On today’s show, Eric Anctil talks to Katie, a married, 33-year-old high school teacher and mother of a 1-year-old baby girl who has lots to share about having a baby and raising a baby in today’s world. She calls it “internetting with baby” and she shares with us what “internetting” looks like for her, from her earliest thoughts about having a baby all the way to raising a toddler and then thinking about raising a child in our current technological world.

At 33, Katie is pretty much at the center of being a millennial and she shares what it was like growing up online herself and then getting married and starting a family with the internet as the backdrop to her life. From getting pregnant and being part of enormous communities and forums for expecting and new moms, to her insights into modern motherhood, especially as its influenced by the current social media age, Katie provides an inside look and perspective on what it means to create and raise a baby in the internet age. She mentions several books and resources which you can find on The Secret Life of Tech Instagram page and below.

We end our conversation with an exploration of the future of technology and what Katie thinks about and worries for her daughter’s place in it, especially in light of the stories and perspectives her high school students share with her about their current technological realities.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

What to Expect … community groups and forums @ https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/

Emily Oster’s books @ https://emilyoster.net

Laura Danger’s website @ https://www.thatdarnchat.com

Fair Play, Eve Rodsky’s system to help couples balance household tasks @ https://www.thatdarnchat.com

Jessica Valenti @ https://www.jessicavalenti.com

CuboAi Plus Smart Baby Monitor, ⁠https://us.getcubo.com/products/cubo-ai-plus⁠

In 2015, the toy company, Mattel, partnered with ToyTalk, a technology company that specialized in conversational AI, to release a special edition Barbie doll called, Hello Barbie.

Hello Barbie was WIFI enabled “smart toy” that incorporated speech recognition and artificial intelligence to engage in interactive conversations with children. Hello Barbie listened to what children said and responded accordingly, providing, what the companies called, “personalized interactions and storytelling experiences by using speech recognition and natural language processing.”

Basically, Hello Barbie was a doll that looked like an ordinary Barbie, except it was connected to the internet and a user could talk to it and it would talk back, remembering things the user had said, details to keep the conversation going, etc and so forth.

Overall, the experience wasn’t bad and you could kind of see where ToyTalk was going when it comes to embedding AI into dolls.

Today, it feels like there is a kind of Hello Barbie 2.0 in the conversational AIs that are popping up everywhere. Large Language Models that sound so human, even with their imperfections. AI models that feel like a person can talk with them in ways that could only be imagined back in the Hello Barbie 1.0 days of the late 20-teens. And, unlike the Hello Barbie doll that was limited to talking about food, fashion, and family, the conversational AIs of today might be able to take on some of the thornier questions and discussions that someone could never have when the language models were in their infancy.

Joining today’s show is Pi, which bills itself as a digital assistant designed to “help you with all sorts of things!” (which is a direct quote from Pi). “Whether you need a friend to talk to, a guide to help you navigate the world, or just someone to share a laugh with,” it says, “I'm here for you.”

Pi was created by a company called Inflection AI, based in Palo Alto, California and their stated mission is to redefine human-machine interaction.

Pi is being used for today’s episode and conversation is because it seems to have a much better “personality” with how it “talks” to a user, especially when compared to the Sky voice of ChatGPT’s conversational AI (featured in Episode 1 of The Secret Life of Tech). The voice sounds a lot like Aubrey Plaza and it even has her sass and sense of humor. In fact, Pi is willing to take on the personality or characteristics of many celebrities and it does a great Aubrey Plaza, even just natively and without being asked to speak in her style or manner.

It's the perfect voice for Hello Barbie 2.0 and we hope you agree.

Barbie Music Mix by Revive Music: https://youtu.be/CgjXWZcVGug?si=PWP19pYSxhwYzvnT

Johnny Cash sings "Barbie Girl" (A.I.) by Justin Ullmann: https://youtu.be/HW1qjsqS1zM?si=moPTu189JZ0uCC1R

On today’s show, Eric Anctil talks with Ricky, a young professional working as an engineer who had a much cooler and better paying job than almost anyone else at his age. Ricky followed the capitalist maxim of “buy low/sell high” and he did exactly that. At his high-point, Ricky was selling more than $70,000 a year of collectable and high-end fashion wear, and netting about $50,000 profit. Clothes and shoes made popular by rappers and artists that could sell for hundred or even thousands of dollars. And, if you are someone like Ricky, who can spot an original or a deal, the profits are yours for the taking.

After listening to Ricky tell his story, you can appreciate why he was voted, "Most likely to get rich or die trying" in high school.

Until the internet and the smartphone (and the hundreds of websites and apps that have sprung up to support all manner of commerce), the best a high school student could hope for was a well-paying grocery store job or maybe making money as a young entrepreneur, selling things to people in the neighborhood or across the city. Today, the sky’s the limit as we will hear from Ricky who bought and sold t-shirts, sweatshirts, sweatpants, sneakers, and more all over the world.

Ricky is using a pseudonym to maintain his privacy, although everything he did was legal. He was just a kid when he did it.