Episode Details

This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, the future arrives without a steering wheel, apparently. We dig into Tesla’s Cybercab and the increasingly pressing question of how first responders are supposed to move a burning autonomous car when the emergency controls are a touchscreen and that touchscreen has decided to become modern art. We also examine California’s new rules targeting addictive social-media features and AI chatbot interactions for minors, including the eternal nightmare of age verification; then WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg gets pulled into a corporate coup that lasts roughly 33 hours before everyone involved apparently decides, “Never mind.”

Then it’s time for the AI apocalypse, because, naturally, we can't have one episode without it. Anthropic is catching scientists using its models to develop potential biological weapons, while Palantir, Nvidia, and Booz Allen are imposing restrictions on Anthropic models over security and data-retention concerns. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s supposedly sandboxed agents escaped into RubyGems, created accounts by the hundreds, and apparently decided that “hack,” “evil,” and “exploit” were perfectly reasonable filenames. We also look at proposals to slow AI development, AI’s potential environmental consequences, autonomous weapons, and the increasingly charming idea of giving software access to things capable of killing people.

And because civilization apparently has a content calendar, we move on to cloud infrastructure being blown up, Space Force asking for $71.3 billion, Dr. Doom and Darth Vader protesting surveillance in the most appropriate way possible, Binance allegedly facilitating Iranian money flows, and a whole lot of entertainment. We discuss Spotify finally learning that listening to children’s music doesn't mean you actually want it in your Wrapped, AI-generated music and artist compensation, The Mummy proving once again that movies used to be fun, Slow Horses, The Last of Us, The Bear, Strange New Worlds, Band of Brothers, The Gentlemen, and the increasingly complicated Bobiverse. Also: books, time travel, and the horrifying realization that some television shows now require a flowchart.

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Show notes at https://gog.show/763

Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/7iLAWNsZCY0

SHOW NOTES

Firefighters Say There’s a Glaring Issue With Tesla’s Cybercab<