At Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, the returning president made a striking break from tradition. The seats closest to the president – typically reserved for family – went instead to the most powerful tech CEOs in the world: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai. Between them, these men run some of the most profitable companies in history. And over the past two decades, they’ve used that wealth to reshape our public sphere.But this felt different. This wasn’t discreet backdoor lobbying or a furtive effort to curry favour with an incoming administration. These were some of the most influential men in the world quite literally aligning themselves with the world’s most powerful politician – and his increasingly illiberal ideology.Carole Cadwalladr has been tracking the collision of technology and politics for years. She’s the investigative journalist who broke the Cambridge Analytica story, exposing how Facebook data may have been used to manipulate elections. Now, she’s arguing that what we’re witnessing goes beyond monopoly power or even traditional oligarchy. She calls it techno-authoritarianism – a fusion of Trump’s authoritarian political project with the technological might of Silicon Valley.So I wanted to have her on to make the case for why she believes Big Tech isn’t just complicit in authoritarianism, but is actively enabling it.Mentioned:The First Great Disruption 2016-2024, by Carole CadwalladrTrump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans, by Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik (New York Times)This is What a Digital Coup Looks Like, by Carole Cadwalladr (TED)The Nerve NewsMachines Like Us is produced by Mitchell Stuart. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Video editing by Emily Graves. Our executive producer is James Milward. Special thanks to Angela Pacienza and the team at The Globe and Mail.Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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AI Music is Everywhere. Is it Legal?
AI art is everywhere now. According to the music streaming platform Deezer, 18 per cent of the songs being uploaded to the site are AI-generated. Some of this stuff is genuinely cool and original – the kind of work that makes you rethink what art is, or what it could become.But there are also songs that sound like Drake, cartoons that look like The Simpsons, and stories that read like Game of Thrones. In other words, AI-generated work that’s clearly riffing on – or outright mimicking – other people’s art. Art that, in most of the world, is protected by copyright law. Which raises an obvious question: how is any of this legal?The AI companies claim they’re allowed to train their models on this work without paying for it, thanks to the “fair use” exception in American copyright law. But Ed Newton Rex has a different view: he says it’s theft.Newton Rex is a classical music composer who spent the better part of a decade building an AI music generator for a company called Stability AI. But when he realized the company – and most of the AI industry – didn’t intend to license the work they were training their models on, he quit. He has been on a mission to get the industry to fairly compensate creators ever since. I invited him on the show to explain why he believes this is theft at an industrial scale – and what it means for the human experience when most of our art isn’t made by humans anymore, but by machines.Mentioned:Copyright and Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI Training, by the United States Copyright OfficeA.I. Is Coming for Culture, by Josha Rothman (The New Yorker)Machines Like Us is produced by Mitchell Stuart. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Host direction by Athena Karkanis. Video editing by Emily Graves. Our executive producer is James Milward. Special thanks to Angela Pacienza and the team at The Globe and Mail. Media sourced from BBC News.Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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1:02:33
Geoffrey Hinton vs. The End of the World
The story of how Geoffrey Hinton became “the godfather of AI” has reached mythic status in the tech world.While he was at the University of Toronto, Hinton pioneered the neural network research that would become the backbone of modern AI. (One of his students, Ilya Sutskever, went on to be one of OpenAI’s most influential scientific minds.) In 2013, Hinton left the academy and went to work for Google, eventually winning both a Turing Award and a Nobel Prize.I think it’s fair to say that artificial intelligence as we know it, may not exist without Geoffrey Hinton.But Hinton may be even more famous for what he did next. In 2023, he left Google and began a campaign to convince governments, corporations and citizens that his life’s work – this thing he helped build – might lead to our collective extinction. And that moment may be closer than we think, because Hinton believes AI may already be conscious.But even though his warnings are getting more dire by the day, the AI industry is only getting bigger, and most governments, including Canada’s, seem reluctant to get in the way.So I wanted to ask Hinton: If we keep going down this path, what will become of us?Mentioned:If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate SoaresAgentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats, by AnthropicMachines Like Us is produced by Mitchell Stuart. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Video editing by Emily Graves. Our executive producer is James Milward. Special thanks to Angela Pacienza and the team at The Globe and Mail.Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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AI is Upending Higher Education. Is That a Bad Thing?
Just two months after ChatGPT was launched in 2022, a survey found that 90 per cent of college students were already using it. I’d be shocked if that number wasn’t closer to 100 per cent by now.Students aren’t just using artificial intelligence to write their essays. They’re using it to generate ideas, conduct research, and summarize their readings. In other words: they’re using it to think for them. Or, as New York Magazine recently put it: “everyone is cheating their way through college.”University administrators seem paralyzed in the face of this. Some worry that if we ban tools like ChatGPT, we may leave students unprepared for a world where everyone is already using them. But others think that if we go all in on AI, we could end up with a generation capable of producing work – but not necessarily original thought.I’m honestly not sure which camp I fall into, so I wanted to talk to two people with very different perspectives on this.Conor Grennan is the Chief AI Architect at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where he’s helping students and educators embrace AI. And Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at Stanford and Harvard, and the co-founder of the University of Austin. Lately, he’s been making the opposite argument: that if universities are to survive, they largely need to ban AI from the classroom. Whichever path we take, the consequences will be profound. Because this isn’t just about how we teach and how we learn – it’s about the future of how we think.Mentioned:AI’s great brain robbery – and how universities can fight back, by Niall Ferguson (The London Times)Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College, by James D. Walsh (New York Magazine)Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, by Nataliya Kos’myna (MIT Media Lab)The Diamond Age, by Neal StephensonHow the Enlightenment Ends, by Henry A. KissingerMachines Like Us is produced by Mitchell Stuart. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Host direction by Athena Karkanis. Video editing by Emily Graves. Our executive producer is James Milward. Special thanks to Angela Pacienza and the team at the Globe & Mail.Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Jim Balsillie: ‘Canada’s Problem Isn’t Trump. Canada’s Problem Is Canada’
In the chaotic early months of his second term, Donald Trump has attacked the Canadian economy and mused about turning Canada into the “51st state.” Now, after decades of close allyship with the U.S., our relationship with America has suddenly become fraught. Which means that Canadians are now starting to ask what a more sovereign Canada might look like – a question Jim Balsillie has been thinking about for 30 years. Balsillie is the former co-CEO of Research in Motion, the company that developed the Blackberry, and is one of the most successful business people in Canada. He’s also one of the patriotic, which makes his recent criticism of our country that much more meaningful. As Balsillie has pointed out, our GDP per capita is currently about 70% of what it is in the U.S., our productivity growth has been abysmal for years, and our high cost of living means that 1 in 4 Canadians are now food insecure.But, according to Balsillie, none of this can be blamed on Trump. He thinks that over the last thirty years we’ve clung to an outdated economic model and have allowed our politics to be captured by corporate interests.So, with less than a week to go before the federal election, I thought it was the perfect time to sit down with Jim and ask him how we might build a stronger, more sovereign Canada.Mentioned:“Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS),” The World Trade Organization“Reinforcing Canada’s security and sovereignty in the Arctic,” Prime Minister of Canada“Ontario Welcomes Siemens’ $150 Million Investment to Establish New Technology Centre in Oakville,” news release from the Government of OntarioFurther Reading:“We are all economic nationalists now,” by Jim Balsillie (National Post) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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.
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