Week in Tech: Turning China's Surveillance Against Itself
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does getting older actually feel like? This week, Oz and Karah discuss MIT Researchers who are using technology to simulate aging. Then, Oz tells the story of an activist who used China’s surveillance state as a form of protest. Karah dives deep into the weird world of humans quietly training chatbots. And finally, on Chat and Me, is replacing your therapist with ChatGPT a good idea?
Also, we want to hear from you: If you’ve used a chatbot in a surprising or delightful (or deranged) way, send us a 1–2 minute voice note at techstuffpodcast@gmail.com.
Sources:
My Day as an 80-Year-Old. What an Age-Simulation Suit Taught Me.
She Sacrificed Her Youth to Get the Tech Bros to Grow Up
A Hidden Camera Protest Turned the Tables on China’s Surveillance State
Inside the lucrative, surreal, and disturbing world of AI trainers
Sam Altman, Tim Cook, and other tech leaders lauded Trump at a White House AI dinner
“First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion
AirPods Pro 3 arrive with heart-rate sensing and live translation using Apple Intelligence
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:17.9 | From Collidoscope and IHeart podcasts, this is Tech Stuff. I'm Osvaloshin. And I'm Kara Price. |
| 0:23.6 | Today, we get into what it's like to be a human who trains AI for a living and the story of an |
| 0:30.2 | activist who turned the surveillance state against the Chinese government. Then, on Chat and Me, |
| 0:36.4 | a real-life therapist talks about how he uses AI. |
| 0:40.3 | It felt like a steady parma. |
| 0:42.3 | What I call a cognitive prosthesis, not thinking for me, but helping me organize and extend my own |
| 0:49.3 | thinking. |
| 0:50.3 | The way a walking stick supports you as you walk. |
| 0:53.3 | All of that on the Week in Tech. |
| 0:55.7 | It's Friday, September 12th. |
| 1:04.3 | Hi, Kara. |
| 1:05.5 | Hi, Oz. |
| 1:06.8 | So normally we record these together in studio, |
| 1:09.7 | but this week I'm in a hotel room in Munich, Germany, at a conference called DLD, Digital Life Design. |
| 1:16.1 | It sounds very lively. How is it? |
| 1:19.2 | It's good. You know, are you familiar with this concept of ambient AI that they're using medical settings? |
| 1:24.1 | Sort of, yes. Can you just tell me a little bit about it? |
| 1:26.9 | So basically it's like |
| 1:28.8 | cameras and sound recording in settings where, like, a person doesn't have to go and use AI. |
| 1:35.3 | AI is just running in the background and feeding back kind of insights and data. And so there's a talk |
| 1:40.1 | yesterday about this being used in hotel settings for food, which I found pretty interesting. |
... |
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