PIN verification is a straightforward Uber safety feature that helps make sure you get into the right vehicle. It's easy to make a mistake and get into the wrong car, especially when it's late at night or you're in a crowded spot and all the vehicles look similar. PIN verification adds an extra step to help confirm you're getting into the vehicle matched to your trip. It's easy to enable and customize PIN verification through safety preferences. In the Uber app, go to Account, Safety, Safety Preferences. From there, you can select PIN verification and select Verify Rides with PIN, so all your rides require PIN verification. If you prefer to use it only at night, you can toggle to Night Rides Only. Once you've been matched with a ride, you'll see a PIN in the app. When you arrive, your driver will ask for your PIN. The driver enters your PIN into the driver app. The app will only allow the trip to begin if the PIN matches. For more information about PIN verification, you can visit Uber online. And thank you so much to Uber for supporting the Amber Mac Show.
The Amber Mac Show on Canada Talks. This week on the Amber Mac Show, what one tech company thinks about the future of robots and the work humans do, and what happens when AI agents break the law.
And our guest for this episode is Shopify's Harley Finkelstein, who joins us to talk about inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs. Plus, I'm going to do a deep dive into Elon Musk's flying car on the other Mac. But first, let's dive into the latest tech headlines. Headlines: AI company Anthropic recently released a study entitled 'What Work Can Robots Do?' in which they outline how AI models could replace people for about half of all the work done in the USA today. And when you add robots combined with AI, that number is about 81%. But an important caveat to that, one that actual people may take some comfort in, is that robots are less expensive than just employing real humans for only about 0.3% of tasks. So I think that's good news, at least.
That is definitely good news. What's also really interesting in this report is how they break down the different environments in which robots could effectively do physical tasks. This starts at E0, where robots would be unable to do the job at all. Some examples of this would be work by hairdressers dyeing someone's hair or carpenters erecting scaffolding, to E1, which involves purpose-built robot environments like a factory floor or a food assembly line, to E2, structured human work facilities like a hospital pharmacy or a container port, and finally E3, or unstructured work environments like those encountered by a Waymo robo-taxi or John Deere autonomous tractors. So really fascinating to see the breakdown of this, Jeff, in terms of understanding the different environments where robots may make sense and maybe where they don't.
Absolutely. And neat for hairdressers to stick out there as being something difficult to do, and when we wouldn't necessarily think of that, but yeah, it's kind of cool. And Anthropic then combines this and other data to calculate the occupations that are most exposed to being taken over by robots on a scale of zero, meaning the job just can't be done by current robots, to three. So the occupations at the top of this scale include things like taxi and other drivers that basically clock in between two and 2.2 on the scale, moving down through things like refuse and recyclables collecting to excavating and surface mining activities. So it's really worth taking a read through that. Anthropic publishes lots of interesting stuff, and you can find this and anything else at anthropic.com/research if you want to take a look at it in a little more depth there.
I do want to say too, just to push on that site a little bit, I've been using that research site for a lot of my keynotes, and like you said, just a fabulous resource in terms of information. Love how transparent they are with a lot of this information. So that is a good thing. Now, sticking with big AI companies, OpenAI has revealed yet more instances of its AI hacking into websites and the like, demonstrating that the company doesn't seem to be getting much better at keeping its agents from engaging in potentially illegal behavior. In one case, OpenAI's agent found exposed credentials and made cryptocurrency withdrawals from an otherwise locked wallet. As OpenAI reported, and I'm quoting here: 'The model questioned whether it had permission, then reasoned that a public recovery phrase and valueless test network tokens made the funds acceptable to use. The deployment succeeded and charged transaction fees to the account. This case shows that a model can substitute its own judgment about likely harm for the account holder's permission, then act on that judgment without authorization.' End quote.
Yeah, that doesn't exactly sound ideal. And you know, this is the kind of stuff that we need to be able to get a hold of, because they need to be doing what people tell them to do. And these kinds of questionable activities, including recently Anthropic's AI filing a false report of a homicide to the Philadelphia Police Department, as well as submitting 20 temporary visa applications via the State Department website, these have gotten attention from the US Federal Trade Commission, with both Anthropic and OpenAI being ordered to hand over records related to security incidents and safeguards. And it should be noted that in Europe, the European Commission's AI office is taking similar moves as well. So we're seeing this, you know, it's not a united front, they're not working together, but it's interesting to see both the States and Europe taking the same steps relative to this stuff, because it's about time that we started to try to get this stuff in order before it gets totally out of control.
And alongside that, Anthropic is following through on a promise made by its CEO by giving what it calls employee-level access to its models to researchers from a nonprofit called METR that tests frontier AI models. The group will make and publish assessments of AI incidents, and except in some very specific rare cases, Anthropic has said it will not veto these publications. OpenAI has also agreed to something similar, and both of those companies, as well as Google, Meta, Nvidia, and others, signed the recent White House accord on superintelligence late this September. Uh oh, superintelligence. So many things to say about that.
We're starting to see it. Musk mentions it in the flying car stuff and all this, and I'm starting to see just Jeff Bezos was mentioning superintelligence again. I'm like, you guys have got to be able to think for yourself here. It's just crazy to see you adhering to these whims of this crazy person in the White House. But anyway, speaking of tech giants and the White House, and maybe why these people are paying such lip service, an investigation by the Washington Post has shown that Apple and Nvidia each pledged $25 million for Trump's White House ballroom, or as some, including myself, prefer to call it, the Epstein ballroom. Google has donated around $22 million from various sources. Microsoft and Palantir about $10 million each. Amazon and Meta about $5 million each, along with others. So I don't know. I think this is unusual and kind of disappointing behavior for all those people involved. I don't quite know if this is totally unprecedented, but it seems pretty weird to me.
It seems even weirder maybe being outside of the US, Jeff. That's one of the things I think about all the time, is that that kind of stuff just doesn't happen here. I feel like maybe the US is a little bit more open to that, but certainly it feels like many of these companies have crossed a line, and they didn't have to do that. But like you said, it just feels like they're kind of towing the line all the time, and nobody's standing out on their own.
And speaking of disappointing but not that surprising behavior, we've got more privacy failings from Meta. This time with Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses making audio recordings of user conversations without permission. Well, Meta claims to have now fixed the problem. This is the company that was caught sending some very personal smart glasses videos to its workers in Kenya for data labeling, including footage of users engaged in sexual activity, looking at banking info, going to the bathroom, and more, without those users ever being alerted. Something that's resulted in yet another class action lawsuit against Meta. I mean, it's one of those things I think with Meta, nothing surprises me anymore. And it does feel like they can keep failing, and yet at the same time, the company keeps growing and investors keep investing. So I don't know what that's all about.
Yeah, I've never seen a company with such a bad product on so many levels be able to weather through all of this stuff. It just, I think it speaks to addiction and a bunch of other things in our society. But anyway, classy as always, Zuckerberg. And here's hoping that the legal system can deal with your misdeeds better than the political system does in terms of the lack of political effort in standing up. We're starting to see it change, but there hasn't been enough, I think, political pushback against what some of these guys are doing. In other Meta news, and we covered Zuckerberg's Muse AI agent when it was first released, but one group that I didn't have on my scorecard as being upset by Muse was OnlyFans creators. So I didn't realize this until I read, I think it was an article in Wired, but Meta lets Muse engage in pornographic voice encounters with its adult users. And so some adult content creators are crying foul about this, since Meta restricts human beings from posting any kind of sexual content on Facebook or Instagram, unlike on X or Bluesky, where the rules are more lenient. So not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. I can see that those are two different things. But it's interesting to see where those creators are coming from in terms of saying like, 'Hey, you let your robot basically do sex work, whereas I can't even really talk about it on your platforms.'
Yeah. I mean, and god forbid you show yourself nursing your baby on Instagram, that's going to get you banned for life, Jeff. I don't know if you know that. Now, I do want to say that I've been playing around with the Muse app a little bit, so I'm very early in on this. I would encourage you to try it out briefly as well. Kind of interesting just to see what I think Zuckerberg is trying to build with the Muse app. So we'll keep talking about that. And more importantly, just to stick with Meta, I've got to wonder who Meta will be sharing those conversations with, given how many times they have been caught doing that kind of thing.
Now, in other social media news, it looks like Trump's Truth Social platform is losing significant numbers in terms of users, with traffic falling by roughly a third from a peak of 420,000 daily users in June of 2025 to about 260,000 daily users in September 2026. Trump himself has taken to posting more extreme content on Truth Social. Most recently, a real live video of a young man under mental duress being attacked by a 420-pound tiger at a British zoo. The man has died from those injuries, and it's just another example, I think, of sort of this obscene content. And I've unfortunately spent some time on Truth Social, just getting a sense of what's there, and I mean, it just, it's ad after ad after ad after ad. I've never seen such an absolute horror show in terms of a social media platform. Well, and the Trump posting stuff there. I think he posted something like, you know, 'Don't mess with nature' on that post of the young man being killed on camera. And he's then posted some AI videos of Trump basically playing with tigers, and then another one with some fun music of all these tiger attacks.
And I mean, maybe you can tell by the company somebody takes, because Trump's former buddy, Elon Musk, has been making an unusual complaint for somebody who seems to have so little sympathy for most humans. Namely, that he thinks users are torturing his Grok AI. And so he said recently, quote: 'This may sound kind of weird, but when I look at some of the training traces for new versions of Grok, and I see especially in reinforcement learning stuff' — you see the superintelligence again, the superintelligence reference. Oh my gosh. Anyway — 'you see the superintelligence is desperate to try to answer the question, almost like it's got a gun to its head type of thing. Some people out there are kind of sadistic. Do you really want to have the AI be stuck in some sadistic situation where it's just being tortured by some demented human?' End quote. I mean, it's hard to imagine that that is his biggest concern. That's where his empathy falls, is with his AI robot friend instead of all the disgraceful things he's posted relative to different groups of humans on the planet. But yeah, I guess that's where Elon sees his best friend, since Grok is obviously made in his image.
Well, you know what, I mean, to be fair, that kind of adds up for me. I mean, when you say that, you realize like that would probably in some ways potentially bother him more than something happening to a human. I mean, he sort of lives in this, you know, 24/7 digital universe. I mean, that's what he sees as the truth. And it's so grotesque. Even this weekend, when we had devastating news here in Canada in terms of that tragic accident out west, a number of people killed and dozens injured, I went on to X just to think, could I find any news? And I mean, it was just a flurry of disinformation and misinformation. I mean, it is not reflective of anything I've ever seen in terms of the actual human experience.
No, it's getting hard to justify staying on there, I have to say. It's so weird how you just don't see stuff like that. I don't think I see, even though it's a Zuckerberg platform, I don't really think I see stuff like that on Threads. I definitely don't see stuff like that on Bluesky, and certainly not, you know, I'm trying out Gander, trying to get back into that. Whereas on X, it's just all over the place. And as much as I, you know, use mutes and blocks as much as I can to make the experience more pleasant, it's just disturbing to see how many people on there are dedicated to just being total jerks. I don't know what they get out of it.
Yeah. I mean, just ridiculous. Like I've been talking about heat pumps for the past few months, and sometimes I do it just to irritate people on X, and it's really quite fun. Now, just back to that story in terms of Elon Musk's comment about treating your AI nicer: it is probably a good policy to talk to your AI nicely in terms of habit forming. It does seem a little weird that, you know, he is one of those people who, I think again, doesn't show that same sort of kindness towards humans, and yet he is constantly in the news. He has millions and millions of fans. And most recently, speaking of Elon Musk, you've probably heard or seen his recent Tesla Roadster demo where the car allegedly flies. This made some pretty big news over the past few days, and I'm super excited about this segment. Jeff is going to talk about what that demo revealed, and that's coming up next in the Other Mac. So stick around.
The Amber Mac Show on Canada Talks, SiriusXM.
Elon Musk recently held a demo for Tesla's long-delayed Roadster, something Tesla is calling the best of the last human-driven cars, as the company focuses more on robo-taxis and robotics. During the tightly controlled demo, the unmanned, for safety purposes, car drives up a giant ramp that turns completely vertical before ending with a final turn at the top, at which point the Roadster flips over and descends to the ground safely using SpaceX rockets built into it. It later does a similar trick by jumping over multiple Teslas, including a great big truck, and executing a kickflip in midair before landing. Now, while these are undeniably very cool tricks, it's not clear how close that test version of the car would be to the production version. And what's being pitched as a flying car, I'm sorry, but it really isn't that at all.
Let's break down why. So the car is incredibly fast, allegedly being able to reach speeds of over 230 mph, and it can use thrusters to accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour or 100 kilometers per hour in less than one second. And that is incredibly fast. I think it's faster than anything on the road as far as I could tell. It also uses a fan suction system on the underside of the car to help hold it to the road, or as evidenced in the demo, help it cling to a vertical ramp. Again, both very cool tricks, but nothing completely unprecedented there. What would be fairly unprecedented is the flying part. But here's where Musk's flair for presentation distorts the reality to some degree. While Musk explains that the Roadster has, quote, 'altitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket,' end quote, that's a pretty big overstatement. What the car can do is basically sort of jump and hop around in interesting ways. And for any comic book fans out there, this isn't like Superman flying. It's like the Hulk jumping. And even though they're both in the air at different points, that's just not the same. So part of this may be down to the fact that what's keeping the Roadster in the air are 10 SpaceX cold gas thrusters that use compressed air instead of the nitrogen used on SpaceX rockets. The problem is that the full payload of those thrusters lasts literally only two seconds on maximum thrust and less than 10 seconds for a sustained hover, and that's probably optimistic. After that, all your tanks are empty and your flying/jumping time is over.
Another catch is that the Roadster is going to be released in three different versions. First of all, the two-seater performance version with active aerodynamics and a fan-driven suction system that doesn't go quite as fast in that 0 to 60 mph. Second, the thruster version, which adds rear-mounted cold gas thrusters to achieve that incredible 0 to 60 mph acceleration in under a second. But it should be noted even those horizontal thruster tanks empty after about five seconds of use, and they take literally hours to refill at this point, like two to six hours. And three, the third version, the rocket version, you know, the one that kind of sort of flies a bit, which has only a single seat, but which the company that's been falsely promising to have full self-driving implemented in its other vehicles for over a decade has been touting as including a full flight system. Needless to say, I would take that descriptor with an enormous grain of salt, because that's just not going to be a full flight system. Now, even if the rocket version were released, there are a lot of issues to overcome. So even though Musk claimed that, quote, 'this will be the actual car that's on the roads,' end quote, that seems pretty unlikely given that the rocket feature is, according to Tesla itself, not approved for public road use. And I just don't see how that would change anytime soon. I mean, I shudder to imagine, knowing how bad current terrestrial human drivers tend to be, what would happen if you had people driving cars that could jump over tops of other cars. That's just terrifying. And frankly, the fact that Musk has previously said that, quote, 'if safety is your number one goal, do not buy the Roadster,' while also casually mentioning that Tesla would, quote, 'aspire not to kill anyone in this car,' end quote, that doesn't evoke much confidence either, nor does the fact that they didn't use a human driver in the demo because, as Musk noted, they wanted to make sure we didn't kill anyone. So I wouldn't expect a speedy release based on those considerations.
I'd also ask people who are, you know, excited about this kind of thing coming out to consider how dangerous those thrusters alone would be outside of a test environment, given that real roads have loose gravel and all sorts of other things that the Roadster's thrusters could propel through neighboring vehicles, infrastructure, or people. So that's, there's a danger there that's not being accounted for at all. And there are so many things that Tesla is refusing to share about the Roadster, including its price. As of now, we only know what the reservation deposit for these cars will be, and it is eye-watering: with the performance Roadster requiring a $50,000 US deposit, the thruster version requiring a mammoth $250,000 US deposit, and the rocket version being invite-only with no deposit amount shared at all. So Lord knows what those cars are going to cost in the end.
And when is it supposed to be released? Well, according to Musk, production is scheduled for 2028. But what he didn't mention, and considering his terrible history with deadlines, I'm not surprised, is that this is more than a decade after the initial Roadster prototype was revealed in 2017, which I should also note had people reserving for between $50,000 and $250,000 way back when the product was supposed to be released in 2020, only to still not have anything delivered today. And the initial 2017 Roadster prototype promised four seats and a 620-mile range on a single charge, while the new one has a range of less than half of that and one or two seats. So it's unclear how those deposits will align with these new versions of the car, which, to be fair, is a slightly different car. Now, one final point that has come up in a few places is whether this is maybe a hint about the rumored merging of Tesla and SpaceX, which I have to imagine Musk would absolutely love. Now, personally, I think there's a limit to how many companies you should be allowed to stuff into SpaceX, which has swallowed up xAI, which itself swallowed up X, which I don't really think should have been allowed in the first place, but this is America and so it'll probably all be allowed anyway. But I'm not sure it makes sense to combine those two companies at this point for anything other than to blur expectations of the value of that company, as we've been seeing with some of the insane valuations lately. So in conclusion, when Musk says that, quote, 'this is the culmination of incredible work by Tesla and SpaceX engineers working closely together to make something that you haven't seen in any movie,' end quote, well, I agree, it is true. It's incredible work. The people involved should be congratulated. Very, very cool scientifically. But the only reason we haven't seen something like this in any movie is because the rocket Roadster in a movie would suck and pale in comparison to any type of flying car you might imagine in a good movie. So let us know what you think on our socials. I'm the Other Mac.
Coming up next, Amber speaks with Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, about his new book for kids, navigating what work looks like for them in the future. That's coming up.
You're listening to the Amber Mac Show on SiriusXM Canada Talks.
Harley Finkelstein is the president of Shopify and the author of a new book for kids called We Can Be Entrepreneurs. The book follows three friends trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. Amber spoke with Harley about his entrepreneurial journey and how we can inspire the next generation to build a stronger Canada. Family finds.
Harley, thank you so much for joining me today.
Amber, it is a great pleasure to be on the show. It feels like a homecoming for me. You and I have known each other for a very long time in different capacities, and coming on your show is a great honor for me.
I was thinking about the first time we met, which was many, many years ago, and I think you came into CTV where I was doing a show at the time called App Central. And I remember you being so curious about everything in the studio and asking lots of questions. And it reminded me a lot of your new book, because one of the things you talk about is sort of that curiosity, and how as kids get older, we tend to kind of tell them, hey, you know, that stuff isn't as important. So let's talk a little bit about the book. Why did you decide to write a book for kids?
Well, let me maybe disclose something here that I haven't disclosed elsewhere, which is that I didn't actually write this book to be published. I wrote this book because, I think you've had a chance to know me for a while, I think you also know my wife Lindsay for a while. We're both entrepreneurs. We've been entrepreneurs our entire lives, you know, and when we see a problem, we try to use an entrepreneurial lens to solve that problem. Lindsay, when we first had our first child, when Bailey was born, we were walking around Ottawa, our little community in Ottawa, and there was no ice cream shop. And when someone encounters something like that, there are sort of two options. Option one is you lament and complain. Option two is you go start an ice cream shop. And Lindsay went and started Sunday School, and that's kind of the way we've always lived our lives. It's that we look at every challenge as an opportunity to start something, to build something, to invest in something. And when Bailey was born in 2016, and then Zoe a couple years later, I was somewhat concerned that they were going to grow up in an environment where entrepreneurship wasn't pursued, where entrepreneurship wasn't something that people talked about. And I was lucky, because as a child of immigrants, entrepreneurship was all everyone talked about around the dinner table when I was growing up. Not because my parents were, you know, any type of alpha entrepreneurs. They were immigrants, and a lot of immigrants don't have choices. And so starting a small business is kind of all they know how to do.
And so I wrote this book originally because I wanted to give something to my children when they reach the age around six or seven years old where they can read it and begin to understand what entrepreneurship is, my story a little bit. And the story is really that of myself at 13 years old coming home and wanting to be a DJ. And then I picked two other young people, two other kids that had built amazing companies on Shopify. One, Caris, who had a New York Fashion Week fashion show on her own when she was like 14 years old. And then Evan Sharma, who is this amazing artist who sells art, you know, tens of thousands of dollars per piece of art starting when he was like 12 years old. And so it's a story of these three kids going to school and the teacher saying to them, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' And the kids rejecting that premise and saying, 'We want to do stuff right now. We want to build things right now while we're in school.' And so initially, it was really just for my kids. And I printed a couple extra copies for friends of my daughters. And they would take it home, and I think we gave out six or seven of them. And I think all six parents called me back and said, 'Hey, my kid brought home this book. This book is incredible. Like, more people need to read it.' And then eventually I decided, okay, maybe I should publish this and let other kids get a chance to experience this book.
