A.I. Beach + Vibes-Based R.T.O. + the ‘Black Mirror’ Quamputer

25:42You're just not going to have those same kind of shared in-person moments that seem essential to building a career. So that part of me kind of understands why CEOs aren't seeing their younger employees integrating as well as they hoped. I think that that is a really compelling case. I think the problem is that it's hard. We can't pretend the old model of working worked so perfectly for everyone either. Like that was just always this kind of devil's bargain that parents, for example, had to make where they always kind of felt like they had to be in two places at once, at their desk, in the office at 4 p.m.

26:18in the afternoon, and also maybe at school pickup or maybe trying to get some time with their kid before their kid goes to sleep. And now, you know, there was this really interesting study from Microsoft that showed people have just completely remade the shape of their day. So instead of like two peaks of productivity before and after lunch, now there's three peaks where you're working in the morning, you're working in the afternoon, then maybe you're taking a break and there's a third peak of productivity at night. So presumably for a lot of people after their kids go to sleep. So I think it's true that maybe remote work isn't working so well for everyone.

26:50Also, maybe in-person work was really hard for a lot of people. I actually have 10 peaks of productivity in my day, but that's just because I'm on the grind set, baby. You're on a beach in France. Yes, he does. Touche. So, Emma, I want to talk about these sort of factors in the remote work equation. So one of them is productivity. And I think a lot of people who are invested on one side of this debate or the other will say that, you know, actually remote work is good or bad for productivity. And on the good side, there's a study that came out by a professor at Stanford called Nicholas Bloom, who studied remote and hybrid work for years before the pandemic.

27:34And one of his big takeaways was that workers who worked remotely tended to be more productive, in part because they're not commuting, but also because of the things you mentioned, like sort of adding additional productivity to your day. And that seemed like a compelling case if you were a CEO during the pandemic to say, well, let's just let our people work remotely because they'll be more productive. So if there's evidence that workers are more productive from home, why are some bosses changing their tune? Why are they now saying, we want you back in the office? I think the problem is there's kind of evidence on all sides where it comes to remote work.

28:09It's not really a satisfying answer, but I don't think we actually know yet where quote unquote productivity is highest or like what kind of work is really getting done. For example, if you look at some of these productivity studies about remote work, some of that has to do with like call center employees. So maybe it's about like literal time you're putting in. And when you're working at home, you're saving time on the commute. On the other hand, there's a big study that showed that when you're working at home, you might get less feedback on your work. So they followed engineers at a company and they found that when you're working at home, people got less feedback on their code.

28:45So they literally just got like less comments on lines of code written. So maybe you might be churning out more work, but not getting as much feedback on it. So that work might be, you know, lower quality. There was another study that showed that people actually form fewer weak ties when they're working at home. So that means like maybe you're not expanding your network as much. Maybe you're not having as many impromptu mythic water cooler conversations. So I think it's a little bit like jury's still out. I think it's possible that maybe like people just churn out more work when they're working at home.

29:16Maybe they cut out their commute time and they put that time back into their job. But I also think that there are questions to be asked about the quality of that work. So Emma, you mentioned Salesforce and its$10 charity bonus if you come into the office. What are some other perks you've heard about that companies, especially tech companies, are offering their workers to try to get them back into the office at least a couple days a week? I actually think there's very little that I haven't heard about in terms of getting back to the office perks. I mean, Google did a Lizzo concert, which was pretty cool.

29:54I was like, can I go for reporting, which I did not. But a lot of companies did free meals. I went to a home buying company called Orchard recently that was doing a game night and happy hour. And it was really fun because they had this like bar cart that said it's 5 p.m. somewhere on it with Jimmy Buffett. But they like started rolling it out like before 5 p.m. It was like solidly in the fours. So they were just in the office for the bar cart, which was fun. I have seen companies do like swag, you know, free t-shirts, mouse pads, like pretty much everything you can think of companies have tried.

30:30So this stuff sounds undeniably fun. I would love it if, you know, work provided me with a Lizzo concert to kind of get my motivation up, you know. but at the same time, these things are just one-offs, right? They don't have any lingering benefit. And if the reason that you didn't like coming into the office was that your commute is long or you want to be home to pick up the kids, none of that really addresses that. So does this feel like the right solution to the issue? I mean, there's a weird reality in which sometimes covering return to office debates can feel like covering a sort of like fraught parent-teenager relationship.

31:05And I literally feel like I'm studying parenting a little bit and figuring out, is it working when they just throw candy at people or do they need to bring down the hammer? I think what works in terms of the perks is when they serve as this social anchor. Because the biggest problem, what people really hate is being called into the office so that they can sit all day long on their laptop and Zoom with colleagues who aren't in the office that day. So I think what works about the perks is that they get people all in on the same day at the same time. That's like one of Nick Blument at Stanford, the hybrid work researcher.

31:41That's his big thing is he thinks like, make the office worth it for people. Because there's like a meme going around of like, you know, CEOs saying, get people back to the office. And then the office is like someone sitting in a privacy booth, like that's soundproofed so they can replicate working from home. So that doesn't work. I think if you can say like, get back to the office and there will be a Lizzo concert where by the way, all of your colleagues will be, then that works really well. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to sound like a total narc here or like a, like a, like I'm sucking up to the bosses who want to get everyone back to the office.

32:15But you know, Casey and I, we, we do tend to record the podcast together most weeks in person. And that's like an important thing that we've identified because there is something, at least for this kind of podcast, better about being in person. It just works better. And so I'm not totally dismissive of the research or just the theories out there that there is something special about being in person. I mean, Steve Jobs famously had an aversion to remote work at Apple. He believed that Apple employees did better work when they were sort of bumping into each other all the time at the cafeteria. He thought that the creativity comes from these sort of spontaneous collisions of people where you bump into something and you ask what they're doing, and then you're sort of able to kind of work on something together.

33:03And I don't think that's totally ridiculous. I do find myself when I'm in the office around other people having better ideas and getting random inspiration from just collisions that I have with people in the office, not literal collisions, but these metaphorical collisions. So what does the research say about that, about the effects of remote work on creativity rather than productivity? Yeah, I think that that is one of the challenging things here is that, you know, we're still a little bit early into this remote work experiment for there to be a lot of like hard evidence around the kind of squishy concept of relationships.

33:39And I think that's one of the things that's like wrinkling workers a little bit. And I think Amazon is an interesting case study of that. Because Amazon recently asked corporate employees to start coming back to the office three days a week. And people have been mad. I wrote a story the other week about a big walkout that happened at the headquarters where hundreds of corporate employees walked out of the office for an hour at lunchtime. And one of the reasons they were doing that was over the mandatory RTO. And workers there that I've spoken with have said that one of the reasons they're so frustrated about being called back to the office is because they don't feel like they've been presented with evidence that being back in the office is that helpful for relationships and for culture.

34:19And a number of them have said to me, we would never be allowed to like build a product for Amazon if we didn't have evidence that it would work. Like our company is so evidence centric. And yet with return to office, we're just being asked to trust our bosses that things will just magically be better. Right. It's like vibes based policy. exactly exactly they're like they're just allow us to just like vibe together and just like you know believe and they're like that is if we just asked you to like you know vibe with our product i don't think that would go over so well so i think that has been one of the challenges here i think it's you know the cultural aspects of in-person work are something that we can like feel more than we can prove right now that being said i have seen a study that said you know staring at your computer all day curbs creative thinking.

35:08And I think that is something that also jives intuitively with what a lot of us feel. But I think it's also going to be something that the more this kind of wears on, the more research we're going to get. But let's talk a bit about the technology piece of this. So Kevin was bringing up earlier that a lot of the companies who were promoting remote work the hardest were also companies making technology that makes remote work possible. I talked to Mark Zuckerberg amid the pandemic about how Meta was going to be the most forward-leaning remote work company of its size. And they also have recently started to walk that back and move to a more hybrid situation.

35:49My curiosity there is, to what extent is that an artifact of the technology not being ready? That we don't have immersive enough video chat. The metaverse isn't really ready to hold a conference call. Is it really a technology question? Or do you think in your conversations, this really just comes more down to questions of human behavior and psychology? I think the challenge is the way the technology kind of structurally limits conversation. So a lot of people use the phrase like the meeting after the meeting, which is like if you're in a meeting where some people are together in person and some people are dialing in, the minute those laptops close, like the people who are in person start just kind of chatting.

36:31And like, maybe that's when the assignment gets made or the billion dollar idea, you know, pops into someone's head. I think there's just something a little limiting about staring at someone on a laptop because it makes you feel like, okay, let's just get right into whatever, you know, task needs to happen so that then we can get back to our real lives. I do think that there is probably going to end up being something a little bit irreplaceable about, you know, the substance of in-person interactions. Again, I would just say that that does need to be balanced with like what's irreplaceable about what people get back in their lives when their lives are more flexible.

37:07There's also been, you know, really important studies highlighting the fact that workers of color have been some of the most vocal about preferring remote work because they feel like it allows them to escape certain microaggressions and kind of office politics and clickiness. So I think if we say that there's something kind of irreplaceable about being together in person, we also have to acknowledge that maybe there's something irreplaceable about what you gain from flexibility. Yeah, it's interesting. Can I try out a theory on you guys that I don't have high confidence in, but I do have somewhat moderate confidence in, which is that I think that AI is going to kill remote work.

37:50And the reason that I think that is because so much of what is happening right now in the corporate world, as these AI tools get better at doing the kind of mundane, corporate, you know, rote work that people do, is that people are getting anxious about their own replaceability, right? And what can I do that can't be done by an AI? And so much of that, so much of these sort of uniquely human skills are things that are much, much easier to do in person, right? Like collaboration, creativity, leadership, these kind of soft skills, as they're sometimes called, that really are things that AI can't do nearly as well as humans right now.

38:30And so my theory, and I'd love to hear what each of you thinks about this, is that as the white-collar workforce gets more and more automated, there's going to be more of a shift back to the office where people can actually prove to their colleagues that they are, in fact, a human and not just like three chat GBTs in a trench coat. Because that is where their value comes from as a worker in an age where a lot of the rote value of their job has been siphoned off by AI. What do you think? I'm going to go first. I totally buy that. In terms of vibes-based RTO, you know, theorizing, that seems completely on point to me.

39:07First of all, I've been talking with a lot of companies that are making these big investments in AI, whether it's like IBM or KPMG or Thomson Reuters. And I've been asking a lot of them with these investments that they're making, like, what are the skills that they think are going to be considered even more essential when they're hiring once they've like completely integrated generative AI. And they always highlight like those interpersonal skills, like especially if you think about like a front office person, an executive assistant, a paralegal, like the work that can't be automated is like the personality you bring to the office, the way you interact with your colleagues, the brainstorming you enable, all of that.

39:46And I've experienced that too in interviewing workers about whether they're worried about being displaced, they always go back to like what they feel can't be replaced in their job is just what they bring as a human to their office. And I totally agree. I think part of that is tied to the in-person work. And anecdotally, I actually experienced this because I did a little experiment that I talked to you about, Kevin, where I tried to chat fish my colleagues. So just speaking to everyone only via ChatGPT for a week. So you use ChatGPT to like do all of your office communication for all of like my slack my email my pitches to my editor everything my responses to sources and I found that like people I'd never met in person were totally willing to buy like my chat GPT voice was me and they were like oh great like you seem like a very formal professional person and the people who sit near me at work when I slacked them via chat GPT immediately responded and they were like that's not you like that doesn't sound like your voice like the editor who sits next to me within seconds was like that's not your voice I know what you're doing.

40:47So I think that there is like an in-person relationship. There's a quality to that that distinguishes us from the robots. Yeah. I think there is a lot to that theory, Kevin. I think I pushed back on it slightly. I think there are forms of creativity that do not require coming into the office or collaboration and that companies may still find value in hiring people Hulu have particular skills that are maybe a little bit more single player. I do think that to the extent that these are collaborative jobs that, yeah, it makes sense that those are probably going to be less remote. But I just keep coming back to all the reasons that we wanted to go remote in the first place.

41:31One of them is just it's expensive to live in big cities. And it's hard to have the kind of life that you want in most American big cities today. And unfortunately, that trend seems like it's only accelerating. So I think you're still going to have a lot of very talented people who want to live in the suburbs or the exurbs or maybe even small towns somewhere. And I think that they're probably going to have the leverage to get the jobs they want, at least for some time. But I definitely think that that one is worth watching. I also think that part of this is a question of what an individual person values most.

42:05Because I think in what both of you are saying, there's a question of like, is your life centered around your career? Is your career or job centered around your life? And I think a lot of people have reevaluated that question in the last few years. I think that, you know, a really tight labor market helped. There were like two job openings for every unemployed person. You know, almost 50 million people quit their jobs in 2021. A lot of people switched industries. I think a lot of people did some digging to ask, like, did they want their job to serve their life or do they want their life to serve their job?

42:37And I think some of it in the end might come down to that because maybe someone doesn't want to be like completely integrated into the fabric of their company and they'd rather live somewhere more affordable and spend more time with their kids. And I think maybe finding a remote role is going to work really well for them. And I think for other people, their job is going to really fire them up. it's going to light up their life in a different way and they're going to want to make certain sacrifices so that they can continue to be really embedded in the culture of their company. I do think there is something to this idea that if you're a manager and all of your employees are in the office, you can delude yourself into believing that they all really want to be there and they all love their jobs.

43:15If you can't see them every day, I think a certain paranoia starts to creep in. And And I think it can become all-consuming for some of these managers. So it's really, I don't know, interesting to think about. You know, my other theory on this is that a lot of this backlash to remote work was caused by these viral TikToks, these day-in-the-life office worker TikToks. Have you seen these? Well, you're saying a lot of the backlash was due to a viral TikTok? I, I, honest to God, I think that, so these were for, for background, these were videos that went viral on TikTok maybe a year or two ago where it would be like, you know, I'm a product manager at Meta or I'm, I'm an engineer at Amazon or something.

43:59and it would be like these people filming themselves a day in the life and the entire day was like, at 11, I do a Peloton class and then I go to the cafe and I get my latte and then I take it back and I relax poolside for an hour and then I do a little bit of work in the afternoon and then around 5.15, I take off for the day and these went viral. People use them as sort of symbols of like how lazy and bloated these tech companies were and I think, honestly, I've heard several executives at large companies cite these as something that made them very upset because they're like, this is what people are doing when we let them work from home.

44:37Like, we're definitely making them come back to the office. It's a true, like, they hate to see us winning scenario where it was like, they gave employees great jobs and the employees enjoyed them too much. And so now the music is going to stop. I think some of them were hashtag acting my wage, which I think is a factor. But I think certain people were like, you know what? I do not get paid enough to grind as hard as they want me to. And also, it was a real worker power moment that people were experiencing. I don't think it was just product managers coasting over to get a matcha latte. I think people were also getting a little bit more empowered to draw lines about how hard they were willing to work and when they just wanted time to themselves.

45:22So I don't think that was all like just people coasting. I think it was also people feeling empowered and saying like, I don't want work to completely control my life. Yeah. You talked about worker power and we talk a lot on this show about zero interest rate phenomena. These things that like happen because interest rates are low and money is basically free and companies are flush with cash and we're in a good labor market and workers have a lot of leverage. So is remote work a zero interest rate phenomenon? Was it something that was very easy for companies to sign off on when the economy was booming and they were all bursting at the seams with money and they could sort of afford to let some people slack off a little bit, but now that interest rates have risen and money is a little tighter, now they really need to batten down the hatches and get people back to the office.

46:15Is there anything to that? I think, it's that's part of it. But I also think that's very dependent on like which CEO you ask, because there are certain CEOs like I remember talking to Jeremy Stoppelman at Yelp and he's a big remote work advocate. And, you know, Yelp is permanently remote. People have scattered. They've moved around the country and and they're still, you know, churning out product. They're still working hard. I do think that for some companies, remote work was part of the easy money economy. And I think that, you know, maybe in 2021, they felt like they had a little bit more margin for error in terms of like, if there were a couple people slacking off, they could sort of swallow that.

46:54And I do think that like once companies had to start doing these layoffs, once the economy tightened in general, I think CEOs did feel a little bit of a need to kind of tighten things up and make people feel like they were under a little bit more of like a watchful eye. So I think that's part of it. At some companies, I also think there are CEOs who genuinely believe in remote work and are going to ride this phenomenon out. Yeah. Well, that sort of gets to my question, which is, I just wonder where you think we find equilibrium here. It feels like some kind of hybrid situation is going to be the near-term future for many companies.

47:32That also seems like it's really uncomfortable for a lot of the managers at these companies. Do you think it kind of stays in that zone? Or do you think there is another twist still to come? I think that a lot of companies are finding that when hybrid work works, it works like fabulously well. I think you just have to think about it. And so I do think some companies have figured that out. And I think other companies are going to catch up. I just think that we're in that kind of like awkward growing stages period where everyone's sort of, you know, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

48:04Right. But one thing we know for certain, Lizzo is going to clean up. I mean, I don't know how many of these concerts she can do, but she's going to be making as much money as she wants, I think. I am still waiting to walk into the New York Times and see her in the lobby. Well, my fingers are crossed for you, and please invite me if that happens. Thank you, Emma. Thanks for coming. Thanks, Emma. Thanks for having me on. We'll be right back.

48:55Kevin, you know, from time to time, we like to look away from our laptop screens and look at bigger screens to sort of wind down at the end of the day. Have you been watching the new season of Black Mirror? You know, I watched the first episode of the new season last night, and I am ready to talk about it. Yeah, and full disclosure, the idea to watch the first episode of this show came from a listener who emailed us saying, Hey, Kevin Casey, this is totally up your alley, so thank you for the suggestion. So if you haven't seen Black Mirror, it is the show that asks the question, what if computer is bad?

49:30Or as Daniel Ortberg at the Toast many years ago, very memorably put, what if phones but too much? Which really, I do think, gets at a lot of the dystopian ideas in this episode. Before we dive in, we should say, we are going to spoil the episode. So if you would rather be surprised by all the twists and turns, feel free to come back to this segment after you have finished. But let's get into it, Kevin. So this episode of Black Mirror is called Joan is Awful. And it's about a woman named Joan who's sort of like a mid-level manager at what appears to be like a big Silicon Valley tech company. And she discovers one day that there is, unbeknownst to her, a TV show being made about her life, starring Selma Hayek as her.

50:20And basically this show, which is running on this fictional version of Netflix called Streamberry, is using some kind of generative AI quantum computer to take the things that she is saying and doing and put them into a TV show that is basically a one-to-one representation of her life. she's very surprised obviously to discover that the show is being made without her knowledge but she then discovers that she in fact did sign away her life rights her story to streamberry in this like very lengthy terms and conditions that of course like everyone who has ever seen a terms and conditions screen she did not read she just scrolled to the bottom and clicked okay but now streamberry is using all of the data from her devices to kind of collect a version of her life and use gender to the eye to like quickly turn it into a TV show that ends up revealing all kinds of unpleasant things about her to the people in her life.

51:15Yeah. And so that's already enough to chew on, I think, for one Black Mirror episode. But then they decide to throw in even more onto the pile. And one thing that they add is, well, what if we're all living in a simulation, right? Because as the episode goes on, the characters learn that they're not even in base reality. And in fact, the character of Joan, who you were first introduced to, who's played by Annie Murphy, who a lot of people will know from Schitt's Creek. She's not even the original Joan. There's actually a base reality Joan who you meet later in the episode. And then, of course, there's just the basic labor anxiety of are all creative writing and directing and acting jobs about to be automated away by AI.

51:57So a lot of stuff that was in there, Kevin. Yeah, it was sort of like talking to your most conspiracy theory-minded friend about all of their ideas about, you know, your phone spying on you. And maybe we're all in a simulation. And, you know, maybe aliens are real, like it didn't go into aliens, but it might as well have because it really did get in like a sort of a grab bag of all of the tech related conspiracy theories from the last few decades. I mean, one fear that I have about this episode of Black Mirror is that some like startup entrepreneur is like out there right now saying like, Oh, I could probably get funded to make TV shows of people without their consent that are like, produced using generative AI, Kind of in the same way that, you remember the Black Mirror episode where you work for these merits and you have to ride on stationary bikes to accumulate more merits that you need for basic daily activities?

52:48I feel like multiple startups were launched because someone watched that episode and was like, that's a great idea. I could make a billion dollars doing that. I mean, to be clear, we already have TV that is made without people's consent. one of the most buzzed about shows this year, which is called Jury Duty. It's on Free V, which is owned by Amazon. Oh my God, these names. But it's about essentially a fake trial where everyone is an actor except for one juror who was apparently not told in advance that the whole thing was fake. So one of the challenges in making these sci-fi shows is just to stay one step ahead of reality for at least as long as it takes to get the thing on the air.

53:25And I think Black Mirror succeeded here, but there'll be other cases where, you know, the auteurs don't make it. So what about this idea of a TV show that is created using generative AI? Do you think this is actually going to happen? Do you think there will be shows on Netflix two or three years or five or six years from now that are entirely created by generative AI? Yes. Do you remember Nothing Forever? Yeah, this was the like 24-7 endless episode of Seinfeld. Yes, and it was not a hit in the way that Black Mirror is a hit, but it definitely had a moment online because people liked the idea of a never-ending episode of Seinfeld that was just generated by something like ChatGPT.

54:07Now, it is true that part of the appeal was just the novelty of it, right? This was a curiosity, oh, look, they're making a Seinfeld-like show using AI. But look, one of the things that the Black Mirror gets right is it's expensive to make TV. And so if you could just have a computer do every single bit of it, there are some people who are going to want to use the computer to make every single bit of it. Now, I expect for the foreseeable future, anything made by generative AI that represents itself as a TV show is probably going to be pretty bad. But as with everything we talk about with AI, the question is just how long will that be true for?

54:41I'll take the other side of this. I actually think I've changed my mind on this. I think I would have once said that fully AI produced TV shows and movies are kind of inevitable. But I've been thinking about something in social psychology called the effort heuristic. Do you know about the effort heuristic? I skipped that day of class, so no. So this is a concept that psychologists use to basically talk about the way that how much we value something depends a lot on how hard we think someone else worked on it. You know, they've done these studies where they give people identical pieces of candy, but some of the candies have a nice note on them that says, like, I picked this just for you hope it makes you happy and the other pieces just have a note like i picked this randomly and then they have people eat the candy and rate how it tastes and interestingly researchers have found that people prefer the candy that has the nice label on it because to them it signals like someone cared someone worked hard to make this candy selection for me even if that's not true and you know kevin this is a great time to point out that every episode of hard fork takes over two years to produce by a team of more than 500 people.

55:49But anyway, go on with your story. So basically, this applies to all kinds of fields where part of what we value about watching, you know, a show like Black Mirror, for me, it's like succession. Part of what is so fun about watching that show is just, you can kind of see the craft in it. You can see how hard the writers work to like get the exact right line or the exact right shot. And you can just sort of appreciate the mastery of it. And I think that one effect that generative AI is going to have is just making everything it touches look extremely cheap to us, right? I wouldn't watch an AI generator TV show in part because I would assume that it's garbage.

56:31But even if you told me that it was good, I would probably still be reluctant because part of why I watch TV is to like, see the effort of other talented people who are making things for my enjoyment. Yeah, I can understand how you would resent that. And here's why I think there is something to this idea. When the chatbots all came out, they took over all of the social networks as people would type anything you can imagine in them just to get them to write scripts or tell jokes or whatever. And whenever I would see one of those screenshots of text, I would just immediately dismiss it. I would think there's no way I'm going to spend some of my precious moments on earth reading the like random firings of a neural network.

57:11Like, because to your point, there was no effort put into it. So why should I care? Way before AI, I once read a line that stuck with me. And I believe it's something like, what is written without effort is read without pleasure. And this was in the context of writing advice. Like, you know, you actually have to put work into it if you want it to be good. But I think it's doubly true in an age where the quote unquote writing is just a series of predictions. Yeah. I mean, I actually wonder if the advent of generative AI will kind of lead us back to a more artisanal way of producing stories. like you know sort of the way that like fast food uh produced slow food like after the fast food industry sort of proved that you could mass manufacture food and that it was like decently good and that people would buy it there was sort of this backlash that resulted in like all these farm-to-table restaurants where they would like come to your table and explain where the vegetables came from and tell you how the chicken was raised and like you know really like put in a lot of visible effort to try to communicate like we are not mass producing this this is not fast food and so i wonder if there'll be something similar with sort of entertainment where you'll have your ai generated tiktok videos or whatever that you watch for sort of cheap pleasure but when you really sit down in front of a big screen to watch something that you want to blow you away you're going to go for the kind of laborious human versions yeah i mean i love watching my favorite part of like any, do you watch like nature documentaries ever?

58:47Like planet earth? Sure. Yeah. So my favorite part of nature documentaries is always the behind the scenes episode that they put out after the last episode where they tell you how they actually filmed the thing. And I just always love that kind of behind the scenes detail because it's so easy to appreciate the effort of someone who like sat in like a little hut in the wilderness for six months to get the perfect shot of the snow leopard on the one day that it emerged and tripped the camera sensor. That is the kind of delicious detail that just makes it so much more enjoyable, knowing that someone spent all that effort just to get you one shot that you saw on your TV.

59:25That is the kind of thing that makes me actually think that AI-generated TV and movies may be a long way off. Yeah, I think that could be. But also, I think eventually some generation of children will be born that never knows anything different and just accepts the ai generations as as good um but hopefully that's a long time off yeah one final thing about this episode uh because i do believe that this episode of black mirror made a contribution to the culture which is that uh the character's shorthand for the quantum computer in this episode is the quamputer and i just actually want to use that like i think that's a good term for a quantum computer and so i will be saying quampuner all right thank you black mirror

1:00:36hard fork is produced by rachel cone and davis land we're edited by jen poyant this episode was fact checked by caitlin love today's show was engineered by alissa moxley original music by dan powell alicia but youtube marian lozano sophia landman and rowan nemisto special thanks to paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Nelga Logli, Kate Lopresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Au revoir. Au revoir. Bonsoir.

1:01:29Thank you.