Machines Like Us

Human beings have always loved to gamble. Archeological records suggest we’ve been doing it for the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. But for as long as we’ve been playing games of chance, we’ve worried about what they might be doing to us. For thousands of years, everyone from Aristotle to George Washington condemned gambling, an ancient anxiety that ran so deep it became something like a moral consensus.

And then that consensus evaporated. In the span of a decade, both Canada and the US legalized sports betting. Now anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can wager on basketball, hockey, or American cornhole.

But it turned out that was just the beginning. A few years later came “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket that let you bet on, well, just about anything: whether the US will invade Cuba, the odds of James Comey being sent to prison, and whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027. That last one, by the way, is currently sitting at 3 per cent on Polymarket.

If betting on missile strikes, military coups, and political prosecutions feels kind of gross, I’m with you. But James Surowiecki thinks we should give prediction markets a chance. Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a book he wrote more than 20 years ago, where he argued that large groups of ordinary people are actually better than experts at making predictions. It’s become something of a foundational text for these markets: the idea that they can crowdsource knowledge, aggregate what millions of people believe about the future, and use that signal to make better decisions. So I wanted to have James on to make the case for prediction markets, and to see if he could make me feel just a little less squeamish about a world where you can gamble on everything.

Mentioned

The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 2004). 

Francis Galton, “Vox Populi,” Nature 75 (1907): 450–451 — the–ox-weighing experiment.

The 1986 Challenger disaster and Morton Thiokol’s stock: Maloney & Mulherin, “The complexity of price discovery in an efficient market,” Journal of Financial Economics (2003). 

Kalshi (prediction market platform).

Polymarket (prediction market platform).

The 2024 “French whale” (Théo), who used neighbour polls to bet roughly $85M on a Trump win — CBS–News / 60 Minutes.

The Polymarket trader’s well-timed bets on the June 2025 US strikes on Iran — CNN–

The market on the length of a Karoline Leavitt White House briefing

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and the earnings-call “mention markets” — Tec–Crunch.

The market on Maduro’s removal and the ~$400K Venezuela payout — PBS–NewsHour.

The Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral market — DL –ews.

The market on Bad Bunny’s first Super Bowl LX song — Pol–market.

DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market (the “terrorism futures” proposal, cancelled after backlash in 2003) — CNN–(2003).

The 1979 Iranian Revolution as a US intelligence failure — Nat–onal Security Archive, George Washington University.

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Towards the end of last year, Australia did something no other country had ever tried: it banned social media for kids under 16. And a bunch of others are following with similar laws, first Denmark, then France, then Indonesia and Austria. All in, there are now more than 25 countries that have either implemented, or are actively considering, social media bans for kids. It seems like Canada is moving there as well. In April, the Liberal party adopted a non-binding motion to restrict young people’s access to both social media and AI chatbots.

All over the world, you can hear parents breathing a sigh of relief. They’ve spent the last decade watching their kids become hooked on their devices, and now we’re doing something about it. It looks like we’re finally going to get our kids back.

But researchers like Candice Odgers are skeptical. Odgers is a psychology professor at UC Irvine who’s been studying the digital lives of young people for almost 20 years now, long before anyone was worried about what social media was doing to their brains. She says there isn’t really any research to suggest these bans will work. But her argument goes even deeper than that: she says the idea that smartphones have caused a youth mental health crisis just isn’t supported by the evidence.

So as governments all over the world start to kick kids off social media, and maybe even AI chatbots as well, Candice Odgers thinks we’re making a serious mistake. And I want to know if she’s right.

Mentioned

The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Press, 2024). 

Australia’s under-16 social media ban — the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, in effect 10 December 2025 — eSafety Commissioner.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Social Media and Adolescent Health” (2024).

Hunt Allcott et al., “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” NBER (2026) — near-zero effects on test scores, attendance, and bullying.

The University of Manchester #BeeWell study finding no link between social media/gaming use and later anxiety or depression, Journal of Public Health (2026).

“The Kids Are All Right,” Scientific American (2026) — young people doing better than prior generations on many metrics.

The Stanford-led evaluation of Australia’s ban (Stanford Social Media Lab with the eSafety Commission), finding most teens stayed on the platforms — The Conversation.

The early-1980s Pac-Man moral panic (Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s 1982 warning; municipal moves to restrict arcades) — Freethink.

Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230) — Cornell Legal Information Institute

Canada’s Gen(Z)AI youth assembly on AI (~100 young Canadians aged 17–23), Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, findings presented in Ottawa.

Machines Like Us is hosted by Taylor Owen, produced by Paradigms, and distributed by The Globe and Mail.

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The people running technology companies love to make wild predictions about the future. They’ve told us that artificial intelligence will cure cancer, eliminate drudgery and solve climate change. But those utopian visions have yet to materialize. Where are the revolutionary moonshots we’ve been promised?

Aza Raskin may well have one. Raskin is the president of the Center for Humane Technology and the co-founder of the Earth Species Project, a non-profit using machine learning to decode animal communication.

Raskin and his colleagues are envisioning a world where birds can vote and dolphins get to represent themselves in court. That might sound hard to believe – but Raskin says they’re not far from making it a reality.

So I wanted to ask him: what happens to our world – and to us – when animals have the right to speak?

Recordings courtesy of Dr. Vittorio Baglione and Dr. Daniela Canestrari (University of León), Logan James and McGill University, and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

Machines Like Us will return on June 9th. 

Mentioned

My Octopus Teacher (2020), directed by Pippa Ehrlich & James Reed

Unlocking Avian Secrets: How Tiny Biologgers Are Revealing the Hidden Communication of Carrion Crows, by Earth Species Project

AI-powered playbacks engage in flexible vocal interactions with zebra finches, by Logan S. James et al.

Decoding Killer Whale Communication From Above and Below, by Earth Species Project

Innovative Behaviours and Synchronization in Bottlenose Dolphins, by Stacy Braslau-Schneck

What the World Thinks About AI and Animal Communication: Findings from Our First Global Survey, by Earth Species Project

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When Prime Minister Mark Carney took the floor at the recent Liberal convention, he described a future where AI benefits all Canadians – not just a lucky few.

It’s an optimistic vision. But according to political theorist Hélène Landemore and democratic innovator Peter MacLeod, our current political system just isn’t capable of delivering on it. Instead, Landemore, a Yale professor and the author of Politics Without Politicians, argues that ordinary citizens – not politicians – should be the ones calling the shots. MacLeod has spent more than twenty years putting that idea into practice in Canada. His new book is Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs The Public.

Our conversation isn’t really about artificial intelligence. But it is about whether our current form of politics is capable of governing it – or whether a radical new technology demands an equally radical form of governance.

Mentioned:

Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule, Hélène Landemore

Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, Hélène Landemore

Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public, Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson

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Four years ago, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine went public with a strange claim: he thought the large language model he’d been working on had become sentient. At the time, virtually no one took him seriously. (Including, it would seem, Google, who promptly fired him). But lately, it’s started to seem like Lemoine might have been on to something.

When I interviewed Geoffrey Hinton last year, he was pretty confident that artificial intelligence was already exhibiting signs of sentience. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that he can’t be sure that his chatbot, Claude, isn’t conscious.

But what exactly does that mean? A chatbot may be intelligent, but does it have a sense of self? And what would happen if it did?

These are the kinds of strange, mind-bending questions Michael Pollan wrestles with in his new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

It’s the kind of book that raises more questions than it answers. But as Silicon Valley continues to flirt with the idea of building artificial consciousness – of designing machines that don’t just think, but feel – these are the kinds of questions we should probably start asking.

Mentioned:

A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan

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