Machines Like Us

The Globe and Mail
  • 4,5 (11)
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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. Big Tech Hijacked Our Attention. Chris Hayes Wants To Win It Back.

    25 DE FEV.

    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.

    30min
  2. New Spyware Has Made Your Phone Less Secure Than You Might Think

    11 DE FEV.

    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.

    36min
  3. A Computer Scientist Answers Your Questions About AI

    28 DE JAN.

    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.

    50min

  4. 20 DE JAN.

    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!

    1min
  5. This Mother Says a Chatbot Led to Her Son’s Death

    14 DE JAN.

    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.

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

    31/12/2024

    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.

    27min
  7. AI Has Mastered Chess, Poker and Go. So Why Do We Keep Playing?

    17/12/2024

    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.

    36min
  8. How Silicon Valley Monopolized Our Imagination

    03/12/2024

    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.

    46min
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Sobre

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.

Informações

  • Canal
    The Globe and Mail
  • Criado por
    The Globe and Mail
  • Anos de atividade
    2019 - 2025
  • Episódios
    25
  • Classificação
    Livre
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 The Globe and Mail Inc. All rights reserved.
  • Site do podcast
    Machines Like Us

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