AI Breakthroughs & Autonomous Vehicles: What’s Driving the Future of Tech? | TSG Ep. 867

Hey, everyone. Are you ready for the A to a era you're watching? Textron Gang.

Hey, everyone. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to our Wednesday edition of Techstrong Gang.

Um, I'm Alan Shimmel. Hope you're ready for a, a, a quick 45 minutes of discussing three hot topics in tech today. As I'm doing going forward, I'm not gonna waste a lot of time introducing people you've been meeting every day for the last year and a half or two.

So let me just say that our gang today is Mitch Ashley, Chris Blak, and the dean, Mike Azar coming at you from Denver as well for the open source Summit. Let's jump right into it. Mike, big announcement out in Denver at this open source summit from the, uh, LF Linux Foundation, Google, uh, donated their a to a protocol to a new, uh, project that LF is fostering or hosting or running.

That includes Google, Microsoft, and, uh, a bunch of other big, big names in the area in the space. And with the, with the idea of, you know, how do, how do our agents gonna talk to agents? How are they gonna interact?

Like APIs weren't enough, but what you are out there, you wrote an article on Textron AI on it. What, what, what do you got? Well, it was kind of interesting to watch the keynote because a lot of the people in the audience were still at the what's eight a again face.

Uh, they were like, yeah, all right, well, this sounds interesting. But not many of 'em actually had built in an agent must much less try to interoperate with anything. So they were kind of, you know, it was met with what I had like to call golf applause, which was kind of like, you know, this is good thing, but we don't know what it means, kind of thing.

Um, I think it's gonna be a significant deal, and it has a lot of implications for MCP as well because, um, what you did see is a hundred vendors are now rallying behind this a to a protocol, and that's a good thing, and that creates a level of standard and interoperability we're gonna need. There's this other thing called the model context protocol that Anthropic created that is still kinda led by them, and they haven't quite gotten around to donating that to a consortium. And the question then becomes, is there're gonna be pressure on them to do the same.

Uh, I think maybe, but will it go to the Linux Foundation or somebody else? I don't know. But Mitch, this whole area now has, uh, an alphabet soup of acronyms of things, and I know you put a post together kind of outlining the different pieces of that.

So maybe you could explain the relationship between A to A MCP and everything else that we're playing with here. Yeah, this is, uh, a report I did on, they'll update it regularly. Matter of fact, right after I published it, this, this happened about the Linux Foundation talking about, you know, where are the top agentic AI open protocols?

Meaning they're not going through a standards body in a formal sense, like IEEE or IETF, something like that. So the two people, if you know about him, the two you'll know about, certainly his MCP, that got the most kind of buzz because it's a different kind of project and I'll talk about about that. But A two A was introduced by Google, largely launched at their Google Cloud next, and it had some support at the time.

Um, and they addressed two, two different things, but they're very similar protocols. Uh, first of all, they're based on kind of a restful type of interface, something that we're very familiar working with in software development. But MCP mobile context protocol is about getting access to things outside of an l lm, how do I get access to a database or to a service, or to an application or to something that will enhance the reasoning of the R LM to IT agent, agent to agent.

And by the way, agent to agent doesn't mean we're, we're splitting alcohol a anonymously to half. It's, that's a different thing. A two, a H, two A is really about agents talking to other agents and discovery of what, what the services or what capabilities of the agents are.

And this, and keep in mind this is a, this is still evolving. It's not a mature thing yet. Uh, the authentication protocol for that, there's still some work to do to beef that up.

What is the modality of it? Is this a text, a image, a voice video? What, what are we talking between each other?

And then an ability to interact between agents but still protect the state. In other words, what's happening inside my agent? You don't need to know about, I'm a black box.

You just tell me what you do and I'll talk to you and I'll do the same for you, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's still more around orchestration layers and things like that for this all to evolve in. Personally, I'm looking at all of this landscape of, of open protocols and saying, okay, where's, where's the pony in there, where's the Kubernetes of agents gonna come from?

Is that gonna be an evolution of a two A probably more likely that than MCP? But, you know, that's sort of making, making the sausage kind of detail. But the, the big thing is externally, it probably a much bigger impact than it did necessarily at the, uh, open source summit.

It really sent some shockwaves to say, great, glad that Google did this. And there's one reason why this was important, and one reason why MCP doesn't have to do it yet Google created it and people don't trust. If Google's got control over this, they're not going to, they'll sign up for it, but begrudgingly.

And, but we better not put all their eggs in that basket. It's an open source project with multiple contributors. And kinda like Kubernetes, Kubernetes being handed off by Google a while back, you know, there, there's much better hope with this being an open standard and being widely adopted.

So that's why I think it's a big deal. I I couldn't agree more. Right.

And, and thankful the background on that, Mitch, and this, you know, I was thinking about this before we got into this episode is a couple months ago I was on this show saying, you know, AI is neither artificial or intelligence, terrible word, you know, phrase, uh, I was kind of wrong. And, uh, there are better words, you know, in civic AI terms, we talk about semantic and solid, right? These are the team members we work with.

And this move, you know, as Mitch as you said, this is huge. This is seismic. You know, we didn't happen three months ago because we weren't ready, and three months from now is too late.

Things move really fast in this space. And a as you folks know, I mean, I'm literally doing all sorts of agent work right now by copy and pasting from one AI's output to the other, a as interface using rock and open AI and claw and all these systems. And we're doing amazing things.

And I'm doing that in the context of the civic AI ethics framework, you know, that we've developed, and it's all working just fine. And I don't see any path forward that lets us take advantage of all the stunning capabilities that all of this evolution, this technical evolution gives us. Other than getting to a point where we can trust these, these semantic team members, you know, to behave as reliably as humans, which isn't perfectly, you know, the many, one of the four of us could lose our minds on air right now, but we tend not to.

And we deal with that. And we're at this point now where we have enough latent structures laying around that this summer. I, I expect it to bolt together.

And by the fall, we'll have different conversations internally. So I have a few thoughts on this. First of all, to the, to the issue of trusting Google as it relates to the open source world and CNCF and lf, you know, Google didn't do bad with Kubernetes, right?

It was Borg or whatever it was before it became Kubernetes, but they donated it to the LF relatively early on, right? Way before, uh, official release. It was still in Bader and stuff.

And, and it's been in a cn you know, the cornerstone of CNCF from, from get go, where Google gave themselves a black eye in this space was the Istio saga, right? Remember, they they were going to donate it. They, they did it, then they didn't want to donate the ip, just the copyright or vice versa.

And there was this long sort of drawn out battle around Istio, which eventually Google did seed over to the CNCF, but that created an opening for other service mesh, linker d and others to really, so today, I don't know if there's a, Istio is not the preeminent service mesh right there, there are several. Um, the way I look at this though, from a bigger point of view is we, we haven't determined best practices for, for ai, for agent, for agent to agent interoperability, et cetera. We're in a, we're in an era of emerging practices, emerging protocols.

Some are will, some will win, some are loose. But in today's world, where you do need that found, we, you know, we have this foundational model that Harry Selden put in. No, only kidding, Harry Selden didn't put in it.

But, um, we have this foundational model. If you don't donate your standard or wannabe standard to a foundation, it is looked at sort of sideways as potential lock-in potential big brother vendor. And so I fully expect MCP to be part, to be donated at some point.

It would be nice. So this new project that LF started, Mike, and I don't remember the name of it. It's, is it eight?

Is it the A to a A two A? Yeah. A two A, right?

Roger, Maybe, maybe it's a home for MCP too much like CDF, right? Has spinnaker and, and, and Jenkins and a bunch of the other CICD tools. It, uh, that it manages or fosters.

Um, it would be nice if we could tie a nice little bow around it that way. Yeah. But they might also give it to, you know, there's the Apache Software Foundation is just as legitimate at home, And there's the Eclipse Foundation.

There's many of 'em. Yeah, I think there's, there's a couple of distinctions. I agree with what you're saying, Alan, but, and the, and the, but is with Kubernetes, you know, the, the race for owning that space was really early and nobody else was in it very much.

I mean, you had what doc, uh, Docker had scout and a few things that were around No, no, there was, well, doc had Swarm, Swarm, sorry. I said, but You also had rancher. You had rancher.

You had Mesos. Okay. But now, and that's my point is, is who outside of our circle knew of those companies.

If you weren't into cloud native containers, blah, blah, blah, blah, you don't know about that space. In this situation. You're talking about the titans are all fighting over ai, and who's gonna win?

Who's going to, I want to control it, but I can't control all of it because my customers won't let me. It won't work with me if I, if I lock them in. So I have to support open things and do it in a way that lets people talk to other services in addition to mine.

Um, but I also don't wanna give away the farm too. So it's a much different competitive situation and who, and who was in it. And, uh, I think the feverish pace of it is also what's pushing that.

And I think why Google controlling it too much is an issue right now for the big guys. All the big guys to really play and play well together in the sandbox. Well, you know, so last Friday I had a conversation with, with somebody, I can't even really describe it too well, because I don't wanna say who it is, but one of the folks technically behind, you know, the big AI world we're in.

And it confirmed a lot of my thoughts. It was a very nice person, knew what they were doing, uh, but didn't understand where it's going. And, you know, for purposes of clarity, I gotta say that, you know, I am, I am now one of these folks.

ai is the company we're starting up that has a website now, will be a corporation by the end of the week probably, and we'll get into this space, tiny little startup. But to your point, Mitch, you know that this market is undefined, moving fast. And to your point, uh, Alan, about open source, uh, we've decided virtually everything we do is open source.

The whole civic AI process that led to this starting the company is all open sourced. Almost all of our corporate processes are in GitHub. Why not?

You know, it doesn't save any time. Things, things are moving too fast, as I've said, as a security person for 35 or so years now, it's like, you need to decide what you actually need to protect, because actually protecting things is hard. And if you're gonna protect everything, I'm sorry, say this nicely down here.

That's not a good choice. I might call you a name. Don't do that.

Right? You know, there's very little inside a company that you really, really need to secure. Put all your efforts in that, and, and maybe as wire wire is doing, post everything online, everything, you just get rid of the questions in the first place.

And, and, and to Alan, you're pointing, you know, you know, I'm an open source capitalist, like, companies have to be profitable. I respect Google and everybody else, you know, making their choices. But I think the choice to keep things in house and control them is untenable.

So there are a couple of caveats in this thing. So first of all, the thing about eight oh a is now it's customizable and extensible according to Google, which could be a good thing, which also means that there's gonna be multiple flavors of this thing. And how they actually interoperate with each other remains to be seen.

And MCP for all the noise and press it gets, you know, when I talk to people, it too is kind of perceived as very lightweight. And to Mitch's point doesn't solve the orchestration capabilities and how you pull data. And so there's just a lot of stuff that needs to be done in terms of strengthening both these platforms and figuring out how they're gonna work with things like GraphQL or whatever else it may be out there.

Um, so it's very early days, and none of this stuff is enterprise ready by any stretch of the imagination. I think it is. And, and, and I'm gonna, you know, and again, you know, since I'm, since I'm one of these players now, a tiny little startup, it could be wrong, but we're taking the approach, starting now, the yes, it is done, done right, and it is enterprise ready, and it's, you know, the, the approach being taken.

While I respect everybody in the, in the industry, you know, doing different things, I think we're taking the wrong approach. You know, this, you know, this is not about having an ai. There is no Skynet.

This is about, you know, getting past, you know, they are not humans. They're, they are, they are, you know, creations of whatever, but they act like humans. And we need to function with them as team members, like we do with people and not like systems.

So we're gonna try that approach and we'll see what happens. Do They have rights too? Yes.

Okay. There we go. Yep.

I, I think we, I could Find Canon, I think do on this, but Chris, what, we'll come back to that point in a minute, but to your earlier point about publishing everything, everything's an open book, if you will. Look, that's GitLab, right? Mitch knows this.

Mike knows this, right? Sid, Sid, uh, Brianon, Jay, uh, and the GitLab team, I mean, they literally published the book on GitLab. There's a book on GitLab, their product roadmap.

Everybody's salaries, who reports to who everything going on is, is, is an open book. And, and it served them well, right? GitLab went public successful company still.

Um, but there's a difference between a company following an open source mantra and, and an open book transparency versus donating your open source project to a foundation that opens it up to coopetition. And that's the real beauty of this a to a thing. And we haven't, you know, we said, oh, the hundreds of other companies, not just hundreds of other companies, the biggest names in the market are part of this consortium, part of this group, right?

Including companies that normally compete against each other. And that's the beauty, that's the beauty of the foundational system, is that cooperation model where you have companies that wouldn't normally com, you know, cooperate. 'cause they're competitors all saying, Hey, let's throw in for the common good, and then each of us will build from that common ground bedrock and go our way with it and see where it goes.

It's, it's worked in cloud native, certainly. Um, it's worked in other areas, right? Look at the, the different flavors of Linux, the different TROs of Linux, right?

Um, it remains to be seen if it'll work here, but I think it, to Mitch's point, it gives people a sense of, man, I'm not getting locked in. Look who's involved in this. It's gonna be okay.

It may not be everything I want it to be right now, but it's gonna be okay. And, and you, and you, you, you and I have been around a long time around open source. I mean, you used a blog about it for network world and folks, um, you, there's so many different models that have happened.

But in this scenario, you know, governance is always key. When, when, when company, when one company isn't controlling an open source project. And so it's about those companies agreeing on what needs to be added and then contributing to it.

Um, I think the, now I'll be on, on the optimist side of it, the optimistic side of it says, um, they know they need to work together because if not this, what else? None of them is gonna create something that is gonna compete with it, at least not right now. And in order to demonstrate what agents can do, you know, agents aren't an island they can't work on by themselves or work just within them.

One vendor's agent ecosystem. They've got, they've got to be able to work across those boundaries and do it successfully without, you know, unnatural act by agents. Um, so there's a real strong, um, incentive not just from customers, but just to get in, be in the market and be competitive, and to accelerate their own adoption and position around AI and agents.

You know, the downside of it is, you know, there's always foibles and game playing and things that can happen to and arguments about. We don't like your implementation of that and my implementation of this. Those things get sorted out on projects and kind of depends on how the governance structure is set up there.

So that really will determine a lot of the success of this, I think. Absolutely. Hey, we're over time on this one.

We gotta take a break. Come back 16 billion with a b records leaked. Yeah, it's just, just another number.

You're watching Textron Game. Hey folks, we're back. And there's yes, 16 billion records, a KE credentials that have been discovered on the dark web somewhere.

But there's a debate as to whether or not these are actually new things, or if it's just somebody kinda aggregated all these things and put out a report about it. 'cause maybe, well, we have lost track of 16 billion records over the years, and I guess the bad guys are trying to make it easier to, for the other bad guys to find this stuff. But Chris, what's your take here?

Is this news in your mind? Or is this kinda like, you know, a little bit of hype? It's not news.

No. Yeah, in, in, I'm trying to think. It was somewhere around the turn of the century if it was when the Veterans Administration's servers got hacked, and a veteran friend of mine and one of the security mail lists, you know, was complaining about that.

I was making the point that, you know, I have put my social security number on so many mini mi graph forms in my life by that point, that have gone out into the world and God knows where, that if my identity and my trust and my, you know, my, my electronic artifacts are attached to that, then I have other problems. And we got in it back and forth. So I posted my social security number on the list, you know, like a hundred of the top security people in the world.

So there was this great silence, like, look, and this is a perfect example. Say 16 billion records, a hundred trillion. Yeah, it's all out there.

So how do we build these systems and why do they trust anything? And I, you know, I feel like a broken record these days, but this has been laid down for a long, long time. You know, folks like Fred Cohen wrote this down years ago, John Kinder Bag, and the, and the Zero Trust thing is another example of how we're going through this.

We need to have systems that based trust on Morgan, just these, you know, ephemeral, uh, uh, connections. And they're coming together. You know, our last segment talked about this.

The, the application of systems that work in the human level, you know, semantic narrative bases, and understand human stories, not just digital stuff, gives us the capability of the speed to get the kind of security stuff. That's because it's not, wait, we think next week there's not gonna be 25 billion or 73 billion or 150. Yes.

That's the world we live in from. The systems don't function if that's how we identify ourselves in developed trusts. I was gonna say, if it was 15 billion, I wouldn't be concerned, but 16.

That really, that puts me over the edge. I just know That's Yeah. Changes everything.

Yeah. Yes. Like guess said Aren, you.

No, did you just show up? Right? You know, it's like, what, What do we have about 7 billion people in the world total, right?

Yeah. Oh, that's two passwords per person. That's assuming every single person was online and had passwords.

I mean, so here's the thing. Bad guys like publicity too, right? They, you know, there, there's something to be said there.

They want the, they wanted the, the, uh, when they take a scalp, right? The marks on their belt, on their wampum belt or whatever. They have OKRs too, don't they?

They've got goals to meet. Yeah, they have KPIs and bonuses, KPIs. But, um, but here's the thing.

This is not new. It's not all from one hack. It's an amalgamation.

And as someone who runs a pretty sizable mailing list here at Techstrong, I will tell you that the shelf life of people's email addresses, as well as their passwords and credentials are ephemeral at best. And every day that is one day further away from when that credential was stolen, is another day where that credential is more than likely useless. And so, go ahead, Chris.

And I was, you reminded me on a, on one of these shows a couple months ago, you'd asked me about, you know, quantum, uh, quantum computing and, uh, passwords and photography and so forth. At the time, I said something similar, what I'm saying now, you know, just expect things, you know, security is about time. I found out down the whole semantic pathway, there's a different answer to that.

You know, uh, you know, cryptographic semantic cryptography, basing keys in cryptography based on narrative strings and the weights and the, the, the, the fundamentals that humans used to think with and AI models used to compute with, or whatever they do, that turns out to be really, really good. If you just talk to one of these, one of these ais at length like I do, they will come to recognize the way you speak amazingly today off the shelf, right? So my advice, un unlike most of the times I'm asked about these sort of things, normally I say, don't change anything.

This doesn't change anything. This doesn't change anything. However, start looking towards systems that don't fall over when this happens, because it's already happening.

It happens all the time. There are better ways to do that, you know, they're merging. Now there are complex systems that we're aware of, and if you're in a critical environment, do those, but start leaning towards something that's not gonna fall over because somebody hacked up database Fair.

And, and I a dumb question. Go Ahead. No, they're on that dumb questions, Mike, you remember that?

I am. Why the hell are we so independent on using social security numbers everywhere for everything? Because, you know, Like it was never intended for that.

Never intended, Never intended for that. I mean, and, and that's a uniquely us thing too, by the way, right? I, I don't think you see that in the rest of the world.

Um, but, you know, but it begs the beg bigger question, and then Chris already hit on it, is we gotta get outta this trap of authenticating ourselves based upon passwords or, or date of birth, social security number, that kind of data. There. There's, you know, whether it's biometrics or something else, there's gotta be a better mouse trap we could build here and just break this cycle of, you know, it's like a hamster wheel.

Well, we're already so numb to attacks, we don't even rubberneck at it anymore. You know, nobody says, oh, 16 billion. Oh my God.

Yeah, they keep driving. They don't even slow down. You know, that's how numb we are to this.

So, you know, it's time to get rid of passwords, go to passcodes, go to biometric, go to please use the password Manager for all that stuff. It's, it's like back in the crime reporting days, right? If, if someone's house was broken into, but you know, the amount of goods stolen was less than a hundred thousand dollars, it wouldn't get covered.

Well, cybersecurity is the same way. Now, if the breach is like less than 10 million, everybody shrugs Drugs, small breach, small, small potatoes, unless, and this has always been true in, in the cyber world, unless you are the zebra whose day it is for the lion to choose you. And that's the fundamental truth of cybersecurity.

16 billion, that's a really big herd. What are the chances that the lion picks me? But when the lion picks you, what you going to do?

Um, anyway, let, let's call a break on that one. We'll come back and do C block here. Tesla's doing robo taxis.

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And yeah, a laud Musk is out really with a, an actual robotaxis, I think he's been talking about it now for a better part of a year or maybe more. And it too got, you know, a lot of initial kind of hype, but now it's like a test pilot program running around Austin, and yet we see Uber and, uh, whammo are already putting cabs out there. So Alan, I gotta look at all this and say, you know, did, did Elon miss the boat here?

I mean, who cares if I can get a Tesla? I already got a million other cars I can hail. Well, first of all, I think a lot of people in LA thought those Waymo's were Tesla, and that's why they, you know, were attacking 'em and burning 'em and everything.

But it, it's interesting. Let me just stay on that La Waymo burning theme for a second. For whatever reason, self-driving autonomous vehicles have come to represent the technological elite.

The one percents the halves to a certain subsection of the Audi of these population. And I think that's why you saw them attacking these Waymo vehicles. It was a way of damaging property without maybe hurting someone.

That being said was, is Tesla late to this? No. You know, a lesson I've learned is that big successful companies, Dell, apple, don't pride themselves on creating a market.

They don't, they don't pride themselves on being first to market. They don't wanna be the missionary. They want a market to become established and have a certain girth and then come in with a plan to dominate it.

Now, maybe I'm giving Elon too much credit, and he's been too busy on his ketomine or whatever the heck it is, but I think they were waiting to see if this autonomous vehicle market is real enough yet that people will trust it and everything else, and then start in Austin, which is, you know, obviously a big tech town and go in and try to become the dominant player, right? I mean, Uber's been trying, look, Uber, truth be told, Uber was originally founded with the idea of autonomous vehicles, right? Not, not having humans in that mix, but, um, certainly, uh, Waymo's done, done.

I mean, you saw 'em all over the RSA area in San Francisco. You know, they, they've proven a model. I think, I think Tesla's still a little early in it.

Now, the flip side of it is, is do they have the goods? You know, they're going to get a certain amount of attention and people will give them a looksie because it's Tesla and Elon, especially if you're 30 per one of the 30% of the people, well, even those people don't necessarily like Elon anymore. But, um, but there's gonna be a segment of the population that say, oh, it's a Tesla.

I'll give it a shot. But if as we're seeing there's been, uh, incidents caught on camera and there's been rumors of, you know, not, not behaving well and accidents and injuries, 'cause we're in a very kind of precarious state in this autonomous driving, right? A lot of people think it's still cool, magical, whimsical.

I don't know if they really trust it and I late, early, or in between. I think that's the biggest issue in front of Tesla and Elon and the whole industry building people's trust. As long as he doesn't scrap a SpaceX rocket to it, I think we're okay.

He did that with a Tesla, didn't he? Yeah, that was early on. But when they weren't blowing up or they stopped blowing up, Chris.

So two, two comments. One, one, you know, not company specific. You know, as we're talking about, you know, right now in this very episode, talking about whether we can trust an AI agent instead of a human agent to decide whether our database talks to something else.

And the complication with that, you know, here we're talking about, you know, a, a AI agent driving a vehicle with humans around. And now in the first example, that database may actually control traffic lights and human life to be at risk and so forth. So there's really no great difference except that we physically see cars driving around when we're standing there and it makes us think about it.

So essentially it is exactly the same issues unless we can trust, you know, these, these semantic AI agents, you know, to act like human agents in similar roles. We can't have any of these things. And the second part of that, uh, interestingly, I've been spending a lot of time working with Crock, uh, recently, you know, the, the Elon Musk ai, great deal of time.

And we're working on right now, uh, a project to look at 400 millisecond response time to get an as bomb across multiple supply chain hop hops inside SpaceX in, uh, infrastructure. com. Um, and it, it's a single entity that understands the whole thing.

So it's, you know, I don't, I think everything you guys said is just true. It is really, really early. If we can't trust AI to get two databases talking to each other, can we trust 'em to drive cars?

No, obviously not. Do we need to work out that both those right now, both because companies are spending billions of dollars making robo taxis and actually driving 'em around the streets. And so we don't have five years, five months, we gotta work.

We have move this one 'em forward and because on the IT side, yeah, you cannot run big data houses and big companies anymore today without some semantic age and help and we don't trust them. So all that's gotta work out real soon. Now, RSN as we used to say, right?

It's also, it's about trust and it's also about use case. This is the best use case you didn't notice. We don't have any cities that get a lot of snow that are piloting, you know, self-driving cars yet just 'cause that we're not there yet.

So these are, you know, what is Austin hot? Lots of sun and occasionally get some rain. So it's a great environment to, you know, pilot other than a lot of people around you wanna kind avoid hitting.

It's a good environment to to pilot that. Wait, Wait, wait. Waymo just applied to, uh, for approval to New York City for their service.

So they, maybe they have some figured out that snow issue. Oh, cabs take out people all at the time, so they don't care. I'm a huge, I've always been a huge self-driving, uh, car fan since childhood.

You know, I expected to be a, a tell my grandkids like, oh yeah, me and grandma are used to pilot metal vehicles and so I really wanna ha see this happen. But for the same reasons, I believe with the whole civic ai, not just our project that go, there's a lot of pieces moving around, figure this out. We have to figure this one out.

No, Waymo doesn't have it figured out. No. You know, Tesla doesn't have it freight out.

No, these things are not safe. We driving on the streets because the four of us can't decide if they're safe to have do two databases talking together. But we have the parts and we can make it.

So, and the fact that these companies are taking the risk, Hold On a second, the equal risk that may drive it to an answer. The fact that the four of us can't decide doesn't mean that there's not an underlying truth there. It's ju you know, let's se it's just that maybe the four of us are just tri lights or what, whatever, right?

That doesn't mean that the damn thing doesn't work. I mean, rainbow is Oh, oh, it, I'm sorry. It, I get excited.

It does work. Yeah. We actually can do, you know, put the two things I said together.

You know, the car shouldn't be out there right now 'cause we don't have the ethical model to trust them. But I'm also deploying AI at enterprise scale today. 'cause I, I think I, we have a way to do that without the risks that's not commonly adopted.

So there's the same thing. You can't, you can't have it both ways. Yeah.

But, but listen, there's a reason why Waymo started in San Francisco and there's a reason why Tesla is going to Austin because these are heavy tech talents. And I think tech people, my people, you watching this out there, we're more not susceptible, but we are more likely to give it a try than some dude, you know, in Times Square on Broadway is, and I don't blame him. Times Square gets pretty messy with traffic, right?

So, so I have a question though. Like, so where are the big car makers in all of this? So won't Detroit, Japan and Europeans all go build their own fleets of cars that are autonomous?

I'm sure they're working on it. I, I'm, I think they all are working. Aren't they all have plans?

But again, back to what I said before, they're not, they're not looking to be missionaries. They're not looking to make a mark market. They're looking to dominate a market.

And once the Waymo's and the Teslas and the, and the Ubers and what have you had their way, you will see GM come into it and Mercedes and BMW and Toyota and the rest of the world's great car makers. Um, that, that's just, you know, it's too early for them yet because they make no mistake. What's the difference between a robo taxi and just your robo family car, right?

There is none other than maybe the robo taxi has some built in payment activity with a meter or something, right? But if we're going, if we're going robo, we're going robo. It's not just a taxi thing.

Or maybe it's, if It's software is the different thing. Yeah. Right.

And to your point, I was having this conversation with somebody yesterday and it was like, well, what's the difference between a robot and an autonomous vehicle? Because isn't a robot essentially driving the vehicle? So won't always, It's a specialized, it's, it's, it's not driving the ve it's a specialized robot.

If, if we're gonna take a, you know, an Elijah Bailey kind of view of robots, that's two asimov's in one day, guys, gimme fire, gimme something on that. Now. Two different series as Two different series to vote.

Well, well Emily, you know, I'm trying, trying to think of anything useful to add. And you know, you and I have, and David Bryn have been discussing and you know, his book film people, you know, we're having these conversations about the ethics of things and it's, it's, it, I I feel like a bit of a missionary. And you're right, the big car companies aren't, shouldn't, wouldn't, don't.

When I was Cisco I wouldn't assist. You know, we just watch out this, right? But it's such a simple thing.

And there's some speculative fiction. David, Brendan did some good stuff, you know, when we stopped. And it's, it's interesting, you know, 'cause these machines we've built, we built out of words and meanings.

That's why I say semantic because that's how they work. They're not gears and cogs, they're not ones and zeros. They function by using the things we use to function for the same purpose.

And our, our inclination, our hesitancy to refer to them using words we use for people. You know, I mean, that's how we get ants. That's why we can't have nice things.

That's why we keep getting caught in all these things for fascinating reasons. Because as we think, you know, when I think about a coffee cup, I don't wanna do something with a coffee cup. I use different structures in my head than when I'm talking to you.

So if I talk to you like I'm talking to a coffee cup, my brain doesn't work and the things come outta my mouth. Don't make your brain work. And so we've made these machines, they are, they're not human, but the only way to make them work is to talk to them and think about them like they are people.

And in teams, you know, when you're having teams, I had a meeting last week with two humans, grok and Lumina, and it wasn't about ai, it was a one hour working session on thes space supply chain system. And it was just four team members working on something. If you, if we think about it that way, then we can all live together.

And if one of 'em goes rogue and kill us, kills us all. So could I, right? That's, that's any human is is huge existential risk to all other humans, but we somehow work it out.

I got one question for I brushing over the security. Chris, I got one question for, I'm just telling you that's the way we need to go. Sorry.

Did you ask them to open the pod bay doors? I have one question. What do you talk about at your meetings?

And normal, normal Is funny, right? Rogue and kill just This, there's four people having a conversation at the end. What's the next steps?

Move on. I need, I think I need to stand your ground loft for ai. That's what I got outta That.

You just start shooting them. Alright. Hey, yeah, on that note, we gonna, I'm gonna have to pull the plug Mike, when you're talking about getting violent.

Oh wow. It's enough. Uh, great conversation today guys.

Hey, heads up Thursday, tech Strong TV is live at Platform Con in person in New York City. Stay tuned. We'll be, uh, streaming live there, I think around 11 through the rest of the day.

Eastern Time. 11:00 AM through maybe 4, 4 30. Um, looking forward to that.

Platform com by the way, is all week on the virtual aspect. Mitch, I know you have a big post up on LinkedIn, um, so you could go check that out. It's free to do that.

Mike and Mitch are in Denver actually today and they were there yesterday and Monday. I don't know if they'll be there. We are you there today, Mike?

Wednesday? I'll be there today. Last Day is Today.

Yep. So three days there at the OSS event. Chris is in meetings with some of his AI friends.

There was a time where they'd lock you up for that stuff. And by the way, I'm doing an analyst panel myself and someone from IDC and Forrester about platform engineering and how it's impacting developer productivity. That's, I might have to sit in on that, Mitch.

Maybe, maybe we'll do an article on platform engineering com that'd come around It. Great. I'll give you some questions to throw at the other analysts.

I'll take the softballs. You're not supposed to say that out loud, Mitch. Oops.

We're recording this. Are We alright? Until tomorrow.

This is Alan Shimmel on behalf of Mike, Chris, and Mitch, have a great day everyone. We're outta here.