Afleveringen
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When the American company OpenAI released ChatGPT, it was the first time that a lot of people had ever interacted with Generative AI. ChatGPT has become so popular that, for many, itâs now synonymous with artificial intelligence.
But that may be changing. Earlier this year a Chinese startup called DeepSeek launched its own AI chatbot, sending shockwaves across Silicon Valley. According to DeepSeek, their model â DeepSeek-R1 â is just as powerful as ChatGPT but was developed at a fraction of the cost. In other words, this isnât just a new company, it could be an entirely different approach to building artificial intelligence.
To try and understand what DeepSeek means for the future of AI, and for American innovation, I wanted to speak with Karen Hao. Hao was the first reporter to ever write a profile on OpenAI and has covered AI for The MIT Tech Review, The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. So sheâs better positioned than almost anyone to try and make sense of this seemingly monumental shift in the landscape of artificial intelligence.
Mentioned:
âThe messy, secretive reality behind OpenAIâs bid to save the world,â by Karen Hao
Further Reading:
âDeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning,â by DeepSeek-AI and others.
âA Comparison of DeepSeek and Other LLMs,â by Tianchen Gao, Jiashun Jin, Zheng Tracy Ke, Gabriel Moryoussef
âTechnical Report: Analyzing DeepSeek-R1âČs Impact on AI Development,â by Azizi Othman
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Do I have your attention right now? Iâm guessing probably not. Or, at least, not all of it. In all likelihood, youâre 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 â but our brains, it turns out, can only absorb so much. Politicians like Donald Trump have figured out how to exploit this dynamic. If youâre constantly saying outrageous things, it becomes almost impossible to focus on the things that really matter. Trumpâs former strategist Steve Bannon called this strategy âflooding the zone.â
As the host of the MSNBC show All In, Chris Hayes has had a front-row seat to the war for our attention â and, now, heâs decided to sound the alarm with a new book called The Sirensâ Call: How Attention Became the Worldâs 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.
Mentioned:
"Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest," by Zeynep Tufekci
Further Reading:
"Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction," by Vikram R. Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez.
"The Attention Economy Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism," by Claudio Celis Bueno
âThe business of news in the attention economy: Audience labor and MediaNews Groupâs efforts to capitalize on news consumption,â Brice Nixon
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Itâs become pretty easy to spot phishing scams: UPS orders you never made, banking alerts from companies you donât bank with, phone calls from unfamiliar area codes. But over the past decade, these scams â and the technology behind them â have become more sophisticated, invasive and sinister, largely due to the rise of something called âmercenary spyware.â
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 â all without you realizing youâd 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 â and our democracy.
Note: We reached out to NSO Group about the claims made in this episode and they did not reply to our request for comment.
Mentioned:
âChasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy,â by Ron Deibert
âMetaâs WhatsApp says spyware company Paragon targeted users in two dozen countries,â by Raphael Satter, Reuters
Further Reading:
âThe Autocrat in Your iPhone,â by Ron Deibert
âA Comprehensive Analysis of Pegasus Spyware and Its Implications for Digital Privacy and Security,â Karwan Kareem
âStopping the Press: New York Times Journalist Targeted by Saudi-linked Pegasus Spyware Operator,â by Bill Marczak, Siena Anstis, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, John Scott-Railton, and Ron Deibert
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Weâve spent a lot of time on this show talking about AI: how itâs changing war, how your doctor might be using it, and whether or not chatbots are curing, or exacerbating, loneliness.
But what we havenât 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 theyâve 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.
Further Reading:
âYoshua Bengio Doesnât Think Weâre Ready for Superhuman AI. Weâre Building It Anyway,â Machines Like Us podcast
âChatGPT is blurring the lines between what it means to communicate with a machine and a human,â by Derek Ruths
âA Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going,â by Michael Wooldridge
âArtificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans,â by Melanie Mitchell
âAnatomy of an AI System,â by Kate Crawford and Vladan Jolerâ
Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, how has generative AI helped businesses?,â by Joe Castaldo
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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 its impacting your life, we want to hear them. Send an email or a voice recording to: [email protected]Thanks â and weâll see you next Tuesday!
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In February, 2024, Megan Garciaâs 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 â 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 âharmful dependencyâ on the chatbot that, coupled with a lack of safeguards, ultimately led to her sonâs death.
Theyâve 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 â and the lives of our children.
We reached out to Character.AI and Google about this story. Google did not respond to our request for comment by publication time.
A spokesperson for Character.AI made the following statement:
âWe do not comment on pending litigation.
Our goal is to provide a space that is both engaging and safe for our community. We are always working toward achieving that balance, as are many companies using AI across the industry. As part of this, we have launched a separate model for our teen users â with specific safety features that place more conservative limits on responses from the model.
The Character.AI experience begins with the Large Language Model that powers so many of our user and Character interactions. Conversations with Characters are driven by a proprietary model we continuously update and refine. For users under 18, we serve a version of the model that is designed to further reduce the likelihood of users encountering, or prompting the model to return, sensitive or suggestive content. This initiative â combined with the other techniques described below â combine to produce two distinct user experiences on the Character.AI platform: one for teens and one for adults.
Additional ways we have integrated safety across our platform include:
Model Outputs: A âclassifierâ is a method of distilling a content policy into a form used to identify potential policy violations. We employ classifiers to help us enforce our content policies and filter out sensitive content from the modelâs responses. The under-18 model has additional and more conservative classifiers than the model for our adult users.
User Inputs: While much of our focus is on the modelâs output, we also have controls to user inputs that seek to apply our content policies to conversations on Character.AI.This is critical because inappropriate user inputs are often what leads a language model to generate inappropriate outputs. For example, if we detect that a user has submitted content that violates our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, that content will be blocked from the userâs conversation with the Character. We also have a process in place to suspend teens from accessing Character.AI if they repeatedly try to input prompts into the platform that violate our content policies.
Additionally, under-18 users are now only able to access a narrower set of searchable Characters on the platform. Filters have been applied to this set to remove Characters related to sensitive or mature topics.
We have also added a time spent notification and prominent disclaimers to make it clear that the Character is not a real person and should not be relied on as fact or advice. As we continue to invest in the platform, we will be rolling out several new features, including parental controls. For more information on these new features, please refer to the Character.AI blog HERE.
There is no ongoing relationship between Google and Character.AI. In August, 2024, Character.AI completed a one-time licensing of its technology and Noam went back to Google.â
If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, support is available 24-7 by calling or texting 988, Canadaâs national suicide prevention helpline.
Mentioned:
Megan Garcia v. Character Technologies, Et Al.
âGoogle Paid $2.7 Billion to Bring Back an AI Genius Who Quit in Frustrationâ by Miles Kruppa and Lauren Thomas
âBelgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbot,â by Lauren Walker
âCan AI Companions Cure Loneliness?,â Machines Like Us
âAn AI companion suggested he kill his parents. Now his mom is suing,â by Nitasha Tiku
Further Reading:
âCan A.I. Be Blamed for a Teenâs Suicide?â by Kevin Roose
âMargrethe Vestager Fought Big Tech and Won. Her Next Target is AI,â Machines Like Us
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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.
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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 Googleâs 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 wasnât alone. For a lot of people, the game represented a turning point â 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 âHey Robotâ 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. Heâs spent his career thinking about how technology is changing the nature of games â and what we can learn about ourselves when we sit down to play them.
Mentioned:
âAlphaGoâ
âThe Beauty of Gamesâ by Frank Lantz
âAdversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIsâ by Tony Wang Et al.
âTheory of Games and Economic Behaviorâ by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern
âHeads-up limit holdâem poker is solvedâ by Michael Bowling Et al.
Further Reading:
âHow to Play a Gameâ by Frank Lantz
âThe Afterlife of Goâ by Frank Lantz
âHow A.I. Conquered Pokerâ by Keith Romer
âIn Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Futureâ by Cade Metz
Hey Robot by Frank Lantz
Universal Paperclips by Frank Lantz
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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 âthe most advanced glasses the world had ever seen.â That same day, Open AI CEO Sam Altman predicted we could have artificial super intelligence within a couple of years. Elon Musk has said heâll 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 doesnât need to be that way.
Mentioned:
âImagination: A Manifesto,â by Ruha Benjamin
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), directed by Questlove
âThe Black Woman: An Anthology,â by Toni Cade Bambara
âThe New Artificial Intelligentsia,â by Ruha Benjamin
âRace After Technology,â by Ruha Benjamin
Breonna's Garden, with Ju'Niyah Palmer
âViral Justice,â by Ruha Benjamin
The Parable Series, by Octavia Butler
Further Reading:
âAI could make health care fairerâby helping us believe what patients say,â by Karen Hao
âHow an Attempt at Correcting Bias in Tech Goes Wrong,â by Sidney Fussell
âUnmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines,ââ by Joy Buolamwini
âThe TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence,â by Timnit Gebru and Ămile P. Torres
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Margrethe Vestager has spent the past decade standing up to Silicon Valley. As the EUâs Competition Commissioner, sheâs waged landmark legal battles against tech giants like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. Her two latest wins will cost Apple and Google billions of dollars.
With her decade-long tenure as one of the worldâs most powerful anti-trust watchdogs coming to an end, Vestager has turned her attention to AI. She spearheaded the EUâs AI Act, which will be the first and, so far, most ambitious piece of AI legislation in the world.
But the clock is ticking â both on her term and on the global race to govern AI, which Vestager says we have âvery little timeâ to get right.
Mentioned:
The EU Artificial Intelligence Act
âDutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms,â by Melissa HeikkilĂ€
âBelgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbotâ by Lauren Walker
The Digital Services Act
The Digital Markets Act
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
âThe future of European competitivenessâ by Mario Draghi
âGoverning AI for Humanity: Final Reportâ by the United Nations Secretary-Generalâs High-level Advisory Body
The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA)
Further Reading:
âApple, Google must pay billions in back taxes and fines, E.U. court rulesâ by Ellen Francis and Cat Zakrzewski
âOpenAI Lobbied the E.U. to Water Down AI Regulationâ by Billy Perrigo
âThe total eclipse of Margrethe Vestagerâ by Samuel Stolton
âDigital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technologyâ by Anu Bradford
âThe Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the Worldâ by Anu Bradford
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Weâre off this week, so weâre bringing you an episode from our Globe and Mail sister show Lately.
That creeping feeling that everything online is getting worse has a name: âenshittification,â a term for the slow degradation of our experience on digital platforms. The enshittification cycle is why you now have to wade through slop to find anything useful on Google, and why your charger is different from your BFFâs.
According to Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the memorable moniker, this digital decay isnât inevitable. Itâs a symptom of corporate under-regulation and monopoly â practices being challenged in courts around the world, like the US Department of Justiceâs antitrust suit against Google.
Cory Doctorow is a British-Canadian journalist, blogger and author of Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as speculative fiction works like The Lost Cause and the new novella Spill.
Every Friday, Lately takes a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day. Itâs hosted by Vass Bednar.
Machines Like Us will be back in two weeks.
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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, âMAGAâs Minister of Propaganda.â 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 âSilicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster.â Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at the Atlantic, and Nitasha Tiku is a tech culture reporter at the Washington Post.Mentioned:
âSilicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monsterâ by Charles Duhigg
âBig Crypto, Big Spending: Crypto Corporations Spend an Unprecedented $119 Million Influencing Electionsâ by Rick Claypool via Public Citizen
âIâm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Isâ by Charlie Warzel
âElon Musk Has Reached a New Lowâ by Charlie Warzel
âThe movement to diversify Silicon Valley is crumbling amid attacks on DEIâ by Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Nitasha Tiku
âThe Techno-Optimist Manifestoâ by Marc Andreessen
âTrump Vs. Biden: Tech Policy,â The Ben & Marc Show
âThe MAGA Aesthetic Is AI Slopâ by Charlie Warzel
Further Reading:
âBiden's FTC took on big tech, big pharma and more. What antitrust legacy will Biden leave behind?â by Paige Sutherland and Meghna Chakrabarti
âInside the Harris campaignâs blitz to win back Silicon Valleyâ by Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku and Elizabeth Dwoskin
âThe Little Tech Agendaâ by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
âSilicon Valley had Harrisâs back for decades. Will she return the favor?â by Cristiano Lima-Strong and Cat Zakrzewski
âSECâs Gensler turns tide against crypto in courtsâ by Declan Harty
âTrump vs. Harris is dividing Silicon Valley into feuding political campsâ by Trisha Thadani, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nitasha Tiku and Gerrit De Vynck
âInside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vanceâ by Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku and Josh Dawsey
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What kind of future are we building for ourselves? In some ways, thatâs the central question of this show.
Itâs also a central question of speculative fiction. And one that few people have tried to answer as thoughtfully â and as poetically â as Emily St. John Mandel.
Mandel is one of Canadaâs great writers. Sheâs the author of six award winning novels, the most recent of which is Sea of Tranquility â 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:
âLast Night in Montrealâ by Emily St. John Mandel
âStation Elevenâ by Emily St. John Mandel
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 â Lecture by Patrick Modiano
âThe Glass Hotelâ by Emily St. John Mandel
âSea of Tranquilityâ by Emily St. John Mandel
Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA, Writers Guild of America
Her (2013)
âThe Handmaidâs Taleâ by Margaret Atwood
âShell Gameâ by Evan Ratliff
Replika
Further Reading:
âCan AI Companions Cure Loneliness?,â Machines Like Us
âYoshua Bengio Doesnât Think Weâre Ready for Superhuman AI. Weâre Building it Anyway.,â Machines Like Us
âThe Roadâ by Cormac McCarthy
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A couple of weeks ago, I was at this splashy AI conference in Montreal called All In. It was â how should I say this â 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 AIâs pioneering figures. In 2018, he and two colleagues won the Turing Award â the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize â for their work on deep learning. In 2022, he was the most cited computer scientist in the world. It wouldnât 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, heâs dedicated himself to AI safety. Heâs 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 itâs too late.
Mentioned:
âPersonal and Psychological Dimensions of AI Researchers Confronting AI Catastrophic Risksâ by Yoshua Bengio
âDeep Learningâ by Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton
âComputing Machinery and Intelligenceâ by Alan Turing
âInternational Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AIâ
âSafetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?â by R. Ren et al.
âSB 1047: Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Actâ
Further reading:
ââDeep Learningâ Guru Reveals the Future of AIâ by Cade Metz
âMontrĂ©al Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligenceâ
âThis A.I. Subcultureâs Motto: Go, Go, Goâ By Kevin Roose
âReasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriouslyâ by Yoshua Bengio
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In 2015, 195 countries gathered in Paris to discuss how to address the climate crisis. Although there was plenty they couldnât 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 â by switching to clean energy or driving electric cars â 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 worldâs 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 Canadaâs 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, itâs inevitably a little depressing. But with this book Dyer has also given us a different way of thinking about the climate crisis â and maybe even a road map for how technology could help us avoid our own destruction.
Mentioned:
âIntervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the Worldâs Climate Engineersâ by Gwynne Dyer
âScientists warn Earth warming faster than expected â due to reduction in ship pollutionâ by Nicole Mortillaro
âGlobal warming in the pipelineâ by James Hansen, et al.
âAlbedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?â by Paul Crutzen
Further Reading:
Interview with Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Gwynne Dyer
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For nearly a year now, the world has been transfixed â and horrified â by whatâs 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 worldâs foremost experts on the future of warfare. Heâs 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, itâs P.W. Singer.
Mentioned:
ââThe Gospelâ: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gazaâ by Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan, and Dan Sabbagh
ââLavenderâ: The AI machine directing Israelâs bombing spree in Gazaâ by Yuval Abraham
âGhost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World Warâ by P. W. Singer and August Cole
Further Reading:
âBurn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolutionâ by P. W. Singer and August Cole
âThe AI revolution is already hereâ by P. W. Singer
âHumans must be held responsible for decisions AI weapons makeâ in The Asahi Shimbun
âUseful Fictionâ
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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 â 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 theyâve crippled journalismâs business model in the process.
It wasnât 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 hasnât 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. Sheâs 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 wasnât the best idea.
Now, sheâs 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.
Mentions:
âStealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America,â by Julia Angwin
âWhat They Knowâ WSJ series by Julia Angwin
âThe Bad News About the Newsâ by Robert G. Kaiser
âThe Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Workâ by By Michael M. Grynbaum and Ryan Mac
âSeeking Reliable Election Information? Donât Trust AIâ by Julia Angwin, Alondra Nelson, Rina Palta
Further Reading:
âDragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillanceâ by Julia Angwin
âA Letter From Our Founderâ by Julia Angwin
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Last year, the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen published a document he called âThe Techno-Optimist Manifesto.â In it, he argued that âeverything good is downstream of growth,â 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 thatâs true, then how do you explain someone like Audrey Tang?
Tang, who, until May of this year, was Taiwanâs first Minister of Digital Affairs, is unabashedly optimistic about technology. But sheâs also a fervent believer in the power of democratic government.
To many in Silicon Valley, this is an oxymoron. But Tang doesnât see it that way. To her, technology and government are â and have always been â symbiotic.
So I wanted to ask her what a technologically enabled democracy might look like â 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:
âvTaiwanâ
âPolisâ
âPlurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracyâ by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and âż» Community
âCollective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input,â Anthropic
Further Reading:
âThe simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its lawsâ by Chris Horton
âHow Taiwanâs Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemicâ by Andrew Leonard
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If you listened to our last couple of episodes, youâll have heard some pretty skeptical takes on AI. But if you look at the stock market right now, you wonât 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 itâs 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 weâd be a thousand times richer than we are now. Itâs hard to imagine what that world would like â 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 theyâll come to fruition.
Mentioned:
âPower and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperityâ by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (2023)
âManias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crisesâ by Charles P. Kindleberger (1978)
âIrrational Exuberanceâ by Robert J. Shiller (2016)
âGen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit?â by Goldman Sachs Research (2024)
âWorkers could be the ones to regulate AIâ by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2023)
âThe Financial Times and OpenAI strike content licensing dealâ (Financial Times, 2024)
âIs AI about to kill whatâs left of journalism?â by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2024)
âDeaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalismâ by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (2020)
âThe China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Tradeâ by David H. Autor, David Dorn & Gordon H. Hanson (2016)
Further Reading:
âBeware AI euphoriaâ by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2024)
âAlphaGoâ by Google DeepMind (2020)
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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 didnât seem all that excited to be talking about AI. Instead, he suggested â I think only half jokingly â that heâd rather be talking about the new reboot of Dexter.
Rushkoffâs lack of enthusiasm around AI may stem from the fact that he doesnât 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 â 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 âCalifornia ideologyâ has shaped artificial intelligence, and why itâs not too late to ensure that technology is enabling human flourishing â not eroding it.
Mentioned:
âCyberiaâ by Douglas Rushkoff
âThe Original WIRED Manifestoâ by Louis Rossetto
âThe Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980â2020âł by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden
âSurvival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionairesâ by Douglas Rushkoff
âArtificial Creativity: How AI teaches us to distinguish between humans, art, and industryâ by Douglas Rushkoffâ by Douglas Rushkoff
âEmpirical Science Began as a Domination Fantasyâ by Douglas Rushkoff
âA Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspaceâ by John Perry Barlow
âThe Californian Ideologyâ by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron
âCan AI Bring Humanity Back to Health Care?,â Machines Like Us Episode 5
Further Reading:
âThe Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effectsâ by Marshall McLuhan
âTechnopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technologyâ by Neil Postman
âAmusing Ourselves to Deathâ by Neil Postman
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