The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 percent of common questions. Not noise, proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM.

**Casey Newton** (0:30)
Now, here was a really interesting situation, Kevin. Did you see this robo taxi outage that left passengers stranded on highways in China?

**Kevin Roose** (0:39)
No.

**Casey Newton** (0:39)
So, this happened in Wuhan recently.

**Kevin Roose** (0:44)
I've heard of that place before. Did they do anything else?

**Casey Newton** (0:47)
Not clear to me. I'm not really 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.

**Kevin Roose** (1:18)
I think that robo taxi outage is definitely the worst thing that's ever come out of Wuhan.

**Casey Newton** (1:22)
Yeah. When it comes to these buy-do robo taxis, my advice, buy don't.

**Kevin Roose** (1:27)
Oh boy. No, that was the worst thing to come out of Wuhan. I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist with the New York Times.

**Casey Newton** (1:38)
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:40)
And this is Hard Fork.

**Casey Newton** (1:41)
This week, social media companies keep losing in court. How will that reshape the internet? Then, The Infinity Machine author Sebastian Mallaby joins us to discuss his new book on Google DeepMind and Demis Hassabis' quest to build super intelligence. Finally, it's been a while. Let's catch up with some HatGPT. I missed you.

**Kevin Roose** (2:00)
Me too.

**Casey Newton** (2:11)
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.

**Kevin Roose** (2:21)
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.

**Casey Newton** (2:30)
We did, and in both cases, social media lost. In LA, 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.

**Kevin Roose** (3:02)
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 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.

**Casey Newton** (3:25)
Yes, 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?

**Kevin Roose** (3:35)
These are the cases that set precedent for other cases, yeah?

**Casey Newton** (3:38)
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 for 30 years has been essentially the foundation that the entire internet rests on.

**Kevin Roose** (4:01)
It's also a dentist's favorite statute.

**Casey Newton** (4:04)
Yes, that's Section Tooth Hurty, if the joke wasn't landing for you. So yes, this is a super important, super important...

**SPEAKER_5** (4:11)
I'm glad you got that.

**Casey Newton** (4:13)
No, the really sad part was I was planning my own Section Tooth Hurty joke.