The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Now, here was a really interesting situation, Kevin. Did you see this robo-taxi outage that left passengers stranded on highways in China? No. So this happened in Wuhan recently. I've heard of that place before. Did they do anything else? It's not clear to me. I'm not really familiar. familiar with their game. But apparently there was some sort of technical glitch that caused a number of robo taxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze, trapping some passengers in their vehicles for more than an hour. And I just thought, my gosh, what a nightmare. Just imagine you're in your robo taxi on the way to a wet market in Wuhan. You have an appointment with a pangolin who's going to cough on you to see if they can transmit anything to you.
And then your robo-taxi gets stuck. It's a nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare.
Well, I think that robo-taxi outage is definitely the worst thing that's ever come out of Wuhan.
Yeah. When it comes to these Baidu robo-taxis, my advice, Baidu don't.
Oh, boy. No, that was the worst thing to come out of Wuhan.
I'm Kevin Russo, tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, social media companies keep losing in court. How will that reshape the internet? Then, The Infinity Machine author Sebastian Malaby joins us to discuss his new book on Google DeepMind and Demis Hassabis' quest to build superintelligence. Finally, it's been a while. Let's catch up with some Hat GPT. I missed you. Me too.
Well, Kevin, while we were away, I was riveted by what was going on in the courtrooms in Los Angeles and New Mexico related to social media.
Yeah, it has been a big week for these social media product liability trials that have been going on now for some months. And we actually got some verdicts.
We did. And in both cases, social media lost. In L.A., a jury found that Meta and YouTube had been negligent in the way that they designed features that they said were harmful to this plaintiff. They have to pay $6 million combined to this plaintiff. And then in New Mexico, the jury said, we believe that Meta has violated the state's Unfair Practices Act and has misled consumers about the safety of its products and has endangered children. In that case, they are ordering Meta to pay $375 million.
Yeah, so we've talked a little bit about this series of cases against the social media companies. You know, social media companies, they get sued all the time for all manner of different things. I think what caught Our eye and specifically your eye was the sort of legal theory underlying these cases. So talk a little bit about that and what makes this case different from other cases that have been brought against the social media companies.
Yeah. So I would say there are kind of two big reasons why these cases are super important. One is that these are what are called bellwether cases. Kevin, you ever heard of a bellwether case? These are like cases that set precedent for other cases, yeah? Exactly. These are the cases that, if successful, are going to open the floodgates for lots of other people to sue under the same theory. The second big reason that these cases are really important is that they appear to have opened up a crack in Section 230 of our Communications Decency Act here, which foreshadows 30 years has been essentially the foundation that the entire internet rests on. It's also a dentist's favorite statute. Yes, that's Section Tooth Hurty, if the joke wasn't landing for you.
So, yes, this is a super important, super important... I'm glad you got that. No, the really sad part was I was planning my own Section Tooth Hurty joke.
Oh, wow.
Because I just went to the dentist yesterday, and now I didn't have any cavities.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:06
2
How did recent jury verdicts hold Meta and YouTube accountable for harms to young users?
6:06–16:37
3
What legal theories allowed plaintiffs to bypass Section 230 in these social media trials?
16:37–35:14
4
Which platform design features are plaintiffs arguing make social apps ‘defective’?
35:14–1:10:38
5
What practical changes might platforms face if these verdicts are upheld on appeal?
1:10:38–1:11:31
Speakers
6 identifiedMore from Hard Fork
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Zuckerberg’s Anti-Doom Fantasy + Finally an A.I. Detector That Works + A.I. Math
The White House’s Secret A.I. Rules + The State of Model Alignment With METR’s Chris Painter + The Final Hot Mess Express