Morning Brew Daily
2024 Tech Breakthroughs: Autonomous Vehicles, Apple Hearing Aids and More
Tue, 24 Dec 2024
Episode 481: Neal and Toby recap the biggest technological breakthroughs from 2024. From Autonomous vehicles, to HIV Drugs, and even Neuralink there was not shortage of advancements this year, and the guys recap it all. Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the biggest tech breakthroughs of 2024?
Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, put on your safety goggles and hold on to your beakers because here comes the science episode.
All the biggest tech breakthroughs of the year and why they matter. It's Tuesday, December 24th. Let's ride.
Good morning and Merry Christmas and Hanukkah Eve. As part of our run of special edition episodes over the holidays, today we're going to be diving into the biggest science breakthroughs of the year. Look, it wasn't hard to find alarming things about technology in 2024. AI deepfakes, chat GPT taking your job, mysterious drones swarming the good folks of New Jersey.
It's a little unnerving. But at the same time, technology has resulted in so much progress, helping create medicines that will save lives, turn AirPods into hearing aids and invent cool gadgets you didn't know you needed, like a transparent TV. And that's what we want to focus on today, the positive sides of tech, because you hear plenty about the downsides.
Call it Morning Brew Daily's Science Fair. So without further ado, Neil, you won the pre-show present wrapping competition. Kick us off first.
Let's do it. Im August gab Google's Autonomous Car Division rund 312.000 Reisen pro Monat, doppelt das Reisevolumen, als es nur drei Monate vorher war. Einige Bestimmungen sagen, dass Waymo jetzt 4% oder mehr vom San-Francisco-Rideshare-Markt betrifft. Und dann in China. Wuhan ist auf dem Weg, die weltweit erste führungslose Stadt zu werden.
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Chapter 2: How are autonomous vehicles evolving?
Jetzt sind es rund drei in jedem hundert Taxis Robo-Taxis, die von Baidus Autonomous Car Division entwickelt wurden. Es gab Bumpen auf dem Weg. GM hat seine Cruise-Robo-Taxi-Division geschlossen, nach Sicherheitsproblemen, weil es die enormen Investitionen nicht ermöglichen konnte. Aber Waymo wächst wie ein Weed. Es arbeitet jetzt in drei amerikanischen Städten, SF, Phoenix und L.A.
Es wird in Austin und Atlanta nächstes Jahr reisen und dann Miami. Nachdem das, testet es in 25 großen Metro-Ären rund um die Stadt. Tobi, last year we were talking about how angry San Francisco residents were setting fires to Waymos, putting cones on their hoods to incapacitate them.
There's been a distinct vibe shift this year and there's a sense that we might be on the cusp of rapid robo-taxi adoption.
There were a lot of... was self-driving just this pie in the sky moonshot that was the distraction from actually improving transportation. Should we have put our efforts towards micromobility or just better urban infrastructure? These were valid questions, but now you see the amount of rides increasing.
You see people's attitudes have totally shifted and now they start to trust these robo-taxis a little bit more. In the eskers of how technology is usually adopted, what we've seen so far are the taste-making cities, the San Francisco's of the world, the Wuhan's of the world.
They usually embrace these technologies a little more, but now we're seeing it rolled out across Miami, across Phoenix, across these other metro areas that aren't necessarily always on the cutting edge of tech adoption. But I do think that you have seen, you used the word vibe shift, a huge vibe shift when it comes to driverless cars.
Yeah, we could see some movement in D.C. as well. One of the biggest roadblocks to autonomous vehicles being more widely adopted and rolling out faster is regulations. Obviously, you want to have a lot of rules on the road, literally, when it comes to self-driving cars. And we have Elon Musk essentially in the White House now.
He's betting his entire company, Tesla, they're moving away from just making EVs to becoming a robotaxi company. He said he's going to work with President-elect Trump to develop robots. Regulierungen, federal Regulierungen, wenn es um autonome Fahrzeuge geht. Also, ich denke, es gibt generell eine Menge Schwachsinn und es wird sicherlich mehr Speedbomben auf dem Weg sein.
Aber, du weißt, wenn du in den Vereinigten Staaten lebst, ist es nicht unvergesslich, dass in den nächsten paar Jahren du ein Robotaxi wie du in San Francisco in Phoenix jetzt kannst. Und ich meine, hast du jemanden getroffen, der das gemacht hat?
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Chapter 3: What is Lenacapavir and why is it important?
Neuralink hat seitdem einen Implantat in einem zweiten Patienten und wurde von der FDA für mehr approval.
Das ist die große Frage, wo du von hier her kommst. Die zweite Implantation, die sie wollen, um es tiefer in den Gehirn zu erreichen. Die erste war um drei bis fünf Millimeter in der ersten Surgery. Die zweite, die sie wollen, um eine Dämpfe von acht Millimetern zu erreichen, um eine bessere Thread Anchoring zu bekommen.
Denn das ist der nächste große Schritt hier, wie du gesagt hast, 85 Prozent der Threads werden entdeckt, was wirklich die Leistung reduziert. Sie wollen, dass bring back eyesight for people who have lost it. So, yes, there are issues, but again, this is the optimistic science episode and those are a lot of optimistic things.
I mean, this guy could not move from his shoulders down and now he's being able to communicate with his brain and move a cursor and play chess. So, it's pretty cool and he's only singing the praises of Neuralink. And we should add, this is Neuralink ist nicht die einzige Firma, die in diesem Bereich arbeitet.
Es gibt mindestens fünf andere Firmen, die etwas Ähnliches machen wollen und die von der FDA verwendet haben, um auf menschliche Patienten zu testen. Also machen sie alle diese Implantation in einer anderen Art und Weise. Neuralink hat ihre eigene Art und Weise. Diese anderen Firmen haben ihre eigenen speziellen Prozeduren.
Es scheint also, dass es eine Bewegung zwischen einer breiten Reihe von Firmen gibt, um das loszulegen.
Apple's AirPods Pro 2 are great for listening to Morning Brew Daily, but Apple wants you to hear more than just the number one business news podcast in the world. It unveiled a groundbreaking feature this year, which aims to assist people with mild to moderate hearing loss by turning the popular headphones into hearing aids.
Pop in an AirPod and the feature enhances surrounding sounds so you can hear your environment more clearly. And it's not just a marketing ploy either. The FDA approved their use as clinical grade over-the-counter hearing aids, which at just $249 means that they are one of the more affordable OTC options out there. And Neil, that is the big unlock here, the affordability of these new hearing aids.
Would you say this is the coolest thing Apple did this year? Ich meine, wahrscheinlich. Sie haben viel gemacht. Sie haben sich weiter in den Gesundheitsraum eingelassen. Ich meine, sie wollen wirklich, dass ihr Apple Watch dieses große, kohäsive Gesundheitssystem wird. Und jetzt haben sie diese AirPods, die tatsächlich als klinische Hörgeräte funktionieren.
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Chapter 4: How does Neuralink change the future of brain-computer interfaces?
It's confusing. Maybe they need a different color, different shirt. Yeah, or a light to show that they're being used as a hearing aid. Have you ever wondered what's going on behind the scenes of your favorite TV show? And behind the scenes, I don't mean the bloopers. I mean literally what's going on in your living room behind the scene.
Well, now you can, thanks to LG's first of its kind transparent TV, which it revealed at the CES trade show in January. Das Produkt war das Gespräch der Konvention. Eine 77-Inch-transparente OLED-TV, die euch entweder Content auf einem Bildschirm zeigen kann oder einen vollen Ausdruck-Kloak auswählen kann und das, was dahintersteckt.
Es wäre perfekt für den Wohnraum eines Billionär-Marvel-Villains, wenn es schiebt, weil es erwartet wird, dass es in den Tens von Tausenden von Dollar kostet und keine wirkliche Ich glaube, es ist irgendwo in der Mitte. Ich weiß, das ist ein Cop-Out.
Aber als ich Transparent TV gehört habe, dachte ich, es wäre wie diese plastische, semi-translucente Sache. Aber wenn du das siehst, geht es literally, es ist eine Glasbox. Es gibt nichts in sie. Und ich denke, die 3D-Natur davon war etwas, was ich nicht erwartet habe. Es hat mehrere Modes.
Ein Modus zeigt seine 3D-Effekte aus, also kannst du es in ein Aquarium verändern, in dem es aussieht, als ob es Fische sind, weil es eine Box ist. Aber du kannst auch regelmäßig auf der TV schauen. Ich habe einige Reviews gelesen, wie die TV eigentlich funktioniert. Und es ist nicht ganz auf der Ebene mit den Top-of-the-Line-Modellen von...
Up next, some more science breakthroughs coming your way. Okay, so I know this is a science-positive episode, but this next story is less of an innovation and more of a debunking. Remember Blue Zones? Those special places around the world where people seem to live longer, healthier lives, thanks to a simple set of easily repeatable behaviors.
Stuff like community involvement and specific diets were enough to produce lifespans well into the 90s and 100s in regions stretching from Okinawa, Japan to Loma Linda, California. The only issue? Some scientists think it's a bunch of hoo-ha.
One postdoctoral researcher from Australia, Dr. Newman, published a paper that was recently honored at the IG Nobel Prizes, a humorous spinoff of the Nobel Prizes, that chalked up the increased lifespans found in Blue Zones to shoddy record-keeping. Newman found that areas with high levels of faulty records also had high levels of centenarians living there.
One especially egregious example is a 2010 Japanese study that found that 230,000 centenarians were actually just a result of unreported deaths. So Neil, there's been some pushback to Newman's work and his paper is not peer-reviewed yet, but it certainly casts Blue Zones in a different light.
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Chapter 5: What innovative features do Apple Hearing Aids offer?
Ich kann es nicht erwarten, aber meine erste Frage war, weshalb wir es überhaupt bewegen. Und ein Teil der Grundlage ist, dass Antimatter uns viel über die Ursprünge des Universums erzählen kann. Denn technisch, als das große Gehirn geschah, wurden gleiche Anzahl von Matter und Antimatter erschaffen. But if you look out in the known universe, there's a lot of matter out there.
So why did the balance shift so heavily in favor of matter? These are the fundamental questions of our universe. And so in order to study them, they want to compare matter with antimatter very closely to see where the differences are. And the reason why they can't do it is the current Positioning of Antimatter is affected by some magnetic fields of the earth.
So they need to bring it to a place where it's less affected by that so they can more efficiently measure it. But yeah, I'm excited too. They're doing it on trucks too. You said that they're putting them in vacuums so they don't come in contact with Antimatter. But what about 10-2 Tobi, 10-2. Wir brauchen ein Helikopter-Polizeicam wie der OJ-Bronco Chase.
Yeah, it probably won't be quite as fast-paced, but it will be fun to watch. Of all the uses of AI that have arisen over the past year, I think this one is my favorite. When Mount Vesuvius erupted over 2,000 years ago, some papyrus scrolls actually ended up surviving. But the carbonized scrolls are incredibly delicate to handle and crumble if you try to unroll them.
Enter the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition funded by some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that promised to reward a cash prize to anyone who could find a way to peer inside the scrolls without actually unrolling them. Back in February of this year, a team of three students won the $700,000 grand prize using AI to decipher the scrolls' hidden secrets.
Despite the contest organizers estimating a less than 30% probability of anyone actually meeting the contest criteria, the three students' machine learning algorithm deciphered more than 2,000 characters in the scrolls, exceeding the grand prizes requirements. This was definitely one of my favorite stories of the year, Neil, because it is using AI to do something extremely practical, actually.
Extrem praktisch, extrem cool und die Leute, die es gewonnen haben, zeigen die globale Natur dieses und wie Konferenzen wie diese wirklich effektiv sein können.
Ich meine, die drei, die Leute, die den 700.000 Dollar Preis gewonnen haben, waren ein ägyptischer PhD-Student in Deutschland, ein Robotik-Student in Schwitzerland und ein Computer-Science-Student in Nebraska, alle jung, alle in es, nur um, sie sagten, es war wie... die purestes Video-Spiel.
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Chapter 6: How do new technologies address health issues?
Ich denke, das ist cool und wir werden wahrscheinlich ähnliche Wettbewerbe sehen, um verschiedene Dinge zu erreichen, die das Maschinenlernen tun kann. Und ich denke, wir haben hier auch die Führung.
Was hat es gesagt? Was haben die Versuche gesagt? Zuerst, das erste Wort, das ausgeführt wurde, war nur das Wort für grün. Es ist eine philosophische Diskussion über die Leidenschaft der Leben. Es geht also um Musik und Essen. Viele Leute lieben es, einen 2.000-Jährigen-Blog-Post zu lesen, wie man Leben genießen kann.
Es zeigt also, dass Selbsthilfe-Bücher oder Selbstreflexion-Bücher zu Beginn der westlichen Zivilisation zurückgehen.
Okay, let's close out the show with perhaps the most important scientific discovery of the year. Monkeys cannot type out the complete works of William Shakespeare, given infinite time, because the universe will run out before then. I'll back up.
There's a famous mathematical concept called the infinite monkey theory, which suggests that a monkey pressing random keys on a typewriter would eventually write out the complete works of Shakespeare with an infinite amount of time, because anything is possible over an infinite time horizon. However, two Australian researchers rejected the theory in a peer-reviewed study.
They claimed that the amount of time it would take for a monkey typing to write out the complete works of Shakespeare would be far longer than the lifespan of our universe, one Google years. So they rejected the infinite monkey theory as misleading. Even getting the monkeys to write out a single word would be a challenge.
If all 200,000 chimpanzees were recruited and typed at a rate of one key per second until the universe ended, there would only be a 5% chance a single one would type out the word bananas. The probability of one writing a coherent sentence would be 1 in 10 million billion billion. Tobi, are you buying this?
Well, I'm buying it, but I feel like they are not jiving with the concept of infinity here. Whenever you put a time horizon on infinity, it ceases to become infinity. So yes, technically all the known monkeys in the universe couldn't Ich glaube, ich könnte ein veröffentlichter Wissenschaftler sein, wenn ich gesagt hätte, dass das nicht praktisch ist. Genau.
Ich hätte dir das gesagt. Vielleicht hätte ich ein paar Werte gewonnen.
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