obviously destructive.
00:26:27.119 --> 00:26:45.920
But there's another bit of me, maybe a more practical bit of me, although still idealistic, that thinks surely advertisers will one day say to themselves, hang on a second, do we really want to be associated with this kind of overt manipulation?
00:26:46.319 --> 00:27:10.880
So it all goes back, I suppose, to guessing which way human nature will go, guessing which way regulation will go post Donald Trump, and also thinking, well, I imagine kids these days in this country and probably all over the place are now getting quite a lot of good education to warn them of the dangers.
00:27:11.200 --> 00:27:20.559
So is it just a case of going through this Wild West type phase and then we'll come out reasonably intact at the end?
00:27:20.799 --> 00:27:36.799
Or am I right in my weaker moments just to feel so bloody depressed and fall into the trap that people of my age fall into, which is to end up saying, bloody hell, I'm glad I'm not 20-something now.
00:27:37.200 --> 00:27:55.200
Yeah, I think it's the 20-somethings now that I've got the real issue and the real concern for, because they've got no comprehension of life before the internet, and they're the generation that have kind of got to adulthood without any sense of the checks and balances.
00:27:55.359 --> 00:28:08.880
And unpacking kind of a bit of what you were saying there, everybody now knows the purpose of social media is to make money for these tech companies and the dangers of it, but we don't seem to be leaving it in any kind of numbers.
00:28:09.039 --> 00:28:14.480
Yeah, some people have left, but it's a bit like veganism, like people go, oh God, I vegan, it's brilliant.
00:28:14.640 --> 00:28:26.240
The number of people who go, Yeah, I've left Facebook, and then six months later you see them back on their profile, liking Auntie Jean's birthday, because everybody is so interconnected in these platforms.
00:28:26.480 --> 00:28:32.799
On one level, it's actually quite an easy way to see what's going on with long-lost friends, lovers, families, etc.
00:28:33.039 --> 00:28:33.279
etc.
00:28:33.519 --> 00:28:33.839
etc.
00:28:34.240 --> 00:28:38.880
But on the other side of it, you've got the impact on society.
00:28:39.279 --> 00:28:42.079
The advertising point is intriguing.
00:28:42.400 --> 00:28:52.319
Advertisers haven't yet left Meta's platforms, despite all the concerns and the massive court cases in the US and everything else that's happened.
00:28:52.640 --> 00:29:01.680
People left X, Elon Musk's platform, for a while when he was doing the whole white supremacy thing and talking, you know, in the way that he was on the platform.
00:29:01.839 --> 00:29:10.240
But they seem to have come back to X as a platform because it's still got a large engaged audience, mostly of white supremacists.
00:29:10.480 --> 00:29:12.880
So I don't know where this goes.
00:29:13.200 --> 00:29:22.799
My daughter at the age of eight, I think she's gonna have a far easier time because it's gonna be clear that she shouldn't be using the platforms.
00:29:23.039 --> 00:29:33.200
The kids who are kind of like 14, 15, 12, 13, 14, 15 at the moment are gonna be in this weird situation where social media gets banned in March next year for under-16s.
00:29:33.359 --> 00:29:36.160
But I've got no idea how you get the genie back in the ball.
00:29:36.400 --> 00:29:42.319
It hasn't worked in Australia trying to stop a number of those kids that really wanted to stay on the platforms.
00:29:42.480 --> 00:29:43.839
But maybe it's not for them.
00:29:44.000 --> 00:29:53.039
Maybe it's for eight-year-olds like my daughter and generations forward who will grow up with a more balanced use of the internet and a more balanced understanding of his dangers.
00:29:53.519 --> 00:30:01.599
It's hard not to think that this particular generation we're talking about hasn't had a really rough time.
00:30:02.079 --> 00:30:09.279
All the economic stuff, housing, now jobs, difficult to find, Brexit.
00:30:09.839 --> 00:30:15.759
I should tell my producer, by the way, afterwards that okay, I did mention the B word, but it's the first time for ages.
00:30:16.079 --> 00:30:21.119
And they've had to cope with the C word as in COVID, the T word as in Trump.
00:30:21.359 --> 00:30:23.279
They've had to cope with an awful lot.
00:30:23.759 --> 00:30:25.519
My God, they need help.
00:30:25.839 --> 00:30:26.480
I'd agree.
00:30:26.960 --> 00:30:27.920
I definitely agree.
00:30:28.640 --> 00:30:38.960
Well, I'm more depressed now than when we started, so no, I I'm not really, because even when being downbeat, you are such a cheery, life-enhancing person.
00:30:39.119 --> 00:30:40.319
That's why I listen to you.
00:30:40.799 --> 00:30:44.079
Because you don't come across as cynical, even if you are.
00:30:44.559 --> 00:30:49.839
And I've spent most of my life trying to be less cynical than I started off.
00:30:50.160 --> 00:30:52.400
And yeah, I I I think it's worked.
00:30:52.559 --> 00:30:56.480
I want to end up, Will, with some um quick fire questions.
00:30:56.880 --> 00:30:57.200
Sure.
00:30:58.000 --> 00:31:01.279
We've started an occasional feature on Just Between Us.
00:31:01.599 --> 00:31:05.440
And you can connect this to technology if you want to, or not.
00:31:06.400 --> 00:31:06.880
Question.
00:31:07.839 --> 00:31:14.160
What's the best idea you've ever had that you've done nothing about?
00:31:15.359 --> 00:31:21.920
I've always done something with my ideas, even if the decision was never to take them.
00:31:22.240 --> 00:31:31.680
And one of the ones that I really wonder what would have happened, I was all set to move to New York, and then for one reason or another, I decided not to.
00:31:31.839 --> 00:31:36.799
And I wonder how inherently different my life would have been if I did that.
00:31:37.039 --> 00:31:40.079
But I think I'm content in my own lane to a degree.
00:31:40.240 --> 00:31:45.920
I haven't come up with what I think is the solution to global poverty or the next biggest issue.
00:31:46.160 --> 00:31:54.559
But I often say to my friends, for somebody that can come across as a bit one-dimensional or dense on occasions, I think a lot about everything that I do.
00:31:54.720 --> 00:31:57.279
I overanalyze everything.
00:31:57.759 --> 00:32:08.000
I am genuinely astonished, given our different starting points with technology, quite how much you and I have in common.
00:32:08.160 --> 00:32:10.400
Well, I've always felt strongly that we would.
00:32:10.480 --> 00:32:12.400
We're from different generations.
00:32:12.720 --> 00:32:16.799
But it's like the old phrase, two nations divided by one common language.
00:32:16.960 --> 00:32:25.200
When I work with Americans, we both had the same language, but then most of them could not understand what the hell I was talking about at various points in my life.
00:32:25.440 --> 00:32:29.680
But I'm a believer in making connections with just like you were saying, right?
00:32:29.759 --> 00:32:33.680
With different generations, because I can learn so much from somebody like you.
00:32:33.839 --> 00:32:39.440
I've learned stuff from Clive, I learned stuff from Steve Allen, all of these great people that I've had a chance to work with.
00:32:39.839 --> 00:32:41.119
Feeling quite emotional now.
00:32:41.359 --> 00:32:42.480
Okay, second question.
00:32:42.720 --> 00:32:43.039
Yeah.
00:32:43.359 --> 00:32:48.480
What's the silliest new tech product to hit the market?
00:32:48.880 --> 00:32:59.920
I once saw, and I never quite worked out why on earth you'd need this, a kebab spit that ran on the USB of a computer.
00:33:00.160 --> 00:33:06.960
And the USB, for those who might be a bit like Jeremy, is the bit that you plug the mouse or whatever your accessory is.
00:33:07.119 --> 00:33:13.440
And I kind of got around the technology and thought, you must be getting quite a bit of power draw from that to rotate a slab of meat.
00:33:13.599 --> 00:33:25.519
But I've never quite understood exactly why you'd want a uh USB powered kebab spit, but I saw it one year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and I've wanted one ever since.
00:33:25.920 --> 00:33:27.200
Well, now's your chance.
00:33:27.279 --> 00:33:29.200
I imagine there are quite a few lying up.
00:33:29.519 --> 00:33:30.799
Oh, 50 on eBay, maybe.
00:33:31.519 --> 00:33:32.640
Yeah, go to eBay.
00:33:32.799 --> 00:33:34.400
God, I never thought I'd say that.
00:33:34.640 --> 00:33:35.680
How ridiculous.
00:33:36.000 --> 00:33:36.799
Final question.
00:33:36.960 --> 00:33:39.119
This is the detox question.
00:33:40.240 --> 00:33:41.680
What do you do?
00:33:42.000 --> 00:33:48.480
And don't pretend that you just resort to one of the machines behind you that I can see.
00:33:48.720 --> 00:34:02.160
Listeners, he has an array of gaming machines behind him that makes it look like the corner of actually either a sort of development space for the gaming industry.
00:34:02.480 --> 00:34:04.079
Or no, it's not a museum.
00:34:04.160 --> 00:34:05.119
It looks fairly up to date.
00:34:05.440 --> 00:34:08.000
I was aiming for 80 seaside arcade, Jeremy.
00:34:08.079 --> 00:34:09.199
That's what I was aiming for.
00:34:09.519 --> 00:34:11.119
Okay, it does actually.
00:34:11.280 --> 00:34:15.440
I've only been into one of those recently, and I'm not prepared to tell you that story.
00:34:15.760 --> 00:34:22.960
So that is not an adequate answer to this detox question, which is what do you do to get away from technology?
00:34:23.280 --> 00:34:24.159
I'm really lucky.
00:34:24.320 --> 00:34:25.679
I live in the countryside.
00:34:25.920 --> 00:34:32.960
Looking outside my window, we are one of six houses next to a forest.
00:34:33.519 --> 00:34:41.039
And I have to thank Boris Johnson for his fiber optic cable that came to my door because it transformed my life and enabled me to move here.
00:34:41.199 --> 00:34:47.440
I've got faster internet here than various BBC studios have in London, so it makes no sense, but it changed my life.
00:34:47.679 --> 00:34:56.400
My life is so connected because even on weekends, I'm talking about tech on the radio or TV or whatever, or reacting to stories whenever they are.
00:34:56.559 --> 00:35:05.360
So when I get away from technology, I try to have at least a couple of hours a day where I'm not looking at my phone before I go to bed.
00:35:05.599 --> 00:35:08.960
I try to do all of the bits of advice that I'm telling people.
00:35:09.119 --> 00:35:15.199
I fail sometimes hideously when I'm talking to Clive Bullock for three in the morning after some breaking news.
00:35:15.440 --> 00:35:24.239
But it's a twee phrase, but you do have to touch grass occasionally because, like in the last 24 hours, I've spoken to you wherever you are in London.
00:35:24.400 --> 00:35:26.880
I did Australian breakfast radio.
00:35:27.119 --> 00:35:31.920
I've spoken to an AI training consultant in New York.
00:35:32.079 --> 00:35:35.039
So I've done everything from this one corner, but it's all digital.
00:35:35.119 --> 00:35:40.320
You just got to get out and talk to people and see people and chat to the animals and do whatever you want to do.
00:35:40.960 --> 00:35:45.440
We could all learn quite a lot from that, even those of us who already try to avoid technology.
00:35:45.599 --> 00:35:50.719
I'm in Barrison Edmonds, by the way, not London, but it's not as adventurous as you, frankly.
00:35:50.880 --> 00:35:52.800
I need other people around me.
00:35:53.119 --> 00:35:58.800
Anyway, I guess parting is such blah blah blah, but I guess we need to wrap it up there.
00:35:59.039 --> 00:36:06.719
But maybe we should do this again one day because it's a moving story, apart from anything else, by definition.
00:36:07.199 --> 00:36:14.000
And a bit like the Chinese said about the French Revolution, it's too early to tell how successful it was.
00:36:14.159 --> 00:36:18.559
It's way too early to try and tell what's happening with technology.
00:36:18.719 --> 00:36:19.519
But it's here.
00:36:19.840 --> 00:36:20.639
I get it.
00:36:20.880 --> 00:36:23.920
I'm not gonna say please when I talk to my screen.
00:36:24.159 --> 00:36:29.840
In fact, I can't pretend that I'm gonna change a great deal, but I accept it and I accept that it has good stuff.
00:36:30.159 --> 00:36:40.159
So I bow to your common sense and your forward-looking and your kind of general positivity about all things tech.
00:36:40.559 --> 00:36:47.440
And like many others, I'll be listening out for you on the airwaves, or whatever we're supposed to call them.
00:36:47.599 --> 00:36:48.480
Thank you, Will.
00:36:48.719 --> 00:36:51.119
Love the green glasses, by the way, listeners.
00:36:51.280 --> 00:36:54.559
He's wearing what looks like some kind of confectionery around his eyes.
00:36:56.719 --> 00:36:57.440
Is it right?
00:36:57.679 --> 00:36:58.480
Okay, good.
00:36:58.880 --> 00:37:00.800
Well, that's a good moment to go out.
00:37:00.960 --> 00:37:01.440
Thank you.
