The Worst Idea You Ever Heard

[intro music plays]

Rick: Welcome back, America! This is The Worst Idea You Ever Heard, America's favorite podcast from your favorite podcast hosts, or at least your favorite podcast hosts who host this particular show.

Robin: You make that joke every time. It was never funny. The first time you said it wasn't funny, but you still say it every week thinking it'll get funnier. It's not going to get funnier, will you please let it die?

Steve: Give it up, Robin, this is who he is. We are souls sailing on a damned ship, and he's the guy spinning the—what do they call it? The spinny steering wheel on boats. The helm? Is it helm?

Rick: I think it's just called a wheel, Steve. And wow, you two are in a dark mood this week. But put those storm clouds behind you, because it's time for this weeks' show! All right, everyone knows how the show works at this point. Each of us will present the worst idea we've seen from this week's news, and we'll try to pick which is the worst of the worst. I'll start things off with my own find, and I don't think you'll be able to top this one.

Steve: Wow. Okay, wow.

Rick: Right? So here's the deal. For those of you out there who were not born yesterday, popping out of a large peach or walnut shell fully formed and with a career and car insurance, infectious disease has always played a big role in war. I don't care how big your guns are, if the guys who're supposed to be shooting them are all passed out in a tent, crapping their pants from dysentery, you aren't going to be doing much war fighting.

Robin: It was George Washington's thing! During the Revolutionary War he ordered that every soldier be vaccinated against smallpox. Historians say it was one of the decisions that won the war.

Rick: And it's been that way ever since. Generals are terrified of infectious disease in the ranks. It loses wars.

Steve: Shoving a large number of people together in cramped quarters, all eating the same meals and breathing the same air, in countries they've never been to with diseases they've never had, putting them in camps with hand-dug toilets and not much for hygiene other than rags and buckets, does tend to lead to a lotta people dying.

Robin: And the flu isn't some minor disease. It's not a cold. You get the flu, you're in bed for a week.

Rick: And we've got a vaccine for it. It's not perfect. They still have to guess, every year, which strains of the virus are going to be out there and it's a crap shoot when it comes to getting it right, but it's one of the things we can vaccinate our troops for and here comes Secretary of Kegstands, good ol' Pete, telling the army and navy that no, no, you can't force your soldiers or your sailors to get vaccinated because it's against their freedom.

Steve: No beardos, though. You can refuse to get vaccinated and it's fine, but we don't want beardos in the army. That's way too much freedom.

Robin: So just the vaccine thing, then.

Rick: It'll be great news in the navy, right? You're stuck on a record-breaking deployment and the ship's toilets are on fire, thank god you still have the right to get the bloody shits if you want em.

Robin: That's pretty stupid. And honestly, this is one of those stories that almost makes you think shouldn't count, for our little contests here. Like, it's so stupid that it has to be intentionally, stupid, right? Pete's doing a bit. This is, like, performance art for Pete Hegseth. He's putting on a little show, here's what the dumbest guy you ever met would do if he ran the U.S. military.

Steve: No, no, I think it's genuine. I don't think Hegs has the acting chops to make this a bit. He really thinks he's on to something here.

Rick: All right, so that's my entry. Steve, your turn now. Go ahead and give us your nominee for this week's Worst Idea You Ever Heard.

Steve: Oh, I'm sure you think you've got me beat. Nothing could top a Pete Hegseth hangover video, you're thinking. Well think again buddy, I've got this one in the bag.

Rick: Uh ... what?

Steve: Right?

Robin: Hold on, we're going to use AI to do air traffic control? Like, of planes? With people in them? With me in them?

Steve: That's what the MTV guy says, yup. He's in charge now.

Rick: So if I get on a flight, if I'm flying to Newark or whatever, maybe for the Newark Santa convention or whatever the hell they do in Newark, I get on a plane and whether or not I live or die depends on a new AI vouched for by the reality show guy who works for the other reality show guy who replaced everyone in government with freaks and crypto scams.

Steve: Yup.

Robin: Okay, so ... okay. So we don't know what kind of AI they're going with, but the thing about AI is that it works by taking past data and returning a plausible-looking average of what it found. You ask it a question, you get a statistically probable blend of how past humans answered that question, or questions kinda like that question. Same with the image versions: You give it a description of what you want to see, like I want to see a painting of dolphins jumping over a rainbow, and it does its little thing and gives you its version of what other people have painted when they've painted dolphins and rainbows.

Rick: Pretty much just one guy who does those paintings, right? Or is it a cottage industry now?

Robin: Cottage, I think. There's a lotta dolphins out there.

Steve: Right, so that's how it works. You feed it some kind of data, and the "AI" part is that it returns the statistical, uh, median of how past humans solved similar questions.

Robin: And the AI doesn't actually know anything about the problem it's solving. It doesn't know what a dolphin is. It doesn't know how to land a plane. This is why it makes pictures of people with three legs or people with a foot sticking out of their chest, it's just throwing the parts together according to what part tends to be in what place in the images it already has, and most of the time it gets lucky enough that you can get the statistical average of dolphin paintings out of it. And a lot of other times, it doesn't. Like, it really doesn't.

Rick: So what you're telling me is that I, as an American in the [bleep]ing twenty-first century, am going to get on a plane, pull away from the gate, and everything that happens after that is going to be decided by the same robot that doesn't know how many r's are in strawberry and occasionally gets confused and says bam, okay, from now on Reese Witherspoon has three arms and rides dolphins.

Steve: Hey, it knows what an average airport looks like, right? You got a plane over here, a plane over there, you move em around a bit. Maybe sometimes it will forget and think there's an extra runway over where the Holiday Inn is, but a lot of airports tend to have extra runways where Newark put its Holiday Inn. They call that 'hallucinating,' and it's a feature of the models.

[silence]

Rick: All right. Okay then, so that's Steve's pick for the week. Robin, your turn. What have you got?

Robin: Yeah, I've got nothing.

Rick: Come on now, I'm sure you found something. Let us know what you found. The newest Worst Idea You Ever Heard.

Robin: No, forget it. I don't even want to play anymore. My thing was going to be Oasis getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but then you came in with Secretary Kegs turning our aircraft carriers into flu and toilet fire crap-o-ramas and Steve let us know that the hallucinating chatbot is going to be put in charge of commercial airline flights and we're all going to die. Mine is just stupid.

Steve: Hey now, I like Oasis. What's wrong with Oasis?

Robin: Nothing's wrong with Oasis, I just don't think—

Rick: She's got a thing against Oasis, I guess? But you know what I'm thinking?

Steve: I think I do.

Rick: Steve, I saw that you brought your guitar this week, right?

Robin: Oh god, no. We were just talking about diarrhea, I'm already—

Rick: And I brought my guitar toooooo!

Steve: All right, all right. Shall we do it?

Robin: You guys please, please don't do this. I swear I will hurt you.

Rick: All right, thanks for joining us this week, everybody. And now as a little treat, here's Wonderwall.