Barbie, T-Swift and the Fed?

Make Me Smart July 26, 2023 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

I am good to go. Alright, let’s go Hello, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense. It’s July 26.

Kai Ryssdal 

This July, this July 26, hello Kai. It is Wednesday. I’m Kai Ryssdal. Thanks, everybody for joining us today we’re gonna get to some news, then some smiles. And then we’ll get everybody on their merry way. So let us go, shall we?

Kimberly Adams 

Their merry way.

Kai Ryssdal

Their merry way.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal 

Okay, so I’ll go first, just for the hell of it. I was driving to work today in my EV, which I think I’ve talked about on this podcast before we got it about six or eight months ago, very pleased with it, you know, a little range anxiety every now and then. But whatever I can deal with that. But I was feeling very smug. And I’m not a guy who feels very smug very often, as I drove to work with my electric car emitting zero anything into a 90 plus degree day here in Los Angeles, and a highway full of gas powered cars emitting a lot into an already 90 plus degree days. So that gets me to my item, which is today in The New York Times and elsewhere I’m sure, General Motors and a bunch of other car companies, including BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes Benz, and Stellantis, which used to be Fiat Chrysler are going to do a billion dollars, total, not each, in a joint venture to build 30,000 charging ports on major highways and other locations in the United States and Canada, that’s a very big deal. Because one of the big draws, holdbacks, holdbacks. One of the big things holding people back from buying EVs is the lack of charging when you’re away from home. So this is a very big step, it will of course, take some time, and it will probably not turn out to be as whiz bang, as everybody thinks it will. But look we’re getting there. And it’s a it’s a big deal. It’s a very big deal. As as you know, the planet just gets hotter by the frickin day.

Kimberly Adams 

It really does. And, you know, I was talking to my friend yesterday, I said, I feel like this summer is the one where climate change became real for a lot of people. Because it’s everywhere. And there are so many examples of it. And I mean, obviously the people who don’t want to believe that climate change is caused by humans, or are going to be not believing still. But for those who sort of believed it, but it was kind of in the back of their minds, or it seemed like it was gonna be far off in the future. I think folks are really starting to come to terms with the fact that like, “No, this is the rest of our lives and definitely like kids lives and grandkids lives in a real way.”

Kai Ryssdal 

I totally agree. And I truly hope that this summer is it. And I truly hope that everybody registers that we have to stop burning fossil fuels the way we have. My fear is that while we the general public, out and about and living this, are by and large in agreement that that climate change is manmade, and is here now, my fear is that global governments, including the government of the United States of America, are not prepared or capable to act on it. And that’s really the challenge.

Kimberly Adams

That is.

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah

Kimberly Adams 

I want a solution, but I don’t have it right now. Okay, well, mine is related to what I’m going to bring up to my make me smile later on both of them have to do with artificial intelligence and algorithms. And there’s a story in CBS in a bunch of other places about a lawsuit against the health insurance company Cigna where it’s being accused in this class action lawsuit of using an algorithm to review and reject patient’s health insurance claims, basically, for no reason. And that, that hundreds of thousands of health insurance claims that should have been approved, were rejected by these algorithms, because nobody was checking. And, you know, it left all these people sort of on the hook for out-of-pocket costs that should have been covered. And Cigna is obviously calling the lawsuit highly questionable, and saying that, you know, what they’re doing that it doesn’t result in any denials of care and things like that. But ProPublica also has been covering this, and I think that we are going, you know, the whiz bang of AI is ChatGPT and, you know, mid-journey and all these other things, but the realities of, you know, advanced AI is going to be stuff like this, when your health insurance claim gets denied, did a human make that decision? Or did an artificial intelligence make that decision? And if the latter, what can you do about it? Right. And as every industry deals with labor shortages, there’s going to be more and more interest in relying on these advanced algorithms to do this kind of work instead of humans, and maybe use humans as like a backstop. But think about all the time you’ve spent navigating pre-recorded phone trees trying to get to a real human, amplify that on the scale of a health insurance company, or, and these API’s, and algorithms I know, they’re sort of the same thing, but not exactly, you know, kind of being another layer in between, I think it’s going to be much harder to get to a real person, and a lot harder to challenge when something goes wrong, because it’s going to be like, well, the algorithm said so.

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah, totally.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah. Anyway, that’s all I got.

Kai Ryssdal

Fair enough. Drew, let’s go.

Kimberly Adams

Yes, so since I had a doom and gloom AI story, I wanted to bring a slightly more optimistic AI story. This one’s from Engadget, that some researchers at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have created a new technique or product, I guess it’s called PhotoGuard that will ideally help prevent people from stealing or specifically AI, empowered bots and things like that, from stealing your images and, and your artwork online. And you people are already using watermarks to try to you know, stop people from manipulating images. Because obviously, if you have a watermark over something, then you know, if you manipulate it, then you notice it, but somebody just wholesales stealing your picture and using it for something else, or your artwork and using it for something else is a lot harder to stop these AIs from scraping it. So I’m just going to read from Engadget here, “PhotoGuard works by altering select pixels in an image such that they will disrupt an AI’s ability to understand what the image is. Those perturbations, as the research team refers to them, are invisible to the human eye, but easily readable by machines.” And so “introducing these artifacts targets, the algorithmic model’s latent representation of the target image, the complex mathematics that describe the position and color of every pixel in an image- essentially preventing the AI from understanding what it’s looking at.” So if the AI is smart enough to know what a dog looks like, in a picture, but you layer this over it, it’s like, well, that doesn’t look like a dog. I don’t know what that is. And so I bring this up, because as, you know, frightening as some of these developments and AI can be, they’re also really smart people working on ways that we can learn to live with this. And that is encouraging to me.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’ll take that as a smile. Totally, totally. Yeah. Okay, so mine’s a little dorky, but it’s got some great pop culture. And it features Jeanna Smialek from The New York Times. So the Federal Reserve is, actually Jay Powell is having his press conference as we record this podcast today. And he’s answering questions about inflation and long variable lags and consumer spending and blah, blah. And so Jeanna, who is the Fed reporter at the New York Times, and also wrote a great book on the Fed asks a question, in which she said, in almost this many words, and then I’ll actually quote what she said, Look, “is it a good news, bad news situation that consumers are continuing to spend so much money because the good news is that we need consumers to drive the economy. But the bad news is that consumer spending is really helping to drive, especially in services, some of this inflation and then she said, we’ve all heard stories about everybody going to see the Barbie movie, and everybody going to see Taylor Swift.” And I was like, God, Jeanna I love you. It was great. It was great. It was great. And look, people are spending a gazillion dollars on Taylor Swift tickets and many dollars on the Barbie movie.

Kimberly Adams 

And Beyonce tickets

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah, you bet.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah. That is great. That that’s for sure a smile. You know, my mother told me that she actually had gotten an email for like early access to buy tickets to the Renaissance tour, because I guess she had been to a Beyonce concert in the past. And so she got one of those emails that would have allowed her to buy the tickets. And she was just like, ”No, I don’t really feel like going.”  and I was just like, Oh my God. Like, she’s like, “I don’t like her newer music” and I was just like, “Mom, you don’t understand.” Oh, God bless her. God bless her. Anyway, that’s it for us today. You can like also be sad with me that I’m not going to see Beyonce. We will be back tomorrow to answer your questions about the restarting of student loan repayments. Restart of repayments. Interesting. Restarting of student loan repayments. In the meantime, keep sending us your comments and questions we’re at 508-U-B-SMART. you can also write us at makemesmart@marketplace.org.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter, today’s program was engineered by Drew Jostad. Our intern is Niloufar Shahbandi.

Kimberly Adams 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Brigitte Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.