Machines Like Us

The Globe and Mail
  • 4.5（11則評分）
  • 科技
  • 每週更新
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. How Do You Report the News in a Post-Truth World?

    5 天前

    How Do You Report the News in a Post-Truth World?

    If you’re having a conversation about the state of journalism, it’s bound to get a little depressing. Since 2008, more than 250 local news outlets have closed down in Canada. The U.S. has lost a third of the newspapers they had in 2005. But this is about more than a failing business model. Only 31 percent of Americans say they trust the media. In Canada, that number is a little bit better – but only a little. The problem is not just that people are losing their faith in journalism. It’s that they’re starting to place their trust in other, often more dubious sources of information: TikTok influencers, Elon Musk’s X feed, and The Joe Rogan Experience. The impact of this shift can be seen almost everywhere you look. 15 percent of Americans believe climate change is a hoax. 30 percent believe the 2020 election was stolen. 10 percent believe the earth is flat. A lot of this can be blamed on social media, which crippled journalism's business model and led to a flourishing of false information online. But not all of it. People like Jay Rosen have long argued that journalists themselves are at least partly responsible for the post-truth moment we now find ourselves in. Rosen is a professor of journalism at NYU who’s been studying, critiquing, and really shaping, the press for nearly 40 years. He joined me a couple of weeks ago at the Attention conference in Montreal to explain how we got to this place – and where we might go from here. A note: we recorded this interview before the Canadian election was called, so we don’t touch on it here. But over the course of the next month, the integrity of our information ecosystem will face an inordinate amount of stress, and conversations like this one will be more important than ever.

    37 分鐘
  2. A Chinese Company Upended OpenAI. We May Be Looking at the Story All Wrong.

    3月11日

    A Chinese Company Upended OpenAI. We May Be Looking at the Story All Wrong.

    When the American company OpenAI released ChatGPT, it was the first time that a lot of people had ever interacted with Generative AI. ChatGPT has become so popular that, for many, it’s now synonymous with artificial intelligence. But that may be changing. Earlier this year a Chinese startup called DeepSeek launched its own AI chatbot, sending shockwaves across Silicon Valley. According to DeepSeek, their model – DeepSeek-R1 – is just as powerful as ChatGPT but was developed at a fraction of the cost. In other words, this isn’t just a new company, it could be an entirely different approach to building artificial intelligence. To try and understand what DeepSeek means for the future of AI, and for American innovation, I wanted to speak with Karen Hao. Hao was the first reporter to ever write a profile on OpenAI and has covered AI for The MIT Tech Review, The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. So she’s better positioned than almost anyone to try and make sense of this seemingly monumental shift in the landscape of artificial intelligence.

    40 分鐘
  3. Big Tech Hijacked Our Attention. Chris Hayes Wants To Win It Back.

    2月25日

    Big Tech Hijacked Our Attention. Chris Hayes Wants To Win It Back.

    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 like Donald Trump have figured out how to exploit this dynamic. If you’re constantly saying outrageous things, it becomes almost impossible to focus on the things that really matter. Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon called this strategy “flooding the zone.” As the host of the MSNBC show All In, Chris Hayes has had a front-row seat to the war for our attention – and, now, he’s decided to sound the alarm with a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Hayes joined me to explain how our attention became so scarce, and what happens to us when we lose the ability to focus on the things that matter most.

    30 分鐘
  4. New Spyware Has Made Your Phone Less Secure Than You Might Think

    2月11日

    New Spyware Has Made Your Phone Less Secure Than You Might Think

    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 Pegasus, a surveillance tool developed by an Israeli company called NSO Group. Once Pegasus infects your phone, it can see your texts, track your movement, and download your passwords – all without you realizing you’d been hacked. We know a lot of this because of Ron Deibert. Twenty years ago, he founded Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that has helped expose some of the most high profile cases of cyber espionage around the world. Ron has a new book out called Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy, and he sat down with me to explain how spyware works, and what it means for our privacy – and our democracy.

    36 分鐘
  5. A Computer Scientist Answers Your Questions About AI

    1月28日

    A Computer Scientist Answers Your Questions About AI

    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. Where do our queries go once they’ve been fed into ChatGPT? What are the justifications for using a chatbot that may have been trained on plagiarized material? And why do we even need AI in the first place? To help answer your questions, we are joined by Derek Ruths, a Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, and the best person I know at helping people (including myself) understand artificial intelligence.

    50 分鐘

  6. 1月20日

    Questions About AI? We Want to Hear Them

    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 Computer Science at McGill University. And he's given me permission to ask him anything and everything about AI. If you have questions about AI or how it’s affecting your life, we want to hear them. Send an email or a voice recording to: machineslikeus@paradigms.tech Thanks – and we’ll see you next Tuesday!

    1 分鐘
  7. This Mother Says a Chatbot Led to Her Son’s Death

    1月14日

    This Mother Says a Chatbot Led to Her Son’s Death

    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 the chatbot that, coupled with a lack of safeguards, ultimately led to her son’s death. They’ve also named Google in the suit, alleging that the technology that underlies Character.AI was developed while the founders were working at Google. I sat down with Megan Garcia and her lawyer, Meetali Jain, to talk about what happened to Sewell. And to try to understand the broader implications of a world where chatbots are becoming a part of our lives – and the lives of our children.

    49 分鐘
  8. Bonus ‘The Decibel’: How an algorithm missed a deadly listeria outbreak

    2024/12/31

    Bonus ‘The Decibel’: How an algorithm missed a deadly listeria outbreak

    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 traced to had not been inspected for listeria in years. The reporters learned that in 2019 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency introduced a new system that relies on an algorithm to prioritize sites for inspectors to visit. Investigative reporters Grant Robertson and Kathryn Blaze Baum talk about why this new system of tracking was created, and what went wrong.

    27 分鐘
顯示全部 (27)

預告片

主持人與來賓

4.5
（滿分 5 顆星）
11 則評分

簡介

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.

資訊

  • 頻道
    The Globe and Mail
  • 創作者
    The Globe and Mail
  • 活躍年代
    2019年 - 2025年
  • 集數
    27
  • 年齡分級
    兒少適宜
  • 版權
    © Copyright 2024 The Globe and Mail Inc. All rights reserved.
  • 節目網站
    Machines Like Us

「The Globe and Mail」的更多內容

你可能也會喜歡

若要收聽兒少不宜的單集，請登入帳號。

隨時掌握此節目最新消息

登入或註冊後，即可追蹤節目、儲存單集和掌握最新資訊。
選取國家或地區

非洲、中東和印度

亞太地區

歐洲

拉丁美洲與加勒比海地區

美國與加拿大