Machines Like Us

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.Mentioned:“Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster” by Charles Duhigg“Big Crypto, Big Spending: Crypto Corporations Spend an Unprecedented $119 Million Influencing Elections” by Rick Claypool via Public Citizen“I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is” by Charlie Warzel“Elon Musk Has Reached a New Low” by Charlie Warzel“The movement to diversify Silicon Valley is crumbling amid attacks on DEI” by Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Nitasha Tiku“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” by Marc Andreessen“Trump Vs. Biden: Tech Policy,” The Ben & Marc Show “The MAGA Aesthetic Is AI Slop” by Charlie WarzelFurther Reading:“Biden's FTC took on big tech, big pharma and more. What antitrust legacy will Biden leave behind?” by Paige Sutherland and Meghna Chakrabarti“Inside the Harris campaign’s blitz to win back Silicon Valley” by Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku and Elizabeth Dwoskin“The Little Tech Agenda” by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz“Silicon Valley had Harris’s back for decades. Will she return the favor?” by Cristiano Lima-Strong and Cat Zakrzewski“SEC’s Gensler turns tide against crypto in courts” by Declan Harty“Trump vs. Harris is dividing Silicon Valley into feuding political camps” by Trisha Thadani, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nitasha Tiku and Gerrit De Vynck“Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance” by Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku and Josh Dawsey

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.Mentioned:“Last Night in Montreal” by Emily St. John Mandel“Station Eleven” by Emily St. John MandelThe Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 – Lecture by Patrick Modiano“The Glass Hotel” by Emily St. John Mandel“Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John MandelSummary of the 2023 WGA MBA, Writers Guild of AmericaHer (2013)“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood“Shell Game” by Evan RatliffReplikaFurther Reading:“Can AI Companions Cure Loneliness?,” Machines Like Us“Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building it Anyway.,” Machines Like Us“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

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. Mentioned:“Personal and Psychological Dimensions of AI Researchers Confronting AI Catastrophic Risks” by Yoshua Bengio“Deep Learning” by Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing“International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI” “Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?” by R. Ren et al.“SB 1047: Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act”Further reading:“‘Deep Learning’ Guru Reveals the Future of AI” by Cade Metz“Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence” “This A.I. Subculture’s Motto: Go, Go, Go” By Kevin Roose“Reasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriously” by Yoshua Bengio

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.Mentioned:“Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers” by Gwynne Dyer“Scientists warn Earth warming faster than expected – due to reduction in ship pollution” by Nicole Mortillaro“Global warming in the pipeline” by James Hansen, et al.“Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” by Paul CrutzenFurther Reading:Interview with Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Gwynne Dyer