HomeView First Look, AI Doesn't Have Feelings, Walk Across Canada

0:00 Welcome to Top 5 Tech, my weekly show about what to watch, listen to, read, download, and something deep every week. The huge news this week is Apple's Welcome Home experience event for the announced HomePod Mini 2, a new Apple TV 4K, and of course the HomeView, the HomePod with a screen that we've been hearing about for years.

0:16 Well, there's a ton of videos out there, but I want to shout out Eric Wielander. I actually met him in person when I was in Chicago at Podcast Movement a couple years ago. He's an incredible smart home focused creator, especially on the Apple smart home. And this was, I think, his first. in-person Apple experience, so congrats to him and Shane Watley and a lot of other smart home creators that were there.

0:35 But he has an incredible video recapping everything from the event, and he goes really in-depth both on the Home View and the new Apple Home Collection, and it's a partnership with LG and Schneider making things like video doorbells, locks, thermostats, and more. Eric's video is great, and I will also link Jen Tuohy's video.

0:51 She is the smart home reporter at The Verge, and this is actually a short, But it's an almost three minute short and she goes really in-depth and has I think the most interaction with the device. A lot of creators said that Apple didn't let them touch the device and actually let them use it. But Jen Tuohy seemed to be able to get around that and use one of these wall-mounted ones a lot.

1:11 So we'll link her short as well. And on what to listen to, yes this is a YouTube video but Michael Fisher actually got to interview several Apple executives about the iPhone Duo. Which the iPhone Duo is actually out for pre-order right now today, Friday. It comes out next Friday, available to everyone as long as supplies last.

1:27 But this is a great interview. It's a great b-roll of foldables and things like that. But it is also a great listening experience because Michael Fisher is a great interviewer. He asks really interesting questions about the iPhone Duo, the display, why it took so long, the different use cases that they thought about when building iPhone Duo.

1:43 Recommend this as your listen for the week. On what to read, I'm going to link my co-host Jason Aiton's article about Anthropic because they have a new policy that they released last week saying that you can't be cruel or speak cruelly to Claude, their AI chatbot. Which bottom line, don't be a jerk. It's not good to do that.

2:00 You should speak kindly to everyone, but Claude is not an everyone, to be clear, and it really feels like Anthropic tries to imply Claude has feelings. It anthropomorphizes Claude as a chatbot, and Jason really puts well into words where their dangerous line is there when we start treating AI and chatbots like humans. Yes, they can sound like humans sometimes. They have full-on conversations like they're humans, but we must remember these are computers and ultimately tools, And most of us, if we hit our finger...

2:30 with a hammer as we're trying to nail something in, if we throw the hammer, we don't think that the hammer has feelings and go over and apologize to the hammer. And that's really how we should be thinking about chatbots too. They are tools to use, not something with feeling. So I recommend reading Jason's piece. He puts it all much more eloquently than I just did. Two picks on what to download this week. BasicAppleGuy, he is a force on social media. He shares incredible wallpapers, which I've linked to in past episodes of this show. He actually released a little app called Across Canada. It's for your iPhone and your Apple Watch. And what it does is as you do walks, whether wherever you live. So I'm here in Florida. And if I use this app

3:05 and share my health data with it, with all my steps and walks, this will take you on a walking tour of Canada, showing you landmarks talking about the scenery. And if you do the entire scope at one time's pace, it can take you up to 10 years to do the entire walk that he has designed. Now you can turn up the pace and two times or even up to five times, it'll just take you two years, about 700 days of walking, but it's a fun gamification of being able to, you know, take your walking data that you might just see as activity rings on your Apple Watch and see it as another visual representation, and you get to see some beautiful imagery and learn more about Canada. Link to this below, and also a new window manager called Trellis WM. Now

3:47 this is free to try. There is a subscription model, but there is also a lifetime purchase of $80, but again you can also just use this for free and you can have up to five docked windows, you have live previews, but it is a new take window management, and it looks really interesting. You can snap windows, you can have better tab groups, resize windows at the seams, and it can live in your menu bar to easily let you manage all your windows. I had a couple people on social media send me this link and said it's really worth a shot and it looks really cool, so we'll link this below. And finally on Something Deep, I know I've been talking about AI a lot on this podcast, but I think it is in everybody's

4:21 mind space we're all wrestling and trying to figure out what do we do with AI, how do we feel about it, should we be worried, and this is a great TED Talk by It's called "Is AI turning us all into the same person?" and she talks about several experiments she did with different AI chatbots in simple things just like choosing an ice cream flavor or trying to make simple decisions, and she talked about how so often when she asks AI a repeated question it will come back with the same answer. So if you asked it what flavor of ice cream should I get from Baskin Robbins, who might have up to 80 flavors, there is just not a lot of variety in the decision-making that the AI gives back. And I think that's a

4:58 key piece of information. voting, AI is not making a decision. That's one of those anthropomorphizing words that when we talk about AI chatbots, it makes them feel more human when they are not they are not making decisions. This is a bunch of math going on in a GPU in some data center somewhere. And she says that AI, the more we rely on it and look to it for answers, it can really make things less interesting. And it just kind of flattens everything to be the same.

5:25 And if we all just did what AI said all the time, we might just look a lot similar. That's not what makes humans interesting, is that we are all different, with different passions and interests and likes and dislikes. And just like it's fun to have 80 ice cream flavors, which can be overwhelming at times, sometimes people can be overwhelming, that differences and those choices are what makes us human and separates us from AI and all the things that are not actually alive.

5:49 It's a quick TED talk, just about 13 minutes, but I think it's another great piece of context to have as we wrestle with all this AI stuff today. And remember, you can get all of these links in a newsletter that delivers every. If you haven't yet, we'd greatly appreciate a 5-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts for this show.

6:26 And thank you so much for listening and watching. I'll catch you next time.