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Machines Like Us

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Fréquence : 1 épisode/16j. Total Éps: 53

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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Gaza is a Window into the Future of War

Épisode 10

mardi 27 août 2024 • Durée 41:04

For nearly a year now, the world has been transfixed – and horrified – by what’s happening in the Gaza Strip. Yet for all the media coverage, there seems to be far less known about how this war is actually being fought. And the how of this conflict, and its enormous human toll, might end up being its most enduring legacy.

In April, the Israeli magazine +972 published a story describing how Israel was using an AI system called Lavender to target potential enemies for air strikes, sometimes with a margin of error as high as 10 per cent.

I remember reading that story back in the spring and being shocked, not that such tools existed, but that they were already being used at this scale on the battlefield. P.W. Singer was less surprised. Singer is one of the world’s foremost experts on the future of warfare. He’s a strategist at the think tank New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and a consultant for everyone from the US military to the FBI.

So if anyone can help us understand the black box of autonomous weaponry and AI warfare, it’s P.W. Singer.

Mentioned:

“‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza” by Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan, and Dan Sabbagh

“‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” by Yuval Abraham

“Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War” by P. W. Singer and August Cole

Further Reading:

“Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution” by P. W. Singer and August Cole

“The AI revolution is already here” by P. W. Singer

“Humans must be held responsible for decisions AI weapons make” in The Asahi Shimbun

“Useful Fiction”

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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Why Journalism Made a Devil’s Bargain with Big Tech

Épisode 9

mardi 13 août 2024 • Durée 42:17

Things do not look good for journalism right now. This year, Bell Media, VICE, and the CBC all announced significant layoffs. In the US, there were cuts at the Washington Post, the LA Times, Vox and NPR – to name just a few. A recent study from Northwestern University found that an average of two and a half American newspapers closed down every single week in 2023 (up from two a week the year before).

One of the central reasons for this is that the advertising model that has supported journalism for more than a century has collapsed. Simply put, Google and Meta have built a better advertising machine, and they’ve crippled journalism’s business model in the process.

It wasn’t always obvious this was going to happen. Fifteen or twenty years ago, a lot of publishers were actually making deals with social media companies, thinking they were going to lead to bigger audiences and more clicks.

But these turned out to be faustian bargains. The journalism industry took a nosedive, while Google and Meta became two of the most profitable companies in the world.

And now we might be doing it all over again with a new wave of tech companies like OpenAI. Over the past several years, OpenAI, operating in a kind of legal grey area, has trained its models on news content it hasn’t paid for. While some news outlets, like the New York Times, have chosen to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement, many publishers (including The Atlantic, the Financial Times, and NewsCorp) have elected to sign deals with OpenAI instead.

Julia Angwin has been worried about the thorny relationship between big tech and journalism for years. She’s written a book about MySpace, documented the rise of big tech, and won a Pulitzer for her tech reporting with the Wall Street Journal.

She was also one of the few people warning publishers the first time around that making deals with social media companies maybe wasn’t the best idea.

Now, she’s ringing the alarm again, this time as a New York Times contributing opinion writer and the CEO of a journalism startup called Proof News that is preoccupied with the question of how to get people reliable information in the age of AI.

Introducing Machines Like Us

lundi 29 avril 2024 • Durée 02:37

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 someone shaping this rapidly approaching future. The first two episodes will be released on May 7th. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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How to Hack Democracy

Épisode 8

mardi 30 juillet 2024 • Durée 36:56

Last year, the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen published a document he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” In it, he argued that “everything good is downstream of growth,” government regulation is bad, and that the only way to achieve real progress is through technology.

Of course, Silicon Valley has always been driven by libertarian sensibilities and an optimistic view of technology. But the radical techno-optimism of people like Andreesen, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, has morphed into something more extreme. In their view, technology and government are always at odds with one another.

But if that’s true, then how do you explain someone like Audrey Tang?

Tang, who, until May of this year, was Taiwan’s first Minister of Digital Affairs, is unabashedly optimistic about technology. But she’s also a fervent believer in the power of democratic government.

To many in Silicon Valley, this is an oxymoron. But Tang doesn’t see it that way. To her, technology and government are – and have always been – symbiotic.

So I wanted to ask her what a technologically enabled democracy might look like – and she has plenty of ideas. At times, our conversation got a little bit wonky. But ultimately, this is a conversation about a better, more inclusive form of democracy. And why she thinks technology will get us there.

Just a quick note: we recorded this interview a couple of months ago, while Tang was still the Minister of Digital Affairs.

Mentions:

“vTaiwan”

“Polis”

“Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy” by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and ⿻ Community

“,” Anthropic

How AI Turbocharged the Economy (For Now)

Épisode 7

mardi 16 juillet 2024 • Durée 38:54

If you listened to our last couple of episodes, you’ll have heard some pretty skeptical takes on AI. But if you look at the stock market right now, you won’t see any trace of that skepticism. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the chip company NVIDIA, whose chips are used in the majority of AI systems, has seen their stock shoot up by 700%. A month ago, that briefly made them the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of more than $3.3 trillion.

And it’s not just chip companies. The S&P 500 (the index that tracks the 500 largest companies in the U.S.) is at an all-time high this year, in no small part because of the sheen of AI. And here in Canada, a new report from Microsoft claims that generative AI will add $187 billion to the domestic economy by 2030. As wild as these numbers are, they may just be the tip of the iceberg. Some researchers argue that AI will completely revolutionize our economy, leading to per capita growth rates of 30%. In case those numbers mean absolutely nothing to you, 25 years of 30% growth means we’d be a thousand times richer than we are now. It’s hard to imagine what that world would like – or how the average person fits into it. Luckily, Rana Foroohar has given this some thought. Foroohar is a global business columnist and an associate editor at The Financial Times. I wanted to have her on the show to help me work through what these wild predictions really mean and, most importantly, whether or not she thinks they’ll come to fruition.

Mentioned:

“Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity” by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (2023)

“Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises” by Charles P. Kindleberger (1978)

“Irrational Exuberance” by Robert J. Shiller (2016)

“Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit?” by Goldman Sachs Research (2024)

Douglas Rushkoff Doesn’t Want to Talk About AI

Épisode 6

mardi 2 juillet 2024 • Durée 44:51

Douglas Rushkoff has spent the last thirty years studying how digital technologies have shaped our world. The renowned media theorist is the author of twenty books, the host of the Team Human podcast, and a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at City University of New York. But when I sat down with him, he didn’t seem all that excited to be talking about AI. Instead, he suggested – I think only half jokingly – that he’d rather be talking about the new reboot of Dexter.

Rushkoff’s lack of enthusiasm around AI may stem from the fact that he doesn’t see it as the ground shifting technology that some do. Rather, he sees generative artificial intelligence as just the latest in a long line of communication technologies – more akin to radio or television than fire or electricity.

But while he may not believe that artificial intelligence is going to bring about some kind of techno-utopia, he does think its impact will be significant. So eventually we did talk about AI. And we ended up having an incredibly lively conversation about whether computers can create real art, how the “California ideology” has shaped artificial intelligence, and why it’s not too late to ensure that technology is enabling human flourishing – not eroding it.

Mentioned:

“Cyberia” by Douglas Rushkoff

“The Original WIRED Manifesto” by Louis Rossetto

“The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020″ by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden

“Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires” by Douglas Rushkoff

“Artificial Creativity: How AI teaches us to distinguish between humans, art, and industry” by Douglas Rushkoff” by Douglas Rushkoff

The Real World Cost of AI

Épisode 5

mardi 18 juin 2024 • Durée 47:17

It seems like the loudest voices in AI often fall into one of two groups. There are the boomers – the techno-optimists – who think that AI is going to bring us into an era of untold prosperity. And then there are the doomers, who think there’s a good chance AI is going to lead to the end of humanity as we know it.

While these two camps are, in many ways, completely at odds with one another, they do share one thing in common: they both buy into the hype of artificial intelligence.

But when you dig deeper into these systems, it becomes apparent that both of these visions – the utopian one and the doomy one – are based on some pretty tenuous assumptions.

Kate Crawford has been trying to understand how AI systems are built for more than a decade. She’s the co-founder of the AI Now institute, a leading AI researcher at Microsoft, and the author of Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Cost of AI.

Crawford was studying AI long before this most recent hype cycle. So I wanted to have her on the show to explain how AI really works. Because even though it can seem like magic, AI actually requires huge amounts of data, cheap labour and energy in order to function. So even if AI doesn’t lead to utopia, or take over the world, it is transforming the planet – by depleting its natural resources, exploiting workers, and sucking up our personal data. And that’s something we need to be paying attention to.

Mentioned:

“ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine” by Joseph Weizenbaum

“Microsoft, OpenAI plan $100 billion data-center project, media report says,” Reuters

“Meta ‘discussed buying publisher Simon & Schuster to train AI’” by Ella Creamer

Can AI Bring Humanity Back to Health Care?

Épisode 4

mardi 4 juin 2024 • Durée 34:10

Think about the last time you felt let down by the health care system. You probably don’t have to go back far. In wealthy countries around the world, medical systems that were once robust are now crumbling. Doctors and nurses, tasked with an ever expanding range of responsibilities, are busier than ever, which means they have less and less time for patients. In the United States, the average doctor’s appointment lasts seven minutes. In South Korea, it’s only two.

Without sufficient time and attention, patients are suffering. There are 12 million significant misdiagnoses in the US every year, and 800,000 of those result in death or disability. (While the same kind of data isn’t available in Canada, similar trends are almost certainly happening here as well).

Eric Topol says medicine has become decidedly inhuman – and the consequences have been disastrous. Topol is a cardiologist and one of the most widely cited medical researchers in the world. In his latest book, Deep Medicine, he argues that the best way to make health care human again is to embrace the inhuman, in the form of artificial intelligence.

Mentioned:

“Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again” by Eric Topol

“The frequency of diagnostic errors in outpatient care: estimations from three large observational studies involving US adult populations” by H. Singh, A. Meyer, E. Thomas

“Burden of serious harms from diagnostic error in the USA” by David Newman-Toker, et al.

“How Expert Clinicians Intuitively Recognize a Medical Diagnosis” by J. Brush Jr, J. Sherbino, G. Norman

“A Randomized Controlled Study of Art Observation Training to Improve Medical Student Ophthalmology Skills” by Jaclyn Gurwin, et al.

The Battle for Your Brain

Épisode 3

mardi 21 mai 2024 • Durée 39:36

Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink successfully installed one of their brain implants in a 29 year old quadriplegic man named Noland Arbaugh. The device changed Arbaugh’s life. He no longer needs a mouth stylus to control his computer or play video games. Instead, he can use his mind.

The brain-computer interface that Arbaugh uses is part of an emerging field known as neurotechnology that promises to reshape the way we live. A wide range of AI empowered neurotechnologies may allow disabled people like Arbaugh to regain independence, or give us the ability to erase traumatic memories in patients suffering from PTSD.

But it doesn’t take great leaps to envision how these technologies could be abused as well. Law enforcement agencies in the United Arab Emirates have used neurotechnology to read the minds of criminal suspects, and convict them based on what they’ve found. And corporations are developing ways to advertise to potential customers in their dreams. Remarkably, both of these things appear to be legal, as there are virtually no laws explicitly governing neurotechnology.

All of which makes Nita Farahany’s work incredibly timely. Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.

Farahany isn’t fatalistic about neurotech – in fact, she uses some of it herself. But she is adamant that we need to start developing laws and guardrails as soon as possible, because it may not be long before governments, employers and corporations have access to our brains.

Mentioned:

“PRIME Study Progress Update – User Experience,” Neuralink

“Paralysed man walks using device that reconnects brain with muscles,” The Guardian

Cognitive Warfare – NATO’s ACT

Can AI Companions Cure Loneliness?

Épisode 2

mardi 7 mai 2024 • Durée 34:39

When Eugenia Kuyda saw Her for the first time – the 2013 film about a man who falls in love with his virtual assistant – it didn’t read as science fiction. That’s because she was developing a remarkably similar technology: an AI chatbot that could function as a close friend, or even a romantic partner.

That idea would eventually become the basis for Replika, Kuyda’s AI startup. Today, Replika has millions of active users – that’s millions of people who have AI friends, AI siblings and AI partners.

When I first heard about the idea behind Replika, I thought it sounded kind of dystopian. I envisioned a world where we’d rather spend time with our AI friends than our real ones. But that’s not the world Kuyda is trying to build. In fact, she thinks chatbots will actually make people more social, not less, and that the cure for our technologically exacerbated loneliness might just be more technology.

Mentioned:

“ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine” by Joseph Weizenbaum

“elizabot.js”, implemented by Norbert Landsteiner

“Speak, Memory” by Casey Newton (The Verge)

“Creating a safe Replika experience” by Replika

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

Additional Reading:

The Globe & Mail:

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