Nerds On Tap

Robots Took The Order And My Fries Survived

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AI isn’t a lightning bolt from nowhere; it’s the latest step in a long line of curve jumps that started with the PC and accelerated with the internet, broadband, and cloud. We sit down with Technical Escalations Manager Jimmy Guest to unpack what’s genuinely useful about AI today, where it’s overhyped, and how the next five years might make intelligence feel as ordinary as Wi‑Fi. If you’ve wondered why your drive‑thru order suddenly sounds human and lands 99 percent accurate, or how your help desk leveled up overnight, this conversation connects the dots.

We get practical fast: triage automation that promotes L1s to higher‑value work, prompts that turn messy Microsoft exports into clean reports, and personal agents that could finally tame the inbox. We map real adoption in healthcare—charting, diagnostics support, and nurse‑call analytics—and follow the money to logistics, retail, and customer service. The throughline is augmentation over automation: AI accelerates people who know their craft, but it doesn’t replace judgment, context, or accountability.

Then we head into the hard stuff: cybersecurity threats powered by perfect grammar and cloned voices, deepfakes that outpace labels, and the quiet creep of bias when models learn from skewed history. We talk ethics, regulation, and why black‑box decisions demand better audits and human oversight. Finally, we look ahead to the invisible wins—home energy that adjusts itself, finances that stay on budget, and conversational agents that summarize walls of text so you can focus on the work that matters. Grab a brew, press play, and join us as we separate signal from noise.

If this sparked ideas or saved you time, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review to help more curious minds find us.

Sponsor of this episode:  Digital Boardwalk
Digital Boardwalk is one of the top 10 Managed IT Service Providers in the United States.  If you are seeking to outsource your IT Management, or if your IT Team could use some help with projects or asset management, give Digital Boardwalk a call today!  They offer a FREE IT Maturity Assessment on their website.  If you want to see how your business's IT scores against industry standards, go to GoModernOffice.com now.

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SPEAKER_02:

Hey everyone, welcome to another fascinating episode of Nerds on Tap, where we get nerdy for a little while talking about business entrepreneurship infused with technology. Today, we're going to talk about AI, the present and the future. But to understand where AI is in its current form and where it's going in five years, you need to understand this isn't new. It didn't just pop up with open AI a couple years ago. AI has been around since the 50s. It started with Alan Turing and the Turing test and the idea of machine intelligence. And then in the 60s, the first chatbot actually appeared. Eliza. In the 80s, businesses invested heavily in AI systems that followed hard-coded rules. 90s, machine learning emerged. The 2000s, big data and better hardware enabled the environment that we know today. And then in the 2010s, deep learning revolution. Neural networks achieved breakthroughs in vision, translation, and speech. 2020s, generative AI, the AI that we know. So again, we're going to be talking about AI and its current state and how it is changing everything every day that we know the way we live and the way we work. And then we'll talk about our ideas of where AI might end up in five years and maybe beyond that. Today we have a special guest. He's been on the show before, Mr. Jimmy Guest. Welcome to the show, Jimmy.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, thank you, Tim.

SPEAKER_02:

Why don't you uh tell us a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_03:

Well, my name is Jimmy Guest. I am the Technical Escalations Manager for Digital Boardwalk. I enjoy the 80s, Ghostbusters, and everything that has to do with computers.

SPEAKER_00:

And he also likes long walks on the beach and moonlight suppers.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks, Tim. And you know what? He's we got him on a beer show here, ladies and gentlemen. And I just found out this man loves sangria. So this is sangria. Jimmy's on the show and he drinks sangria. And this is sangria, and I just took a big old sip of it. It's good. Yeah, it is good. It's good. It is good. It's a little I'm sure the ladies like it.

SPEAKER_00:

Jimmy.

SPEAKER_02:

Jimmy. It's good. It's a little too late for me to go out and find some sangria. So we are gonna make you drink some beer today, Jimmy. Are you okay with that?

SPEAKER_03:

I'm okay with it. No sangria, though, right?

SPEAKER_02:

No sangria. It's all Brewski's.

SPEAKER_03:

We'll try it.

SPEAKER_02:

All right. It will put hair on your chest, sir. That's what my dad used to tell me. Does he need more hair on his chest? I don't think he needs any more hair on his chest. Welcome to the show, man. Thank you. Glad to have you back. He's up here from sunny Lakeland, Florida.

SPEAKER_03:

Warm Lakeland, Florida. It's cold up here.

SPEAKER_02:

So our first segment is the state of AI in 2025. Useful, overhyped, or both? Jimmy, what do you think?

SPEAKER_03:

I think it's a combination of possibly a little bit of both. And the reason why I say that is 90% of it is useful in the day-to-day age of what we're doing, especially in the fact of new things where Microsoft is doing things. It helps you do calculations and things that you couldn't normally do in a quick situation. I think where the overhype comes a little bit is the fear of AI, the fear of AI to where it's going to take over the world or it's going to do like the, I think when people understand it a little bit better, I think more things could happen.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, you know, like let's just take your job, for instance. Is it going to replace your job or has it made your job easier to do?

SPEAKER_03:

Easier. So if people start understanding how that's going to be with making people's jobs easier, that's going to set thing the future of AI into where this technology goes.

SPEAKER_02:

So triage. So we battled with triage automation for years. You know, we hired multiple people, brought them in to triage dispatch and and bring it over to you. And AI is now transforming that. Um, all of our level ones we have trained and brought up to level two and level three status, L1s is now like L1 work is triaged. It's yeah, it's brought in and it's handled by a technical assistant, right?

SPEAKER_03:

Correct, correct. And AI is a big part of that for them. AI has been a AI has been a catalyst for a lot of things in the technology industry that are coming forward.

SPEAKER_02:

Do you think in regards to AI with your job and and what you've seen with your other engineers, has it improved clarity and tone? Sure. Or or just the sound?

SPEAKER_03:

Sure.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, does it just sound overly polite?

SPEAKER_03:

I mean, what I mean, it doesn't really sound overly polite, but I mean it gives the advantage if you know the right things to ask it and the right things to go with it. You only it goes with the old expression, you only get what you put in.

SPEAKER_02:

You know what? I think we need to juice this conversation up. How about we introduce our first beer, Mr. Edge? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Nerds on Tac. I'm your host, Tim Shu, and I couldn't be more excited to embark on this nerdy adventure with all of you. So grab your favorite brew because things are about to get exciting.

SPEAKER_04:

Three, two, one, go.

SPEAKER_00:

Alright, guys, so the first beer, which is close to the middle, uh, is the Kentucky Vanilla Barrel Cream Ale. Uh, it's a beer so smooth it could probably negotiate world peace. Aged in bourbon barrels and infused with vanilla. This is basically dessert disguised as a respectable adult beverage.

SPEAKER_02:

So it tastes like a dessert, and that sounds like it was written by AI.

SPEAKER_00:

You bet. We're doing an episode about AI, so might as well just throw that in there.

SPEAKER_02:

So AI has helped us build an episode on AI. What what what how do you like that? Uh that tastes like dessert.

SPEAKER_03:

AI got it right.

SPEAKER_02:

So, what productivity enhancement from AI has surprised you the most, not just within your job, but everywhere, good or bad? Like, like was there a something bad that was a byproduct of AI that you've seen out there? I mean, obviously there's some weirdness going on, but it's a very good question.

SPEAKER_03:

So the basics of what surprised me the most with AI is the quickness for, you know, not to bore the listeners out here, but when you pull reports from Microsoft, they can be very cumbersome. If you type sufficient something and say, please tell me uh AI or please tell me to split this up into uh two different uh spreadsheets and to do X, Y, or Z, it does it within minutes versus where it would take you 45 to 50 minutes to do such a task. The pitfalls of AI is where it could be if you don't understand what you're so if you're asking it to do something you don't already understand, you're not going to get anything from AI.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's a that's a good point. So so okay. All right. So what what what industry, what industry do you think you're seeing most visibility with AI deployment right now? I mean, what are you seeing out there?

SPEAKER_03:

So technology um in our industry with you know repair and computers, but most of all, it's made some differences in the shipping industry, uh, predictability about people, what they buy the most. I mean, you see a lot of stories in the media about Amazon, about how they're utilizing it. It's going to be a thing that once it grows more and more, you will not only see it, but every person will be experiencing it in some way, shape, or form.

SPEAKER_02:

I mean healthcare. Healthcare that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about it.

SPEAKER_03:

There is predictabilities they have what charting. Charting. So YART diagnostics. A famous program called YARTI that they use in the healthcare industry, has the uh things of getting reports from AI. There's a lot of uh nurse call systems, things that you use in healthcare facilities, that the reporting is going to be based on AI. Okay, this person A has fallen this many times and give you a report. It I should get to the point of where it could determine predictability of where that might happen again.

SPEAKER_02:

But but you still have to have people working in those jobs. This is going to help make them more efficient. Correct. Charting, diagnostics, so on and so forth. But they have to be, they have to have an aptitude for AI and they have to understand it. So there, there's so when we, you know, we're we're we're just naturally talking about this. It's obviously going to upset certain certain industries where people think, oh my God, I'm gonna be out of a job. Correct. But just like anything, just like this company, just like Digital Boardwalk, if we're not evolving year to year, we're dying on the vine. If you are not evolving your personal uh and work skill sets, you're dying on the vine. You're dying on the vine. I mean, it you're you're just ousted. I mean, you're not you're not gonna have a job if you don't continue to improve your education and your skill set. Correct.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, you know, to throw this out there, I feel like twenty, thirty years ago, everyone was freaking out when computers were being set up in the house and everything was becoming digital. You know, everyone had websites now, everyone used Google, and you had the same kind of people fighting about learning how to use computers and making technology for businesses, and then here we are 20 years later, every single business uses it. Like it's you can't get a job unless you know how to use a computer, and AI is going to be the same exact thing.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, I talked about this on some other panel I was on, but we call this curve jumping in the tech industry. So it all, I mean, if you think about it and you go way back, the curve jump started with the PC. The introduction of the PC, it gave a bunch of us new jobs. So when the PC came out, you had people going to school for microcomputing and computer science, and there wasn't really it wasn't really segmented like it is today. But they went out and got their jobs and they worked on mainframes, right? That's where it all started. So you had the and then you had the introduction of the PC into businesses, which created a lot of new jobs and businesses, but people had to know how to use them.

unknown:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02:

And if they didn't know how to use them, they couldn't get that job. Then the introduction of high-speed or uh internet, so internet was another big curve jump. I mean, that created endless opportunities for all kinds of people. So there were new jobs being created during each one of these technical cycles. And the people that didn't evolve their own skill sets, they were out of jobs. And the final one before AI was bandwidth. When bandwidth came about, oh my goodness, cloud came about. I mean, when you have bandwidth, you have cloud and you have streaming. I mean, look at just Xbox. Look, look at Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo. And I mean, not even those, just those three, but just going on. I think Netflix has their own gaming network now, Amazon. You can as long as you have a controller, you Bluetooth it to the TV, it's all streaming.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and also don't forget about the invention of the cell phone. Like it was crazy to think you people had a telephone inside their car, let alone in their pocket, with more power than computers back then. Like it's it's ridiculous the amount of things you can do with your phone. There's some people, they do their entire job from their cell phone. They don't they don't even have a computer anymore.

SPEAKER_02:

Edge, the first business that I started, I ran on literally a laptop and a well, not even a laptop because I couldn't afford one. But they were they were thousands of dollars back then. But I did, I did somehow buy this massive cell phone. And I used to sit on the beach under an umbrella with this massive cell phone and put orders in for computer stuff that I was having, I was having imported uh hardware, and I resold it here in the States. But I spent my entire day on the beach ordering and then building these computers for people way back in the day. But it was the size of my lap. Well, I wouldn't say it was I'd say it was two-thirds of the size of the length of this laptop that's sitting in front of me now.

SPEAKER_03:

So, so transmitter case, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Let's talk about a couple others because I want to bounce this around to you guys.

SPEAKER_03:

Marketing, ad copy, go for AI, where marketing and AI will I mean, will definitely it already is, right? I mean, it is. I mean, you could tell it to ask, you can ask it to develop a spreadsheet to of what you're looking for in the commonly uh used you know locations in a certain site to give you a report, it already is going through there.

SPEAKER_02:

But is it but is it going to eliminate copywriters?

SPEAKER_03:

No.

SPEAKER_02:

No. Why?

SPEAKER_03:

Because they're still gonna need to be there to begin with.

SPEAKER_02:

But when you when I write copy using chat GPT or Copilot, same thing. What and then you write copy for the same topic with Chat GPT, and we compare notes, are they gonna look pretty similar?

SPEAKER_03:

I would think so.

SPEAKER_02:

If you have the same input, you're gonna get uh a similar output.

SPEAKER_03:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

It but it is going to learn over time. This is what I know about AI. It is only gonna know, it is only gonna be as smart as as as what has historically been put out there, and I'm gonna I'm gonna pull this from the movie Um The N uh The Internship uh where the where uh Vince Vaughn and uh they get the job as interns at Google. You know, when you put it out there on the line, historically, anything that's been put out there on the on the line, that's uh that's as smart as AI can be. Correct. Otherwise you're gonna get hallucinations. Correct. And hallucinations are what you don't want. I mean, and you can tell when it's sometimes you can tell if it's hallucinating. But if it gets bad information, that's as smart as it is. It's going to so don't believe everything, and that's why right now, as an educational tool for kids, and that's why teachers don't want them to use it. Obviously, they want them to learn. But and this kind of goes into the five years from now thing. We're not to that segment yet, but currently, in it in its current state, AI is good as a helper, like just to pull inspiration from, but you don't want it writing your report for you in five years. I think it's going to be a tutor for our young people.

SPEAKER_03:

I would believe it would be too.

SPEAKER_02:

Cybersecurity. Go.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, cybersecurity. That's I mean, you've already got stuff in the news where uh was it a China group, China-based group that uh conduct hackings with AI. Did you see that one? Yeah, yeah, that was kind of crazy. But yeah, it's gonna that's gonna blow up the cybersecurity field. I totally believe it.

SPEAKER_00:

Another cybersecurity is social engineering with with AI. You know, just what a year ago, bad actors were able to record your voice through a scam call. Oh, yeah, and run that through AI and call people that you're connected to, like your relatives or your loved ones or your friends or coworkers. Oh, yeah. That was a big one. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's another one. On top of all of the the fake online shopping scams, that's all AI generated products.

SPEAKER_03:

Or video.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm glad you brought that up.

SPEAKER_02:

And and that's not on my list, but phishing scams. One, so when you so I get them, and and this is funny because because as you know, growing up in cybersecurity and IT, I'm really quick to recognize when I get a phishing scam coming through on email. It usually ends up my quarantine every now and they uh uh they get through. But lately, specifically the past three or four months, I've been getting ones that look so well written and perfect that if I didn't look at the header, I would have clicked on it, similar to uh a guy I know named Devin Brown, but that's a whole other story.

SPEAKER_00:

Who's laughing? Ted, are you laughing? I can't wait for the Christmas party Friday night for him to see what I put together for him. I'm just I'm just gonna leave it at that.

SPEAKER_02:

So, education, tutoring, and anti-cheating tech, anti-cheating, anti-cheating's gonna be able to help.

SPEAKER_03:

AI is gonna be able to detect that. There's so much. The list goes on.

SPEAKER_02:

Customer service, retail. I mean, AI.

SPEAKER_03:

So, hey, I guess we have that for the go-to can. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Bo Jangles. Do you know? Are you familiar with what's going on in the fast food industry? So the fast, it's not even in my notes, but fast food industry. So, what are we used to? We pull up to a drive-thru, we talk through a mic, and somebody on the other end has a headset on. Half the time they get your order wrong because they can't hear you. I mean, they're just doing their job, but it's it's even though it's clearer than it was 10, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, they are struggling, and and half the time they're gonna have your order wrong. And so um what I told uh my wife uh a few years ago when minimum wage hikes started to go up, and then of course the introduction of AI, I said the first industry that's gonna be impacted. Now, this was me talking five years ago, is going to be fast food. I said the first thing that's gonna go is the drive-thru. They're gonna automate how you order food. Now, me, I thought five years ago it was gonna be a you know, uh uh a screen, uh maybe a touch screen where you hit stuff, like kind of like what you see in the McDonald's, some of the McDonald's now where you go in and they got a kiosk. It's not, it's going to be AI. And this is what they're gonna do. They're gonna replace the drive-thru person, not a hundred percent, but they're gonna replace the ordering with AI and the payment with AI, but they're still gonna have to cook and deliver your food to the window. Now, the first one. And this is real. And I learned this from a new friend I made. His name's Jason. He works for Microsoft. And I ran into him in Savannah, and he was telling me about hearing about Bojangles having the first AI drive-thru. So, of course, they have one down near his house, about five miles from his house. So he immediately hopped in his car and went and got Bojangles for him and his wife. And he said it was crazy. He goes, he pulled up, and I forget what system it was built on, but he said he knew the system. So he was, he even said that to the AI system. He goes, I know you're blah, blah, blah. And he had a conversation with the AI. And it's he said it sounded like a human. He knew it was AI. It got his order 100% right. And he said the accuracy of that system is like 90. It was either 98.9 or 99.4 accuracy, which is better than what humans can do with all the mics. It's going to eliminate all those headsets that they that these all the overhead is going to go away and they're going to put it into AI, but the customer experience is going to be better. But it exists. Bojangles, if you go to a Bojangles, there's a good chance. I think they deployed it across all of theirs that AI Wendy's is doing it too. Wendy's is next.

SPEAKER_03:

Wendy's is they're already testing one in Lakeland.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, but they haven't deployed it yet, right?

SPEAKER_03:

No, there's one in Lakeland on Shepherd Road.

SPEAKER_02:

Have you tried it?

SPEAKER_03:

Yes.

SPEAKER_02:

Did it work?

SPEAKER_03:

Yes. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_02:

Did you have a back and forth? It comes up, it comes up. I didn't.

SPEAKER_00:

Does it make any comments about your cholesterol levels or anything like that? No. Like, oh, you know, you should probably get the gluten-free version of it.

SPEAKER_03:

No, I would be a big that'd probably be a big problem for me. So I won't lie.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, I honestly thought the fast food industry would get rid of the like the drive-thru ordering altogether and just make it all online ordering where you just order ahead of time and you drive through, they scan your phone, hand you your food, and you take off. And you don't talk to you.

SPEAKER_03:

I mean they got these forms of that, but not like totally, you know.

SPEAKER_02:

So before we grab our second beer, let's get into some weird AI use cases. So these are examples. But let's say they existed today. So an AI therapist. Come on.

SPEAKER_00:

I think that's dangerous. I think it's super dangerous.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I mean. Oh, are you I mean are you imitating AI right now? No, I mean, but think about it. The I mean, you're not you're not far off from what could be coming, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00:

So the problem that I have with AI and therapy, I mean, it's great for bouncing ideas off and stuff, is AI is all about promoting what it thinks is going to make you happy, even if it's a terrible idea. So you could ask it to build you a business based off of a model where you don't provide any services or sell anything, and it will tell you it was the best idea, it's heard all day. And I think that's where the danger lies, is there needs to be some sort of realism, and it needs to start talking to people in like a very clear, direct manner. It needs to say, you know, that is unique, but it already does that, it's not a realistic thing. It kind of does that. Right now, it's gonna do anything and suggest anything to make whatever you put in there a possibility. I mean, have you guys watched the South Park episode with AI where um Stan's dad like builds a business off of all of yes, I've seen that. Yeah, it's and he's his marriage starts falling apart because he starts asking AI for advice on everything.

SPEAKER_02:

Unfortunately, I haven't watched South Park in a while. You need to watch I used to be a very religious South Park watcher, but uh I haven't watched it in very relevant. Maybe we can swap jobs and and and I'll have time to watch that. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. So AI generated church sermon, and you're religious.

SPEAKER_03:

So let's an AI generated. We we actually, true story. Uh Pastor and I, we we he had what he had printed and talked about, and then we asked AI to generate a sermon on that, and it wasn't that far off.

SPEAKER_02:

Here's what I here's what here's how I would here's how I would go about it. Brothers and sisters, let us log into the eternal network of grace. For the Lord said, where two or three are connected in my name, there I am in the cloud. Amen, brother. Amen. You can't access the bl faith is like a password. You can't access the blessings without the right credentials. And no, one, two, three, Jesus is not secure.

SPEAKER_03:

Take it to the preacher there, sir. Go come on, give it back to me.

SPEAKER_00:

That sounds so AI generated.

SPEAKER_02:

So AI relationships go.

SPEAKER_03:

AI really uh but guys, this I can't wrap my head around that, but I mean two AIs meet on a dating algorithm.

SPEAKER_02:

One says, You had me at all in this world. You had me at hello world.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh we got people in today's day and age that are having relationships, actual people that are having relationships of AI.

SPEAKER_02:

Your neural network completes me. I've never felt such strong back propagation of affection.

SPEAKER_03:

Thanks, Jack. I I'll I'll take that under so that is AI written.

SPEAKER_02:

That is AI written, but I wanted to give an example. I asked AI earlier today, hey, what would what is some funny commentary that would be related to a church sermon? And that's what it gave me.

SPEAKER_03:

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02:

I thought it was funny.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, on the topic of relationships with AI, I'm not against it. There's a lot of people out there that have social anxiety or just are bad at communicating their thoughts to people. Um I just worry about it being abused or manipulative or anything like that.

SPEAKER_02:

There's definitely some fine-tuning that needs to happen before well being in the being in the cybersecurity, we know, you know, we're fighting bad actors all the time. Yep. And we're well, we're not fighting them, we're blocking them, we're keeping them out of our customers' networks. But the problem with it is as we evolve and get better, they're evolving and get better, and we're having to stay ahead of that. And they're now using AI, and it is getting smarter and smarter, but so are we. But it is getting it it's it's becoming a thing. So before we have our our next beer, because I am thirsty, um here's the last funny one AI planning your dog's birthday party. Jimmy go. The AI planning what what would it deploy? What would it deploy at your dog's birthday party that you could tell it was controlling because it's AI, it's connected to other things, and maybe it's well, okay.

SPEAKER_03:

So if I ordered my cat, oh I have to go with a cat because I have a cat. If I ordered my cat's food from Amazon, or I ordered certain things from Amazon, and it was connected to my Amazon account, there you go, it would know exactly what. Well, maybe Johnny needs this.

SPEAKER_02:

How about a smart feeder that dispenses treats?

SPEAKER_03:

I have one of those, so yes.

SPEAKER_02:

So at the party, AI is dispensing treats, a ball-launching robot program for infinite, you know, whatever. Anyway, or maybe an ambient playlist, who let the dogs out? Ooh, ooh, ooh.

SPEAKER_00:

Or maybe anything from uh little bow wow.

SPEAKER_03:

I I'll go with the 80s.

SPEAKER_00:

I need a beer. Let's go. All right. So our next beer that we have uh is the Emerald Coast Ultra Premium Lager from Destin Brewery. Uh working for crisp Beachy Glory. We've got this beer from the Destin Brewery. This is the kind of beer you drink when you want refreshing, but also want to pretend you know things about crafting and brewing. That's good.

SPEAKER_02:

It's got a good snap to it. It leaves a nice uh maybe we should ask AI because I sound like a blubbering idiot right now. Ask AI about it. So let's talk about AI in five years, guys. Um, in five years, does AI kind of like um electricity, kind of like Wi-Fi, kind of like the internet, having PCs, having phones in our pockets, all that's become normal. All of it's become normal. So does AI become so normal that people stop even talking about it? I think so.

SPEAKER_03:

I think it will. It'll become like you said, having a phone in your pocket. It's gonna become the norm. It'll be what part of there's so many philosophical and things going back and forth right now on it, you know. It it can be back and forth. I mean, I think it's gonna be just like you have, you know, your phone. It's gonna be a part of you.

SPEAKER_01:

So is it okay, Tam? Do you have a Edge? Do you have a take on that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't even remember the last time I heard someone talking about their smartwatch. Like that was a hot thing just a couple years ago, and everyone had to have one, and then now no one ever talks about it. We just know they have it and they use it, and that's that. I think AI is gonna be the same thing. Right now it's very prominent. People are very in your face about detecting what's been AI generated and what hasn't, and and all this kind of stuff. But eventually it's gonna get to the point where we everyone just accepts it, and we just all know that pretty much everything is gonna be AI generated to some extent. No one brings it up anymore.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. That's a good point. Really good point. What's one everyday task though that you think AI will quietly handle without anyone realizing? Let's take your your grocery ordering. Grocery ordering, okay. I mean, we all can already see inside the refrigerator using cameras, right?

SPEAKER_03:

So you're you're expecting a good one. You're expected, you know, fuel consumption per week and when you should refill your car or electric or whatever. I think I think back and forth there.

SPEAKER_00:

I think soon social media presence will be all AI. Like it'll just be connected with your phone and with your shop. I'm just gonna say it.

SPEAKER_02:

I hope social media, I hope social media goes away.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, I think AI is just gonna start posting for you and just updating everyone about where you're at and what you're eating and how life is going. It'll just start uploading pictures from your phone on there for everyone to see.

SPEAKER_02:

Social media, one word comes to mind when I think about social media, and that's the word division. It has created so much division in our world just because it's giving everybody a microphone. And I feel like I feel like when everybody has a microphone, nobody's gonna agree on anything, and it creates division. And I'm not just talking politics, I'm talking everything.

SPEAKER_03:

No, that's very true.

SPEAKER_02:

So the one thing I that comes to mind for me is uh home energy. Home energy. I mean, we already have NES thermostats, we're already kind of getting smarter with that sort of thing. People are deploying solar panels, but you know, AI can will continually um uh adjust your thermostat, your lighting, and your appliance schedules, you know, based on weather forecasts, people in the house, energy prices.

SPEAKER_00:

Maybe even your mood.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, your mood too. I mean, um, I mean, instead of thinking you should turn off the lights, AI will already have dimmed them when you left the room, you know, so you're not forgetting that currently, like my my daughter, and she may listen to this, I don't care. You know, she's been on the show, uh um, won her basketball game last night, 30 to 12. I was very proud of those girls. They did such a fantastic job. But um, she leaves every morning. She leaves the lights and fans in her room on every day when she goes to school. It doesn't matter how many times I tell her, turn that stuff off. So I had to, I had to put smart switches and smart plugs in her room just so it would shut everything off, knowing she'd be at school, like after she leaves. That all that stuff shuts off automatically because I got tired of turning it off. Uh, predictive maintenance is another thing that comes into mind with that. I mean, I forget to pour bleach down the drain for my AC and stuff like that. I mean, it'll detect uh maybe detect early signs of appliance issues. Cars. Cars, schedule repairs before you even know something's wrong. Yep. Um, and then of course, syncing with your cal calendar and your habits, warming the house before you wake up, cooling it when you're I mean, it's already doing that.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, but the rental car we brought up here will actually tell you you're coming to a toll plaza.

SPEAKER_00:

That's cool. I'd like to see AI integration with finances, like having it automatically pay my bills and also understand budget restraints and plan, you know, groceries, all that, everything automatically. So it just kind of gives me whatever substance you can. It's where it's going to.

SPEAKER_03:

There's a lot of the budgeting stuff already.

SPEAKER_02:

So what so what's the first thing your personal AI agent would take off your plate tomorrow if it could?

SPEAKER_03:

Anybody? Question.

SPEAKER_01:

Come on, guys.

SPEAKER_03:

I mean, I've got a there's a few that pop to mind. One, all the day-to-day uh replies to email or okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02:

Let's stop you right there. Managing your inbox. Yep. That's the easy go-to. That should be the first thing everybody because why? Because the volume. Correct. Right? I get so many emails every single day. When I get up in the morning, my first hour is spent with a cup of coffee and going through emails every single flipping day.

SPEAKER_03:

And give you a report of what you should, here's what you should look at today, you know.

SPEAKER_02:

I wanted to summarize my long emails. I don't want to read a book by certain people that send me super Tim knows what I'm talking about, super long emails. I want it to summarize that and just get to the point. Auto-prioritizing the important stuff, putting it at the top, drafting quick responses for me based on what it knows, you know, how it knows I like to respond to things. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, for me, it's not emails, but like text messages and Facebook messages. This people send me messages all the time, and I am the worst person at responding back. I sometimes I don't respond in two or three weeks because I get a lot of messages where people just like send me reels to watch, but they don't actually say anything. So I never even open it because there's you know, it's nothing important, there's nothing personal. You reply to me. Yeah, but it's all it's all about work. You don't just text me to ask me how you know the band's going.

SPEAKER_01:

Sometimes I do.

SPEAKER_03:

How's the band going? I'm gonna go see them.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm going to see him in a couple weeks. We practiced last night. We're in the middle of recording a brand new song, um, and we got a show in two weeks. Yeah, and what am I gonna do when I'm at your show? Gonna get drunk and mosh. That's not what did I tell you the other night? What am I gonna do at your show? You're gonna stand at the front of the stage and fanboy.

SPEAKER_02:

And fanboy. That's not what I said. I told him I'm gonna heckle him. There's a difference between fanboy and heckling. Come on, man. Um, so uh are are you gonna trust your AI agent more than humans in five years?

SPEAKER_03:

I think it'll become to that, yes.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, oh, not the answer I was thinking.

SPEAKER_03:

I I think that the paradigm of Skynet is always watching you will dissolve, even though James Cameron did his best to try to make people do like that in the 80s. I think that parent will will slowly dissolve and that will become the norm.

SPEAKER_02:

You know what, you know what makes me laugh is some famous guy once said you won't need more than 640K in your computer. Do you remember who that guy was and when he said it?

SPEAKER_03:

I don't remember the toll.

SPEAKER_02:

I think that was Bill Gates. It was Bill Gates, and it was probably back in the early 80s.

SPEAKER_03:

I was gonna say jobs, but then it's maybe no, it was 640K.

SPEAKER_02:

That would have maybe been late 80s, early 90s. You won't need more than 640K. But that was before anybody envisioned what we're seeing now.

SPEAKER_03:

The size of machines you need to power all this stuff will get smaller and smaller over time goes by.

SPEAKER_02:

So, Edge, you brought up a good point um earlier when you were talking about stuff. You were talking about uh I think it was related to AI ethics. So the biggest thing, and you know, I I was bashing on social media, I would love for it to be regulated. It's not, I don't care. You know, they're anywhere you just have to follow the money. You just follow the money, and it's never gonna change. It's the truth. But AI ethics and regulation is going to evolve faster, I think, than any uh AI is gonna evolve faster than any previous tech. I think we know that. But the regulation's going to follow with it. So, what's the biggest ethical issue with AI we still won't have solved in five years? And that's a tough question, but I mean, because we're trying to see into the future. Um, what do you think it's gonna be?

SPEAKER_03:

I'm half and half. There's already stories of people talking about how to commit deadly acts or something like that, and AI was telling them on one of the chat GPT models. So I'm half and half thinking that they will get through that or they will let it to let it go through. I I don't know. I think there's a lot of things that they could talk about and change, but again, it depends on how and how it goes in the next few before you can make a judgment in five.

SPEAKER_00:

Um I don't think they're gonna solve the deep fake issue. There you go.

SPEAKER_03:

Now that's there you go good point. That's the one that's an awesome one that that yeah.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So get into it. Get into it, Edge. So I mean They've been doing a good job with you know adding the like banners across that say that this this has been AI generated. And I mean that might help, but there's not going to be stopping it. People are going to do deep fake videos, whether it's about pornography or politics or terrorism or propaganda or anything like that. And it's it's at the point right now where it's good enough to question whether something is real or whether something is AI generated. And I think that's gonna be the battle is for the next couple of years is trying to figure out what's real news and what's fake news. Not fake news like you know, conservative, but yeah, what what is real and what is fake.

SPEAKER_02:

I think I'm gonna go out on the edge here and talk about something that's uncomfortable. Um but you know, we already we experience societal inequalities across a lot of stuff, right? And AI systems learn from historical data. So when you have societal societal inequalities that go back hundreds and hundreds, you know, hundreds of years, and AI is learning from historical data, that means that hiring tools, uh credit scoring systems, facial recognition, so can perpetuate discrimination, right, against marginalized groups. So bias hides behind the facade of technological neutrality, right? Correct. So unlike human decisions, I think AI decisions, think about it. AI decisions occur in black box models, right? Correct. Right. So it's gonna make it hard to detect or explain unfair outcomes, and you're already seeing, I forget what the percentage of differential between with facial recognition, where it identifies what uh Caucasians um, you know, versus uh African Americans and and and other races, you know, it again, again, our world is tilted a little bit because of a uh not a little bit. It's still it's still you know, there's a margin there. And you know, I'm hoping they get it right. I'm hoping they get it right. But I think, you know, and and I think one day we're gonna solve this stupidity, but I think that overall in the near future, and when I say near future, five years, I I think that we're still gonna have these inequalities, and I think AI might exasperate them.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, look at all the stuff on TikTok. If you ever look at anything at anything, 90% of it's AI. There's a ton.

SPEAKER_01:

Edge, anything to add?

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, I I would assume we're not too far away from the days where AI just takes over all of human resources, and you just show up to work one day and you've got a new employee because AI hired them. It detected that you had a a shortage or a need for more hour coverage, and boom, you've got a new employee. It already did the interviews and vetted them with you know their resume and all that kind of stuff, and that's that.

SPEAKER_02:

All right, before we ask Jimmy his five quick questions, and these questions don't have one-word answers, it's probably gonna be a sentence or two, but I'm going to fire away five questions for you and urge you to answer right away. Before we do that, Edge, what's our last brewski?

SPEAKER_00:

All right, so our last beer that we have is the Gulf Coast Blonde Ale from Doc's Hop Shop, which unfortunately is no longer with us anymore. They ended up closing down a couple months back. Uh, but this was the Hometown Hero right here in Pensacola. It's bright, easy drinking, and just blonde enough to get underestimated.

SPEAKER_02:

That beer is blonder than a brunette. And that was not AI written, and it was funny. Did you like it, Mr. Jimmy?

SPEAKER_03:

That was great.

SPEAKER_02:

All right, here go our questions. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna fire these away at Mr. Jimmy Guest, and we're gonna see how quick he can respond and what crazy answers he's gonna give us. What's your wildest, but still slightly believable AI prediction for 2030?

SPEAKER_03:

The wildest and straight for 2030.

SPEAKER_02:

And the next question is no, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03:

Flying cars.

SPEAKER_02:

Flying cars. Will AI become the world's best bartender? And what drink do you think it will invent first?

SPEAKER_03:

The flavored, your choose your flavored sangria. Wow.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we might need to bring a little bit more testosterone into this group. Do you think AR glasses will finally look like normal glasses, or are we destined to look like cyborg librarians? Normal glasses. Could you see smart appliances negotiating purchases on your behalf, like your fridge haggling with Walmart's AI? Yes.

SPEAKER_03:

I you can add a sentence if you know. I mean, it's it's a straight up answer. I mean, yes, I believe that it will eventually be go back and forth and try and negotiate prices. That's very possible.

SPEAKER_02:

What's the dumbest AI product you think will somehow become wildly popular?

SPEAKER_03:

A dumbest AI product. I'd have to think about that one. That's not really, I mean. Hairspray. Choices of hairspray.

SPEAKER_02:

I was going on the I thought you were gonna say sex bot, but no. All right. What's one way AI will make life better and one way it will make life weirder?

SPEAKER_03:

It'll get more productivity and more things done in our life. But the weirdness may come from, depending on how it evaluates five years, of how well as a society we embrace it.

SPEAKER_02:

Awesome. Jimmy pros, cheers and good drinking. Uh I want to thank you for coming on the show. You've been great.

SPEAKER_03:

That's always a pleasure.

SPEAKER_02:

Edge, thank you for producing this show.

SPEAKER_03:

Yep.

SPEAKER_00:

Anytime.

SPEAKER_02:

And ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank Digital Boardwalk for sponsoring our show. And stay tuned uh for our next show, which we're gonna have a wildly crazy character on the show coming soon. Thank you again for joining Nerds on Tap. Cheers, my fellow nerds and beer lovers. Stay tuned for more Nerds on Tap. Oh, and one more thing. Help us spread the nerdy love and the love for grape brews by sharing this podcast with your friends, colleagues, and fellow beer enthusiasts. Let's build a community that embraces curiosity, innovation, and the enjoyment of a cold one.

Head Shot

Tim Shoop

Host
Contributor

Jimmy Guest

Guest