Machines Like Us

The Globe and Mail
Machines Like Us

Machines Like Us is a technology show about people. 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 the people shaping this rapidly approaching future. He’ll speak with entrepreneurs building world-changing technologies, lawmakers trying to ensure they’re safe, and journalists and scholars working to understand how they’re transforming our lives.

  1. AI Has Mastered Chess, Poker and Go. So Why Do We Keep Playing?

    4 DAYS AGO

    AI Has Mastered Chess, Poker and Go. So Why Do We Keep Playing?

    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 Sedol retired, saying that losing to an AI felt like his entire world was collapsing. He wasn’t alone. For a lot of people, the game represented a turning point – the moment where humans had been overtaken by machines. But Frank Lantz saw that game and was invigorated. Lantz is a game designer (his game “Hey Robot” is a recurring feature on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon), the director of the NYU game center, and the author of The Beauty of Games. He’s spent his career thinking about how technology is changing the nature of games – and what we can learn about ourselves when we sit down to play them.

    36 min
  2. How Silicon Valley Monopolized Our Imagination

    DEC 3

    How Silicon Valley Monopolized Our Imagination

    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 to be living through the kinds of technological leaps we used to only dream about. But whose dreams were those, exactly? In her latest book, Imagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin argues that our collective imagination has been monopolized by the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world. But, she says, it doesn’t need to be that way.

    46 min
  3. Margrethe Vestager Fought Big Tech and Won. Her Next Target is AI

    NOV 19

    Margrethe Vestager Fought Big Tech and Won. Her Next Target is AI

    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 attention to AI. She spearheaded the EU’s AI Act, which will be the first and, so far, most ambitious piece of AI legislation in the world. But the clock is ticking – both on her term and on the global race to govern AI, which Vestager says we have “very little time” to get right.

    35 min
  4. Bonus ‘Lately’: The Great Decline of Everything Online

    NOV 5

    Bonus ‘Lately’: The Great Decline of Everything Online

    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 different from your BFF’s. According to Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the memorable moniker, this digital decay isn’t inevitable. It’s a symptom of corporate under-regulation and monopoly – practices being challenged in courts around the world, like the US Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Google. Cory Doctorow is a British-Canadian journalist, blogger and author of Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as speculative fiction works like The Lost Cause and the new novella Spill. Every Friday, Lately takes a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day. It’s hosted by Vass Bednar. Machines Like Us will be back in two weeks.

    35 min
  5. Musk, Money and Misinformation: Tech & The U.S. Election

    OCT 22

    Musk, Money and Misinformation: Tech & The U.S. Election

    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 shifting to the right. What does all this mean for the upcoming election? To help us better understand this moment, we spoke with three of the most prominent tech writers in the U.S. Charles Duhigg (author of the bestseller Supercommunicators) has a recent piece in the New Yorker called “Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster.” Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at the Atlantic, and Nitasha Tiku is a tech culture reporter at the Washington Post.

    33 min
  6. Emily St. John Mandel Imagines The Future

    OCT 8

    Emily St. John Mandel Imagines The Future

    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 Tranquility – a story about a future where we have moon colonies and time travelling detectives. But Mandel might be best known for Station Eleven, which was made into a big HBO miniseries in 2021. In Station Eleven, Mandel envisioned a very different future. One where a pandemic has wiped out nearly everyone on the planet, and the world has returned to a pre industrial state. In other words, a world without technology. I think speculative fiction carries tremendous power. In fact, I think that AI is ultimately an act of speculation. The AI we have chosen to build, and our visions of what AI could become, have been shaped by acts of imagination. So I wanted to speak to someone who has made a career imagining other worlds, and thinking about how humans will fit into them.

    39 min
  7. Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building it Anyway.

    SEP 24

    Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building it Anyway.

    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, all in. The stage was filled with startup founders promising that AI was going to revolutionize the way we work, and government officials saying AI was going to supercharge the economy. And then there was Yoshua Bengio. Bengio is one of AI’s pioneering figures. In 2018, he and two colleagues won the Turing Award – the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize – for their work on deep learning. In 2022, he was the most cited computer scientist in the world. It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to suggest that AI as we know it today might not exist without Yoshua Bengio. But in the last couple of years, Bengio has had an epiphany of sorts. And he now believes that, left unchecked, AI has the potential to wipe out humanity. So these days, he’s dedicated himself to AI safety. He’s a professor at the University of Montreal and the founder of MILA - the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.  And he was at this big AI conference too, amidst all these Silicon Valley types, pleading with the industry to slow down before it’s too late.

    42 min
  8. There’s a Way to Cool the Planet. Scientists are Terrified of It.

    SEP 10

    There’s a Way to Cool the Planet. Scientists are Terrified of It.

    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 paying attention to climate change, the pace of our action is radically out of step with the severity of the problem. What is becoming increasingly clear is that just cutting our emissions – by switching to clean energy or driving electric cars – will not be sufficient. We will also need some bold technological solutions if we want to maintain some semblance of life as we know it. Luckily, everything is on the table. Grinding entire mountains into powder and dumping them into oceans. Sucking carbon directly out of the air and burying it underground. Spraying millions of tons of sulphur dioxide directly into the atmosphere. Gwynne Dyer has spent the past four years interviewing the world’s leading climate scientists about the moonshots that could save the planet. Dyer is a journalist and historian who has written a dozen books over his career, and has become one of Canada’s most trusted commentators on war and geopolitics. But his latest book, Intervention Earth, is about the battle to save the planet. Like any reporting on the climate, it’s inevitably a little depressing. But with this book Dyer has also given us a different way of thinking about the climate crisis – and maybe even a road map for how technology could help us avoid our own destruction.

    44 min
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4.5
out of 5
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About

Machines Like Us is a technology show about people. 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 the people shaping this rapidly approaching future. He’ll speak with entrepreneurs building world-changing technologies, lawmakers trying to ensure they’re safe, and journalists and scholars working to understand how they’re transforming our lives.

Information

  • Channel
    The Globe and Mail
  • Creator
    The Globe and Mail
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2024
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 The Globe and Mail Inc. All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Machines Like Us

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