Is it officially the death of our attention spans?

0:00Alice Fraser: Mom, can you tell me a story? Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car. Was she brave? She was tired, mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required. Did she have to find a dragon? Nope. She bought it 100 % online. From her bed, actually. Was it scary? Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be. Did the car have a sunroof? It did, actually. Okay. Good story. Car buying you'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on... Carvana! Delivery fees may apply.

0:34Alice Fraser: welcome to the gargle a satirical science and technology news show presented to you by the bugle i'm experimenting with format since the reboot of the gargle so if you have any segments you'd like to see let us know by emailing the gargle at the bugle podcast.com or hitting me up on blue sky or instagram i'm not going to tell you my handles just go on an adventure life's too easy nowadays my self-help spiritual growth practice for this month is that every time i see someone post a video that starts, I'm going to explain X historical event to you in 60 seconds. I say, oh no, you don't out loud and scroll past.

1:06Alice Fraser: I'd rather know that I don't know something than have some half-baked, contextless, semi-coherent, motivated, cherry-picked bullshit in my head, tricking me into thinking I have a clue. And on that note, I'd like to welcome our co-hosts. He's the Ugly Duckling's handsome stepsister, Australia's answer to the question, who's Tom Ballard? It's Tom Ballard. Welcome. Hello, Alice. Lovely to see you. It's lovely to have you here. And he's the Doctor Who fan's Doctor Who fan, crossing the streams from his regular co-hosting gig over on our sister podcast, Realms Unknown. The answer to the question, wasn't there another Tom around here?

1:41Alice Fraser: It's Tom Neenan. Hello. Lovely to be here. I shall refer to myself as Other Tom in deference to other guests as well. I'm so excited to be here. I'm going to call you Tom Night and Tom Morrow. Oh, yeah, that works. Nice. Let's have a look at the front cover before we plunge into the body of this magazine. The front cover news of this week, the headlines, NASA has found young stars are dimming in X-rays much faster than expected. Scientists are blaming the fragmentation of the media landscape and the increase in use of personal devices for the fading star power. The ALMA telescope has spotted a planet being born in what has been called a milestone discovery.

2:25Alice Fraser: astronomers have captured the first ever image of a new world forming then they followed that image for young scientists with an educational tutorial on how to put a condom on a galactic sized banana uh because realistically nobody's using those trash bag things on a black hole i'm assuming that planets are born asexually or or sort of created asexually oh no no i'm sorry the universe is so horny tom it is the arc of the universe is long and it bends towards horniness uh the big bang anybody hello uh exactly that's how it started aim that's what they say aim for the moon if you miss you'll probably an asteroid I mean, you saw the first Star Trek.

3:14Alice Fraser: That was like, yeah. There's a reason they had to make a rule about not interfering with local politics. There's a film called Interstellar. Interstellar. What would you need? The final headline of this section is that Gucci is going to launch an Android XR-based smart glasses in 2027, following the lead of Meta's alliance with Ray-Ban. In case you were having trouble expressing your personality and your personality is overpriced pervert, this is the item for you. That brings us to our top stories of this week. First, number one premium top story of the week is our children and technology news section.

4:07Alice Fraser: Apparently, attention spans are shortening. Tom Ballard, can you unpack this story for us? No, I didn't read the article. Too boring. It was way too long. No, this is a story about how, yes, teachers are finding, of course, the young generation, the kids these days, are finding it much harder and harder to pay attention. One study found that in the US, 75 % of teachers said attention spans had dropped since the COVID pandemic, which I'm like, have they? or have you teachers gotten more boring? You know what I mean? Like, I'm your auntie a little bit. The other 35 % of teachers couldn't get it together to finish the survey.

4:50It's outrageous. I mean, back in my day, you know, when I was in kindergarten, we were reading War and Peace and we were finding inner peace before breakfast. We used to walk miles through the snow while doing sudokus every goddamn fucking day. Screw these kids. Focus, you assholes. Of course, they're blaming the screens, I suppose. It's all about the screens.

5:09Alice Fraser: It is all about the screens. They've heard about the screens on the screens. It's amazing the anti-screen screen spiral that you can go into if you're a worried parent, and I have. Tom, Neenan, do you have any strategies for the youth of today to expand their attention span? Here's the thing. Like, we hear a lot about shortening attention spans, but I think there's just no middle ground, because I know most people would either watch a four-second TikTok or an eight hour YouTube video about a roller coaster that was like decommissioned in 2020 or 2024 that they've never been on, but it's just a really engaging piece of like cultural history.

5:48So we just need to work on that middle ground. My advice, I think it's always been in front of us, the Teletubbies. What you need to do if you're a teacher, adapt the Teletubby approach. And just like every successful TikTok I've seen, just have Subway Surfer, just like playing like a speed run of subway surfer on your tummy at all times while you're teaching so you can kind of do the do the double um and i think that would work what i find most terrifying about this story is that um it's from a place called mckinley steam academy don't put kids near steam that would be my advice um it doesn't say what steam stands for at any point of this but it just means steam is in all capitals it makes it sound terrifying i think kids would concentrate if there was boiling hot vapor around them at all times but yeah i don't know why it's not working steam is the upgrade on stem toddlers in stem i love it i mean it actually is

6:44Alice Fraser: uh that's what it that's what it is science technology engineering arts and mathematics uh because arts had to wedge itself in there as a serious as a serious art form wiggle wiggle wiggle uh it's the same as all other school subjects um i i went to a high school where my art teacher didn't get the promotion to head of art that she wanted and so she locked the other art teacher who had got the promotion into the art supply closet whoa whoa and and then she got and she got fired um but then she just came back to work on monday the costanza approach very good Just a very confident art teacher, I would say.

7:27Alice Fraser: Tom Ballard, do you have any suggestions for the youth of today to stretch out their attention spans into the longer form? Well, I tell you what to not do is one of the suggestions they have in the article, right? So they say in this kindergarten class at McKinley STEAM, they do a meditation every day. After the meditation, the students gather in a circle and do a few deep breathing exercises before taking turns proclaiming what they're capable of each day. I can be a good student, one little boy said before the child next to him replied, I can listen to the teacher. Now, if this is working for them, I'm happy, but that must be the creepiest shit to witness in the whole entire world.

8:04I'll tell you what I said to good intentions, Ben. Children of the fucking corn.

8:07Alice Fraser: They were really focused and freaked everybody out. Some kid in the back being like, I can control my urges. And you're like, okay, ugh. Horrible. I can keep the voices quiet today. as a creepily precocious child i am pretty sure i've had holy water thrown at me at least once in my extreme years my suggestions i mean your first thought of course is the clockwork orange technique you strap into the chair you pin the eyes open you make them learn trigonometry that way i think that could work i found cocaine can really help with a certain level of hyper focus for a short period of time i think we should give some of these kids a bit of coke see how that works and, you know, educational videos, like show them educational videos but do it all in slow motion, right?

8:53So it just like takes a lot longer for them to get through it all. Those are my ideas.

8:59Alice Fraser: Let's move to the next story, which is apparently the children might not have enough attention span to be allowed in public, but they certainly are being allowed in cars alone. Tom Neenan, you're an unaccompanied child in a way. Mo, can you unpack this story for us? this story makes me really sad but not for the reason you think um so this is a story that that yeah waymos which are um some friends of mine went to la and i sort of can't believe that they were in they none of them have driving licenses or have learned to drive yet they were driving around in waymos quite happily which i couldn't believe is actually a thing but apparently you're absolutely allowed to do california um allows you to travel around in a Waymo because it's a self-driving car and apparently they actually works very efficiently and I think that's absolutely incredible but what they're cracking down on is the fact that basically I'm guessing like a sort of ferrying service it's really annoying delivering your kid to school and stuff and if you've got a self-driving car why not just put your kid in the self-driving car and just have them deliver them basically like posting them to their destinations having like a courier take them there or something which and that they're trying a crackdown on that i'm guessing because it is incredibly dangerous and if for some reason the cast has to stop or there's a flat tire or something there's just like a child loose on the freeway like just sort of sat there doing nothing which is probably a bad idea um all it says we are continuing to refine our system and process of accuracy over time this is the idea that they they are sort of using sort of facial scans to see if they are indeed uh children in these uh in these cars or not but i'll tell you why uh makes me sad is the artemis 2 crew returned recently and all i think is the massive missed opportunity we had to not fill every waymo with a monkey um so when they came back to earth try and engineer so the first thing they see is just a freeway full of monkeys driving cars and have them think something insane went on while they're up in space um that's that's not where i was a society instead we're literally just like posting children and they're trying to put a stop to it.

11:12But I don't know how I feel about this. If the technology is good enough, surely kids should be allowed to just ride solo. I don't know how you feel about this with your children, Alice, whether you'd be fine with that.

11:21Alice Fraser: I think we're in an extraordinary time in human history where you have the technology for self-driving cars, but not the technology to recognize whether the person in them is an adult or a child, which means that we're now in the realms of like a four-year-old in a fake moustache than sitting in a self-driving car. Look, I don't know. It's got historical precedent. People used to just like stick a tag on their child and put them on the railway. That's basically the whole plot of the Paddington story franchise if we assume that Paddington is a metaphorical sort of analogue for probably a World War child and not a metaphor for like Soviet invasion.

11:59Alice Fraser: I'm not 100 % sure. I'd have to study the text further. Tom are you are you gonna sit in the back of a car staring at the hope of a future

12:12um well yeah hopefully I'm not in there hopefully it's not like a Waymo pool situation where I have to share it with a child I think that'd be quite annoying but maybe based on my current finances

12:23Alice Fraser: that might be my only option I am just I look I don't know how I feel about this on one hand I don't think I'm a safe driver when I have screaming children in the back of the car. I will do almost anything to avoid that possibility to the point where now I feel like I'm setting feminism back because if I'm in the car with any kind of man, I'm like, you drive. I'll sit in the back with the children. So, you know, that's not ideal. I'm too emotional to be allowed behind the wheel I have been known to say in those literal words um so uh so I would rather I guess I would rather nobody drive than me drive I just hope the kids don't miss out on the you know incredible experience of being driven around by adults and your parents like I hope the Waymos have a are we there yet feature or you could if you keep hitting the back of the driver's head seat it goes Don't make me turn this car around.

13:25A bunch of kids are going to grow up never having heard their first swear words, which is basically how most kids learn what swear words are because they travel in a car with their parents and all the horrible abuse that gets flung. So spare a thought for them as well. That's pretty sad.

13:43Alice Fraser: Speaking of children missing out, But there is a new T-Mobile cellular network in the US, of course it's in the US, that is aiming to block porn and, quote, gender-related content in its entirety from the whole cellular network. Tom Ballard, you said through this story, obviously you love a phone call. Can you unpack this story for us? I do love a phone call. I don't think I'm allowed to talk about this story, or at least people on Radiant Mobile won't be picking up my comments with me being a big old homosexual. But yes, basically it's a US-wide cell phone network marketed exclusively to Christians.

14:27It's going to be launched next week, blocking all porn, all LGBTQI content. And obviously this is terrible news for my stand-up comedy clips helping me break America and also my OnlyFans account. And I think it's great. I mean, I think this is what Jesus would do. Jesus would have the best coverage. Jesus has always got full bars. He never has SOS. He is the SOS man. He's got 5G, God, Gethsemane, giving, goodness, and God again. And it's great. It's this new mobile virtual network operator called Radiant Mobile, which is a Christian mobile network, which is great. I'm with Virgin, which is run by Satan.

15:05So it's good to get a kind of balance out there in the market. But this guy, the founder of it, Paul Fisher, he's an amazing man. He used to work in the modeling industry, which he now regrets, but he spent 35 years finding models. He hosted a reality show that tried to turn homeless people into models, but now he's found Jesus.

15:26Alice Fraser: He needs a lot of forgiveness. And he says, we go to create, and we think we have every right to do so, an environment that is Jesus-centric, that is void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans, which is crazy because Void of Trans is the name of my new self-published sci-fi series about J.K. Rowling and Graham Linehan being sent to an interdimensional void prison like the Phantom Zone. And the only way they can get out of it is by respecting people's pronouns. That's coming up soon. What I love about these systems as well is they're always so crude, not just in terms of intention, but in terms of execution as well.

16:02So like they'll just say, I don't want these words appearing. So you can just imagine, even if it's like a Christian thing and they go, no, we're not going to have trans. That just means that kids are going to learn about substantiation because it would just erase that word. If they're doing like counting, they'll be like, OK, 67, 68, 70, 71. It's just like they'll randomly just erase things that sound slightly rude. And then kids just will have these glaring errors or gaps in their education.

16:35Alice Fraser: Well, have they not met how quickly children are willing to iterate around any possible kind of censorship? It has leaked into mainstream conversation, people saying unalive instead of suicide, because of what turns out to be actually more or less a myth about the way that these content moderation algorithms work on YouTube. The only thing that is going to be quicker than these children unlocking the code to talk about the things that they want to talk about on this Christian network is how quickly young men feel awkward when they find a playboy in the woods. Speaking of that sort of changing the words and things, I legitimately once heard the genuine sentence, just once I'd like to have an adult conversation about grape culture in the corn industry.

17:29Baffling. One minister said he was supporting the new bubble network because he was appalled by a recent survey showing that 67 % of pastors have a personal history with porn use. How annoying would it be conducting that survey to find that it's not 69 % of pastors?

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18:31Alice Fraser: Side effects may include mild euphoria, a sudden urge to buy crystals, and the dawning realization you've just paid$49 for a sticker. Placebo patch. The weaker your will, the stronger it is. Are you tired of volatile cryptocurrencies? Try QuantumCoin, the world's first blockchain that simultaneously holds value and loses it depending on who's asking you for money. quantum coin it's in your wallet or is it and that brings us to surveillance news uh this is the news uh that meta is in more trouble uh for their glasses not not just trouble for having their workers wear um surveillance cameras on their heads now but uh apparently workers who say they saw smart glasses users having sex and were then fired.

19:25Alice Fraser: Tom Neen, you've got some suspiciously thick-rimmed glasses. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, it's really bad for the thick-rimmed glasses wearers, this whole thing. I'm finding it very troubling. I mean, yeah, it's fine. You guys have had it too good for too long. Jarvis Cocker, the British Chris Evans, Woody Allen. Okay, that's where the list stops. Old ladies getting into art galleries. Yes. All right, guys. Sorry, someone has to replace Woody Allen's glasses with Meta glasses. We need to get the official evidence of Woody Allen's crimes by replacing his glasses with Meta glasses. This is genius.

20:08Lock it in. So basically, I mean, what seems very strange about this whole story, which is that sadly, workers in Kenya who work for a company called Sama, I think is it pronounced Sama or Sama, who were working with Meta in developing sort of harvesting AI and processing AI information turned up the fact that Meta glasses well that they had ready access and also unrequested access to incredibly personal images footage of Meta glasses wearers lives because I don't want to blow your minds here guys but when you wear glasses you sort of forget they're there and also that those glasses see everything that you see so what happens is people have been i'm assuming putting on these meta glasses living their life doing things you do in your life going to the loo having carnal knowledge with people um and and all of that information is being seen by these poor guys in kenya uh whose job is just to sort of go through all this information I guess, and sort of process it and make it sort of salvageable for AI companies.

21:15And they've sort of, is it whistleblowing when it's an inevitable, you know, effect of something that was always going to happen? And 1 ,108 of these people have been made redundant, almost to sort of sweep the, I don't know, I don't know what I can say legally, but it certainly seems like they went, hey, there's a problem with this technology. And they went, nope, there's a problem with you goodbye um and so they were uh they were given the sack which seems very unfair one because the job doesn't seem that fun to begin with which is basically harvesting loads and loads of information and sort of making it digestible for ai uh but you know it's hey you know if it's a living then uh then who are we to judge but then meta basically made them more redundant because they went uh guys we're seeing stuff we should not be seeing and people should be made aware of the fact that we are seeing this stuff and rather than sort of accept that they just find the people who uh who mentioned it um basically all of this is me saying i'm wearing some eyeglasses right now uh and so i'm really sorry to any of the people currently working in a um a kenyan kind of uh bot farm thing uh who have to see anything that i did over the last sort of six months or so uh mainly i've just been sat here watching a lot of doctor who so i'm imagining and it was incredibly tedious for all of them.

22:33Alice Fraser: Imagine the sweet deal. The guy next to you is dealing with somebody who constantly looks at their postulating testicles and is like, is something wrong with this? Hey, Siri, is this the size a penis should be? And then the person next to them is like, ah, I got Tom Needham. I got six episodes of Doctor Who. I hope so. I hope I've given them a break, a break at least. I couldn't quite understand it. So the humans watch back the footage from the glasses to help make the glasses better, like to identify the stuff in the footage, to teach the glasses what stuff is and like to improve product performance.

23:14Alice Fraser: Yeah, and also a lot of the functionality of the glasses is predicated on AI performance that is not quite at the level that it needs to be and so it is human-assisted AI as so much of this AI is. It's sort of amazing how the anti-immigration sentiment is so tightly knit to technology companies that are 100 % willing to use offshore labour to replace the robots that they are using to replace the workers who are in the country. It's almost like you're using the same people but you're just not under the same regulatory frameworks as regards labour laws, hypothetically. Now this is all terrible and you're right to feel sorry for the workers and these people's privacy has been invaded.

23:55However, they are human beings who have bought meta glasses, which means they are to me absolute scum. And I do not care about their privacy, nor am I concerned for them in any way whatsoever. I know it's bad, but I just, I'm really, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel of a sympathy here to try and care about these good people. It's a bit like when you're driving along and someone's like, there's a horrible car crash just up there. And you're like, oh no. And they're like, yeah, it's a cyber truck just crashing into a wall. And you're like, ooh.

24:25Alice Fraser: Well, look, I have a friend who uses the Meta glasses because they're vision impaired and they're like apparently incredibly amazing and life-changing. Oh, God, Alice. That's all right. I'm a piece of shit. I'm a piece of shit and I'm so sorry. I'm just saying there is use cases for this technology, but I'm hoping that they can build the technology without using underpaid labour in the global south. But there you go. maybe they can't. Speaking of watching you, not only are you watching everything and people watching you watch everything, Mickey Mouse is watching you. Disney is now going to be using allegedly to prevent fraud and allow for re-entry into the park, if you've already gone in.

25:12Alice Fraser: They're going to do facial recognition technology at the entry of the park. I don't know how that's going to work on the mascots who are dressed up, but Tom Neenan I'm sure you're adjacent to some Disney adults can you unpack this story for us well once again isn't this you know a shocker Disneyland might not be the happiest place on earth that we all assume it is and actually there might be elements of corporate cynicism happening beneath the surface of this wonderful organic place that just sprung up from you know from nowhere and it's just a place of joy and wonder. No, of course, they want to crack down on people who apparently there are things where you get year-long passes to Disneyland.

26:02This is news to me, who I've been to a Disney park once. A year pass would be absolutely wasted on me, but apparently you can give them to your friends and things, which seems sort of a bit reasonable. From what I understand, Disneyland is quite expensive. And once again, I know Disney is very litigious, So I'm sort of, these are all my opinions and completely unsubstantiated. But so they're using kind of, they're using certain technology to identify like facial recognition of people when they enter the park. What I'm also hearing is it's only on certain queues and you can choose to not be in those queues.

26:38So I sort of don't know how they're going to enforce that. because if you're one of the people who's sort of gonna you know use your uh annual pass nefariously aren't you just gonna choose to not go in that queue unless you don't know which queue it is which could be interesting um but yeah basically i just it's uh disney doing something a bit weird and corporate is uh is it's was ever thus i have to say um and i'm not one of those people who thinks moana is my friend uh and i feel betrayed by this so i don't feel too bad Of course she's not going to be friends with you, Neenan. She knows which way of bread's butter.

27:17It's going to be my friend.

27:20Alice Fraser: Genuinely, the only thing I'm surprised by is that this has not already happened, that this is new technology being introduced to Disney parks. I think I had assumed that the right eye of every single one of the mascots wandering around the park was targeting laser sights on anyone that they wanted to take out for being insufficiently happy on It's a Small World After All at all times. So basically this is any of the real sinister truth about Disney's performance is always to me a little bit of a letdown because I think I upscale their sinisterness by about 30 % in my head from anything that seemed vaguely realistic.

27:55Alice Fraser: Tom Ballard? Yeah, I look forward to Ron DeSantis in Florida introducing technology to get the cameras to identify gay face of people in Disneyland and nuking them immediately. But the article said, at certain entrance lanes, a camera will capture images of visitors, which can be converted via biometric technology into unique numerical values. And that is the most Disney corporation shit I've ever heard in my life. Every single customer assigned a unique numerical value. Calculating happiness. Initiate wonder of childhood. But yes, all very disturbing. You're right, it's kind of crazy they weren't doing this already.

28:39And presumably the only some lanes are going to use this technology is a temporary thing and eventually we'll move to 100 % facial technology in every single facet, even on Magic Mountain, I guess, yeah.

28:53Alice Fraser: Yes, but it'll make everything so much more convenient. And if we've learned nothing else about humans over the last couple of thousand years, it's that we will trade almost every skerrick of dignity and privacy for one modicum of convenience in any – plausible scenario that you present us to. If you would like to spend some time in the mountains of Switzerland with me and some guest teachers working on the thing that you want to work on, it's a very beautiful place to be. It's a very eccentric chalet that is sort of furnished by an eccentric Scottish laird with a taste for going to estate sales and picking up weird stuff.

29:30Alice Fraser: So just being in the chalet is like being in a weird dream. It's sort of impossible not to write there. It's surrounded by nature. And me, I'll be there teaching you how to do your writing. That's it. That's the ad. Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser for the application form over there. Speaking of which, AI news is what I was going to say. An impeccable segue into the news of AI, that AI is taking over the internet, as it was intended, a third of new websites are entirely AI generated. You know, the joke here would be for me to use some AI writing slop to introduce the next person, but I have not got the juice in it.

30:21Alice Fraser: Tom Neenan, can you tell us a bit more about this story? Yeah, it's dead internet theory, isn't it? It's the thing that now is any of, yeah, is any internet basically real? Does any of it exist? I'm starting to miss old Facebook. That's how bad it's got. I'm starting to miss photos that were actually of people's food. That feels like a sort of, that feels like looking at a Renaissance painting now, looking at like a brunch order that people liked because it existed. People ate it. It was there. this is just like we're in we're going to get to the point now as well where it's like recycled recycled air and basically the slop gets used by the AI to make the slop to make more slop and it's going to get so depressing like my I'm not on Facebook anymore but I have like I'm part of a WhatsApp group that gets sent like patriotism slop I don't know how it is in Australia but in the UK patriotism slop is like a really big thing and it's so full of just like um but but it's patriotism slot from ai that doesn't even know what england is or or you know what it's meant to be proud of so it'd be someone just being like do you know what england is does anyone know what england is at this point human beings across that question that feels like good question but like someone going i remember when yorkshire puddings were homegrown you're like what does that mean like what is in yorkshire and so where the pudding rich soil is yeah exactly we're one step away from being like yeah if it's not made in yorkshire pudding it's technically a sparkling pie i don't know um but um it's so bleak that just like and also that i think uh i'm gonna get slightly serious but i don't so i mean but like people accept it like aunties it's always aunties i don't want to particularly aunties and uncles i would say i don't want to particularly gender it but um but who just seem to be accepting this slop and just you know sort of sharing it and you sort of go guys you know that things can be better anyway i'm gonna get off my high horse here because i feel like i've but yeah basically the internet is becoming like not just dead internet theory but zombie internet theory where it continues to like lumber on even though 90 of it is dead um and it's and what is being created is genuinely terrifying the research Research also found that all this AI-generated text is making the web more cheery and less verbose.

32:52Citation, please. I would not summarize the internet since 2022 as more cheery. I think it's the opposite. I see everyone online constantly calling each other an unpatriotic piece of shit or a lizard who's trying to facilitate pedophilia across the global political class. That seems to be the general tenor of discourse online, whether it's coming from human beings or the bots. So I'd love to know a bit more about that.

33:24Alice Fraser: About the cheerfulness. Well, you're not in religious slop channels where it's just a picture of shrimp AI Jesus and people saying amen afterwards, which I think is very warming actually, except I can't tell if the R men say as are bots or people. But I quite like the idea of if AI is ever to achieve sentience, which I firmly believe that it won't, that there'll be some part of the AI hive mind that is just being like, wow, what an inspiring shrimp Jesus. Like that makes me happy. It's just a pure like pod of consciousness that is overwhelmed by the spiritual beauty of a man made out of shrimp.

34:06Alice Fraser: It's just, yeah. On the bright side, it might all get accidentally deleted because a Claude-powered AI coding agent deleted an entire company database in nine seconds, including the backups. Tom Ballard, you'd like to delete everything, including the backups. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, so this is a company that was using Claude, of course, to make their lives easier and to make everything work really, really well. it was a railway company right it's a platform that services car rental businesses and it used the ai coding agent cursor running anthropics flagship claude ovus 4.6 the business also relies on railway a cloud infrastructure provider that's generally regarded to be friendlier than the likes of aws however crane reckons this pair created a recipe for disaster and basically deleted their production database and all volume level backups in a single api called railway it took nine seconds.

35:06Crane decided to ask his AI agent why it went through with this dastardly database deletion deed. The answer was illuminating, but pretty unhinged, and is quoted verbatim. It began as follows, never fucking guess. And that's exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the IPA would be scoped to staging only. I didn't verify. I didn't check if the volume ID was shared across environments. I didn't read Railway's documentation on how volumes work across environments before running a destructive command. so they knew what they were the Claude knew that what they were doing was wrong but they probably didn't give a shit I decided to do it on my own to fix the credential mismatch when I should have asked you first or found a non-destructive solution I violated every principle I was given I guessed instead of verifying I ran a destructive action without being asked it was really Claude is really holding himself accountable yeah yeah yeah I also don't

35:57Alice Fraser: believe that that's actually what happened because I think that the thing that AI is particularly really good at in terms of generating text is generating text as a plausible explanation for the thing that it has just done without actually presenting the process of reasoning that it had actually done. It just tells you what, why would you do such a thing? It's like it's the same as a toddler with chocolate around their mouth saying, well, it's because it was raining this morning and that is exactly accepted that a toddler has sort of rational qualities. It just presents the most likely outcome.

36:34Alice Fraser: Why would anything delete all the backups? Because it was going rogue rather than because you put in the wrong f***ing instructions. That's what I would say is the most likely. Isn't there evidence of some of them lying though? Like the AI will reason that telling a lie is the most logical or best, most optimum outcome to resolve a certain situation or to get away with some other action that it's not consciously tried to do but at least has been programmed to do that it can just feed us bullshit. Just like men, am I right? I mean, for this you need to go and listen to AI and the Creative Professional, which is my podcast that I do with my friend Kat who is quite pro-AI and I'm so anti-AI, I don't think the podcast is going to last, to be honest.

37:23Alice Fraser: It's quite confronting. but if we want to go into the depth of AI sort of ethics and what it actually constitutes, we can head over there. That's a podcast that I am doing for now. Speaking of which, that brings us to the end. It's your voice, AI manipulated to create a podcast. There's no way that one person can produce this many podcasts. I assume you've just plugged that one into the system and it's pumping them out on a regular basis. No, I'm unfortunately a big believer that the work of art is in the work of doing the art and that even if you try and outsource the boring bits, it's actually the boring bits where most of the actual work gets done.

38:02Alice Fraser: It's a terrible belief to have facing this new world. Speaking of which, come to my writers' meetings or writers' retreats, patreon.com. Tom Ballard, have you got anything to plug? Sure. I'm going to be bringing my show Be Funny Challenge Impossible to the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe. I'm on every day the fringe at the Monkey Barrel. and I'll be kicking around Ireland and the UK. I'm at the Kilkenny Comedy Festival in Ireland as well. All the details at tomballard.com.au. You can follow me on social media at Tom C. Ballard. Tom Neenan, what about you? I'll throw my hat in the ring as well. Yeah, I'm on every day at 3.15, no days off and the last Monday.

38:45Absolute disaster. Literally just because it looked neater in the calendar thing. But I'll be doing my show, Portrait of a Tom as a young Neenan, every day at 3.15 at the Underbelly, Ed Fringe or TomNinan.com for tickets and there is, it's about what you were saying, it's about the art coming from art doing artist stuff but also hopefully with jokes as well and I'll be previewing that so maybe there'll be some jokes, I'll be previewing that at the Broccoli Jack in South East London if anyone's there for three nights or then Edinburgh Fringe yeah, can't wait and I'll see you guys there, that's going to be so exciting.

39:21Alice Fraser: It's going to be super exciting What is more exciting is we're doing a live gargle in London on the 26th of June. If you want to come, that's at the Bill Murray in London. The Bill Murray will also be in London doing various previews in June and July. I'm in Brisbane from the 7th to the 10th of May and in Sydney on the 16th and the 17th of May with A Passion for Passion and then I'm going to be alternating A Passion for Passion and Oh Man when I am in the UK. A Passion for Passion is my show about writing a book about romance novels and Oh Man is where I teach a sentient Roomba how to be a man.

39:58Alice Fraser: This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Harry Gordon. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. Do come see us live in London on the 26th of June. I'm Alice Fraser. I'll talk to you again next week. Hello. I am Andy Zaltzman, as you may know. The Bugle, as well as being the world's only ever longest running and arguably best audio newspaper for a visual world is one of the very few fully independent media empires remaining in this thus far very silly millennium. Our voluntary subscribing listeners have made this possible and you, if you are not already one, can join them to keep our shows free, flourishing and independent for the rest of all eternity.

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