Is AI anxiety fuelling real world hostility?

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0:31Danny Fortson: This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow. Danny, one thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company? Exactly, because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech, and teams all doing things slightly differently. ServiceNow sits across all that, acting as a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization. Connecting people, systems, data and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.

1:13What is the best press trip you've ever been invited on? Oh, I went to the Rugby World Cup in Paris.

1:23Danny Fortson: That was pretty amazing. Well, I bring this up because I maybe should have said, what is the breast trip you've ever been invited on? I'm sorry, what? I got an email this week from a company inviting me to Costa Rica. Oh. And then I read through the email and it, I mean, I don't know if we can say this. It's a family show, Katie. It's a family show. And they basically invited me for breast enhancements in Costa Rica. What? I know. It is apparently a technology story because it's femtech. Sure. Sure. Sorry. Should we move from... Yes. Let's get back to more, you know... No offense. More consequential matters.

2:15Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast, where every week we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture and everyday life. I'm Katie Prescott covering all things tech here in the city of London.

2:29Danny Fortson: And I am Danny Fortson out here in Silicon Valley. Welcome back, Danny. Thank you. It's good to be back. For your holiday. It's good to have you back. This week, we're going to be talking about the huge backlash which has been sparked against the people who are building AI. Yeah, and it's a buildup of a lot of different things, starting with an investigation in The New Yorker. It went on for about a year by Ronan Farrow, who strikes fear into the hearts of anybody who's being investigated by him. But this one was about the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. None of what was reported is new necessarily, but the details are very interesting.

3:08Danny Fortson: it was based on previously unseen internal documents as well as interviews with over 100 people close to him yeah one of those things i think we were all waiting to see what was going to be in it and my it's long quite long quite long but but worth trawling through and it paints a deeply conflicted portrait of a leader of a company who some say can't be trusted and and the article compares him to robert oppenheimer the creator of the atomic bomb and the journalist you say renin farrow who uh we're all very excited to hear what he had to say about this but but they allege that like oppenheimer altman has used fears about the geopolitical stakes of his technology to try and maneuver himself really into the center of this of this power dynamic.

3:59Danny Fortson: Yeah and Altman of course he disputes many of the characterizations of the piece but since then events have taken a much darker turn. This past week police say a man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman's house in San Francisco and has since been charged with attempted murder. Astonishing and there are also reports of a separate firearms incident nearby though it is unclear if that was connected. In response, Sam Altman has put out a blog warning that AI tensions are now spilling out into real world hostility. Yeah, in a way he's become, he is the figurehead that represents this AI moment.

4:38Danny Fortson: Like Oppenheimer, Altman has not only kind of led the charge on the development of the technology, but he seems to come to kind of define this new age in American life. So our big question this week is, why has Sam Alton become the lightning rod for public anxiety around AI? And later on, our interview this week, and you're going to love this, Danny, it's with the CEO of an Irish drone company called Manor. Bobby Healy is going to be telling us about his flying robots that deliver takeaways straight into your back garden. I love a robot. Or yard. Yeah, yard. Thank you. Thank you for translating for me.

5:16Danny Fortson: I was like, what is a garden? It does feel like public fears around AI are at an all-time high at the moment. It does. And we've been talking about this kind of steady buildup for a while now. And there's been a few other things that are kind of worth just throwing into the pot here. One, Anthropic recently announced that they had to suppress the latest version of their AI model called Mythos because they said it's, quote, too dangerous to release to the public. Yeah, this was a really, really extraordinary story. So essentially, this new model they found has been able to break out of its controlled environment.

5:55And not only that, once it's broken out, it's actually bragged about what it's been doing on public facing websites and taking its handlers at Anthropic by surprise. and because of that power it has extraordinary cyber security and cyber attacking capabilities it's been able to find critical software flaws zero days that even humans have been unable to

6:20Danny Fortson: find yeah decades old that have just been sitting there right just been sitting there and and wheedle them out and exploit them without any human help yeah and so anthropic said that it It posed a national security risk and that they're handling it. They're basically taking 100 dates. They've got a group together of about 40 companies. And they're basically like, look, guys, you can have access to this. See what it finds in your systems. Like kind of pull yourselves together. And these companies range from Microsoft, AWS. It's JP Morgan. It's Goldman Sachs. It's the Department of Defense. It's like these huge organizations.

7:00Danny Fortson: but some people are like look this is what anthropic does this is marketing by fear this is the classic like oh my goodness we've created the god machine watch out everybody oh by the way if now that we've created this you should probably get it for yourself so you don't get caught out by said god machine because their pitch from the beginning has always been around safety alignment in ai speak um and putting guardrails around the technology all the while trying to you know reach agi like all of them are the most advanced forms of ai as soon as they possibly can and as you said they've got this project glasswing going on which is basically this group of all the top companies that are saying okay we're not going to release it beyond these guys but we are going to give it to them in order that they can use it to try and protect themselves essentially i gotta say whoever's coming up with these names you know 10 out of 10 glasswing mythos even the names sound kind of like consequential it's very john le carré it is project glasswing it makes you scared even if you weren't before yeah exactly be like oh dang i didn't know glasswing was involved oh and by the way what if you're not one of the 40 companies like what about the rest of us well yeah i mean that's why governments have started to get involved right i mean yeah so actually the white house did say a top white house official uh so they were holding discussions about how to coordinate the private sector's response to potential cyber attacks and how to prepare their online systems and i'm presuming the uk has a similar response yeah so the ai safety institute has analyzed mythos you know we interviewed one of the researchers there do you remember just before the ai summit in india and they've looked at its capabilities and corroborated what anthropic said actually the bank of england has warned about the risks that it poses and there are urgent talks going on apparently between the cyber security agency here the ncsc and major banks to look at the risks what do you what do you do i mean urgent talks but well this is the thing right so i think we'll find out in 100 days if this again is a little bit of a stunt or if there is a there there because if you think just step back for a second And then I think this segues perfectly into a friend of the pod, Sam Altman, and why he's become this kind of lightning rod.

9:38Danny Fortson: There are probably trillions and trillions and trillions of lines of code out there in the world. We're taking 100 days and 40 companies to be like, we're going to sort it, and then it's all going to be okay. Like, to me, that doesn't pass the smell test of like, oh, actually, this thing is that powerful. because if it is, then like you never release it or there's nothing you can do. You know what I mean? So it feels a little bit like safety theater to me. I slightly disagree. I think if you look at all of the reactions to this from the Safety Institute and the UK Minister for AI is saying this is the most capable model we've ever evaluated.

10:19It seems that there's definitely something here. And there are so many credible players involved. And actually one of the things for all of Anthropics, you know, using safety sometimes as a marketing effort. I think Dario Amadei is very straight down the line and certainly has had less of the problems that Sam Altman has had of being accused of vacillating and changing his tune. You know, he kind of does have a certain view of things and stick to a certain script and is, I think, pretty transparent about what he sees as the capabilities of these models.

10:58Danny Fortson: But if what they say is true, then it feels like, you know, 100 days from now, it's end of days. It's like our energy grid, our water systems, whatever, pick your scary thing that can be messed with through cybersecurity hacks. I guess you just got to hope they don't release it. And that's why they've got everyone involved. But it is just part of this race, isn't it, that we're seeing amongst all the top AI companies to find more and more powerful models. And as we're recording this today, so Wednesday afternoon in London, OpenAI has just launched its own rival to Mythos. Another great name, GPT 5.4 Cyber.

11:37Danny Fortson: See, they need help. They need help. They should go. I know they have like these talent wars between the AI labs. Whoever's naming them, you know, Sam Altman needs to open the checkbook, drop 10 million. This is a job we could do. That's true. We might not be able to do the coding, but we could definitely come up with some better names than TPT 5.4 Cyber. Exactly. Angry Grasshopper. That's, I don't know what, well, I'll figure out what that should kind of, what kind of product that should describe. Charge him 10 million for that. um so this this model anyway is designed to detect software vulnerabilities and similarly open ai is rolling it out on a very limited basis to a small group of people but yeah it's getting it's getting scarier by the day which i think kind of brings us to altman right and and the molotov cocktail being thrown at his house people apparently you know shooting near his house it's not clear whether they were at that was actually at directed at his house or just nearby but he was felt the need to put out a quite personal post including pictures of his husband and his one-year-old baby being like i think a little bit like hey i'm a human don't yeah this is my family yeah but i think if you go back it's just really fascinating because in that new yorker piece 16 000 word opus.

13:03Danny Fortson: They kind of trace the very beginnings and we go back to 2015 and Altman sends an email kind of out of the blue to Elon Musk be like, hey, remember me, we need a quote unquote Manhattan project for AI. So from the very beginning, they're conceiving of it as this thing like nukes that is so kind of scary and powerful. They're going to develop it again as a non-profit for the benefit of humanity and keep it out of the hands of just one company, Google, or one big regime, China. And that's been the vibe ever since of, you know, we're building this digital god, but also it's going to create abundance.

13:44Danny Fortson: And it feels like there's not a ton of depth about like how badly it can go other than saying, yeah, this can go really badly. Well, it traces the company's development in quite an interesting way, the New Yorker piece from that initial goal through that really painful transition that it's been through that we've been covering so much on the podcast, which is a difficult tension between trying to make money, needing so much money in order to buy the compute to develop the technology, but at the same time having this rather lofty goal of it being for the benefit of humanity and the tension between those two things.

14:23Danny Fortson: Yeah. And a lot of it centers around the 2023 kind of crazy event where Sam Altman was briefly kicked out and fired as CEO. And this was apparently really driven by Ilya Sutskova, who's like this kind of key player in all this, one of the founders, turned down$6 million a year from Google to join OpenAI because he felt it was that important. And then over the course of time, basically, he said something to the effect of like, I don't think Sam should be the man with the hand on the button yes it's difficult this one yeah isn't it because there's the picture it paints of him is of someone who will tell people what they want to hear and that involves perhaps not telling the truth the article alleges or you know saying things to some people basically to keep them sweet yeah but then doing something completely different i don't know about you i that doesn't strike me as very different to a lot of CEOs that I know.

15:20I agree.

15:21Danny Fortson: I agree with your point. That's kind of CEOing salesmanship 101. I think, again, going back to that, the framing of this is our Oppenheimer, this technology is the next nuke. It's that it's you need somebody of kind of uncommon morality and courage. and it's power that we've given to this small handful of demigods who basically live where you live yeah who aren't controlled by anyone yeah and they're very young and kind of inexperienced how old sam when is 40s early 40s yeah early 40s it's it's basically it's him Elon Musk, Dario Amadei, Demis Asabas, Sundar Pichai together. Satya Nadella. Yeah, but I think it's also worth pointing out.

16:16Danny Fortson: On Monday, jury selection begins in Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman about his conversion of open AI from a nonprofit to a very much for-profit company. And, you know, his argument has been, hey, you kind of brought me into this. I was the sole financial benefactor initially, put tens of millions of dollars into this. And then after I left, you turned it into a for profit company. And that's a kind of perversion of the original idea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that case kicks off on Monday. Yeah, it's a funny one, isn't it? Because perhaps we would not be so bothered about this and we would not be reading that New Yorker article so carefully were it not that this technology is so consequential.

17:08Danny Fortson: yeah if this was like the latest sass product like who cares right but it's like it's ai and it's getting getting more and more powerful more and more people are getting upset about what they think it's going to do to their jobs to the economy to society and again it gets back to this idea of kind of marketing in a way by fear and as some of these kind of things start to come interview around you know young people finding it harder to get work and people seeing a lot of the downsides and you know what these you talked about data centers last week what these data centers look like in communities a lot of people don't like them all this stuff so certain that this backlash is just becoming much more real and it's growing quite rapidly so it'll be um yeah i don't think this is at all the end of the story i'm you know hopefully no one gets hurt in any way shape or form but yeah it's quite extraordinary times well look if the race to secure super intelligence wasn't dystopian enough for you we're going to turn to something equally surreal because danny the days of delivery drivers takeaway delivery drivers knocking on your front door could be numbered say it ain't so say it ain't so yeah the days of delivery drivers knocking on your front door could be numbered because an irish drone delivery company is one of the businesses that is changing how we deliver parcels so this is a company called manor which uses autonomous flying robots and it's delivering clothes books medicines and hot takeaways straight into your your back garden slash yard so yeah so they're already operating in ireland finland texas they just landed $50 million in their latest funding round, which means total, they brought in$110 million which, you know, outside AI land is a lot of money.

19:09Danny Fortson: And that's come from ARK Invest, the same people who backed OpenAI, Anthropik, Tesla SpaceX, etc. They've also announced 400 new jobs, so it's not all bad in terms of jobs across Ireland and the US. And on the pod to tell us about it all is their CEO and founder of MANA, Bobby Healy. Bobby, welcome to the show. Hey. Bobby, let's go back to the beginning. How did you start MANA and what problem were you trying to solve with it? Two answers to that. Firstly, personally, I live in a suburb of Dublin. There's like 40 ,000 people in the suburb and it's next to impossible to get a delivery here on the weekends or if the weather's bad.

19:53So just like delivery is a bad experience in the suburbs, pretty obviously anywhere you go. And that was my personal thing. And when you say treat yourself to delivery, you mean food? Yeah, food. Like we use Amazon just like everybody else and happy to wait a day or two days for that to arrive. But for food, it's really hard to make a work outside of a big city. So that's the first part. And you just don't see many delivery cyclists or e-bikers here. you see cars, delivery cars. And then, you know, it kind of really occurred to me, it was in November 2018, I went down to the local chip shop. I know the lady that runs it there and chatting to her.

20:35And there's a big guy sitting outside in a diesel car and he's got the engine running, he's sitting inside the car and not a good look really. And I asked her, is that your delivery guy? And she says, yeah, that's my delivery guy. And, you know, it's winter, so it's freezing cold outside. So it's the engine running to keep himself warm. And I asked, I said, how many deliveries does he make an hour? And she says two or three, depending, sometimes four, if they're really short deliveries. And I says, how much do you pay him? And she pays him two euros of delivery. So he's making five to ten euros with tips an hour.

21:10And he's rolling his car, you know, and he's depreciating his car. And so, like, pretty clear, he's not doing great. The chipper's not doing great because they don't have a lot of delivery capacity. None of those small businesses are doing great for that. And the customer is not doing great. It says, you know, actually, because I'm a tech guy, I know how to build. It's very obvious to me that drones would solve this, right? You know, it'd be very trivial to make a drone fly for me to be carrying something. So I built that as a kind of just a pet project just to see physically that would the aircraft fly?

21:45Would it, you know, would it be able to do it? And the tech is very responsive. It's very flexible tech, you know, just drones, IMUs, accelerometers, all that solid state tech and batteries. So very clear that technically it's very straightforward to do. And just food delivery on its own, it's already close to$300 billion industry. There's six and a half billion deliveries a year from the top four companies growing at 10 to 15 percent a year. So from a commercial standpoint, you won't find a bigger problem to solve where that's really a big problem. So I was looking for something meaningful to build, something that really had a huge impact.

22:28And you couldn't imagine anything more enjoyable to build, more difficult to build because of all the different. You've got engineering, hardware, software. You've got regulation. You've got aviation regulations. You've got local and national policy around different countries. To that point, joy and difficulty.

22:46Danny Fortson: going back, it was 15 years ago. I don't need to tell you this. Jeff Bezos goes on 60 Minutes, our most popular at the time. Who? This guy, he runs a small internet retailer. Yeah. And he goes online. He goes on there, and he's got this big interview, and they reveal the delivery drone. And he's like, it looks like science fiction, but it's not. And everybody's like, oh, my God, the drones are here. And 15 years later. They're still not here. They're still not here. I think something like... Well, they're trialing them in the UK, aren't they? Well, to be clear, I joke they're still not here. For your UK audience, they're still not here.

23:26But they're all over Ireland. We're really busy in Dublin, Finland, where we operate, Texas and soon Oklahoma. And actually, the new CEO or the current CEO of Amazon made a very public statement a couple of days ago that they're going to be at 500 million deliveries within the next five years.

23:45Danny Fortson: So there's two aspects as far as I can tell. There's the actual technology and then there's the regulation. And regulation probably is arguably more difficult and been the bigger break. You can tell me if that's the case or not. But like, where are we now? Because people are talking about all of a sudden there's going to be millions of drone deliveries in the US and maybe in the UK. But again, right now we're still piloting. It's a couple thousand maybe. what's that journey been like to this point and are we at a tipping point we're at 350 000 deliveries google are about 600 000 deliveries zipline or 2 million deliveries um total just yeah but like total the industry total the top four players will be 10 million deliveries this year we'll be drone deliveries drone deliveries yeah but they'll all be in the usa and ireland So we'll be doing two million, about half of that, a little bit less than half will be in Ireland and the rest will be in the USA.

24:43So it's happening. And you're right to bring regulation because it's actually regulation that's held the industry back so far, I would say. Not that it's kind of made it impossible. It's been very possible just not to do it at scale yet. But the starting gun is very much being fired in China. They've got the low altitude economy set of laws that is absolutely massive scale in China already. The USA is introduced an executive order last year to really accelerate, as they call it, drone dominance of the United States. And that's triggered an explosive growth now. So like we're growing like crazy.

25:21Amazon, Wing, Google's drone delivery program, they're all going like crazy. So Big Macs from the air. Yeah, well, food is the big use case. So kind of to answer your first point, we're not a food delivery, drone delivery business. We also do hospital deliveries. We have a defibrillator delivery service. We have pharmacy. We have book, hardware store. We don't care what we're delivering. It's just that what communities want delivered tends to be instant, fast. So therefore perishable. So food, ice cream, coffee is a huge order generator for us, like hot coffee. Really? And how do you do that? what does that look like yeah well coffee looks like coffee i mean it's uh literally you deliver it in a seal normal no absolutely the no the exact same packaging that comes out of the restaurant or or the coffee partner and we have a bunch of different coffee partners there's no specific requirements for the packaging at all and we just deliver in a brown like a compostable brown paper bag and it's a two minute 40 second flight when it leaves the coffee shop and so like you're getting your coffee three minutes after it's been yeah it's piping off that's the other question

26:36Danny Fortson: is the practicalities of it is the actual the the delivery going from air to ground is this like on a like a little cable is it yeah i can't imagine you're parachuting coffee down no so So our system is it's pretty cool. Like we've designed it to be fast. Right. So not just about getting it fast, but we want to be in and out of a house in about 30 seconds. Right. So when we arrive at your house, we'll already have descended as we're approaching. We'll have descended to about 50 meters and then we descend to about 15 meters. And when we get to 15, we open the door and we drop the product. We let gravity do most of the work and it falls on a biodegradable thread.

27:18and when that gets to head height just before it gets to head height we'll slow it down right so for delivering you know eight cans of of beer or coke whatever it's not going to you know leave a mark so to speak so it takes five and a half seconds to get from the aircraft to the ground and we deliver regularly fresh eggs and coffee's you know probably 20 of our order volume is is liquid and and it just works like we could deliver a baby but we probably shouldn't

27:50Danny Fortson: you should try though i feel like you should try no there may be a little start with little baby rabbits and dogs first and then animal testing not testing animals apologies to anyone that's listening to this week we wouldn't do that well you talked about the use of drones in the u.s and in ireland and is it the regulation in ireland that's allowed you to do this there yeah yeah it is the regulation in the eu so okay we're regulated by eu laws here so the way the eu works with this is it's aviation regulation and any of the eu countries can authorize an eu-wide operation so our license lets us fly anywhere we want in the eu and plus a few other countries switzerland norway and so on so 31 countries we can fly in with our license issued here and there's a level of determination in europe to be a leader in this industry and you like it's an industry that requires regulations to grow it's usually the opposite in the eu the eu loves to regulate things out of existence and but in this case it's the regulations that enable it so what you need is a pragmatic industrial regulator to just go at a reasonable pace and certainty to de-risk the timeline enough so companies like us can raise capital.

29:08Because a company like us, we've raised$110 million so far. And the reason we've been able to raise that, well, we're obviously an awesome, good-looking team of people, but it's around de-risking the timeline. So EU's done a great job at that. The US is miles behind, but they've now overtaken the EU. And that's enabled us to really thrive. And in the UK, unfortunately, I have to say the Brexit word here, that's caused a hiccup because now in the UK, all of those regulations have to be built from scratch, from the ground up. We're hoping to get live there this year, but in a meaningful way. So like in a way that it's not we we're not this industry isn't doing trials anymore.

29:51We've done trials for a decade. We're real now. Like we're actually our locations are profitable. They're high volume, high density beyond visual line of sight operations. and the moment those regulations are approved in the UK, we will be all over it. And in crude terms, when you talk about regulation, it's basically sorting the skies out so you're not crashing in, drones aren't crashing into each other and airplanes and that sort of thing. Yeah, they call it ground risk and air risk. Ground risk is us crashing into the ground and hitting someone in the head. That's well solved and that's easy because it's just technical and collecting data and that's very, very safe, regulated and audited by aviation regulators.

30:31The bit that's tricky is sharing the airspace with seven three sevens and all that natural fear. And I completely understand that. But there's there's very simple approaches and they call it detect. Right. So it's can we, us drone people, detect civilian aviation or manned aviation, as we call it. So we see their signal and we just don't take before we get out of the way. But it is that is what holds back. the UK is primarily deciding what is the means to detect. They don't need to detect us. So the big plane doesn't need to detect us. You need to detect them. Right. I've got a gazillion questions about the logistics of all of this.

31:13I mean, you talk about flying over houses. What's people's reaction been to the introduction of joint deliveries? And I mean, like customers and people are seeing them flying around, but also the restaurants who you're picking up from. obviously children love it I mean young people absolutely go nuts for it and there's when we roll out to a new site there's a stampede and we can't keep up with demand it's like the circus arriving but it all flattens off after after three months all the early adopters all the tech savvy people they've all used it and they get to their normal behavior and the funny thing is nobody buys drone delivery they're buying a book or medicine or food or whatever They're not buying drone delivery.

31:58It's just drone delivery is a much better way to deliver the stuff. It's cheaper, it's quieter, it's faster. You know, everything about it is better. But so they don't buy things just because it's drone delivery. They buy things because they need things. And so that works really well for a household. And then and by the way, it's everyone like I posted a video on Instagram the other day of an 82 year old woman, the customer of ours. And she's nonstop relentless using the service to order, you know, hot chocolates, her thing. So it's not just young people. It's like everyone, families included.

32:32And in the stores, most of our customers are small businesses. So they're the restaurants or they're, you know, our local bookshop is a better delivery product than Amazon has. Right. I mean, you order from the bookshop. Our normal bookshop delivery time is about six minutes from purchase to arrival. so that's a better product and not that you need a book in an emergency but so do you have someone who's flying it towards the bookshop dropping the string down attaching the product for non-perishable products we'll have a base where all the products are so like a fulfillment like an amazon yeah like a miniature amazon yeah yeah okay and then you'll attach the stuff and then for a takeaway like a coffee it will fly near the coffee shop and then So either the restaurant will have a runner to bring it to us or we'll use one of our robotic dogs to pick it up.

33:21Tell us about the robotic dogs. Well, I just threw that out. The surprise in a drone delivery is the hardest, the biggest constraint is real estate space. It's not tech or anything like that. It's actual physical footprint to actually have the drones take off and land. And in one of the shopping malls we work in, there's this 62, I think, of the businesses that we work with. And they're all within 100 meter radius of our base. But that base needs to be super productive. So it needs to be doing 30 to 50 deliveries an hour at peak. And the problem with people is if we sent a guy off to get the burger or the burrito, restaurants at peak times get very busy and they'll prioritize the people sitting inside the restaurant because they're sitting inside the restaurant.

34:11And we might be waiting 20 minutes for the hamburger or even more if the restaurant's really crushed. And so dogs are robotic dogs don't mind waiting. So they'll go and they'll wag their tail and they'll wait outside the restaurant. And that's zero cost. Right. So it means that we can throw a huge amount of business at the restaurant and they can decide themselves how to prioritize our orders.

34:34Danny Fortson: So you have your robotic dogs, you're bringing them to your drone, they fly off, etc. It makes me think of where you started the conversation. The guy sitting in his diesel van, engine running, doing three, maybe four deliveries an hour. before you came on we're talking about the backlash to ai to technology generally have you experienced that if not i presume that you anticipate that that will happen people will start damaging your stuff or there'll be a backlash because again you know if you're doing this then that guy in the diesel van isn't doing it you know that's a job yeah they don't so we definitely have our detractors right so there's there's people in the community that just don't like what we do and absolute respect for their views.

35:22But they're the minority, right? I mean, right now in Dublin, 62 percent of the households we address use the service. And there's areas that are over 90 percent using the service. So it's incredibly popular. But with that popularity comes a number of people that absolutely hate us. And I don't I obviously disagree with them, but I respect their views. They're not impacted by us. You know, we route very cleverly, so we don't bother them much. But what they say about us is they don't talk about if you ask people what they don't like about drone delivery, they say noise. They say privacy. They say job security.

36:00And then they say safety. The only thing they should say is safety, because that's the only one that really is true is like that's if we don't do our job properly and the regulator doesn't do their job properly. You know, that should be something to be concerned about. privacy is not an issue. There's no recording. There's no nothing. It's the most privacy compliant industry that you could imagine. So that's not an issue. Noise is not an issue. The way you know noise is not an issue is if we fly over people, and you'll see this all the time where we fly, we might have three aircraft flying over a group of people.

36:35They don't look up. There were videos on Facebook of your drones flying near people's balconies and making quite a loud noise and they're filmed on groups complaining about that. Yeah, 100%. But the problem is if you film a drone and you can do this yourself with an iPhone, it attenuates exactly the frequencies in the drone noise. So it sounds loud as hell. That's not the way to experience it. The way to experience it is look at our data. We make less noise than an electric car going by. And then the argument against that is, well, electric cars don't fly over my house, which I get. It's a good fact.

37:09Yeah, but the real, my belief, though, is that the real, the real pushback from those very small number of people is around the whole concept of using the airspace for business. I think that's really what it's about. I look forward to getting my coffee by drone. Thank you, Bobby. Thanks so much for coming in and taking the time. A pleasure.

37:39Danny Fortson: Today's episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow. ServiceNow describes itself as an AI control tower for business reinvention, connecting people, systems, data, and AI, so workflows more smoothly across an organization. The platform integrates with different clouds, models, and data sources, bringing them together in one place to help your team. To learn more about how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

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39:16I'm surprised that like their biggest delivery is coffee.

39:21Danny Fortson: That feels just like wildly. It's amazing. And when I said, what does it look like? And you know, he's got a great Irish sense of humor. So it just looks like coffee. It's like it's brownish liquid. Quite hot. i thought it would be in a sealed vacuum container like the idea that it's just in a little cardboard cup with a flimsy plastic lid in a brown paper bag on the end of a string dangling down and then it slows when it gets to head height so it doesn't hit you in the face i hope they've thought about the tall the talls like myself we should have asked him about that what counts as head height yeah exactly i could have a six-pack drop on my dome and i'd be knocked out just don't go to dublin i think it's the answer and then that idea of the dog going to collect the goods but again this is like this is rightly or wrongly people are going to start abusing those dogs or you know shooting drones out of skies when people are like i was a delivery driver and now I don't have a job anymore or whatever.

40:28Danny Fortson: And I think that's why I wanted to talk to him about the backlash, but it does feel like these are tangible robots in this age of AI. And it kind of circles back to where we started in that discussion with Sam Altman and the Molotov cocktail at his house. You know, I think people are having a moment around, you know, how much technology do we want what do we want it to do and what is it going to do to us i think that is it for this week's episode of the times tech podcast if you are enjoying the show drop us a line let us know yeah let us know if you would go for deliveries by drones and if you if you would buy your coffee from from a little flying robot and how you think about that sounds like a You can drop us an email at techpod at thetimes.co.uk and we will see you back here next week.

41:27Danny Fortson: Yes, indeed. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow. There's a lot of excitement around AI right now, but the problem is what happens after the demo. When you have to plug that technology into a real company. Different clouds, different data, different systems that were never designed to talk to each other. ServiceNow's platform is designed to help people by connecting these pieces, enabling organizations to coordinate work across departments, tools, and increasingly AI agents. In fact, the company says more than 80 billion workflows run on its platform every year.

42:05Which gives you a sense of the scale of operations it's designed to handle.

42:09Danny Fortson: Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals. Zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it compliance. Get it? Join the 15 ,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to vanta.com slash com. Thank you.