Machines Like Us

Do I have your attention right now? I’m guessing probably not. Or, at least, not all of it. In all likelihood, you’re listening to this on your morning commute, or while you wash the dishes or check your e-mail. We are living in a world of perpetual distraction. There are more things to read, watch and listen to than ever before – but our brains, it turns out, can only absorb so much. Politicians...

It’s become pretty easy to spot phishing scams: UPS orders you never made, banking alerts from companies you don’t bank with, phone calls from unfamiliar area codes. But over the past decade, these scams – and the technology behind them – have become more sophisticated, invasive and sinister, largely due to the rise of something called ‘mercenary spyware.’ The most potent version of this tech is P...

We’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about AI : how it’s changing war, how your doctor might be using it, and whether or not chatbots are curing, or exacerbating, loneliness. But what we haven’t done on this show is try to explain how AI actually works. So this seemed like as good a time as any to ask our listeners if they had any burning questions about AI. And it turns out you did. Whe...

We spend a lot of time talking about AI on this show: how we should govern it, the ideologies of the people making it, and the ways it's reshaping our lives. But before we barrel into a year where I think AI will be everywhere, we thought this might be a good moment to step back and ask an important question: what exactly is AI?  On our next episode, we'll be joined by Derek Ruths, a Professor of...

In February, 2024, Megan Garcia’s 14-year-old son Sewell took his own life. As she tried to make sense of what happened, Megan discovered that Sewell had fallen in love with a chatbot on Character. AI – an app where you can talk to chatbots designed to sound like historical figures or fictional characters. Now Megan is suing Character. AI , alleging that Sewell developed a “harmful dependency” on...

In July, there was a recall on two brands of plant-based milks, Silk and Great Value, after a listeria outbreak that led to at least 20 illnesses and three deaths . Public health officials determined the same strain of listeria had been making people sick for almost a year. When Globe reporters began looking into what happened, they found a surprising fact: the facility that the bacteria was trace...

The board game Go has more possible board configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Because of that seemingly infinite complexity, developing software that could master Go has long been a goal of the AI community. In 2016, researchers at Google’s DeepMind appeared to meet the challenge. Their Go-playing AI defeated one of the best Go players in the world, Lee Sedol. After the match, Lee...

The past few months have seen a series of bold proclamations from the most powerful people in tech. In September, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta had developed “the most advanced glasses the world had ever seen.” That same day, Open AI CEO Sam Altman predicted we could have artificial super intelligence within a couple of years. Elon Musk has said he’ll land rockets on Mars by 2026. We appear...

Margrethe Vestager has spent the past decade standing up to Silicon Valley. As the EU’s Competition Commissioner, she’s waged landmark legal battles against tech giants like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. Her two latest wins will cost Apple and Google billions of dollars. With her decade-long tenure as one of the world’s most powerful anti-trust watchdogs coming to an end, Vestager has turned her att...

We’re off this week, so we’re bringing you an episode from our Globe and Mail sister show Lately.  That creeping feeling that everything online is getting worse has a name: “enshittification,” a term for the slow degradation of our experience on digital platforms. The enshittification cycle is why you now have to wade through slop to find anything useful on Google, and why your charger is differen...

The tech lobby has quietly turned Silicon Valley into the most powerful political operation in America.  Pro crypto donors are now responsible for almost half of all corporate donations this election. Elon Musk has gone from an occasional online troll to, as one of our guests calls him, “MAGA’s Minister of Propaganda.” And for the first time, the once reliably blue Silicon Valley seems to be shift...

What kind of future are we building for ourselves? In some ways, that’s the central question of this show. It’s also a central question of speculative fiction. And one that few people have tried to answer as thoughtfully – and as poetically – as Emily St. John Mandel. Mandel is one of Canada’s great writers. She’s the author of six award winning novels, the most recent of which is Sea of Tranquili...

A couple of weeks ago, I was at this splashy AI conference in Montreal called All In. It was – how should I say this – a bit over the top. There were smoke machines, thumping dance music, food trucks. It was a far cry from the quiet research labs where AI was developed.  While I remain skeptical of the promise of artificial intelligence, this conference made it clear that the industry is, well, al...

In 2015, 195 countries gathered in Paris to discuss how to address the climate crisis. Although there was plenty they couldn’t agree on, there was one point of near-absolute consensus: if the planet becomes 2°C hotter than it was before industrialization, the effects will be catastrophic. Despite that consensus, we have continued barrelling toward that 2°C threshold. And while the world is finally...

For nearly a year now, the world has been transfixed – and horrified – by what’s happening in the Gaza Strip. Yet for all the media coverage, there seems to be far less known about how this war is actually being fought. And the how of this conflict, and its enormous human toll, might end up being its most enduring legacy. In April, the Israeli magazine +972 published a story describing how Israel...

Things do not look good for journalism right now. This year, Bell Media, VICE, and the CBC all announced significant layoffs. In the US, there were cuts at the Washington Post, the LA Times, Vox and NPR – to name just a few. A recent study from Northwestern University found that an average of two and a half American newspapers closed down every single week in 2023 (up from two a week the year befo...

Last year, the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen published a document he called “ The Techno-Optimist Manifesto .” In it, he argued that “everything good is downstream of growth,” government regulation is bad, and that the only way to achieve real progress is through technology. Of course, Silicon Valley has always been driven by libertarian sensibilities and an optimistic view of technology. But...

If you listened to our last couple of episodes, you’ll have heard some pretty skeptical takes on AI. But if you look at the stock market right now, you won’t see any trace of that skepticism. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the chip company NVIDIA, whose chips are used in the majority of AI systems, has seen their stock shoot up by 700%. A month ago, that briefly made them the most valua...

Douglas Rushkoff has spent the last thirty years studying how digital technologies have shaped our world. The renowned media theorist is the author of twenty books, the host of the Team Human podcast, and a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at City University of New York. But when I sat down with him, he didn’t seem all that excited to be talking about AI. Instead, he suggested – I t...

It seems like the loudest voices in AI often fall into one of two groups. There are the boomers – the techno-optimists – who think that AI is going to bring us into an era of untold prosperity. And then there are the doomers, who think there’s a good chance AI is going to lead to the end of humanity as we know it. While these two camps are, in many ways, completely at odds with one another, they d...

Think about the last time you felt let down by the health care system. You probably don’t have to go back far. In wealthy countries around the world, medical systems that were once robust are now crumbling. Doctors and nurses, tasked with an ever expanding range of responsibilities, are busier than ever, which means they have less and less time for patients. In the United States, the average docto...

Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink successfully installed one of their brain implants in a 29 year old quadriplegic man named Noland Arbaugh. The device changed Arbaugh’s life. He no longer needs a mouth stylus to control his computer or play video games. Instead, he can use his mind. The brain-computer interface that Arbaugh uses is part of an emerging field known as neurotechnology...

When Eugenia Kuyda saw Her for the first time – the 2013 film about a man who falls in love with his virtual assistant – it didn’t read as science fiction. That’s because she was developing a remarkably similar technology: an AI chatbot that could function as a close friend, or even a romantic partner. That idea would eventually become the basis for Replika, Kuyda’s AI startup. Today, Replika has...

In the last few years, artificial intelligence has gone from a novelty to perhaps the most influential technology we’ve ever seen. The people building AI are convinced that it will eradicate disease, turbocharge productivity, and solve climate change. It feels like we’re on the cusp of a profound societal transformation. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling we’ve been here before. Fifteen years ago,...

We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction will become our reality: robot best friends, bespoke gene editing, brain implants that make us smarter. Every other Tuesday Taylor Owen sits down with someone shaping this rapidly approaching future. The first two episodes will be released on May 7th....