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Historical Context of Generative AI. AI And Humanity.

September 04, 2024 • Cyber Crime Junkies. Host David Mauro. • Season 5 • Episode 44

David Mauro interviews Mike Acerra, the president and founder of Luxblox, about AI and its role in humanity. They discuss the evolution of technology, from typewriters to computers, and the impact of AI on various industries. Mike shares the story of how Luxblox was created and how it encourages creativity and problem-solving. They also touch on the importance of independent verification when using AI-generated information. The conversation explores the impact of automation and AI on various industries and society as a whole

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In this conversation, David Mauro interviews Mike Acerra, the president and founder of Luxblox, about AI and its role in humanity. They discuss the evolution of technology, from typewriters to computers, and the impact of AI on various industries. Mike shares the story of how Luxblox was created and how it encourages creativity and problem-solving. They also touch on the importance of independent verification when using AI-generated information. The conversation explores the impact of automation and AI on various industries and society as a whole. It discusses how automation has revolutionized pottery making, allowing for mass production and the expansion of its use beyond funeral ornaments. It also highlights the role of AI in democratizing design and making it accessible for small businesses. The conversation delves into the risks of deepfakes and the importance of verifying information in the age of AI. It concludes with a discussion on the potential of AI in agriculture and the need for open sourcing and transparency in AI development.

Historical Context of Generative AI. AI And Humanity.

Topics

The Historical Context of Generative AI, AI And Humanity, How AI Fits Into Humanity, How AI Helps Small Businesses, How Does AI Help Small Businesses, Generative AI In Design, AI And Creativity, Artificial Intelligence And User Experience, Improving User Experience Through AI, Improving Communications With Ai, New Ways Of Designing Products With Ai, Design Enhancements Through AI, AI Design, Making Design Available To All By AI, Technology, Luxblox, Creativity, Automation, Pottery, Automation, AI, Mass Production, Pottery, Design, Small Businesses, Deepfakes, Verification, Agriculture, Open Sourcing, Transparency

Takeaways

AI is a natural evolution of technology and has become more accessible and mainstream in recent years.
The invention of new technologies, like Luxblox, can enhance creativity and problem-solving abilities.
AI can generate answers and information based on a vast amount of data, but independent verification is still necessary.
The evolution of technology has always led to the displacement of certain jobs, but it also creates new opportunities and industries. Automation has revolutionized industries by reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
AI platforms like Canva have democratized design and made it accessible for small businesses.
Deepfakes pose a significant risk, and it is crucial to verify information in the age of AI.
AI has the potential to transform agriculture by optimizing processes and increasing productivity.
Open sourcing and transparency are important in AI development to ensure ethical and responsible use.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
06:57 The Evolution of Technology and the Role of AI
11:35 The Historical Context of AI and the Democratization of Technology
19:32 Generative AI: Enhancing Creativity and Innovation
24:51 The Revolution of Automation and Mass Production
27:34 Rethinking the Purpose of Jobs
31:03 Democratizing Design and Creativity with AI
34:46 The Risks of Deepfakes and the Importance of Verification
38:28 The Future of AI: Advancements in Robotics and Automation

Dino Mauro (00:10.006)
All right. Well, welcome everybody to cyber crime junkies. am your host David Morrow and in the studio today is just Mike, Mike Sarah, president and founder of Luxblocks and an inventor and somebody from, back in the day, as well as a, Chicago, Italian with a long history. So Mike.

Thank you so much for joining. Welcome to the studio. Thanks, David. Yeah, it's good to see you again. Great to see you. Yeah, my wife remembers you more than I do. She has rena fraternity. I was a I was a fight out. Yeah, right. She asked was your fight out. That's what. it was a fight out. We were all the soccer playing dudes from the right international background stuff. I don't know. I was like a kid from the suburbs. There are a lot of Chicago suburban kids at Knox College. Yeah, there were. Then there was a lot of Internet.

like Stelios, Cree, Morocco's, we had tons of people from India, Pakistan, Germany, Sweden. yeah. Next college is just phenomenal. It's just a wonderful experience. Yeah. So and you are still in the hometown there. I'm still I could you have nestled in after going to like, India and living in a yurt and doing a bunch of

For those who aren't familiar with you, walk us through Lux Block's high level. But today's discussion, we're going to be going about AI and how it's a natural, where AI really fits in humanity right now. We're going to talk high level, you know, get into what it really means for people. So, it's interesting because we started the company 10 years ago and, AI just recently the last five years has become a big conversation again.

But I went to college when you did back in the late 80s. And back then we weren't really talking about computers that much. I had a early PC, you know, and the Mac had just come on board. But I was really excited by typewriters and I was really, it's going to be like, you guys are so old. I'm like, listen, kids, there's a lot that you can learn here.

Dino Mauro (02:26.69)
But the computers that would come out of the typewriters that would come out where that you could see part of the screen. Yeah. And I was like, that is a game changer because you can edit it before you hit return and before it prints under the page. Well, we saw in we're the generation that was really the in between generation, the middle of teeter totter, right? Because when I was in high school, I took a computer science class. Right. And it was you had a had a had a DOS. Black screen with amber screen.

amber or green screen and it was you had a telephone wire that went to the bank. Right. Yeah. And hold on a second. My wife, I told her to be quiet. She's already noisy. We have adjacent offices. So, yeah. So so you send you put in your ANSI, COBOL, your FORTRAN program, your basic program, you press send it, go to or maybe enter it, go to the bank, process it on mylar tape and send you back an answer. Right.

And then so that was happening. then somebody brought in this little box and said, this is a Mac, a Macintosh. And we're like, and it had the first object oriented kind of mouse. We love the initial Macs. It was the first time you can actually visualize what you were trying to do. It's the first time that we saw the technology.

had just like was killing science fiction because if you remember the movie Alien when it came out, it was all basically just amber green screens. Right. You know, it's almost like teletypes in the spaceship. It's like, and even yeah, so it was like science fiction had started to have a hard time keeping up. And we had the cell phone, the flip phone. So we were doing Star Trek. And so, yeah, it's been a very interesting ride to see how art and technology and movies have been trying to race with each other.

And so I moved to, I went almost Luddite after college. I moved to a hut in the woods and went off pretty much off grid. was burning my own wood and you know, and had garden and goats and stuff living in a hut, a yurt in the main woods because I wanted to kind of really, before I went into the work world, I wanted to do a deep dive into the things I didn't cover in college. So I was interested in Buckminster Fuller and the idea of understanding geometry at a kind of a idiosyncratic level.

Dino Mauro (04:45.154)
not just academic, like going into like the, what Fuller did was the geodesic geometry of nature, which is what Einstein used when he wanted to do his formulas, something that wasn't normally taught. And I came out of the woods with a really deeper understanding for myself of how nature is put together. as you know, I come from a carpenter's family. So my dad and grandfather were carpenters from Chicago. So I grew up in a building site. So I had already had an intuitive idea of like how buildings,

you know, work together, like why buildings want to move if you don't stabilize them. Now that I had this And you were just holding up Lux blocks. Yeah, it's a Lux. This is a demonstration of like, when you put Lux blocks together, it behaves like a building does. It'll move in gyro and stuff. So when my wife and I started dating, were both, we were both interested in Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, Chicago being a showroom of him and Louie Anderson. Louie Anderson? Lou Sullivan. And on the

Bauhaus and all these kinds of guys. It's a showroom of architecture in Chicago, right? And so we found that when we visited Frank Lloyd Wright's house up in Wisconsin, Taliesin in Springfield, Wisconsin, we found a book in the bookstore called Inventing Kindergarten. And I didn't know it was invented. Did you know that kindergarten was invented? No, I did not know that. I just thought I just thought being born here, it was just kind of an initiative from Congress. It's a journey. That was a good. That's actually interesting. So it was a German guy.

Frederick Frebel back in the Napoleonic era. And he was a scientist. Yeah, he was a scientist. And he was a scientist, a geometer of crystals. And he became very moved by all the orphans and the fact that people really didn't know what do with kids. And he said, I think I could solve this problem. still don't know what to do with Yeah, well, he had a really good idea. The first kindergartens were really amazing and they produced, they were like genius factories. And it was adopted here in the United States and it worked for a while. But then certain people intentionally destroyed it.

And they said, well, that's going to be a feeder for our factory schools. And so it's just going to be like pre first grade primer for the factory school. So they destroyed the kindergarten as it was originally intended. And so, but we looked at that original kindergarten. It was all about art and hands on activities and tuning kids into nature's shapes and structures and emotions. And we said, you know, we can make a toy that resonates with that philosophy. And so we came up with Lux Blux.

Dino Mauro (07:05.004)
So it's unlike it's similar in the sense of on the shelves, it's near Lagos and things, but it's so far beyond Lagos that it is involved in so many curriculums across the U S like it's I see you guys. You're on national TV all the time and you're you're at the education conferences and I've talked to teachers actually that use Luxbox and I'm like, I know Micah chair and they're like,

I don't know who that is. I'm like, he made that stuff. I'm like, he's the one. And they're like, that's cool. So what, like, what was your first invention in terms of Luxblox? Like, what? It wasn't Luxblox. It was just trying to come up with a way to, I knew how nature kind of worked, right? So I had to think of a way to, how do you make a modular system that's off the brick grid?

because nature doesn't, bricks are great, but nature doesn't use bricks. Nature doesn't stack to make it structures. It does something different. has these built -in organizing principles. That's why if you kick nature, whether it's in lava or liquid methane on the planet of Uranus or whatever it is, it's going to make bubbles. Bubbles are ubiquitous around the whole universe. Why is that? These perfect little spheres in any viscous fluid, viscous medium, if you put a gas through it, it's going to pop into a bubble, right? Or a film.

like the suds of the just automatically does that. Trillions of seconds. It's like a universal law. Yeah. So why does nature do effortlessly make such beautiful, symmetric, nice structures? And so we had a handle on that. so how do you make that into plastic like Lego? So we use the same exact plastic as Lego, but we had to make a structure that inflated and deflated and turned into these beautiful geometries just out of squares. So that's what we did. And it took, my God, it took so long. I talk about technology being on the edge because

This was in 2012 and had, there were print, 3d printing technology was not so good. So we had to invest in some of the early 3d printers that were always breaking down and we put 4 ,000 hours on a MakerBot 2X, which is a printer and hundreds of iterations and working with a German apprentice. He was 15 year old German kid from across the street and he was, was our AutoCAD draftsman. So I'm an artist by training. So

Dino Mauro (09:22.188)
I draw the picture of these crazy designs. He'd put them into AutoCAD. We'd print the idea immediately. We knew when we put it together, the print that it wouldn't work. We go right back into a different iteration. So we were failing to succeed kind of like must does where you just keep making iterations and you know, know, it's going to fail, but maybe it's going to fail in an interesting way or a predictable way or an unpredictable way. So we did that. The life lesson there is you didn't give up. didn't just go, this is hard. So I'm going to move on to something else.

We knew kind of what we wanted to do. We never knew it would do this though. The interesting is we never knew we were going to make this. We didn't know this was a thing, but it makes sense because it wasn't a thing until you invented it. Well, it was, it's a hinge system. It's a, it's a kinematic system like we are. So it was like, yeah, but I had to look in Wikipedia and find out what that was. It's technically called a serous linkage made named after a French guy named Serres. Okay. But yeah, that's, that's phenomenal. And right now we'll have links in the

show notes, two Lux blocks, but I implore listeners and viewers check it out because it is so wonderful to give that to children because I've just seen young people just get so creative because you can do things with it that you can't do with any other, toy model or anything else. Right. It's almost like a live CD version of computer animation that you can make. It's phenomenal. It's, highly probatev works.

or ponderable because when you put it together, like one kid was making something at a show. was a rock, it was a jet airplane, right? But it was something like, it's like a motorcycle, right? But he built it and he was like doing improvisational building and he built it relatively fast. Like in 20 minutes he had this beautiful ship. goes, I can never, I'm a Lego kid, but I never could have done this with Lego. Because while Lego is predictable, it doesn't keep giving you new ideas as you go necessarily as much as these do because these are cage structures.

So it doesn't bend and it doesn't go in three dimensions. It's like plastic clay. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's phenomenal. artificial intelligence, when we think of artificial intelligence, when we think of machine learning, it's really nothing new. Like it's, it's decentralized in a sense, meaning it got popular, it made it to its way to mainstream now. And now if you look through

Dino Mauro (11:43.2)
Instagram, you there's a million different apps that'll say this is going to do this. And you know, you can make all this money so fast. Everybody's always looking for the easy way of doing things, but always has been that way too. It always has been. Yeah, it really has. So, so let's kind of break down. Like let's, let's, let's get away from the snake oil salesman of, of AI apps and things like that, and really talk about

why it really isn't a surprise and how it's really a natural evolution of our learning and our evolution. Well, yeah, we're the frog in the pot, right? Because just what we're feeling now is acceleration upon acceleration curves. So much is happening so fast now, but it was always happening. you know, like I said, I'll use an example if people can understand probably a lot better. It's like, so I grew up in a construction site. So my dad oftentimes used a handsaw.

He had a skill, we call them skill saws because they're named after the company that made them skill, but circular saws. It's a brand name like Kleenex. Like Xerox, exactly right. So on a job site, if you're building a home, you might have four to six carpenters, one or two laborers, right, to frame a house. back in the day, there was a ton of using regular hammers, regular saws. wore an apron, and you had in the apron...

oftentimes it's a cloth apron and you'd have 16 penny or 18 penny nails which are, know, they're wire nails. made them with extruded wire and they cut the wire before they had, they used to forge nails, but now they wire nails very cheap. And then after the war, what you have after wars is called killing re is the science of killing people. And so after wars, you have all this innovation that goes into killing people, right? But what do you do with the money, all the infrastructure when the war is over?

Right. So we no longer have to kill people and everybody comes home and wants to make So World War II, everyone had these beautiful stainless steel perfect semi -sperical salad bowls. But it used to be the head of torpedoes. We could stamp metal now really good. So let's make these beautiful stainless steelware. And also it was like, well, we're on a job site and we're paying 18 union carpenters to do this apartment building. But

Dino Mauro (14:01.806)
We learned in World War two how to take a 308 cartridge and put it in a machine gun and fired it at Messerschmitt, right? Using a magazine or a belt. So was like everybody can visualize that because everybody knows what a machine gun does Yeah, but he's seen the pictures of them loading up the bullets in the belt while the machine gun is shooting or or steel box like a like a magazine you put out you slap it into an AR -15 or M16 So they they said yeah, let's do that

So I saw my dad, he never used one. But in the 1980s and 90s, you started seeing propane and pneumatic and electric hammer guns come online. And then a carpenter now could basically do the hammering of three, four or five carpenters as fast as you can pull a trigger, you were nailing. OK, so you're just feeding the car. that's a natural evolution. Once again, it gets back to that belief that I know a lot of people have a concern of

Well, AI is going to take my job or robots are going to take my job. And I don't, I've never believed that once, but I believe that people leveraging the advances in technology. They're complaining about it. Right. Okay. So it's people sometimes don't realize how full of shit they are because, I mean, we're still, we still go to the museum and mourn the memorial of all the, saddle makers, right? The poor saddle makers, all the leather workers.

And the people used to shovel the horse shit because, know, Chicago was built high up off the street because you'd have about four to six feet of horse shit at any one time on the city street. Yeah. So it's like, boy, I really, you know, more than the day when, we could do that, when we could do that and we get to wear boots because there was shit and pissed everywhere. all this progress. That's a good point though, because isn't AI kind of like a, it's a generational evolution. Like when you think about that time,

and the innovation of the automobile, right? Everybody kind of mourns the loss of the horse -drawn carriage. It's like, well, yes, there were some horse -drawn carriage mechanics that might have lost their jobs, but we burgeoned an entire industry of automakers and designers and mechanics, et cetera. And it's exponentially bigger.

Dino Mauro (16:23.296)
So here's, there's a moral equation to it too, because, you know, people don't think of engineers as being moral or virtuous agents, but they might be the most moral and virtuous agents when you come to just practical outcomes. a case in point is, for Ford, Henry Ford, he wanted to make before Henry Ford, the horseless carriage was for millionaires and rich people. Right. And you might have a few in a town and maybe an oddity and, because they were handmade, and, they were expensive.

And he said, well, I want to make the cars that people in my factory can afford. Right. Which were poor people. And they thought he was insane. he, but he, of course, created ergonomics and mass production. And Elon Musk is definitely the torchbearer now, right? Where I'm going to make rockets that go to space and come back and are recyclable, reusable. And so because I want space to be cheap so more people can go to so we can open the dream for everybody.

enabling people, giving people transportation, cheap transportation around the country to everybody is such a virtuous, beautiful thing. Now people can say, cars make the world ugly, blah, blah, blah. Those people have a car, right? Right. So and think about it. Most people will watch this discussion, right? On a laptop that we now have at our homes, right? Or on a phone that we now carry with us everywhere. But that was Steve Jobs democratization and bringing

this vast amount of technology because prior to Apple doing certain of these iterations, right? The computers were only for large corporations that could have their staff using them, right? But now it's everywhere. And that is virtuous to me, like bringing something that is not just accessible to the exclusive, right? Not just accessible to the affluent and bringing it to everybody is critical.

He broke a cardinal rule, they say of businesses to don't invent something that people don't know they need. Like, can you have to educate them? So they said, he said, want to, famously said, want to make computers for like women in their kitchen, which sounds sexist these days. But I mean, he made it for kids. mean, for everybody, right. But people, but at the time you're right. People thought, computers are for like, the department of defense and big insurance companies and the bank or whatever, but definitely not for my wife or me or my kids.

Dino Mauro (18:46.722)
right? Yeah. He's like, no, it's not the it's not don't think about the big box in the big room with the air conditioning. It's going to be something you hold in your hand. It's going to be Jetsons. And and we got away from that. We got away from you probably remember this remember back in the 50s and 60s had those magazines called Things to Come, maybe beautiful illustrations of the future floating cities and know, Jetson kind of stuff. We for some reason, even with the age we live in, we're not

thinking about a really cool future. Almost all the movies now, the science fiction movies are dystopian. They're all like Mad Max and Blade Runner and Aliens and just these dark, awful futures. And I don't know why the hell we're doing that because the technology now is showing a world of what I call a world of impossibilities that we're going to have not improbables, but impossibles happening more and more every day. And I think it's just it's a really cool future. Absolutely. So the historical context.

of AI and, and the bringing to market about a year and half ago of generative AI. I mean, it's, it's really quite phenomenal. when, you know, we're so used to Googling things, whether we use Google or Bing or Safari or Firefox, whatever the browser is that we choose. But the point is, is we're still doing online searches and we're used to asking a question and then

seeing the blue lines that are hyperlinks and then clicking on that. But somebody wrote that or their vendors or their sponsoring to be there. And it might be truthful, it might not be. But now we can put that same inquiry into AI and it will look at the entire history of the internet and then generate an answer and provide it to us. Yeah. it's phenomenal. was like when we were lazy in high school and we were given those horrible assignments, we had to use the reference library. my God.

And maybe you have to do it micro fish, micro film. And yet that's library. And we're in the library and always hated us because I was an idiot. I'm a football player like, I got to use the micro fish, you know? And so, it's like, now you want it's it's like that lady on progressive insurance. It's like the library now is that white room and you walk into it and you've got whatever her name is. she's like, yeah, flow is like rock or flow is like Google. And she's like, what do you want to know about? I want to know about the history of grain production in the 19th century.

Dino Mauro (21:11.944)
And specifically, what do you want to know? I'll just tell you, right? Right. There's no more microfiche does. And then so that's that's just again, it's people inherently are lazy. They just want the answer they want so can get on with the thing they have to do. Right. And so is do we miss microfiche? Do we miss those giant publications? Are they those giant books of all the old magazines they'd have in the libraries? No, nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody misses that. Or having to go through six or seven articles.

that you find in an online search and have to then understand it and make sense of it and then formulate your answer. And that might not be good. It might not even be good data. Right. Exactly. And this is generating that answer for you. Now you still have to do independent verification because it's not always 100 percent accurate, but it's pretty darn close. Right. In general, overall, it at least gets you

moving toward what the truth is, which is good. Well, it's like, it's so weird. like, it'd be like if you said, well, the only car we're going to have is going to be Ford. Ford is going to make the only cars. know, the Italians earn a lot of make cars and the Japanese only make cars. It's just the Americans and it's just Ford. You'd be like, well, that's, I guess it's smart. You don't think about that. Right. So of course you're going to have Grok come online. That's going to make Google look like an asshole when it makes Vikings Asian. Right. Right.

So it's like, you're going to have competing AIs, which is awesome. It's like free speech, the more speech, the best speech is more speech, right? The more, the best AI is more AI. Let them fight it out and say, you are so full of shit. You're lying to these people right now. That's what's going to happen. Exactly. And it just lets the market, because eventually in there is the truth. they can cite the data. They could both cite the data, you know, and okay, what is the data is the data corrupted? Right. So, yeah. So how is, there's a concern that

generative AI could replace creativity, it can enhance it, can't it? My background's art and art and art history. So I see it as it's on the continuum. There's no breach of like, there's no, this is past history. This is not past history. This is in the timeline. It makes utter sense. Most people, what AI is doing is making people embarrassed by the fact that they really don't even know what they're doing. They don't even know what they are.

Dino Mauro (23:39.502)
You know, we're automation. We're so 99 .99 % automated that it's embarrassing. all of our billions of cells have, you know, hundreds of millions of chemical reactions every second. And it's all, none of that we decided upon, right? So we're highly automated creatures and a little bit of free will we have, we hardly ever exercise. You know, we like habits and routines and even our opinions sometimes we just regurgitate other people's opinions. We don't come up with our own. So we're highly automated. We're really kind of like robots in a sense, biological robots.

And when it comes to art production, whether let's give you a simple example of pottery. So this our biggest historical record is pottery. There's shards that all over the world that lasts forever. It doesn't go away. And so everyone was doing pottery. And at first, of course, you'd take you'd have to take coils, you'd roll coils and make it like a stack of snakes and smooth it out and make a hand thrown pot. OK, so what was the big innovation over hand thrown pottery? Do you know? No, the pottery wheel. Yeah.

Yes, they put somebody had the idea of putting getting a wagon wheel and putting a piece of than OK, so what you're saying is back in the day they would roll it out and then have to loop it around and then smooth it out and then you would have a pot. It was desirable to have a right. You're right. The invention of the pottery wheel as they could make it spin, they didn't have to hand roll it. They would just it was a revolution. So yeah, it brought down the cost of it, too, because now said any one person sitting there all day making this hand thrown pot.

You can just get a lower skilled worker on a big wheel, you know, center the clay so it's going around symmetrically, and then just stick your fingers in and boop, you have this beautiful amphora, right? And so they started mass producing these pots. so they could put, so they weren't just funeral ornaments, which would be a high -end thing for a rich king or a princess or whatever, to put your ashes in or whatever. Now it could be something you put your olive oil in and your grapes in or whatever you're going to put it in the pot. You can make it for a packaging.

right? And because you had packaging, now you could transport transport food and liquids over the ocean and caravans. economic advantage to Yeah. And so again, that's automation. The wheel was automation. And then you had a thing where they decorate the pots. And so you'd have a kid, usually it was a kid because obviously it's cheaper labor or a crippled person, but a full grown man and woman were doing important things, right? So you'd put little designs on a pot.

Dino Mauro (26:00.588)
which was, took a lot of skill and they figured out very quickly that if you spin the pot around with a little, and you had a little needle and you just touched the pot with the needle, you could score it with these even lines all the way down. But you could barely see them like pencil marks. You barely see them on the still kind of leather hard, wet pottery. And then you could go and you could fire it. They had these lines and then you could paint, you could see the lines like a tracing paper when we were kids, when we did our handwriting and it gave the people lines.

And then they taught themselves little algorithms, little kind of design tricks so they can make a repeating pattern. Okay, so you made these beautiful geometric repeating patterns. So they're coding. They literally had to have these algorithms like, you know, loop over the top, loop over the bottom and stop, loop over the top, loop over the bottom and stop and make a little wave. And so they started using this lane. Artists always were trying to make a living and make money and...

they realized that part of their job was to replicate themselves. If they were the higher skill set person in the workshop, in the studio, you wanted your studio to become a workshop. You wanted to replicate your skills. So Leonardo started as a painter in someone else's studio as a kid. And then when he had a workshop, he employed all his kids, young men, and then he would train them and he'd only do the executive functioning of the painting and they'd do all the angels and the backgrounds. And he'd you know, fix it if they had to fix it.

So Italian artists and French artists and Dutch artists were always trying to mass produce as fast as they could because, you know, time is money. It always has been. It's not some precious thing where... It's all about scaling. always has been about scaling. Always has been. That's phenomenal. In terms of the economic perspective of AI.

When we think of jobs, what our jobs are versus tasks, let's delve into that and how does AI play a role? It's a cultural thing and it's almost like a religious instinct where I have a friend who's a roofer, great guy, he's a good roofer, third generation roofer, family business. It's tough job. It's a horrible job. No one wants to do it. Usually it's like you have to get prisoners to do it because it's just...

Dino Mauro (28:09.622)
It's a wretchedly difficult, hot, uncomfortable job to get on a roof in the summertime and put down tar shingles or whatever. So I said, you know, robots are common, dude. And the first job they're going place is probably drywalling. And then it's going to it's going be roofs because it's dangerous. companies don't want to insure it. Insurance companies kind of drive a lot of technology, of course. Right. So it's a, you're going to, you're going to get a gantry kind of robot. It's going to put that stuff on. They already had the gantry robots to put the stuff on the roof for the roofers. Right. But.

the idea of putting down plywood and nailing it down, you're going to have a robot doing it in the next five years. You're going to see them come online. know, in a way, thank God, because, you know, people break their backs. It's dangerous work. And we romanticize a job saying, well, what about the roofing union? And what about, you know, we've been doing this for hundreds of years. It's going to go away. We need more skilled workers. No, we need things. We need to get shit done. That's what a job is. You go to a place and they say, got to get the shit done. So that's what you're going to do.

Right? But if the stuff has got done, maybe we have to lay you off because we're not getting stuff done. You got it done. Thank you. Thank you for your service. So, you know, it's like having a standing army. It's not a good idea to have a big standing army because you have to give them work to do. That means war. So you want to kind of like draw down your standing army. And of course, soldiers are also difficult because, know, they get drunk. And so it be learned a long time ago not to have such a big standing army. Like you draw it down, give them a farm, get them working, get become citizens.

So there is this idea of that jobs exist for workers. Right. Like it's a right. Like it's a fundamental human right. It's a weird idea. know, it's like, jobs don't exist. Jobs exist because things got to get done. And that was the whole point. Things got to get done. If we can get things done faster and it takes one worker when it took five, like two years ago, then it takes one worker. Right.

And you just need to learn what that worker does so that you can be the worker. Yeah. And but the work itself, I mean, there is I'm sure there is, of course, holy work. There is good work. Right. But, you know, work with a cause and a mission behind it. And sometimes, you know, I don't know about you, but I enjoy a little bit of drudgery. I don't mind doing the dishes. I don't mind, you know, mowing the lawn. really don't. It's like I like to use my body, like to get out and do things. But I don't expect

Dino Mauro (30:31.086)
a golf course to hire 40 kids with handmowers to go mow the lawn at the golf course. They're going to get a tractor and no one's going say, those poor kids, used to mow the lawn at the golf course now. so some jobs should go Well, examples of how AI has evolved things. When you think of certain platforms, think of Canva, for example. Canva has really democratized and made design available for small businesses because it used to be

really expensive for them to get a website for them to they have an event coming up. How do we get the word out? How do we put it out on social media? You had to hire all these organizations and that got in the way of the small business spending more money on inventory and other things that it needs to ultimately sell the products and services that they're designed to do getting stuff done. And without a doubt, without a things like Canva that ties into AI and all of this thing.

they're able to hire somebody even part time or just have one of the other workers during their downtime from selling or whatever, develop the announcement for the event. listeners don't know Canva is, is kind of, it's Adobe for dummies kind of thing. It's a graphic, it's a program. It's like what publisher was back 25 years ago, where basically, publisher took, graphic artists and publishers, you know, it took their jobs in a sense and said, you could

publish your own little newsletter on your own computer, right? And what great Canva does is it says you don't need to hire necessarily a graph that graphic artist that's going to lay out your designs. Canva is evolving fast now too, because now with AI, Canva can learn quickly and say, here are the trending Instagram concepts. Okay. So give me your raw photos if you have any, otherwise we can generate some pictures for you.

right? And we'll put them in this thing. We'll have a little moving banner up here and we'll have flashing words down here. Here's some really cool music that's copyright free. And it's happening so fast that pretty soon you're just going to talk to your computer like Jodie LaForge in Star Trek and say, I need an Instagram photo or thing with a pretty girl on the beach and she's selling my towels. Right. And she's got all her friends, all her friends like her because her towels are so cool. Blah, blah, whatever it is,

Dino Mauro (32:48.662)
And Canvas is going to make it for you. It's going to make five different versions. If you don't like it, you know, I want more fuchsia and less teal. And then if you want to go in and customize it, it's so intuitive. You can figure it out. Like, it's just so easy. Yeah. And so if you check online and go like to a Facebook post of like Synthetic Studio or Mid Journey, which is an amazing AI program where a lot of people go to make these pictures of these beautiful futuristic things and women warriors and

And now with GROK, GROK is doing real people. So you'll see a video of like, you know, Trump dancing with Kamala Harris, you know, it looks just perfect. It's amazing. And what also is democratizing, it's enabling small businesses to act like big business because they don't have to hire Fifth Avenue artists and firms to do really great ad content. But it's also enabling artists like you could make a really decent science fiction movie now on an iPhone. yeah. I mean, and you could be a teenager and do it.

Yep. That's that's not, you don't think Spielberg would have jumped at that chance of when he was 12. He would have made a great movie. He would have made his best movie maybe when he was 11 or 12. So that's what's happening now. It's it's it's you're we're able to we're able to find those potential Spielberg's out there in middle school or younger because they have these amazing tools. you know, who can complain about that? Just amazing stuff. Now, all kids won't use it. Some kids are going to live in their mom's basement, play video games and go into the metaverse and become and lower their testosterone and become like.

I don't know what they're becoming, but it's, it's not the technology's fault. doesn't that gets into the question of creation versus consumption, right? It's a good point. When you, when you play a video game or you watch TV, you're consuming, right? When you scroll social media, you're consuming. But if you want to be seen on social media or advertise for your event that you have going on, right? Then you need to create. And that's where AI

can really, it's really helped with democratizing and taking away a lot of that drudgery or the expense of having third parties do it. It's perfectly said. Yeah. All right. I'm really, I'm really, hearing that's why we have you on man. He's your phenomenal. But now on this show, we talk about the risks a lot and, we've talked a lot about deep fake because to me it's really scary because

Dino Mauro (35:13.74)
you know, for years we've been talking about, you know, how do you spot a phishing email? How do you spot somebody that's trying to socially engineer you or basically trick you? It's the old, like it's just leveraging technology to do the same thing we've been doing for hundreds of years. It's not that complicated everyone. Right. And, and, you know, they appeal to a sense of urgency. They try and get that amygdala hijack going in your brain. So you can't even process it. It drives behavior. but

But deepfakes raise it to a level. And so funny, because whenever we talk about spotting a phishing email or things like that, everyone's like, that's so boring. That's so dumb. We know how to do it. I'm like, no, no, you don't because it is still the cause of not just some of the breaches, a vast majority of them. It's still your willfully opening your willful. It's like the vampire at your door. You're letting them in. You're letting you're openly letting them in. mean, we that's why we dig into when we see a big data breach.

online, I'm always digging into how did they do it. Eight out of 10 times, four out of five times, it is them fooling somebody that lets them in. So we have all the firewalls and all the systems in the world to protect us from harm. And forget about accents. It's not going to be like them in. It's not going to be some guy with an Indian accent. can spot a second. grammatical errors used to be a red flag. Those are gone now because you have AI voices that are perfect and listen and can respond.

And it's a live video, Mike. mean, live video. Like what, what happens now is if you don't fall for the email, they'll send you a calendar invite and they'll get on a zoom or a teams video and be speaking to you deep faking. And you see this a lot on, on, romance scams, right? People think that they're talking to Todd. Todd's this great guy from Ohio. Meanwhile, Todd lives in Nigeria.

And is deep faking himself the entire time. Right. You know the term, the word biomimetic? No. What does that mean? Biomimetic means technology that imitates biology. Like the F -14 famously had landing gear that was based kind of like on the grasshopper's legs. So it could land on an aircraft carrier at a high velocity. Right. And just kind of land. And land. And it looked like a grasshopper's legs.

Dino Mauro (37:34.016)
So that's called biomimetic engineering. We are kind of imitating what biology does. But my view is that we're biological. And I don't think that anything really isn't technically biological. I think we're living in a biological expression. We're toolmakers. We're interacting with our tools. But we're still dealing with biology in a sense. What I was going say is this. You just brought up really interesting point about the amygdala and the idea of seduction. Human beings have been seducing each other since time immemorial.

some man or woman wants to get into that cave and they're going to say anything and do anything they can to get into that fucking cave, right? So they're going to make themselves look nice, say cool things, be complimentary, flatter, whatever it takes. Do deeds, do tasks, whatever it is to get into that cave, to be with that clan, to be with that woman, whatever it is, right? We are seducers. That's what we do. We're programmed to do it. Because we're transactional creatures.

We found out it's better not to always kill the other person and beat them down. Sometimes you can make a deal with them. Okay. Or you could deceive them. You know, you could trick them. So we've been tricking people, deceiving people, making deals with people, compromising people since before we could speak and nothing has changed at all. It's the technology now is making it so we're still doing it. can hit people from the tools are so without even being geographically located near them. They're so good.

but it's no different than the caveman trying to get in the cave or the woman trying to seduce the man or vice versa. It's a seduction. It's a, yeah, it's just, it's the oldest crime in the book. now the is so amazing. people view AI? When we, as we're wrapping up here this discussion, when we think of AI's context in humanity for the, for the average user, like how should they look at AI? I mean, a lot of people fear it.

A lot of people just don't understand it, so they're not bothering to learn it. And I think that's a risk.

Dino Mauro (39:34.518)
Again, I think it comes down to how much do you invest in yourself anyways? Like you think it's hurting you or whatever, like we make jokes. live, when we were younger, we lived in the city and people would say, I live in the city because of the culture. And then you're talking to your friends like, when was the last time you went to a play or a show or what? You're watching Netflix like everybody else. You're sitting in your town. So it's like, so are we...

developing ourselves, are we learning other languages, are we pushing ourselves? These tools are amazing for doing that. If you want to learn a language now, it's never been a better time to learn a language. never been easier. A lot of things, but you still have to do the work. You still have to make the commitment to better yourself. We have the best answers now to our questions than ever before, right? If you want to get in shape, the best advice in world now is online or nutrition. It's all there for you. and the other mention is too.

This democratizing now is going to ramp up so fast where now, know, John F Kennedy Jr. Robert F Kennedy Jr. was talking about nutrition and health. It only takes about 20 by 40 foot piece of land, okay, to feed two people year round. That means you could actually blanch your tomatoes and put them in jars. you know, so a relatively small plot of land could feed a big family year round in terms of its vegetables and fruit and things like that. And with the coming online of robotics.

where you basically have robot helpers like Optimus Prime or something doing your weeding, tending your garden, helping you with optimizing for sunlight and everything else. You're gonna have people basically doing family gardens like never before. So you're freeing people to really be healthier and go back to the land because you're eliminating lot of the drudgery and a lot of the headache of like, I'm not an expert gardener, how am I gonna know that? Well, Optimus Prime can help you with what you don't know or whatever it is, whatever robot it is.

So this stuff's coming fast and it's going to transform society, I think in a very positive way. That's phenomenal. What are some of the AI platforms that you have found very useful in your crafts? I mean, you a lot of artistry. For my business, it's because of Luxblocks, it's a consumer business, online business. So we need graphic art. we've used Canva, I a lot of Adobe and Adobe is an older program, but it's always updating fast.

Dino Mauro (41:55.246)
We use Chachi PT, a 4 .0. I haven't tried Grok yet. And then we just started recently using Mid Journey, which is an amazing visual arts program. Mid Journey is amazing. Unbelievable. It's gorgeous. It's really great. And you get a lot of young men who put kinky pictures of women with sweat all over them. They get a lot of that stuff. again, it's a big dollar. You're going to certain industries drive technology. I won't mention those industries right now, but you know what I'm talking about. Yes, we know.

Yeah. So and it's going to happen with many of them have phenomenal cybersecurity, believe it or not, they have a view of if you're online and you're not paying, we're going to have pictures that if you click on them or videos that if you click on them, there's gonna be a lot of malware. But if you're a paying client, you are either our customer or our enemy. Like we've talked to people in that industry and they are like they are at war online and they take it very seriously because privacy is so important in that industry.

Would your advice be that to people right now that if they get on their phone and look at any one of these sites, they're at risk, would you say? Yes, absolutely. That is where most malware sits. Unless you're a paying customer. If you're a paying customer, then, and I'm not promoting that, but I'm saying, but if you are going to be, what do think the percentages of people who actually pay for it? that's a good question. That I don't know. I could ask somebody in the industry.

Because you think that would be the carrot, right? It be like, it's free, it's free, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Well, I think the ability, yeah, Grok is the system in the platform that does the videos, right? The creation of realistic videos. Grok is the AI for Twitter, for X. Right.

And recently, grok started doing visuals too. And unlike the other platforms like chat, chat, you won't let you I can't use David Morrow on your image on chat GPT. But I think if you're a public person, or you could go on and put your image on grok, or someone without their permission, you can use. Yeah, well, and that's scary, because that's where we get into all of the deep fake social engineering, right? mean, there was a recent case. mean, check this out.

Dino Mauro (44:15.214)
Mike, there was a recent case where a superintendent of a school outside of Baltimore lost his job because there was a, there was an athletic director that he was investigating for some allegation, just allegation of some money being missing or whatever. Well, that athletic director got mad at the superintendent for going after him and deep faked his voice and certain things claiming that he was racist. And the superintendent lost his job because the board was like,

We hear you saying this. And then later on, he had to get a forensic company to come in and show that is synthetic media. It is not accurate. I mean, he a guy who lost his career because of that. Yeah, it's horrible. It's just horrible. But the word's going to get out that you can't trust anything you see or hear on, you know, no, especially it's an election year too. So we're, we're, we're already starting to see it because now whenever, you know,

somebody, family member or whatever says, Hey, this political person said this. I'm like, we have to independently look that up to know whether that's true. Right. Because you have to look it up and you just do searches online to see if they actually said that. And to a certain degree, we're okay with being lied to, when it comes to art and comedy and fashion, are completely fine, especially women, but men too, with being lied to L magazine, Vogue.

we know those women's necks aren't that long. We know they're not that skinny, whatever. We like, so what? It's almost like we've been socially conditioned for this. It's like the perfect storm, right? Because we've been, we've been having airbrushed images for decades. That's been going on for decades. The filters now on your phone, could filter your face. People are lying. They're conscious of it. They want to lie. They want to lie. They want to say, I'm, I look like my eyes are bigger than they really are. Right. It's crazy.

Like I'm surprised that anyone is surprised by that because you know, back in the Renaissance, would, Titian was a famous painter and his venus would have red hair and really alabaster white skin. But this is fricking Italy, right? So the women wanted to look like Titian's venus. So they'd go out and they'd get their hair dyed red, right? Which has the dye to set in the sun. So you're walking down a Venetian street and smell this rotten meat because women are putting these big slabs of meat in their face to keep the sun off their beautiful skin while their hair is setting.

Dino Mauro (46:42.71)
So unbelievable. Shit doesn't change. People are going to put, you know, so. That's exactly right. So at the end of the day, in terms of where AI sits, it's really not a surprise.

I don't think historically there's any aberration from what's going on. We just see it's about, if you do it scientifically, it's about curves of progress, right? And because there's so many patents now coming at such a rapid rate and so much innovation, it's hard to keep that curve from not being vertical. You have to keep stretching the horizontal axis of that curve because it's just, it's an acceleration upon an acceleration. Orders of magnitude are happening now. And so you just have to know that the stream is getting quicker, but still a stream.

That's that's absolutely phenomenal. And it's really not as much of a threat as people think. I think it's more of an opportunity. But definitely lean into it. Experiment with it. Try it. I think the lethality is worse. Like it's like saying, well, a bow and arrow is not as much a threat as a musket. No, muskets are more dangerous. Right. For sure. And atomic weapons are way more dangerous. So AI can be a really lethal prospect if we don't have the discipline to understand it and use it right. think probably.

What's your view on regulating AI? certain putting. Groucho Marx would say I'm against it. think that, but I think Elon's got the right idea of there should be some open sourcing going on and there should be some competition going on, but there should be, it shouldn't be secretive. Right. You know, I think these secret societies like Google and stuff that keep things behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, now haven't we learned or listened to the guy behind the curtain? You can't trust him. Right. Absolutely.

There's something about that about open sourcing it and getting it democratizing the process. So everyone's kind of like part of the process. think and having a having, you know, your own personal AI that can be like you're kind of like checker, like what you guys do at your work. Like if you had like a technology would check people's you could have it now. You could check a video and they'll tell you if it's a deep fake. Correct. Yeah. mean, famously, I think the Russians said that the Apollo 11 was a deep fake at a conference. Yeah, it might be propaganda, but.

Dino Mauro (48:55.66)
So yeah, the technology is coming to where you can, you'll be able to scan processed food at a restaurant. And the person said there was olive oil on it. You'll have a scanner to tell you that's canola oil, dude. You're lying. So that's coming too. And it's going to be great. Well, I think that'll be good for people just to once again, get to the truth. Don't say it's something that it's not. It's to be in service of the truth. That's what you've been talking about the whole time. Is it, what is it in the technology? What is it serving?

Okay, is a person's gonna lie to get into the cave or they can offer a product in transaction to get into the cave, right? And it's, you know, so it's just about, goes back to virtue and honesty. You're right. Totally right. That's Mike, what is that? What's coming up on the horizon? Thank you so much for joining. I always love having a conversation with you, my friend. Slowly, slowly we're bringing robots online. It's taking a long time to do it right, but we're going to have a robotic Lux blocks. We've got some really. Yeah.

How exciting is that? Yeah, but we also got, I'm really a big fan of World War I. We've got the Red Baron and his flying circus and biplanes fighting him. Those are coming online. And so we've got a cool toys coming for Christmas too. So check out our website. the next couple of months. Luxbox doc. Yep. We will have it on the screen and we will have it in, the show notes. Mike and Sarah, thank you so much. My brother. Always a pleasure. Good. Thanks so much. Absolutely.

Well that wraps this up. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed our episode. The next one is coming right up. We appreciate you making this an award -winning podcast and downloading on Apple and Spotify and subscribing to our YouTube channel. This is Cybercrime Junkies and we thank you for watching.

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David Mauro

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