Terminators are REAL, Your Car is Spying on You & Google Goes Ambient with Jason Kapadia, Matt Webster and Jag Sharma - E113
Cars, glasses, maps, even humanoid cops – the tools around us are quietly turning into an environment that watches, profiles, and nudges us.
In this week’s Disconnected we trace a shift in the world which no longer serves you, but spies on your every move.
From Google’s ambient AI and car-cam reconnaissance to China’s combat-ready robots, what’s really left of privacy, agency, and work when the machines are an irreversible part of our infrastructure?
This episode of Disconnected covers:
Cars becoming lucrative data-farming platforms
Surveillance normalised through convenience and small print
AI shifting from a tool to an ambient layer of everyday life
Embodied AI and humanoid robots entering the public realm
Episode Highlights:
“Your car may already know where you go, how fast you drive, how hard you brake, whether you wear your seat belt, who is in the car with you, what music you listen to, how tired you look, your facial expressions, your body language, and potentially other aspects of your health.” - 3:05 - Jag Sharma
“We've normalised surveillance through convenience, and it always arrives disguised as something helpful… underneath it all, it's a rapidly expanding data economy.” - 4:30 - Jag Sharma
“Where there's data, there's money.” - 9:15 - Matt Webster
“You go into any retail store and there's CCTV cameras just pointing at you, anyway, I don't think you can protect your face anymore.” - 17:00 - Jason Kapadia
“I really, really think that all of the AI companies are pushing like crazy at the moment… they're building all these features at unprecedented scale.” - 26:00 - Jason Kapadia
“This is not Tesla, this is not Boston Dynamics… it's Engine AI, a Chinese robotics company that is now specialising and focusing on humanoid robots.” - 44:05 - Matt Webster
“These robots now exist in society… are they going to be used for emergency situations, are they going to be used for crowd control, and then the final big one, ground troops?” - 47:35 - Matt Webster
Links & references:
Jag Sharma:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jagsharma
https://www.instagram.com/jagsharma/
Matt Webster:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattwwebster/
Jason Kapadia: