kill switch – Details, episodes & analysis

About 48 hours after the US National Security Advisor was spotted using a weird cloned version of Signal, someone said they’d hacked it. It took them all of 15 minutes. We now know that TeleMessage is ‘cartoonishly hackable,’ but we still don’t know why top White House officials were using it. And what about the investigation to find out if this Israel-based app is bad on accident, or on purpose? I called up my friends Evan McMorris-Santoro of NOTUS and Joseph Cox of 404 Media to get some more context on how bad this might actually be.

Here’s the links promised in the episode:

Evan’s daily newsletter in NOTUS
Joseph’s article in 404 on the Telemessage hack
And here’s Micha Lee’s technical breakdown of Telemessage’s security problems

Our guests:
Evan McMorris-Santoro: @evanmcs.bsky.social
Joseph Cox: @josephcox.bsky.social

Got something you’re curious about? Hit up @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky. See you on the next one.

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Have you seen Shrimp Jesus? What about the Hollywood sign burning? It probably feels random, but it’s not. There are real people behind AI Slop, and there’s real money to be made. Dexter talks to Jason Koebler from 404 Media who’s been tracking AI slop since its beginnings, and they compare notes to try to figure out where the money is coming from.

Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.

Read + watch: 

Jason’s article, Facebook's Shrimp Jesus, Explained

Dexter’s article, Inside the Economy of AI Spammers Getting Rich By Exploiting Disasters and Misery

Dexter’s video: people made money doing this. (so did Instagram)

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A.I. is already better than human doctors at diagnosing skin and breast cancer. And as machine learning advances, it's becoming able to decode more complex information, like brain waves and the human genome. A.I. is beginning to revolutionize medicine, and allowing us to see into the future of our bodies...but can we ever know too much about ourselves? What will happen when machine learning lets us open our own black boxes?

In this episode: Physician and author Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Google X founder and Kittyhawk CEO Sebastian Thrun, Regina Barzilay of MIT's J-Clinic and CSAIL, Dr. Andy Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh, Gill Pratt of the Toyota Research Institute.

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War has been a driver of breakthrough technology for a long time. The first waves of artificial intelligence and even the internet came out of DARPA, a defense agency whose original mission was to keep the U.S. technologically ahead of the Soviet Union. But what happens when the battlefield is increasingly dominated by autonomous weapons, which don't require humans in the loop to shoot and kill? In this episode: Arati Prabhakar, former head of DARPA; Richard Danzig, former Navy Secretary; Paul Scharre, author of "Army of None"; and Jonathan Wilson, former Navy SEAL.

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Robots are coming for our jobs, and not just in factories. Artificial intelligence doesn't distinguish between blue collar and white collar work, which means that the economy of the future will look very different. And as it changes, we'll need to make big adjustments. But A.I. is also being used in the fight against world hunger. This episode, we speak with roboticists, inventors, and a fast food regular about how we'll put food on the table.

In this episode: Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group, Kai Fu Lee of Sinovation Ventures, Gill Pratt of the Toyota Research Institute, George Kantor of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institue, and Walter Kankowski.

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We travel to Silicon Valley where Astro Teller welcomes us inside X, Google's secretive innovation laboratory, to explain how one of the most powerful companies on earth is building the future. X is working on everything from creating new antibiotics to restoring internet connectivity after natural disasters. And they're not alone. Tech companies are increasingly involved in building infrastructure, and even playing the role of government. But what kind of power does this give them? And what can we do to rein it in?

In this episode: Astro Teller of X, Lina Khan of Columbia Law School, Sal Candido & Pamela Desrochers of Loon, Jack Clark of OpenAI, and Jamie Susskind, author of "Future Politics". 

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It's getting harder to tell reality from fiction. Fake news and misinformation are all around us, and they're increasingly used as weapons of war. But what happens when A.I.-doctored videos are added to the mix? We meet the people fighting back against deep fakes, and even using them for good. And we visit Facebook headquarters to learn how Russian agents are trying to manipulate our behavior.

In this episode: Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook, John Micklethwait of Bloomberg News, Jose Sotelo of Lyrebird, Danielle Citron of Maryland Carey Law, Hany Farid of Dartmouth, and David Kirkpatrick of Techonomy.

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Ever wondered what it would be like to live in a world where computers know exactly what we're feeling? It may sound far-off but advances in sensor technology and A.I. are making us easier to read than ever. For some, this conjures fears of a Minority Report future. For others, it means revolutions in medicine and end-of-life care. We speak with leading experts in the field of empathetic technology to understand the risks and rewards of giving up our privacy. When our technology can adapt to us, how should we respond? 

In this episode: Poppy Crum of Dolby Laboratories, Jaron Lanier of Microsoft, Kai-Fu Lee of Sinovation Ventures, and Lisa Talia Moretti of Methods.

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If data doesn't make you think of a new world order, it should. AI is enabling wholesale surveillance, and changing the landscape in countries like China, where cameras monitor citizens to decide their social credit score. But how is this already playing out in the US? We speak with experts on both sides of the Pacific, and visit the NYPD to learn how they use AI. Plus, we see where else predictive technology is being used in the American criminal justice system. 

In this episode: Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group, Kai Fu Lee of Sinovation Ventures, Mary Haskett and Alex Kilpatrick of Blink Identity, Lisa Talia Moretti of Methods, Glenn Rodriguez of the Center for Community Alternatives, Ben Singleton of the NYPD, and Jason Tashea of Justice Codes.

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If there's one thing that sets people apart from machines, it's creativity, right? Automation may take over certain jobs, but what happens when algorithms start to learn from our work to create their own? This episode, we speak with people using AI to generate films, poetry, music, and even recipes. And the founder of Google X, Sebastian Thrun, explains what's powering this new wave of AI.

In this episode: Ross Goodwin and Oscar Sharp of Sunspring, Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness, Drew Silverstein of Amper, Sebastian Thrun of Kittyhawk, Cristobal Valenzuela of Runway ML. Check out Magenta's AI Music tools here.

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