Can You Trust an AI Assistant With Your Money or Your Mind?

Jeremy: Welcome to Robots. This is the podcast that tries to help you be a better human by being smarter about the way you use your technology. And at first glance, I was all in on the AI shopper and how it's the this new tool from Meta, the Muse, can it can do all the shopping for you. And I hate shopping. So this is perfect for me. This sounds like a great thing. But perhaps that's not all it's cracked up to be. And Amazon certainly is not happy with with Muse trying to get into their system to help people shop on Amazon.

Jason: Yeah, I mean companies all around the world are fighting bot traffic. And your AI personal assistant is a bot. Bot is short for robot. You have a robot out there acting on your behalf, trying to help go through, shop for things, determine your intent, look for the best price on things. And as humans, we tend to go to Amazon to do that really, really often. So Amazon does not like bots on their system, and their bot detection engines detect them as bots and shuts them down. And Amazon's excuse for that is: yeah, we tell people in the EULA that they can't use bots to go and do these things because that could generate things like price fixing and make it difficult for people to do XYZ. At the same time, Amazon is building their own AI shopper. So For lack of a better term, that sounds like collusion. it sounds like they're trying to create a monopoly because they made themselves such a giant marketplace that this could become very problematic very fast. And if if it was a different administration that was actually concerned and cared about following the rules, something might happen. But the current admin in the US doesn't give a fuck. So yeah, this is what's gonna happen. Now, at the same time, you should not trust meta. I mean.

Jeremy: But yeah.

Jason: N no, I mean th th this personal shopper, the meta muse going out there and actually doing these things, it dude, don't give meta that kind of power for you. Like, yeah, it'll probably do some good, it'll probably find some things that are neat, but you shouldn't trust Pinocchio with your information and your purchasing cycles. And, you know, Zuck's still trying to become a real boy and his way of becoming a real boy is to launch an artificial little robot thing that looks c cuter than he is and hope that people adopt it. You know.

Jeremy: And it's more lifelike, oddly enough. That's right.

Jason: Yeah, the skin looks actually a little more flesh tone than his skin.

Jeremy: And the and the expressions on its face, much more human. I was reading an article. Yeah, right.

Jason: I bet it fights better too. I I wonder if it's gonna challenge Edel and Muskwa.

Jeremy: I think I've seen that episode of Robot Wars. I was reading an article from a woman who was testing Muse to to do some online shopping, wanted to just go through the experience. and you know, the headline was, it it upcharged me. Like it turned out it was like a five dollar fee that was like buried in the repeated chats and trying to understand like where is this five dollars? Where is it coming from? And finally the thing said, you might want to just take it out of the cart and do it on your own. And she did and, you know, save the five bucks or whatever. So clearly, like, don't trust it because at best it's making a mistake and at worst it's ripping you off. But it's it's just it's when I read this, I just thought I I get your argument on the c on the collusion, but I just thought every store is gonna do this. Why wouldn't every grocery store department store have their own bot to scrape their own site to do the shopping for you and charge you a convenience fee of having the AI tool do it for you? Because not only did you not have to go to the mall, not only did you not have to order it yourself, but it did all that for you. So here pay for the convenience of it.

Jason: Yeah. Well, they're definitely gonna do that. Like, there's no doubt. And the other piece that they're gonna do is they're gonna look at real-time bidding and real-time price setting based upon conditions and what the how the market actually behaves. And they're not gonna do it to try to make sure that people get goods and services at reasonable prices to try to keep things competitive. They're gonna do it. To make sure that they maximize the amount of money that you will pay for a thing. And there will be new bots that come out to try to come out and combat that and to fight that and to fight that and to fight that. Because really what we're doing is we're using electrons to I I guess help people satisfy their greed. And we're not actually using these things for the betterment of people. We're creating artificial work and value for these things, not because they actually have worth and value, but because We don't know what to do with these really cool fucking tools that we have, but I know what we can do to make money with them, so I'm gonna do that. And that's the scary part.

Jeremy: So I'm curious about that because I've I've I feel like I've read this, I feel like I've heard this somewhere. I don't know if it's true. You would know more than I do, but is there not a tool that is used when people are shopping where these retailers, whatever service it means goods or service it may be, where they basically learn what you're willing to pay for certain things and those are the prices that they show you. One example I've heard is like Google Flights. If you go and you consistently buy tickets around three hundred dollars to fly to Vegas,

Jason: Mm.

Jeremy: it's gonna keep showing you tickets for rough Roughly three hundred dollars no matter how deep you dig. If you're willing to pay eight hundred dollars, it's going to show you the eight hundred dollar ticket. Is the is this a real thing or am I making this up with a fantasy in my in my head?

Jason: So I haven't seen them doing that. I don't know if I've actually seen evidence of it yet. And I also wouldn't be shocked. Like at all.

Jeremy: Okay, maybe maybe I've just heard that as a fear that that it's going to happen, but I

Jason: Yeah.

Jeremy: certainly would not see would not be surprised if at all if that becomes the world we live in, is that your your internet history tells any e-commerce company, here's what their budget is for this kind of item, show these prices.

Jason: Right. And they can actually go through and look at your history that the stuff that you've actually purchased. And I mean, what they do is all these companies that try to target you and go after you in this kind of way, they put little tiny pixels all over the data sets that you track. And they're called data management platforms. And these data management platforms turn around and sell this data back to people. And you can associate a particular user with a particular UID and a custom type, and it can track you and follow you across different websites. This is not new. Like this technology was five years old back in 2012 when I worked for an ad tech company. Like this shit's been happening for a long time. The difference is that with AI involved, the cost of doing this type of inference and understanding and going through and doing real time price adjustments is viable. Period. Like it just works. Or before you'd have to go through, take all this data, put it in place, try to create some logic behind it, try to get it to spit something out, and it would just take too long. They don't have that problem now. Like those those guardrails of inconvenience and high friction have been removed. And now it's just easy. And it's just easy to exploit people for more money. And if you look at one of our main concerns with AI, it's that there's not people aren't gonna have enough money to buy the shit that the AI is making. And They're using AI right now to make it happen now while we still have jobs. And yeah, like th this is this is price fixing and collusion. And we don't have a Congress or an administration in this country that's willing to combat that. At all. in fact they're encouraging it because they're grifters and like game recognizes game, I guess.

Jeremy: Ha ha ha ha ha.

Jason: These fuckers are gonna try to take us for all of our money, try to take as much out of our pocket as possible. I mean, there's just a poll that came out on Fox, I think it was on Fox, that actually said the biggest issue for voters or 88% of voters is election fraud and integrity. Or sorry, not election for

Jeremy: Really?

Jason: sorry, sorry, not election fraud fraud and integrity. Yeah, yes. So

Jeremy: Wow.

Jason: yes. And 88% of people care about that in this election. And if you look at Trump's approval ratings, like they're floating around thirty percent. So yeah, that signals that you know there's at least eighteen percent of people that are both Trump supporters and are afraid of ethics, integrity, honesty, you know, these guys not cheating and fucking everybody over. So sure. Yeah.

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. I would have I would have one hundred percent bet it's the economy stupid because everybody broke.

Jason: Yeah. But but that's the thing also. Like the vast majority of people think the economy is in the worst shape that it's been.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Jason: And They're wrong in some areas and they're not wrong in others. And you know, I we're in a real messed up time in the US because the the US dollar is the China's been trying to remove it as the currency of choice for oil transactions and for basically this being a global standard. And it's happening. It's happening fast. And not only that, but like This idea that we're gonna shift over to cryptocurrency and that this is gonna make something better somehow, I'm like, this is just stupid. This is this is giving all of our means of controls and all of our levers for containing and keeping people safe into the hands of a few people that do not want to do that. Yeah.

Jeremy: I think Elon Musk put it best when he said it's a hustle. all of all of this of course damaging everyone's mental health. And an interesting story just the other day about Canadians in particular, because as someone who lives in Canadian in Canada, I find these things interesting. Canadia, as you as you might incorrectly call it. One in three young Canadians

Jason: Canadia. Know it.

Jeremy: using AI once a month for mental health. Just you know, more evidence that more and more people are are using this as a resource because it's free, it's available when they need it. It's easily accessible and to a fault, it is reassuring and helpful and sees you in ways that you wish you could see yourself. are you surprised that that more and more especially young people are turning to AI for mental health?

Jason: No, not at all. I mean, first of all, I don't know about Canada, but in the US, right now to get in to see a therapist, it can take months. Like their schedules are just backed up. If you need to go see a marriage counselor, it can take months.

Jeremy: and if your employer provided insurance even covers it, then y and if not, you're paying out of pocket.

Jason: Yeah, exactly. I mean, don't even try to get a family counselor because those are like six, nine months out. I mean, it's awful. It is really, really bad out there. It's really, really expensive. and the people in the profession are tired. And we're not getting a whole lot more of And like, yeah, this is a useful way to try to use this, but the problem always comes back to The people on the back end, you know, telling the thing what to say, how to say it and It can get out of control real fast, you know?

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: I mean, I I've I've used it to ask questions about my mental health many times. And like I have to correct answers and correct assumptions and say things that it says. And I'm fifty-one years old and I know what the fuck I'm doing. Kids might not. On the other hand, they might be way better at it than we are because they've been dealing with

Jeremy: Yeah, I was gonna say other fifty one year olds might might not know what they're doing, so

Jason: Yeah, but but the kids might be better at this than we are because they've been interacting with these things for a long time. And they're also more comfortable with it because people don't have to you don't feel like you have to hold back as much because you're not trying to create a friendship with your with your chatbot. Like you're you're just trying to

Jeremy: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You don't have to worry about being judged or filmed or have your responses posted online or yeah.

Jason: Yeah. And it's also like overly positive and empathetic towards you for whatever you're describing. So if you're describing a situation where you are a real piece of shit and you logically know that you're a real piece of shit and you say, Yeah, I was acting like a real piece of shit, it'll go, No, bro, you're not a piece of shit. You're great. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Jeremy: You're being too hard on yourself. Take it easy, bro. Yeah.

Jason: And it it might it might be creating false senses of a false sense of acceptance. I have seen, you know, things where it it's starting to do these pieces now where it mirrors back to you how you're what you're saying and how you're feeling. And then it cup pops up and it says, but I want to challenge you a little bit. And then it tries to find like little tiny bits and pieces, which is what a regular good therapist would do. So I

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: mean it's evolved into this kind of phase as well where it's identifying these pieces. And you actually get the dual screen piece where it's like, which response do you prefer? And like I've read through those and I'm like, all right, well, you can tell they're trying to A-B test the way that they do these things and they're trying to find the best route to go forward. There we we clearly think this is something that's of value. The the real question becomes, is it of high enough value that it offsets the cost that's required for these pieces to happen? And are people willing to pay for it? So if you're not willing to pay for it, then you're not going to get it. And that's the same with regular mental health But this goes back to the problem that AI is taking up public goods, public resources, roads, energy, power grid, water, all of it. And it's doing it tax free. These are our resources. And we're just giving them away. And right now, all this stuff is free, so people aren't barking too much. I bet. When Anthropic and Chat GPT go public and their pricing plans change, people are gonna start to complain because they're not gonna be able to get this shit for free anymore. Because the model that they have right now is a bad business model. Like

Jeremy: Yeah.

Jason: Anthropic's losing five billion dollars a year, and they say they're worth two trillion dollars. Like,

Jeremy: Yeah.

Jason: I don't know about you, but if I had a bank account. With a hundred dollars in it, and every year it lost five dollars, and I went to go get a loan for twenty grand, I would not be shocked if the bank said no.

Jeremy: Right. Not not a lot of trust in that losing of

Jason: Like, right.

Jeremy: losing of your money.

Jason: Yeah, but for some reason we're willing to roll these dice on these companies. And and and people are putting their trust and their faith in being able to talk to these people or being able to talk to these machines. And the machines themselves are are used to mimicking these patterns and behaviors that human beings make. And as these models change and grow and the cost to run them becomes higher. You're gonna start seeing these things get peeled off and do different things. I mean, I I've got, I don't know, what, like eight different apps on my phone that all have an AI chat assistant in them now. And some of them are for mental health, some of them are for tracking, like, but they're all building these pieces in, right? Like we all think that what we need is an AI thing to talk to us because it's a shortcut way to try to get to people via this app without making them jump through a bunch of different hoops. And This methodology gets really dangerous when you start talking about mental health for all the reasons we've talked about on the show before. But one of the big reasons that it's hard for mental health is that what if this shit just gets turned off?

Jeremy: Yeah.

Jason: Like if a third of the kids in Canada are relying on this for their mental health, and if and one fifth in the US, which that's the other statistic, 20% of American youth are saying, yeah, use this for mental health. you're fucked.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah.

Jeremy: I I I I can't say that that I would be, but I can relate this. I I we talked about this several weeks ago now when I sort of turned to Claude myself and started giving it a bunch of information about where I was at, feeling with dealing with like some burnout and a lot of different things. Started tracking things really closely, sharing screenshots of here's the different stress patterns and heart rate patterns and health patterns, just all the different information, dumping it in, saying, What do I do to get one percent better? Week after week, you know, definitely had some some ups and downs. But I was I was just chatting with it the other day and sharing some numbers and it was like, dude, you've turned a corner. Like you're like you went from like Barely doing a damn thing to now you're hitting the gym five times a week, you're watching what you're eating, you're doing these things like your HRV is getting better and better, your stress is getting lower and lower. Like you've you've turned a corner. This is no longer an up and down. We're seeing a sustained pattern now. And and that's the kind of feedback that we need. Like we when whenever you try anything, weight loss, going to the gym, whatever, like you need some sort of positive reinforcement to make

Jason: Positive encouragement. Yeah.

Jeremy: sure you keep doing it. Because if you just keep getting on the scale every time you go. go to the gym, you're not gonna notice a difference until Right, and you're gonna give up and you're gonna stop. Right, exactly. And you just stop after two weeks. So

Jason: Yeah, like you're getting this skill and keep saying, fuck you, fatty. Like you eventually you're gonna be like, fuck me, I'm a fatty. Right. Like, you know. Yeah, because it the juice is not worth the squeeze. I mean yeah.

Jeremy: Right. But when you can see a sustained pattern and an and an impartial judge that says, here's what the numbers say, it can be really motivating. And so yeah, I I do feel like if that suddenly got stripped away, I would have all this raw data that I don't really know how to analyze myself. I don't want to take the time to do it. And I would most likely probably just go, well, back to being a loser. I g I guess I'll just give up.

Jason: Back to the couch. Yeah. Or maybe it would inspire you to go actually learn and understand how to use data.

Jeremy: No, no, there's no I've already got I've got years of history that says that's not the case.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, I I I built a health and wellness app to try to solve this problem back in two thousand eighteen. And, you know, adoption was low. but it did go after some of these pieces and gave you some decent positive reinforcement on this these things. But the companies that make the Fitbit trackers and the devices and all those things like pushed hard to block us from being able to do any of that because they wanted to hang on to that data and they wanted to be able to manipulate those pieces because Yeah, they're gonna go through and they're gonna feed you information to keep you hooked using that app and using the stuff that they have because that's a value to them. And they sell your information, they sell your data. So don't be shocked by that.

Jeremy: Yep. Yeah.

Jason: but that's that's like one of the many fucked up shitty things about, you know, the the fact that we treat the internet and all the things on it like a business. Because it's not. It's it it's more than that. It's It's key infrastructure. Like it is a telephones don't use the plain old telephone system anymore the vast majority of the time. So the plain old telephone system, way back in the day when phones were first invented, it was wire a wire and it connects point A to point B. And that is what a telephone was. And then somebody went, Well, I want to talk from point A to point Q. Well, you had to have wires stretch in between each of them. And you had people called switchboard operators that would literally take a plug, unplug it, and put it into the right thing. Those people were eventually swapped out for phone switches. And the phone switches let you go through and do those things automatically by putting in a phone number, which then goes through and says, okay, I know that the first three digits, the area code, suggests I need to go to this thing first. And then the next three digits say I need to go to this thing. And the final four digits are the specific phone type that you're trying to get to. And that's how traffic got routed and pushed through. And you used to do that over a pair of copper wires. And these things are what are known as the plain old telephone system. You had to have these things in. You had to have an RJ11 jack in the wall to plug those pieces in. And you know, you had phones with cords and you'd twirl that shit and hold it on here. Some parents put payphones in their houses because they were tired of paying the fucking cell phone bill for the kids to talk to people all day and night. It created all kinds of wars between like Sprint and everybody else for these fiber optic connections because they were turning regular electrical impulses into photons. Like this is how this shit evolved. And then in the 90s, we created a thing called telephony, which is turning your communications into data. And once you turn that communications into data, you don't need a plain old telephone system anymore because you can run over the Ethernet. And then eventually you can run over the airwaves with cellular technology. Like all these things have grown and evolved. And I don't think anybody thinks of the phone as not being a critical part of infrastructure. And we pay a shit ton for it. Like our cell phone bills are fucking outrageous. And people have given up their home phones because they can't afford them. and their cell phones. And honestly, companies like Verizon and Comcast and ATT, they don't make any money off of the phone business anymore. Because you know, WhatsApp came in and Slack or and and well yeah Slack, Skype, like all these different freeways to talk to people over the public internet with video. And they were like, well fuck that. I'm not using my regular phone service. And honestly the voiceover IP sounds better. So All these improvements, all these things got better, all this technology play went in and worked. And it works fucking great. And it runs over the public internet. you know what else runs over the public internet? All of your TV, all of your news, pretty much all of your banking transactions, all of your commerce. I mean, it's fucking everything.

Jeremy: Everything. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason: And we've handed control over to it to a very small number of of people or very small number of companies. And They're not concerned about you having access to it. They're concerned about making money. And it would be

Jeremy: They're concerned about trying to get five extra dollars on your online sweater purchase with Muse. Yeah.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I mean this is just this is where the fucking reality of things are. Because we have taken away all the personal pieces behind it. We've turned the internet into the information superhighway for fucking real. Well, when's the last time you drove on a prov on a private road on a private toll road? That's what the internet has become. It's a private toll road.

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah.

Jason: and it's a private toll road that runs over public lands, that uses public dollars. That is subsidized and funded by your tax money. I mean like what the fuck?

Jeremy: Hence the reason we all need more and more mental health support.

Jason: And I need to get on with an AI chatbot and talk to them about this and explain the entire

Jeremy: Ha ha ha.

Jason: history of the fucking phone and all of the different switching technologies and how those pieces came through because more bullshit esoteric knowledge is in my head that wants to go and get out. Right? Like, who the fuck knows this much about phones? This asshole.

Jeremy: Well now a lot more people because they just heard you tell that story.

Jason: They're not gonna remember this. They're gonna forget it, cause it's useless fucking information that they can go

Jeremy: Ha ha ha.

Jason: and look up on ChatGPT to get. If you go on ChatGPT and go, give me the history of the telephone, it will say

Jeremy: Ha ha ha

Jason: the shit that I fucking said, and probably in a more eloquent way, likely with less cussing, unless you've actually gone through and programmed your chat to do that.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: I mean, that that's the thing. Like, we live in a vastly interconnected world, in a vastly interconnected society, and we've taken over. regular normal communication communication paths that humans would normally use, you know, things like standing in front of each other and talking. And we've replaced that with video calls. We've replaced that with cell phones. Like we're doing right fucking

Jeremy: Like like we're doing right now, as it turns out.

Jason: now. Right. Which is wonderful, right? Because I don't want to drive to Canada every day to do that or every Friday to do these kinds of podcasts. And you don't want to drive down here to do these podcasts. Like this is nice because it allows these things to go through. That being said, We know it's not a replacement for actually getting together and shaking hands and giving each other a hug and doing something fun together because we spend time and we take time to do that with each other. But I would say the majority of our conversations and interactions are in this format. Like if you just look at the the time space and everything that's used, it's this. And

Jeremy: Th this this is the vast majority of my human interaction is is sitting in this spot, looking at this

Jason: Yeah. Yes.

Jeremy: screen, talking to somebody on this screen.

Jason: Yep. Yep. And it's not just human interaction. You are getting a facsimile of human interaction that allows things to put be pumped into your senses in a way that makes it feel like you're having human interaction. But you're not. You are interacting with a computer and in the world of AI. There are avatars. There are fuzzy screens. There are things that people can do that you will never know. And this is the thing.

Jeremy: It's the it's the McDonald's of human interaction. It's you know, it seems like food, not actually food.

Jason: I think it's more like the cheesecake factorization of

Jeremy: Yeah.

Jason: things because the menu is so deep and so broad and so chaotic and everything is bad for you. And way more.

Jeremy: And way more expensive. So yeah, I think you're right. I th I think that's a good analogy.

Jason: Yes. Yes. Make sure you try the twenty four hundred calorie cashew chicken 'cause it's delicious.

Jeremy: that should be the only thing I eat that day, but it wouldn't be. That would just be what I ate at dinner. Of course, yeah.

Jason: g no no I have DPUS a cheesecake too. I mean that's the scary part. Like I have gone to Cheesecake Factory and I've eaten six thousand calories before. And walked out going,

Jeremy: Sure. I I am sure.

Jason: for long, I'm too full. I feel like I'm gonna die. You know?

Jeremy: Well now I'm hungry, so we should go. plus I have an an appointment with my internet therapist. So thank you so much for listening. I don't know that this has provided any hope, but perhaps some some companionship in the in the misery.

Jason: Some catharsis.

Jeremy: some cathars. That's the word I was trying to find. See, you're always so good with the words. I I I can never find the words.

Jason: It's because I'm not real, I am in fact an AI.

Jeremy: It certainly helps.

Jason: Asshole intelligence.

Jeremy: All right. Well, if you would like to follow the show and hear more of this, you can do that at robots.me. That's where we have a new episode for you every Monday. Thanks so much for listening. Please share this with anybody who you think might enjoy it. And until then, we will talk to you next Monday at Brobots.me

Jason: Thanks everyone. Bye bye.