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The Interface
Teens banned from social media - what next?
00:36:47
UK teens banned from social media, AI’s nuclear fusion grab, and Siri’s iPhone takeover
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- [00:00]
Podcast Advertiser
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Like those $5 roses at a gas station? Or a secondhand piece of technology that breaks in the first 10 minutes? Marketers know that feeling. We optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not so great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for bullspend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest roas of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title and more. So cut the bull. Spend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com broadcast that's LinkedIn.com broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching?
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Nicky Wolf
Washington Wise is an original podcast from
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Podcast Advertiser
Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen@schwab.com washingtonwise that's schwab.com washingtonwise.
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Nicky Wolf
There's problems with the way that you can identify somebody as under 16. 70% of the children who'd got around the ban described it as easy.
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Karen Howe
Welcome to the Interface, the show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Karen Howe.
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Thomas Germain
I'm Thomas Germain.
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Nicky Wolf
And I'm Nicky Wolf.
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Karen Howe
Today on the Interface, the UK bans teens from social media. What happens next?
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Nicky Wolf
Why are AI companies getting involved in nuclear fusion?
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Thomas Germain
And is Siri finally going to be good?
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Karen Howe
This past week has been absolutely insane for tech news.
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Nicky Wolf
Yeah, a lot going on.
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Karen Howe
There were literally so many massive stories, one of which was that SpaceX iPod and Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire.
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Thomas Germain
Congratulations. So, so exciting for, for all of us. You, you just cannot wrap your mind around how big this number is.
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Karen Howe
It's actually. There have been studies that have shown that the human brain is unable to accurately assess how much a trillion is. But if you were to stack 1 trillion pennies on top of each other, that would literally get you to the moon and back twice.
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Thomas Germain
That's a lot of pennies.
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Nicky Wolf
It's funny you should say that, Karen. If You. A trillion dollars is enough to give every mouse on the planet $200.
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Thomas Germain
$200. What if you were.
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Karen Howe
Wait, sorry. What if the mouse Popul.
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Nicky Wolf
I mean there are actually, there are fewer mice on the planet. Slightly fewer mice than humans.
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Karen Howe
I'm so glad I know that fact.
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Thomas Germain
Now the rest of the episode is going to be us advocating for a mice, a mouse, universal basic income. Universal mouse income. I think we could really. Yeah. We're talking about the big issues today.
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Karen Howe
Another massive story that happened this past week was Anthropic faced off with the US Government again. For longtime listeners of the Interface, we have talked about anthropic competitor to OpenAI having a spat with the Department of War. This time what happened was the US government put export controls, which is a specific mechanism that the government has power to do on Anthropic's latest AI model, Claude Fable, which if you remember, we did an episode on Claude Mythos this supposedly super scary AI model that was too dangerous to release. Anthropic then added safeguards and renamed the model Fable to release it. And the US government decided, no, no, you cannot release it to any foreign nationals, which means that they cannot release it at all. So Anthropic had to pull the model. But we're not going to talk about any of those things.
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Thomas Germain
Yeah, no, we're not.
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Nicky Wolf
Yeah, let's get to the. We're going to talk about a small. A small island off the coast of Europe has just done something massive and may have heard of it from.
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Karen Howe
Used to have a big empire.
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Thomas Germain
Yeah, yeah.
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Karen Howe
So what we're actually going to talk about is the fact that the UK banned or announced that it will ban children under the age of 16 from social media. The government has not officially clarified exactly which social media platforms it is going to ban, but it has said that generally speaking, they are going to ban platforms whose purpose is to enable social interaction and allow users to post content. So they've already said yes, they're gonna ban Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X. No, they're not gonna ban WhatsApp and Signal. And they're also potentially going to consider overnight curfews and breaks in doom scrolling for teenagers under 18.
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Thomas Germain
This is something I think I could use. A legal bedtime would be good for me. You know, like the government says, I must not illegal bedtime. Yeah, I guess you don't have to go to bed, you just have to get off.
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Karen Howe
Exactly.
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Nicky Wolf
You know, you could just raw dog
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Karen Howe
it for the rest of the night.
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Thomas Germain
So between the ages of 16 and 18, you can go on social media, just not at night.
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Karen Howe
Exactly. The UK is following in the footsteps of Australia, which implemented a social media ban for its kids in December of 2025. And the government has already indicated that it is planning on implementing, putting out the policy by Christmas of this year. So it'll be roughly a year after the Australia ban and then the implementation would happen in around spring of 2027. So it's kind of an interesting moment because I think when Australia did it, it seemed a bit anomalous. But now that the UK is also following in the footsteps, there is this question now of whether this is going to kick off further momentum and have more countries around the world ban social media for kids. And generally speaking, this is a move that is actually incredibly popular among parents. So this, this was a move done with significant amounts of public consultation. There was actually 116,000 responses to government consultation period. And there was a poll that came out from YouGov, a data analytics and market research platform that found that 77% of parents in the UK with kids under 18 support a social media ban like this. Interestingly though, only 45% think that it would actually be effective for 46% think that it could potentially not be effective at all.
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Nicky Wolf
That's a very British level of cynicism in that whole, like, yes, it would be a good idea. Nah, it's not gonna work though, is it?
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Karen Howe
What I'm reading from this survey is that parents think something needs to change and they are at this point willing to try the nuclear option, just banning everything outright and just seeing what happens because the cost of keeping the platforms around as is, they have determined is too high.
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Nicky Wolf
It's interesting that what it seems like parents are in favor of is the feeling that right now they are taking all the onus of responsibility on policing their children's Internet use, social media use, and this idea that, you know, all the parents I know are exhausted by that experience and they're like, if the government can have a go at it, that would be really good if someone else can take that responsibility away from them. Now there are some pressure groups that are not nearly as positive on it.
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Thomas Germain
Right.
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Nicky Wolf
A lot of them have pointed out the Australia example. They're saying that there's problems with the way that you can identify somebody as under 16, whether you use an ID based verification or a facial recognition based verification. So obviously both of those have huge flaws and problems with them. Five companies are already under investigation for non compliance, including YouTube, Meta, TikTok, there was a study by the Molly Rose foundation, which is a children's digital rights NGO. 3/5 of 12, 15 year olds who did have accounts on social media before still have those accounts. There have been lots of case studies that the Australian government found they did a three month report where a 14 year old can game the age recognition, the facial recognition software and just convince it that they are 16. And over 70% of the children that the Bolly Rose foundation polled who'd got around the ban described it as easy. So there's implementation problems, there's conceptual problems. That just goes to demonstrate these things are not easy to implement.
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Karen Howe
One caveat to this survey though is that experts have pointed out that six months is really not enough to actually understand a ban like this. There's not actually enough data to analyze the effects. And a lot of parents, while they understand that their kids are still getting on these platforms, are quite optimistic about what this kind of ban does for, for kids that will never get accounts. I mean, right now we're talking about the kids who had social media that are in this weird transition where it was taken away from them. But parents are holding out hope that, that for the generations that never had accounts, like they will end up not having a social media as sort of an integrated part of their upbringing and that will then lead them to have more healthy, robust, offline experiences.
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Nicky Wolf
Yeah, and the, the, the backdrop to which this is happening in the UK is lots of funding has been cut for social programs, youth programs, youth clubs, youth groups. There, there are rules being brought in. People don't like when teenagers hang out in parks. There was this thing we talked about briefly when we talked about Helena Syndrome, where you can get shops that have a high pitched noisemaker that push teenagers away from hanging out.
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Thomas Germain
It's like a sound that only young people can hear. It's like super high pitched and it's very annoying. And they like put it to like keep kids away, like we got to give them an alternative. We have to do something for children. Aside from saying like, oh, we don't go on social media and then I guess everything will be fine. I, I don't know if I, where
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Nicky Wolf
are kids going to hang out?
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Karen Howe
So it's worth saying that this is deeply unpopular among tech companies in particular and that meta, YouTube, Snap, they've all come out pretty strongly against this impending ban and they have specifically mentioned that there's a risk to isolating teens and taking away the benefits of social media while also potentially pushing teens to unregulated, anonymous or less safe options. But interestingly, it's actually not just the tech companies that are pushing back. There are some online safety experts that have mentioned as well, they don't think these kinds of, of harsh bans are actually going to keep kids safer online. And indeed, they also say, similarly to the tech companies, that it could just pull kids away from real social connections that they're developing in online communities that can be quite beneficial for their development.
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Thomas Germain
I think the social media companies have a point here about pushing people to more dangerous parts of the Internet. We have tried this with pornography. Now, in most or something like half of US states, you have to pass an age verification test to get onto a pornography site. And the thing that has happened is all of the super mainstream sites are following these rules and then these sketchier sites from other countries that can't be prosecuted aren't. So if you're going to go on the Internet and we can all agree that the Internet could be a dangerous place, you're probably a little better off on a giant platform that is more moderated than a small one where there's more weird and illegal and disturbing and upsetting stuff happen. That's exactly what's going to happen here with social media. If it is harder for kids to get on social media, the place that they are going to go is gigantic group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram and other parts of the Internet, which functionally work just like social media. Right. It's just like people posting but are
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Nicky Wolf
completely invisible from the outside.
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Thomas Germain
And I think a lot of the same problems will just crop up there. It seems like a very blunt and not particularly thoughtful measure.
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Nicky Wolf
And the other thing that people have pointed out is that also coming in very soon in the UK is a reduction of the voting age to 16. And a lot of people have made the point, and I think this is a pretty good point, that like it or not, social media is the main source of news.
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Thomas Germain
It is where the discourse happens.
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Nicky Wolf
How do you become an informed voter at 16 without access to any of these spaces? And obviously places like X are not. There's huge downsides to them being the core source of news. Unfortunately, they just are. Now, that is the information world we live in.
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Karen Howe
Well, but I think that's also because that the kids have access to social media right now. But when you lose those channels, I think news consumption behavior would shift.
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Thomas Germain
I mean, I think they're just not going to consume it. I don't think kids are going to be like, God, I can't go on Instagram. I guess I will go to BBC.com like that's not like.
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Nicky Wolf
Well, when, when I was growing up, when I was growing up, there was a kids newspaper. It was put out by the Sunday Times. It was called the Fun Day Times. I read it. Ooh, maybe that's, you know, every week. Yeah, Kids newspapers would be.
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Karen Howe
Yeah, yeah, I did that too.
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Thomas Germain
As much as I like that idea, I don't think that's where it's going.
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Karen Howe
There was this really interesting point that Ursula von der Leyen said. She's the president of the EU Commission. She was speaking at a G7 meeting on Monday and she said the debate is not whether young people should have access to social media. The debate is whether social media should have access to our children and teenagers and when. And I think that's exactly right. There's a genuine question now of whether the current implementation of social media can really deliver the benefits that social media could have while protecting kids from those harms.
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Thomas Germain
That's exactly my problem with these bans though, is built in is this assumption that there's nothing that we can do to change the status quo, that social media is bad. Oh, well, that's just how it is. So let's get kids off of it. What about doing something to address the problems of social media? Right. In the United States, we've got laws protecting children's privacy, but not adults privacy. Right? So like, oh, the privacy problem is so bad. Oh, well, like we'll protect kids from it. No, just pass a law that regulates how you can collect and use people's data. The same applies here. We have a problem with the way that social media companies operate. Why not do something about it? I think it's also interesting how this is going to change social media. Right? Like, so much of popular culture comes from young people and teenagers. Right. That's how it's always been. They're like the main drivers of cultural change. We could be looking at a world where it's just like only old people on Instagram. I mean, I guess they'll still be like 18 and 19 year olds is not 16 and up. Yeah, I'm exaggerating. But there is going to be a big change, right? Like the, the kind of content that's online, that what people are making and what gets popular. If this whole cohort of young people is eliminated, there's going to be a dramatic shift. Kind of hard to predict what it'll be like, but like the stuff that you see online will be different.
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Nicky Wolf
And there's also a chance that The UK is one of the, is one of the first dominoes to fall and this will be coming to other countries. There is already legislation in the U.S. senate CO sponsored by Ted Cruz and Chris Murphy. Just kind of unusual for a piece of legislation to have that level of Republicans at the end of the spectrum supporting it.
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Karen Howe
Yeah, yeah.
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Thomas Germain
And apparently, according to one poll, at least 64% of Americans are in favor of banning kids from social media. It would probably be a little bit harder to implement in the US because of the First Amendment. We have much stronger free speech protections in the US Than there are in the UK and most of Europe. So it, even if it does get passed, it might not survived the courts. But this kind of like blunt thinking is how American legislators have been moving. So I would be surprised if we don't see something like this in some way in the United States and the rest of the world very soon.
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Podcast Advertiser
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Karen Howe
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Karen Howe
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- [20:22]
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- [20:27]
Nicky Wolf
Okay, I'm psyched to bring this next story to you guys because I've been doing a lot of reporting and actually been obsessed for years and years with fusion power, but suddenly Silicon Valley and particularly AI companies have joined me in that obsess. Yeah, fusion power, just really briefly, nuclear fusion is the power that. That's the energy that powers the sun. Right. We are talking about building small suns on planet Earth that we can potentially get near limitless amounts of energy from. This is kind of the holy grail for power and has been for a really long time.
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Thomas Germain
And fusion, as opposed to fission. Right. Fission is how nuclear reactors work now. You split the atoms apart. Fusion, you smash the atoms together. And this is. It's cleaner. It's like unfathomably more efficient. Infinite energy, essentially, if you could figure out how to do it. But so far, it's a little bit science fiction. Right.
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Nicky Wolf
And it's been science fiction for 40 years.
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Thomas Germain
Yeah. Like, you do it in a lab under very specific circumstances, but you can't. Like, you have to put more energy into making it happen than you get out. They haven't figured out how to do it right.
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Nicky Wolf
Exactly. There have been a couple of times where there's been. So there have been fusion reactions. We have created small funds. There's one in France, there's one in the uk, there's one in the US In Los Alamos. They have a few times created a net energy gain, which means huge amounts of energy have to go into making a fusion reaction. And then that fusion Reaction just about produces more energy by tiny, tiny factors than it's put in. And only just. That's after decades and decades of work. Here's. Here's a sign of how long fusion has been just around the corner. When I was in high school, I. Fusion, 40s, writing new technology. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was between the world Wars.
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Thomas Germain
Yeah, right.
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Nicky Wolf
No, we'd be talking late 90s, early 2000s. I was in high school and became obsessed with nuclear fuel. I don't know if you guys know the TV show Robot Wars. I think maybe it's called something different in the U.S. battleBots. Yeah, BattleBots.
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Thomas Germain
Yeah. It was like fighting robots.
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Nicky Wolf
We wanted to build a robot that could go on and fight on. BattleBots on Robot Wars. And we were planning on. We were like, it's so close. We can build one with a nuclear fusion reactor on it. Because people then were saying, fusion is a few years away. And they are still saying exactly the same to this day, 25, 30 years later.
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Karen Howe
I love all of the technologies that have been 10 years away for 10 years. 100 years.
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Thomas Germain
Yeah.
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Nicky Wolf
Nonetheless, Sam Altman now has. Sam Altman, the OpenAI founder, has a fusion startup called Helion. A few days ago, they just raised half a billion dollars in a new seed funding round. There's lots of other random fusion companies popping up. We'll get into those in a little bit. But the problem with fusion is it's really, really, really, really hard. And we are still very early on in its development. But, Karen, I don't know if you can speak to why AI companies are suddenly obsessed with this.
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Karen Howe
I've actually been reading a relevant book about this, so I wanted to give it a shout out.
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Thomas Germain
One of my favorite companies, this is
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Karen Howe
called Nuclear Is not the Solution. The following.
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Nicky Wolf
Talk about giving the whole thing away.
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Karen Howe
In the title, I'm just. Yeah. The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change by MV Ramana. And he talks about how billionaires, tech billionaires have actually long been obsessed with nuclear, not just fusion, but also fission. And he. And specifically because it kind of helps feed into their ideology that we can continue to grow forever with infinite resources and support that with the physics of our Earth without getting accelerating runaway climate change, if we can unlock nuclear as like a viable energy path. And so the reason why we have seen this obsession for a long time and it's become even more of an intense obsession now, is because of the AI industry and the extraordinary degree of energy that they need to power their supercomputing facilities, that they are Building all around the world. Recently, OpenAI announced that they are going to try to build a 10 gigawatt supercomputing facility in Ohio. 10 gigawatts is roughly the average power demand of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco combined.
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Thomas Germain
Oh.
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Karen Howe
So that is the amount of power that they want to direct to one supercomputing facility and. Wow.
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Thomas Germain
Yeah.
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Karen Howe
Yep, yep. Private nuclear companies that are invested in biotech billionaires, which has been an ongoing thing for many, many years, are structured in a way that ensures that the tech billionaires will actually be able to profit before the nuclear reactor has ever produced energy.
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Nicky Wolf
I had a friend of mine who's a quantum physicist who I gave the Sam Altman Helion stuff to look through. He looked through what they were doing and he was like, what they can. The scale of how far they've got to go. They are talking about they're promising that they can build a Ferrari when they've just about jury rigged a spark plug, let alone an engine.
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Karen Howe
Yeah. And this book actually talks about Sam Altman specifically and how he has put his investments in a number of different nuclear companies. It's not just Helion. There's also nuclear fission companies that he's put his money into. And the way that he structures the deals is such that it doesn't actually matter if the reactor is ultimately going to deliver energy to the public, it is ultimately going to deliver returns on investment to the tech billionaires. And it's not just Altman, it's Bill Gates has long touted nuclear as a solution. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, you know, it's the whole cast of characters that we've become so familiar with on this show.
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Nicky Wolf
And it's not just Silicon Valley. I've just reported a story published this week with New World magazine here in the uk.
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Thomas Germain
Huge scoop.
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Nicky Wolf
A big scoop. I did a scoop which is that the British government has gone into partnership with a company called TAE technologies. It's the UK's Atomic Energy Authority, which regulates and invests in fusion power projects, has gone into partnership with a company called TAE Technologies, which is currently going through a merger with Trump Media Inc. Which owns Truth Social.
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Karen Howe
It's like the most insane sentence.
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Nicky Wolf
Wild. Yeah. Trump's social media platform is merging with a nuclear fusion company, which is wild. You know, sense, insane sense that there's money in the water and British government will pay us to do this partnership.
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Thomas Germain
So the British government is partnering essentially with a company that's owned by Donald Trump.
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Nicky Wolf
Yeah, correct. Which is wild. And that's Part of this gold rush. They're like, if you put the word, it's like fusion is kind of the new, maybe even not the new. It's one of those things that you can attach to almost anything. We've seen this with, obviously with the word AI, you can be like, yeah, AI and anything. We saw it with blockchain. You can be like blockchain for books, blockchain for art, blockchain for anything. And it just a thing you can say that immediately puts you forward for getting investment into something and the technology is just not there. Hopefully it will be, but it's just not there right now.
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Thomas Germain
So my question, and I know this is why you brought all this up, is how will fusion benefit our podcast? This is a huge opportunity.
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Nicky Wolf
I don't know about you guys, I. I never quite got rid of that dream of the Robot wars battlebot. So if we can create a interface Robot Wars. If you are a nuclear fusion scientist and you want to help us build a color robot, please get in touch. Do get in touch@the interfacebc.com robot/robot.
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Thomas Germain
That's how email addresses work.
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Nicky Wolf
New spinoff show.
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Thomas Germain
Yeah, yeah. All right, let's move on to talk about something that is happening right now in real time, not maybe someday in 30 years. So last week Apple had its developer conference and they announced a brand new revamped AI Siri. Maybe you heard this one before. They announced this a couple years ago and that it never arrived. There was like a class action lawsuit, I think it was two years ago, because they promised if you buy the new iPhone, you'll get all these new AI features. And then the features never came. And some people were very upset. But now they are going to deliver on that promise. Those features are here. Some people have tried them out. You can download the beta version of the new iPhone operating system. It only works on, you know, newer phones. Like if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or any phone newer than that, or like newer MacBooks or iPads, you'll be able to have access to this. I think there's like a waiting list. Like some people can't get it immediately, but these features are here. They're in the wild. They are available. This is finally real.
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Nicky Wolf
Can you run down what it can do? What are these features?
- [30:03]
Thomas Germain
Yeah, so the features on the iPhone, it's fairly basic, but the bottom line is now Siri will have access to like all of the data that's in your text messages and your email if you've connected. If you're like using Apple Mail and stuff like that. And it will be context aware, so it will be able to see the stuff that's on your screen and it will be able to do stuff in all kinds of different apps, which might sound small, but it's a big shift right now. If you've tried to use Siri, it is extremely limited and I think for a lot of people, very frustrating. There's things where you feel like, obviously it should be able to do it now all this stuff is going to work a lot better. I'll give you an example of what I think is like actually really truly useful and cool. It's small, right? There's baby steps, but I saw a. There's a band I like that is playing show in October. They announced it on Instagram. I have some work travel around that I'm not sure if I can go, but I don't want to forget. So I want to make a calendar entry to remember this. In order to do that now I have to tap my phone in very specific places, like 20 different times, right? I have to go over to the calendar app, I have to find the date, I have to click, I have to type in and I gotta go back and forth between the two apps to remember the information from Instagram. I gotta put the time and the venue and all this stuff. Now you can have your phone and be like, hey, Siri, you see this thing on the screen right now? Make a calendar entry for this. What we're really talking about here to me has been the actual promise of AI. Not that like I can have it write me an essay or like give me feedback on an email. The promise of natural language processing for me, right? Natural language process that's like computer interaction that uses just human language, is that you can speak to your devices the way that you speak to a person and it's much more intuitive. So I don't think this is going to change your life, but there are ways that it could make your interactions with your devices a lot more convenient. But more importantly, what I think this means is suddenly massive amounts of people who don't interact with AI are going to start seeing it and using it in small ways at first. And I think that is a very dramatic shift. And I'm not here to tell you that this is good, like hooray for Apple, right? Like we've been talking for six months now. I think this is episode 19 about all of the problems that come with AI. We're going to get all the problems and all the potential benefits here. But I think what's really changing is that this is a big shift where people are going to see this stuff and they're going to find small ways that it's useful. And I think this is going to be people's entry point into AI. A lot of people who, like, haven't found their way to it yet. And that, I think is a very dramatic change.
- [32:59]
Karen Howe
Yeah. So I think you're right, Tom, that it is going to become an entry point for a lot of people. And oftentimes I think people aren't even going to realize that they're actually interacting with AI. And I think that's actually the trick to getting more people to use it is that it's just a seamless. It just feels like a seamless upgrade to the general experience. Right, exactly. I have genuine questions about to what extent people are actually going to be using the voice interface.
- [33:31]
Nicky Wolf
I don't know about you, Karen. I'm a real skeptic of voice activation as being the next big thing. It's great for people with disabilities. In no way am I saying that voice activation is not a useful technology for anyone. But to me, telling the act of saying, okay, hi, Siri, can you please wait? There's this band. Wait, wait, wait. Can you open the calendar to it?
- [33:59]
Thomas Germain
I mean, Nick, you used a phone from, like, 1910, right? You're on a BlackBerry, right?
- [34:04]
Nicky Wolf
Like, my phone still has buttons.
- [34:06]
Thomas Germain
Siri, this thing on my screen. Make a calendar entry for. Put this on my calendar. That simple.
- [34:10]
Karen Howe
I mean, so one of the things that makes me skeptical about the voice interface. Well, there are a few reasons I'm skeptical. One is that we literally have been talking about voice interface for a long time. Like, I moderated a panel back in 2017 about how voice interface was coming and it was going to transform everything. And that was the time when, you know, the first couple generations of Alexa had just come out and everyone was like, this is going to revolutionize everything. Everyone's going to be talking to their computers with their voices ever after. And then it turned out that all people want to do with Alexa is ask for the weather. So set an alarm and play music. And there's just like, never really been that much adoption beyond that. So that's like, one point of skepticism. And I will caveat my own skepticism with. I could see Siri being different because it's multimodal. Like, you are seeing your screen while also talking to the screen, which is different from the Alexa experience. But the other thing that I'm kind of skeptical about is we have the capability to send voice memos to each other through text message. A lot of people still don't do that because you're often in a noisy environment, you're on the go and you don't want to be spilling your private life on like a subway. Right. And so I'm kind of curious whether or not people are actually going to take to the voice interface specifically.
- [35:34]
Thomas Germain
But I think the reason people didn't really adopt Alexa for things other than like checking the weather and setting a timer is because, like, that's kind of all it can do. Amazon was really hoping that we would say, hey, please buy toilet paper. People don't want to make purchases that way. It can't do a lot of stuff. It's extremely limited. What we're talking about here is they're unlocking a bunch of new sets of functionality so it will be able to do way more stuff. Like, I think the reason people don't use Siri is because it stinks.
- [36:02]
Karen Howe
Yeah.
- [36:03]
Nicky Wolf
There's a whole separate set of concerns that I have, which is a Siri and AI which has screen watch and multi app use powers. Is that always on? Is it always watching your screen? Is it able to access all of your apps, accessing all of the data from all of your apps all of the time in order to be able to do this and then what's happening to that data?
- [36:27]
Thomas Germain
Yeah. So that is a very serious concern that Apple is worried about. The hilarious concerned about. They have announced that like a bunch of, you know, ways that they are going to be protecting your privacy here. Take it with a grain of salt because I think those concerns are real. Apple says that the processing happens on your device, that they're not going to be sharing all this information with Apple. You will be able to determine like, I don't, like, I don't want Siri looking at this app and you don't have to use this at all if you don't want it. Like for now, you have to go seek this stuff out and turn it on. So this is certainly something that they're considering. But yeah, the fact that all of this stuff will be swooped in to Siri is an issue. At the same time, you also got to think about that, like, Siri is just my phone's operating system. Your phone already can see all the stuff on your phone. So there's like. Yeah. Not to dismiss that concern entirely.
- [37:27]
Nicky Wolf
Yeah.
- [37:27]
Thomas Germain
But I mean, if you think about what this stuff could do. Right. Like there's all this stuff that you can do that required all these multiple steps that will now be simplified. It'll be easier.
- [37:38]
Nicky Wolf
The example that it gave in one of the articles, and this was in like a pro Apple blog or something that was like, you'll be able to put in a calendar invite for a dinner party, and then ask it for recipes for your dinner party. And I was like, oh, go easy, you, Grace. I can find a recipe online.
- [37:55]
Sponsor Voice
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- [37:55]
Thomas Germain
What a gift.
- [37:56]
Nicky Wolf
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't shower me in riches.
- [37:59]
Thomas Germain
The thing that I'm hoping right now is to let you into. To my twisted mind, I get so angry at my phone all the time. I'm constantly freaking out because this thing won't do the stuff that I wanted to do. I think I really use as in,
- [38:16]
Nicky Wolf
because you're pressing the wrong buttons.
- [38:18]
Thomas Germain
Because I'm pressing the wrong. Or it's just like, it won't do a thing that I want it to do or like, where is that setting? And like, at the very least, at least when I yell at my phone, there will be someone to hear it.
- [38:33]
Nicky Wolf
No, they won't.
- [38:33]
Karen Howe
So basically, no, they won't.
- [38:35]
Nicky Wolf
You really think adding a layer of actual shouting is going to make your phone less frustrating in those situations?
- [38:43]
Thomas Germain
AI, You've lost the battle for sure. But I just, I find that, like, I have to translate the things that I want to do into computer speak into the right buttons. And like, I. I don't know if I'm just in a hurry and I need to relax, but, like, my brain just doesn't work the way that my phone works.
- [39:03]
Karen Howe
Sounds like you have road rage, but with your phone.
- [39:07]
Thomas Germain
Yeah, I. I hope that this will make me less annoyed at my phone. That's really what I'm banking on here.
- [39:13]
Karen Howe
I really hope for you too, Tom,
- [39:15]
Thomas Germain
because I am quite worried that it's
- [39:17]
Karen Howe
going to do exactly the opposite.
- [39:19]
Thomas Germain
Not good for my blood pressure, I think.
- [39:21]
Nicky Wolf
I think there's nothing more infuriating than, for example, you know, on, like, a call center. And it's like, please tell me what your problem is. And I'm like, lime bike broken. And it's like ordering lime ice cream. You're like, no, no, no, no, no,
- [39:37]
Thomas Germain
no bicycle solution here. I'm gonna tell my phone I'm under 16 and it'll just ban me from it and then I won't have to deal with it anymore. I can go read, like, you know, go read the kids newspaper or something like that.
- [39:51]
Nicky Wolf
The thing with voice activation is it doesn't work at all unless it's perfect. If it doesn't quite understand that context that you're going for, it instantaneously becomes more annoying to use than hitting the button.
- [40:05]
Thomas Germain
Yeah, and I will tell you like the number of times that I, you know, I try to use AI more than I would normally just because I want to be really versed in it for my reporting and my writing. And the number of times that I open up Claude or ChatGPT and it starts doing something and I'm just like, you are out of your mind. What the hell are you talking about? I get that.
- [40:26]
Nicky Wolf
Don't destroy the world. Don't. Don't fire the nuclear weapons. I wanted to order wine. Give every mouse $200.
- [40:35]
Thomas Germain
If Siri could give mice $200 then I would say Apple has finally done it.
- [40:43]
Karen Howe
Thanks so much for tuning in this week. Join us next week. If you're in the uk, listen on BBC Sounds. If you're outside the uk, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts or search for the Interface podcast on YouTube. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us@the interfacebc.com or you can find us on social media links in the show Notes.
- [41:10]
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