Episode 9 The Ethics of Emerging Technologies

The conversation moves through how pricing can shift based on personal signals, how AI can enable convincing fraud, and why legal systems often struggle to keep pace with fast-moving capabilities.

Gene editing, patents, and unintended consequences bring the discussion into biotechnology, while autonomous vehicles raise questions about bias, safety, and liability when humans are no longer the drivers. Along the way, the episode looks at data privacy, targeted advertising, platform responsibility, and the tradeoffs between convenience, security, and personal autonomy.

Episode Show Notes

Surveillance pricing and personalized pricing based on behavioral and location signals
Data collection through apps, browsers, and payment trails
Creative destruction and the limits of traditional market assumptions
Public surveillance, cameras, and the debate over effectiveness vs. overreach
Gene splicing, patent disputes, and unintended legal consequences for farmers
CRISPR-Cas9 and the ethical concerns raised by its inventors
AI-enabled fraud and the risk of deepfake-style impersonation in business settings
Blockchain and credential verification as a proposed response to identity spoofing
Autonomous vehicles: fault, insurance, and accountability when there is no human driver
Bias and testing gaps in automation and safety systems
Technology change vs. legal change: reacting after harm occurs
Metadata sales and privacy concerns in sensitive categories (including therapy and DNA)
Platform responsibility in preventing scams and misleading advertising
Tradeoffs in safety surveillance: tracking family members vs. privacy and autonomy
Practical vigilance against scam outreach and unsolicited messages

Episode Timestamps

00:00:32 Surveillance pricing and personalized pricing signals
00:02:33 Creative destruction and Joseph Schumpeter
00:04:07 Surveillance cameras, public safety, and overreach
00:06:19 Gene splicing, Monsanto seeds, and patent infringement concerns
00:09:57 CRISPR-Cas9, Jennifer Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier
00:10:58 “Rampage” as a pop-culture reference to gene editing
00:12:21 English common law and innovation moving faster than legal systems
00:13:25 AI avatar scam scenario and identity verification
00:16:57 Malcolm Gladwell example: autonomous cars and unexpected behavior
00:19:17 Self-driving car liability and bias in detection systems
00:23:16 Elizabeth Holmes and fraud as a consequence case
00:23:35 Sam Bankman-Fried and fraud as a consequence case
00:28:12 Windows 11 surveillance concerns and migration to Linux
00:29:01 Hardware and ecosystem constraints (MacBook Pro M2 monitor limits)
00:32:31 “Better Health” metadata sales discussion
00:34:24 23 and Me bankruptcy and DNA database concerns
00:35:55 Levi’s bracelet scenario: consumer surveillance incentives
00:37:52 Elder care tracking scenario: safety vs. privacy tradeoffs
00:45:45 Scam texts and why blocking can be safer than replying
00:47:16 AI-generated scam ads and platform responsibility (Meta)
00:54:35 Payment trails, surveillance tradeoffs, and a story about receipts exonerating someone
00:56:21 Closing

Entities

CuriousPundits.com (website mentioned)
Joseph Schumpeter — The Theory of Economic Development
McDonald’s app (surveillance pricing example)
Monsanto (seed patent example)
CRISPR-Cas9
Jennifer Doudna
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Rampage (film reference)
Malcolm Gladwell
South by Southwest (Austin)
General Motors (voice interaction example)
Winamp
YouTube
Spotify
Windows 10
Windows 11
Linux
MacBook Pro (M2)
Hammurabi code (reference)
Elizabeth Holmes (reference)
Sam Bankman-Fried (reference)
ChatGPT (reference)
Meta / Facebook (reference)
Google (reference)
23 and Me (reference)
Better Health (as named in transcript)
Levi’s (bracelet scenario)
Wrangler (brand reference)
Uber (reference)
Amazon / Whole Foods (checkout experiment reference)
Blockchain (credential verification reference)
Two-factor authentication (2FA) (reference)

About the Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Carney and Emanuel Petrescu, two curious minds exploring ideas, culture, and everything in between. Curious Pundits is a conversational podcast where each episode starts with a topic that caught our attention and unfolds into thoughtful, unscripted discussion. We follow curiosity wherever it leads, across disciplines, opinions, and perspectives, without pretending to have all the answers.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Emanuel: Hi, and welcome back. My name is Emanuel.

[00:00:03] Kevin: My name is Kevin.

[00:00:05] Emanuel: And we are The Curious Pundits. Two people, two digital marketers that simply are curious about stuff that we like to talk about.

Today’s topic is the ethics of emerging technologies, and as the previous episodes, Kevin choose this topic as well.

Kevin, what did you have in mind when you, what was going through your mind when you decided on this topic?

[00:00:32] Kevin: Surveillance pricing.

[00:00:36] Emanuel: Surveillance…. raise one eyebrow…

[00:00:38] Kevin: Pricing.

[00:00:40] Emanuel: Raise the other eyebrow also. So do tell…

[00:00:46] Kevin: You’ve heard of it, right?

[00:00:48] Emanuel: I’m not sure I understand exactly. So please.

[00:00:53] Kevin: Corporations are selling us stuff through our phones and our browsers.

And because apps bleed information, for lack of a better word, they know a lot about us. So two people can buy the same thing at the same time and pay different prices.

[00:01:16] Emanuel: Should I put my tinfoil hat on for this one or…

[00:01:19] Kevin: No no, this is for real.

[00:01:22] Emanuel: I know. No, I’m just kidding. I know it happens. Even right now, we can do a live experiment even when my computer going incognito or anything like that.

Canada, you’re in the US… but… yeah, go ahead.

[00:01:41] Kevin: But it’s based on what zip code you live in. They’ve even caught, and I think it was McDonald’s. Charging people more on payday than they charged them the day before payday, because the McDonald’s app is able to figure out when payday is based on your cycle, if you will, of activities and stuff.

It’s a pretty insidious practice and it’s getting more and more common.

[00:02:08] Emanuel: Capitalism.

[00:02:08] Kevin: That’s not the end of it, that’s just what was on my mind when I thought of this topic.

[00:02:13] Emanuel: Capitalism at its best.

[00:02:15] Kevin: Boy, that’s a topic all by itself.

Can I segue off to the side and I’ll get back to… the main topic in a minute?

[00:02:25] Emanuel: As we usually do.

The whole… this podcast is essentially a topic and consists of…

[00:02:32] Kevin: A bunch of segues.

[00:02:33] Emanuel: Yeah.

[00:02:33] Kevin: So we’ve all heard the idea that capitalism progresses through creative destruction.

[00:02:41] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:02:42] Kevin: That idea comes from a guy named Joseph Schumpeter.

Joseph Schumpeter wrote a book called…

[00:02:48] Emanuel: You mentioned this.

[00:02:49] Kevin: What was it called?

[00:02:51] Emanuel: Yeah.

[00:02:51] Kevin: I just finished reading it and I can’t remember the title, but it’s… economic, oh… The Theory of Economic Development.

[00:02:58] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:02:59] Kevin: Now, nowhere in his book does he say capitalism and competitive markets go together. Like he never says that. But that idea permeates everything he said, like he could not even imagine a world in which a corporation knows so much about you that they could charge you different prices at different times.

That was just, that concept was not even foreign to his mind. It didn’t even exist. To a certain extent, surveillance pricing is not capitalism at its finest, its capitalism at its worst.

[00:03:42] Emanuel: Not fun, not fun. I think it was always there. It’s just we didn’t have the opportunity, the technology, the opportunity.

[00:03:50] Kevin: Yeah, the technology didn’t exist to allow us to do that.

[00:03:53] Emanuel: It was even back in the day, not say 20 years ago where you would go to a different city. I’m from Romania and I’m from Bucharest, it’s capital. And things were more expensive just because it was the capital.

That’s one example.

[00:04:07] Kevin: Yeah. But everybody in the capital would pay the same price for the same thing on the same day. The price might change next week. Two people in line for the same thing didn’t pay different prices, the way that does in fact happen today.

But it’s far beyond this. Not only do we have surveillance pricing, we have surveillance like everywhere… cameras and crime districts.

And we have these for legitimate reasons and they serve beneficial purposes, but there are considerations that we never talk about.

I shouldn’t say never, but almost never.

[00:04:48] Emanuel: I think overall surveillance didn’t decrease the crime rate that much.

[00:04:53] Kevin: It has in some areas. I think the most surveilled city on earth is London and apparently you cannot walk around London without being on camera.

And they have probably more than one… like control center where they’re monitoring the videos and they do catch people in the act of committing crimes and are able to respond more quickly. And according to them, it’s working for them.

[00:05:22] Emanuel: According to them. But I have friends in London.

[00:05:24] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:05:24] Emanuel: And they tell me otherwise, and we know for sure we seen them online that even if you pick, pull up your phone in London, somebody on a scooter or something’s going to snatch it up and run away with it.

Not to mention the others more horrendous crimes, and there’s a bunch of YouTubers that do that for living… they follow people… topic for under conversation.

So I’m not sure that actually had a impact on its purpose, but I know for sure that it made definitely somebody made… it made somebody rich because installing the cameras, maintenance, recurring.

[00:06:07] Kevin: Oh yeah, it’s an entire industry.

[00:06:09] Emanuel: Right? So somebody made money. So it had probably an economic impact overall, but its purpose, I don’t believe so. But again…

[00:06:19] Kevin: It’s not just surveillance… like gene splicing and… probably one of the most egregious examples of… in my mind… ethical considerations is a practice that Monsanto does relative to some of the seeds that they sell.

So they will genetically engineer some seeds, some aspect of a seed, and that seed has certain characteristics which is advantageous in some way. And if a truck with a bunch of Monsanto seeds on it drives down the highway and the wind blows some of those seeds onto the field of another farmer, it’s not the case that Monsanto has accidentally contaminated that farmer’s field with seeds he didn’t buy and didn’t want. It’s the case that farmer is now in patent infringement and can be sued.

So this is an ethical consideration of a technology… gene splicing that we didn’t really anticipate, and we haven’t really done a good job in terms of what are the laws around this.

In my opinion. Monsano obviously disagrees. They think the laws are great, right? I personally disagree with that particular one. For 10,000 years if you did something like that, you contaminated their field and you had to clean it up. Now you’re in patent infringement

[00:07:48] Emanuel: Because they have the lawyers and they have all the…

[00:07:51] Kevin: They have the lawyers.

[00:07:52] Emanuel: And everything else. Yeah, definitely something to think about. I don’t want to be in that position, and it’s hard to fight somebody like that.

They also have their own… wars to deal with. There’s plenty of people who have publicly expressed the disagreement with this. I think this falls under a different topic, and not necessarily the ethics of the emerging technology, but the ethics of the world, the ethics of business, the ethics of corporations, and how much we allow businesses, corporations, entities, even people to exercise their control over us and what mechanisms do we have to fight against.

Usually things happen when… the knife… we have a saying in Romania… the knife hits your bone.

[00:08:54] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:08:54] Emanuel: Basically. And in most cases it doesn’t, especially in North America. People aren’t like starving or anything like that. And homelessness usually is correlated with mental health and drug consumption.

So probably you need to fix those first before the homelessness, in my opinion… the basics. But in other places people can starve and at one point they’ll revolt.

That’s my opinion, but interesting topic and I didn’t thought about.

So when I read the topic, I didn’t ask you more questions.

I thought you are referring maybe to, again coming back to the AI, and the use of AI…

[00:09:46] Kevin: Oh yeah. All of the above. Yeah, surveillance pricing was simply what was on my mind because that’s a capability enabled by the fact that we all have smartphones now.

[00:09:55] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:09:57] Kevin: But it’s by no means limited to just surveillance pricing.

In fact, even the concept of gene splicing, the only technological endeavor in which I know the people who invented it said, “whoa, stop, we need to really, seriously talk about the ethical considerations of this”… is in fact, gene splicing through a technology called CRISPR-Cas9.

That particular technology was developed by two biologists. I’m not sure exactly what their field of study is, but an American named Jennifer Doudna, I think, and a French woman named Emmanuelle Charpentier. And they co invented this thing… just in their labs, an academic project, and when people started using it, they actually said, “whoa, put the brakes on this. We got to figure out what the limits are in terms of being able to manipulate DNA with precision”.

[00:10:58] Emanuel: There’s actually a movie, I think it’s called Rampage, which is an action movie, I think, with The Rock, but…

[00:11:04] Kevin: I don’t know.

[00:11:05] Emanuel: It talks about the technology and does a good job of describing it and potentially…

[00:11:10] Kevin: But for the most part we just ignore those considerations.

[00:11:15] Emanuel: One, I would argue that out of all the emerging technologies that we should spend more on, understanding it, learning about it, investing in it, because that’s basically what will cure cancer, sooner, hopefully, rather than…

[00:11:30] Kevin: Oh, absolutely. But it also has the potential to produce a horrific pathogen that can wreck enormous damage.

It goes both ways. Every new invention can be used for a variety of purposes.

[00:11:47] Emanuel: Like a hammer.

[00:11:49] Kevin: Yeah. Or gunpowder. Like the Chinese invented gunpowder and thought that fireworks were cool. And that’s where they stopped.

[00:11:57] Emanuel: And then I think it was a Hungarian who industrialize it and make… weaponize it and…

[00:12:06] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:12:07] Emanuel: Brought it to the Ottoman Empire.

I think, as far as I remember. Of emerging technologies. So which, where would you want to start with?

[00:12:16] Kevin: Oh man.

[00:12:17] Emanuel: We’re already like 10 minutes in. Where would you like to start? But still…

[00:12:21] Kevin: This is… I know why we’re here and I do not know how to not be here, but much of the world runs on a legal tradition known as English common law because England was the dominant empire… and in English common law, unless it’s expressly forbidden, go for it.

If it turns out that what you’re doing is not good, we’ll deal with that later. Laws will be passed, it will become prohibited. But in the meantime, just go for it.

And what’s happening is that the technological innovations that we’re just going for it with, are happening faster than the legal system can stay up with it.

[00:13:08] Emanuel: Significantly.

[00:13:08] Kevin: Right? So we have all of these interesting and exciting technologies that can be used for a variety of purposes, both exceptionally good and exceptionally bad, and the legal statutes are just not able to keep up.

So AI, in fact… this is like my favorite… “be careful what you ask for” scam. This happened when AI was in its infancy just a couple of years ago.

So an American corporation had a…. I don’t know if it was a division or a wholly owned subsidiary in Singapore, and the general manager of the Singapore operation was invited into a executive conference call about some topic, went into the call, the CEO was there, the CFO was there, and they’re chatting about this company initiative that was going to be done or spearheaded by the Singapore office and it was going to cost $200,000 a month or whatever.

And they just wanted to give this guy a heads up and make sure he was aware and the vendor was this and blah, blah, blah. So six months into it, he’s back at headquarters and he asked the CFO I’m just curious, what’s the status on project XYZ that we’re spending all this money on?

And the guy’s… ” what project?”. And it turns out the entire thing was a scam. And in the… and I think it was more than one video call, but in the video calls, everybody except him was an AI avatar, and they were just siphoning off 200 grand a month from this company using advanced technology. It was just straight up theft, right?

So it’s not like the laws prohibit straight up theft, but there was no concept of… is this for real? Should I check with the CFO? Because like he was in the call, right?

[00:15:06] Emanuel: There’s also solutions for this and I’m working actually on a project to verify the credential. Back in the day, I read this somewhere… I read it initially many years ago.

There was a persons whose job is to verify that the king is the king. Because most people didn’t knew how the king looked. You didn’t knew who he was, but you knew that person. The agent, and I forgot the name. So we trust these all sorts of entities, government, private, all those things. But the solution here is blockchain for sure.

And different solutions built on the blockchain. But here I am giving the, solution to a problem that is not mine and nobody ask for it.

[00:15:52] Kevin: Yeah, but we’re pundits, so that’s what we do. Yeah, we offer unsolicited opinions about things, we know something, but not much about.

[00:16:00] Emanuel: Yes. And usually these type of things help put the stress on the system to become better, to develop new security protocols.

Sometimes make even a bad experience because I’m tired of how many 2FA logins and all kinds of information I need just to simply send an email or anything like that, but hey, the consequences of not doing that…

[00:16:26] Kevin: Can be severe.

[00:16:28] Emanuel: Can be severe. So I prefer to do that. I prefer to sometimes not have a payment go through from my credit card and then spend 30 minutes to an hour just saying that I am me.

And that verifying…

[00:16:40] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:16:41] Emanuel: …verifying over the phone that it’s really me by just saying my birthday or something like that, which is not the case anymore, but it used to be just a few years before.

[00:16:51] Kevin: Yeah. A minimal amount of information was enough to verify your identity.

[00:16:55] Emanuel: Sooner rather than later… the solutions.

[00:16:57] Kevin: But autonomous vehicles… somebody and specifically, I’ve got to think of the guy’s name. He’s a well-known pundit… Malcolm Gladwell.

[00:17:07] Emanuel: Okay.

[00:17:07] Kevin: So he mentioned he lives somewhere in New York and he’s a part of like a group that meets in the park to do yoga.

[00:17:15] Emanuel: Okay?

[00:17:16] Kevin: And he said nobody’s really thought, but when the number of cars on the road are mostly autonomous vehicles, nothing prevents my yoga group from just taking over the street because the cars are programmed to stop and not hit us, right?

So if we just move in the middle of the street and set up our yoga, the cars will just stop and we will completely stop traffic in that section of the city.

[00:17:45] Emanuel: If you are willing to deal with the consequences because there’s…

[00:17:50] Kevin: Presumably there will be some kind of consequences and there is rules against doing this and blah, blah, blah.

But this is an example of a technology enables some weird behavior that like the people who developed the technology just never thought of. And sooner or later someone’s going to want to do that, probably not within the context of practicing yoga, but a protest of some sort.

[00:18:14] Emanuel: Yeah. Most likely.

[00:18:17] Kevin: Oh, sooner or later it’s going to happen.

[00:18:19] Emanuel: Speaking of self-driving cars I can’t wait for the day that they’ll come here in Toronto as well, because most people can’t drive and not to mention Uber.

Have you ever been in a self-driving car?

[00:18:34] Kevin: No, and I’m not… I’m not like adverse to the idea, but I’m not like “oh my God, I’ve got to go find one”. Like I’m on neither side, I’m on neither end of that spectrum.

[00:18:45] Emanuel: I think closest to Texas has a few cities that have the…

[00:18:50] Kevin: They have some in Austin.

[00:18:51] Emanuel: Okay.

[00:18:52] Kevin: Maybe elsewhere, but I know they’re in Austin. Austin has a big festival show every year called South by Southwest. And I’ve heard people who have been to South by Southwest say, “Oh yeah, while I was in Austin I took a self-driving car and it was fun” or whatever.

[00:19:08] Emanuel: Fun, yeah.. That would be the norm. So what are some ethical considerations…

[00:19:13] Kevin: Of self-driving cars?

[00:19:15] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:19:17] Kevin: Imagine that two self-driving cars have an accident. They like literally run into each other due to a technology failure. Who’s at fault?

The people in the car are not the drivers. In fact, the people in the car may not even be required to have driver’s licenses. So the insurance companies are going argue this in front of the judge presumably, but what are the rules here? We don’t know. I mean at least, I don’t know, maybe some people know.

And then probably the worst one…

So we have this, I’m going to say bad habit and I don’t really have a better phrase, although I’d like to find a better phrase, but the engineers who design some technology, design a technology that they’ve tested on themselves, and this has resulted in people who are not like them… the technology doesn’t work so well.

So the first example that I’ve ever heard of was way back in the eighties when they had like voice interactions, I think it was General Motors and it was some kind of service… you could have two-way speaker conversations, but before you could get to a person, you had to go through like an automated voice interaction type gateway.

And no one had ever thought to test it with a deep South American accent. So when they rolled this thing out in Alabama, it didn’t work, right? Because the automated AI couldn’t understand what these people were saying, right?

So automatic soap dispensers have not dispensed soap to people who have dark skin because none of the people who worked on it and tested it had dark skin.

And self-driving cars also don’t see dark-skinned people all the time.

So sooner or later a self-driving car is going to run over somebody who is black or from Southern India or you get the idea. And then of course, there’s the issue of liability. A person who is a passenger obviously is not liable. Who owns the car? Is it the manufacturer of the car? Et cetera, et cetera.

Who is responsible for that death or hopefully just injury? But this is an example of we haven’t really thought this through.

[00:21:41] Emanuel: Coming back to the common law… English common law and many other parts of the world, at least up until at one point lived by the Hammurabi code, and I think I mentioned this in the, one of the previous episodes, the engineer who build a bridge will live under it with his family for… I don’t know how many years? I think was a year or something like that.

So it needs to be consequences and it needs to be tied to a specific person that will for sure pull a stop or a pause or at least slow down the emergence of anything new, which can be a bit frustrating of course, because I know coming from a bureaucratic country where you can’t do anything essentially, even a lemmonade stand.

[00:22:34] Kevin: Everything’s prohibited unless it’s specifically allowed.

[00:22:36] Emanuel: Yeah. So even…

[00:22:37] Kevin: Like the opposite, yeah.

[00:22:38] Emanuel: It’s not uncommon for cops to arrest old women who sell like some vegetables from their garden or stuff like that. You see it on the news because that’s the way the law works. Where… I think that’s obviously the extreme, but I think it should make it more tied to the… an ownership essentially.

And for better or worse, fortunately the US system has worked. What’s her name? Elizabeth? I forgot her name. With… the one with… she had that technology that with the pinch of blood, she could tell you how much.

[00:23:16] Kevin: Oh, Elizabeth Holmes.

Yeah.

[00:23:17] Emanuel: Elizabeth Holmes. She had her run and now I wouldn’t trade places with her.

Not for money.

[00:23:23] Kevin: Yeah but that was just straight up fraud. Like their machine didn’t work.

[00:23:27] Emanuel: Yeah. She’s paying the consequences.

The other guy SBF right, Bankman-Fried.

[00:23:35] Kevin: Yeah, Sam Bankman-Fried, same straight up fraud.

[00:23:38] Emanuel: Although, I don’t know about Elizabeth Holmes, but if this guy knew about the technology, he was also he knew about how it operates. He was a developer. He knew some stuff. They paid the price. So there were consequences for them.

I wish maybe a little bit more consequences for even bigger, even other aspects where I’m going with this… software updates, oh man, are they killing me? And I have friends who work in different corporations and just a minor software update can shut down or pause a system.

[00:24:15] Kevin: Yep.

[00:24:16] Emanuel: That’s resulting in paying like fines or not being able to deliver the data that people are paying for in time just because of a minor software update. I think these type of things… should be more… not necessarily… controlled is not the word, but should have more consequences or should cost more.

You want to make a software update, a UX UI? Coming back to one of the previous episodes you just do an update just because… just because you need to justify your job. So let’s say we need a new UX or you need a new system, do we actually need it? Or you just, you justifying your money. If you want to enable that, then it should come at a price, perhaps each software update should cost the company, Apple, Microsoft, and all the other… Android, Google should cost money when you’re making these big changes as well. So I think… that’s important.

[00:25:11] Kevin: I completely agree.

[00:25:13] Emanuel: From the topic of the conversation, but it’s important because… it’s okay to make updates, but not at a scale, it went out of hand essentially, you can’t even install something without going like 2, 3 other places and something as simple as listening to music on my computer in 2025, it’s a pain.

I don’t know how to listen to music on my computer other than going to YouTube or Spotify. Sometimes I like to use Spotify because I discover some music that YouTube’s algorithm wouldn’t recommend me otherwise.

But… what do I use? I used back in the day, I used to have Winamp, you tune in Winamp, you drop in the folder and hit play. Right Now you need to create this like IKEA or Lego. So that’s one of my frustrations and I think there should be consequences based on that. But this is not necessarily about ethics of emerging technologies.

I’m going drive back… self-drive back to AI, the AI component, the LLMs and… no I’m going to go back to what you initially said about giving the McDonald’s example and how they can figure out when you get paid so they can charge you more. Because probably most people on their pay they treat themselves with a excellent meal at McDonald’s Big Mac.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like food from McDonald’s. I’m not saying that they eat there or that they say it’s healthy, but I never met anyone who doesn’t actually like it because it tastes amazing.

It’s also that other apps are deliberately releasing some data to other… not the apps themselves but the entities, the companies that own them, resell the data, and share that.

Not necessarily Kevin or Emanuel, but these young gentlemen from this segment, from this cohort are usually… see… we see an increase in their income… money coming in, in their account on the fifth of each month. Stuff like that.

This type of information are shared and it’s not always people. I like to think that people are aware, but realistically, most people aren’t. So where’s the fine line of the ethics? And now that I’m thinking about a user experience, even when you install a new software and you get that privacy policy and all those things, terms and conditions that you would read through 30 pages of…

[00:27:47] Kevin: Yeah, nobody reads that.

[00:27:48] Emanuel: Babbling and all those things. I think that’s, that helps us obviously with progress, right? With learning more. Who would have installed a new software if they were, they would have to read all those things, right?

[00:28:00] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:28:01] Emanuel: But I think… and technology allows us… for us users to have more control over as well.

So I think that can play also in our…

[00:28:12] Kevin: To a certain extent. So my desktop system runs Windows 10. I have a laptop that runs Windows 11, and I’m seeing more and more complaints about the surveillance built into Windows 11 to the point where apparently Microsoft is preparing some kind of a response, although I have no idea what it is.

But in order for us, shall we say poor consumers, to have a say in how some technologies impact our lives, we’ve got to hit some serious critical mass. Apparently there are communities of people who are helping each other migrate from Windows 11 to Linux, because in their mind it’s that bad. And Microsoft is like, whoa, this is a problem.

[00:29:01] Emanuel: Definitely is. And even I’m on a Mac, so it’s a little bit, it’s less than Windows, but it’s becoming an issue as well. And it’s becoming a painful, process to have all these weird stuff that we didn’t even realize that when I bought my Mac for example, I didn’t do the proper researching the idea of what actually you cannot do.

You won’t think about, but I have an M2 chip and I went with a 13 inch MacBook Pro in 2022. Because I like the 13 inch. I didn’t want the bigger one, but it turn turns out that this one only supports one extra monitor. Why?

[00:29:44] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:29:45] Emanuel: Why? Okay. But I didn’t… I’m assuming that most people don’t connect two extra monitors, but for what I’m doing, every once in a while, I actually need that extra monitor.

For example, when I’m recording this podcast, for example, I would like to have a a third screen that I can connect to my… I would like to have the possibility to connect my external screen that I use for the teleprompter, where the camera sits on, so I can actually look in the… I try to do some stuff, some improvisation using the laptops monitor. It doesn’t work as intended.

But you get the idea. But this is not… this is a podcast, this is not therapy, so we’re not talking about what’s frustrating us, but maybe we should do something like that.

Let me go back to the topic and actually ask you, what’s the biggest threat at the moment that you consider?

And you notice how we talk. We strictly… didn’t go outside of North America for the moment because when you are talking about surveillance and you’re talking about other countries, there’s a different, completely different border.

[00:30:56] Kevin: Oh yeah, it’s across the spectrum. Like China is more of a surveillance state than the United States is, and the European Union is less because the legal systems are structured in those ways.

[00:31:07] Emanuel: I come from Romania. The Secret service used to be… it was the worst next to the KGB. So their surveillance went to a whole different level and I can only imagine how that would look like with today’s technology available.

[00:31:23] Kevin: You know the joke about why ex Stasi officers made the best taxi drivers?

[00:31:29] Emanuel: No.

[00:31:30] Kevin: So in the 1990s, like Germany reunified, so this was a popular joke.

[00:31:35] Emanuel: I think I know

[00:31:37] Kevin: Because you only have to give them your name. They already know your address.

[00:31:41] Emanuel: Yeah.

[00:31:41] Kevin: So Europe was divided for… since the end of World War II until the nineties, like rigidly by what Winston Churchill called the Iron Curtain.

So there were two completely different concepts of how much surveillance was acceptable. But within the European Union, there’s the data privacy directive and it’s fairly strict about what data can be collected and in what ways it can be used.

So that was my reference of less so in the European Union.

But I do think one of the greatest threats is the way that information that is collected about us is being collected and used.

Companies… have you heard of a company called Better Health?

[00:32:30] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:32:31] Kevin: Apparently part of their business model is they sell their metadata.

[00:32:37] Emanuel: Tell people that don’t know what Better Health is.

[00:32:40] Kevin: Better Health is an online therapy company. And the concept I think is great. Like I’m a big believer in therapy… like everybody should have a good therapist. A good therapist is someone you pay to be a good listener, they help you think through things, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:33:00] Emanuel: So just make it… it is not us. Okay. We know that you like…

[00:33:04] Kevin: Oh no, it’s everybody including us.

[00:33:06] Emanuel: Actually no, but it’s not us, we’re not a therapist. The podcast…

[00:33:08] Kevin: Yeah yeah. We are not therapists. Yeah.

And Better Health is a online platform for matching people who want therapy with therapists through the Internet so you can get a better match independent of geographical constraints.

[00:33:26] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:33:26] Kevin: However, part of their business model is they sell their metadata. Now, apparently it’s been made as anonymous as possible, but they’ll know that in the city of Hamilton, so many people are using online therapy, at the following times, and that information is of value to certain people.

[00:33:55] Emanuel: Advertising.

[00:33:56] Kevin: I’m not sure exactly who buys it or why, but just the fact that people buy it creeps me out. And then right now…

[00:34:01] Emanuel: Advertising could be one of them. I can say…

[00:34:03] Kevin: What’s that?

[00:34:04] Emanuel: For sure. Advertising as an ad man, if I know that people use that a certain time, then it can influence a lot. I can set up my budgets… to put more under… at different times and all those things and can save me a lot of money, make me a lot of money. Right.

[00:34:20] Kevin: And there’s another…

[00:34:21] Emanuel: All comes down to advertising at the end of the, what’s the goal?

[00:34:24] Kevin: I’m sure it does, but there’s another one right now that I think is a glaring example. So the DNA testing company 23 and Me is in bankruptcy protection. And apparently they’re being liquidated.

Things are being sold off in order to raise money to make the creditors as whole as they can. And one of the things that’s being sold, is the DNA database.

Now, when people signed up with 23 and Me and agreed with how their DNA could and could not be used, there was a clause in that agreement that says in the event that we go bankrupt or the company is ever sold, we may lose control over that.

So now people’s DNA is in the process of being auctioned off to the highest bidder. What are they going to do with it? No clue.

[00:35:18] Emanuel: I want to ask because I’m sure that it was very explicitly said in one of those 200 pages of terms and conditions that people read and agreed.

[00:35:28] Kevin: Absolutely.

So this is the stuff, but there’s all kinds of… like these surveillance technologies, I believe have productive uses, but they also have uses that are, in my opinion, clear overreach.

I’ll give you two examples and I actually saw these examples discussed on a television show many years ago.

So you’re a parent, you have a 15-year-old daughter, and you’ll get there, right?

And your daughter comes to you with a proposal, and the proposal is she wants to wear this bracelet that Levi’s, the Blue Jeans company has asked her to wear, and they’re going to pay her 50 bucks a month to wear it. And the reason they want her to wear it is Levi’s not only wants to know what she does buy, they want to know when she’s in the store, what did she think of buying and not buy. Because they want to use that information and feed it back to their product development people in terms of this is feedback for what products we need to develop. So if she picked up a pair of Wrangler jeans and then put them down and then picked up a pair of some other brand jeans, tried them on and put them back, and then picked up a third pair of jeans, tried them on and bought them, they want to know that.

And it’s worth 50 bucks a month per person for them to know that. So as a parent, do you let your daughter do this?

[00:37:07] Emanuel: I don’t want to… it’s easy to give yes or no answer, but reality is always different. So I’m inclined to say no. I would rather give…

[00:37:16] Kevin: Most parents would. “All my friends are doing it. It’s 50 bucks a month. All of my friends are doing this, how can you say no?”.

[00:37:25] Emanuel: I’ll pay you a hundred bucks and I’ll get you a cooler bracelet.

[00:37:30] Kevin: Okay, let’s go to the other extreme.

[00:37:33] Emanuel: I have solutions, remember, so I’m not the… I’m not a good example. That’s why I am thinking the algorithm is like they have a note, they’re saying don’t, use Emanuel’s data because it’s not relevant. I’m jumping from one thing to the next and all those things, but that’s just me.

I’m one of the very few.

[00:37:52] Kevin: So now I want to jump to the opposite extreme, which is you have an elderly parent, they’re in the early stages of dementia, and once a month they wander off and it takes you a few hours to find them. You can get a little device the size of a grain of sand injected in their shoulder and you’ll know exactly where they are all the time.

However, unbeknownst to you, approximately every other time that they sneak off, they go next door and the next door neighbor takes them to a bar and he has a few drinks and you, for whatever reason, as their child, you disapprove of this because of some health condition or whatever. If you put the chip in them, they will lose the ability to do that.

Maybe they go to the racetrack, maybe they go to the local bar, right? Is that trade off worth it? Is knowing where they are all the time because of their early stage dementia… does that override the invasion of their privacy? Because they don’t want you to know they’re going to the track or the bar or whatever.

[00:39:07] Emanuel: Excellent question and excellent topic. If I’m to answer honestly, because that’s what I am thinking about, I need to put myself first and understand that if I’m going down to that route, it’s not sane for me and I’m speeding up my own dementia. I’ve seen this happening recently with a a mother who sent her daughter, and I understand obviously concerns are not absurd with an Uber.

And she was constantly monitoring the, telephone when the package was about to be dropped off. And I understand on one point, but then I asked, how old is she? Oh, 19.

Okay. And I saw what kind of life that means. I understand the dangers. I am well aware. I read the news and all those things.

I live in Canada and unfortunately, Romania from this perspective is safer than Canada and… most of Canada and most of the US. But is that even a life? Because what stops me from just monitoring it for their own sake and becoming an obsession, having becoming an obsession and call the elderly parent three times a day.

Why did you go there? Why did you buy, oh, they did this, they do that. I’m in that position as well, right? My mom’s older. Fortunately, she’s still has most of her thoughts together. And I wish for this to be the longest, but in many ways, she’s more aware and more adapted to the new emerging technologies than I am because they all, everyone is forcing people to pay their utility bills, for example, from their apps using their phones.

I don’t do that. My mom does, so she knows more than I do. She’s getting the scam calls that we get them all over the world. She’s having to deal with all these things that I don’t even know how to deal with.

I give her at one point the laptop and speaking about updates… why she was asking what, what’s happening? Why does it do that? Didn’t we do this yesterday also? And it’s hard, it’s idiotic, essentially, it’s hard to explain when you look at things the way they are, you say yeah, it’s idiotic, it’s… I don’t have any other explanation, but would I want to go there? Am I becoming actually that control freak that… I’m becoming the state own…

[00:42:01] Kevin: Yeah, I get it. And you are about to have a child and your perspective on this question is guaranteed to be influenced by that. There’s no way around that.

[00:42:12] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:42:13] Kevin: But all of these technologies with a form of overreach potentially built in, they all have positive uses.

[00:42:22] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:42:22] Kevin: Okay. I’m part of a group, a “where are you?” app with my brother and sister-in-law. No big deal. But if I’m ever like in need, I can open the app, hit SOS, and they get an alert and vice versa.

[00:42:37] Emanuel: Yeah.

[00:42:37] Kevin: It’s never happened, but potentially it could.

[00:42:40] Emanuel: And there’s all kinds of devices other people can wear.

[00:42:42] Kevin: Before I call my brother just to catch up and see what’s happening. I jump in the app so that I can assess whether he’s likely to be busy or not. And I base that strictly on where I think he is, right?

So I look in the app, it’s oh yeah, he’s likely to be free, and then I call him. Oh, he’s likely to be busy, and then I don’t. So this is a… I would call it a productive use of this surveillance capability. So they all have…

[00:43:12] Emanuel: Yeah.

[00:43:12] Kevin: …uses, but they also all have abuses.

[00:43:17] Emanuel: I like that one. They all have uses, they also have abuses.

And I tend to be more on the focus, more on the abusive part, probably because…

[00:43:25] Kevin: I do too.

[00:43:26] Emanuel: Because I’m a digital marketer, so I probably use some days, even 30 to 40 tools, different tools that have their own thing going on their own way of doing their own UX, their own updates.

So I’m in… in front of this more than most people. But I think the regular folks also started to feel frustrated. But again, this is not about frustration. That’s a different topic that we had in mind and probably will record it next. But the ethics of emerging technologies is definitely something we… I even think my mind is set to come up with a solution, but I don’t think that’s the purpose.

We shouldn’t come with a solution, but as you said, to be pundits and give our own opinion, walk through some scenarios and do some exercises as you did earlier. That actually put me to think a little bit, put my mind… to think a little bit. And I hope all of our listeners get something out of it. And maybe just to raise the question.

Okay. What now? Is this okay? Even if you ask yourself this, because I can only think of where this potentially can go if just left by itself and with the use of AI. The good thing is AI can also empower smaller entities, smaller businesses, people who traditionally wouldn’t have access to do many things.

But not all people feel this way. And we burn through a lot of money and a lot of… consume a lot of energy just to ask ChatGPT something we already know or I can’t even think of something stupid. But usually that’s what most queries are about.

I’m not in that.

[00:45:33] Kevin: Yeah, AI has positive uses, but it’s also going to turbocharge scamming people out of money.

[00:45:39] Emanuel: And solutions for validation for… I’m going to…

[00:45:45] Kevin: At the risk of giving advice, my advice to anybody who’s listening is if you don’t know them, you don’t know them, right? And if you do know them, maybe it’s not them.

I’m very skeptical of that kind of stuff. I’m the kind of guy… everybody gets unsolicited text messages that have nothing to do with them. “Hi, it’s Meg. I’m going to be in town next Thursday, care to play golf?”. And I used to say, sorry you got a wrong number. And then there’d be this conversation.

Then who are you? And let’s chat. And I got to the point where I would get two or three of these a week. And finally, as soon as I get one, I just block the number.

[00:46:31] Emanuel: Yeah.

[00:46:32] Kevin: Like I don’t even respond to them anymore because they were too frequent… and the frequency of them has dropped off significantly since I started doing that.

[00:46:43] Emanuel: Yeah, because you’re in the system. So once you responded and went through the conversation, they said, oh, okay, this guy here is our…

[00:46:50] Kevin: We got live one.

[00:46:52] Emanuel: In a cohort that we are targeting essentially. And potentially you… you realize it sooner rather than later. Some people lose a lot of money because at the end of the day, they just want your money.

You want to start a conversation. You don’t realize it looks so realistic or seems genuine, but at the end of the day, all be in town, I’ll be in town. You get to know them. And I know if you are somebody lonelier just by yourself, they target these people and…

About ethical consideration, I do just remember a recent topic I saw over the news.

We’ll probably drop a link somewhere in the show notes about some scams that were going on. And initially people learn about them on Facebook. So the scammers run Meta advertising with Canada’s Premier Mark Carney saying that they enable this new cryptocurrency coin and that they’re giving people money who sign up for the program.

It was all the fake AI generator, right? Yeah. And Facebook Meta allowed for this to run on their platform and people sign up, they put their information and that’s what they need. And they got a call from, I don’t know where they were, those people somewhere, east Europe and then they drain them for their life savings and stuff like that.

That’s an ethical consideration as well, given the fact that Facebook, Google, they’re advertising company, they’re B2B, businesses to businesses. Their businesses is to sell advertising to other businesses. Okay. And they have the platforms to do so where people live.

That’s it.

[00:48:34] Kevin: Well Meta brings up a example that just blows my mind. They… and I don’t know exactly who inside Meta they are, but they… whoever they are, thinks it’s okay for minors to interact with sexually explicit chatbots. Like they view this as an opportunity to sell ads. And I’m like, geez… this is too much for me.

[00:49:01] Emanuel: I don’t think I heard that. And I don’t even want to explore that part right now, at least to go in…

[00:49:09] Kevin: Hopefully they changed their mind. Hopefully the backlash on that idea was so strong that they backed down.

[00:49:16] Emanuel: Hopefully. Yeah, but not even go that far, but even something simple as this. Do you think Meta could have done a better job preventing this?

Yes, probably. I run a lot of Meta advertising and I know that I have clients who spend hundreds of thousands per year or per month even then and have some issues and their ads get suspended and all those things, something straight up. Whereas somebody else with a brand new account can run scams, scam videos like that for five bucks a day budget or something like that.

[00:49:54] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:49:55] Emanuel: And I think here is where these big guys can do a better job. Talking about the… European privacy laws, they’re in place specifically for these big players, for the Metas, the Googles, the Apples, and all those things. But at the end of the day, the end consumer pays the price because it created a very bad experience from user perspective.

I read sports and if I wouldn’t have an ad blocker, even with the ad blocker, I still… you get all the popups in the world, and sometimes it takes over that you need to accept the terms and conditions and all those things, which at the end of the day creates a frustrating experience, and I’ve seen more and more people complaining about it, and even I myself, not simply making the conscious decision of not visiting a site, even results from Google or ChatGPT. If I see like too many unuseful notifications or popups and all those things.

So that’s something that I choose to do. Obviously, I’m not in… I’m not the… I’m the outlier always. I’m not a good example, but I can barely… I can probably live pretty good without accessing that website, without accessing that piece of information without… and I wouldn’t go in opening up the data security, so not the use of data in itself.

But also how many companies store in their data, our data essentially, and what measures they take to secure that data. And sometimes it’s unbelievable. Unbelievable how accessible things are. But that’s a topic for another conversation, I think. Kevin, you mentioned at one point that you had some experience in IT and security.

So you probably…

[00:51:46] Kevin: Yeah, I used to do it for a living. That was like in a prior life, metaphorically speaking.

[00:51:52] Emanuel: I understand. Yeah, sure. But yeah, there’s probably some stories you could share in another episode, probably. Any last thoughts… a message for our audience? What would you like them to remember after these episodes, the ethics of emerging technologies?

I’m just…

[00:52:11] Kevin: I don’t know, man. It’s such a broad topic and it, and I mean it really is the… none of the phrases that come to mind really do justice to what I want to say, but it’s like this unknown frontier of technology and law and… we are not going to slow down in order to figure this out, we’re just not going to, that’s not our way, right? So we’re just going to blaze ahead and then damage will be caused because all new technologies create damage and we’re going to be reactive and figure things out after the fact as best we can.

[00:52:47] Emanuel: But be vigilant at least, and don’t…

[00:52:51] Kevin: Yeah, be vigilant. And I gave some advice a few minutes ago, although I’ve already forgotten what it was. But the other piece of advice is if you get one of those weird messages of… “Hi, it’s Meg, can we play golf on Tuesday?” don’t feel shy about just blocking her and deleting it.

Like it’s probably not a person named Meg.

[00:53:10] Emanuel: Don’t be the good samaritan and let Meg know that she got the wrong number. Because…

[00:53:16] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:53:16] Emanuel: It’s dangerous. And even in some countries just by replying, you get charged…

[00:53:23] Kevin: That could happen, yeah.

[00:53:25] Emanuel: And if you call back or stuff like that you don’t realize that it’s a code for sending money or stuff like that.

Not that much anymore, it’s a topic for a different conversation altogether. But this can be very complicated, and it all starts by being a nice person and wanted to say some… that person got the wrong number. So be vigilant. Always ask yourself why, if anything, and if it sounds too good to be true, most of the time it is.

And also try to enjoy it and embrace it, because at the end of the day, self-driving cars are a good thing at the end of the day, self checkout is a good think in a sense that I’m hoping for the day, and this should totally be possible right now where I think Amazon proposed and even experimented in some places in the US with the Whole Foods ones.

When you go into the store, you just buy your things, put it in your basket, and the moment you, go out of the store, that’s where they scan it because they have the ID, the digital IDs of all the products that are in your bag, and you get charged by your credit card that’s already on system. So you shouldn’t theoretically even go to the process of the cashier.

[00:54:35] Kevin: Actually this, brings up another… like comment about surveillance of modern technologies. Like people have legitimate major concerns about other people knowing too much about their personal habits. If you don’t want people, whoever they are, to know about your personal habits, don’t use credit or debit cards… like period, end of discussion, right?

You leave a trail which the payment processor knows in detail, and is that information going to stay within them? Now for what it’s worth, I use both, as do most people. And the idea that I would stop using them, it’s mean I’ve got to go back to carrying cash in my wallet. Yeah, I don’t think so. But just be aware that you’re leaving a very detailed trail.

This is secondhand, this is the story from my brother, my brother met him. This guy had been charged with a crime, convicted of a crime, sent to prison. And apparently a relative of this guy, his sister, his brother just kept digging in and they found an electronic record that they were in a different city at the time of the crime.

Took this electronic… it was like a receipt or something, took this electronic record back to the judge and they were like, oh my God, we made a mistake. And they let the guy out of prison. So the story is every time this guy walks by a security camera, he waves at it and he keeps all of his receipts and he tapes them in a scrapbook and he keeps on… it’s like it’s saved my ass once. Who knows? Maybe it’ll do it again.

[00:56:21] Emanuel: Too much to discuss.

It’s been a pleasure… always. We are The Curious Pundits.

My name is Emanuel.

[00:56:31] Kevin: My name is Kevin.

[00:56:32] Emanuel: Curiouspundits.com is our website where you can like, follow, or send us a message. Tell us what you think about the podcast. Until the next episode.

[00:56:41] Kevin: Yeah, take care.