Machines Like Us

Dec 17 2024 19 ep. 37 mins 1.1k
Machines Like Us Podcast artwork

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.

  Technology  Society & Culture  News
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AI Has Mastered Chess, Poker and Go. So Why Do We Keep Playing?

Dec 17 2024 35 mins  
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 Google’s DeepMind appeared to meet the challenge. Their Go-playing AI defeated one of the best Go players in the world, Lee Sedol.

How Silicon Valley Monopolized Our Imagination

Dec 03 2024 45 mins  
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 “the most advanced glasses the world had ever seen.” That same day, Open AI CEO Sam Altman predicted we could have artificial super intelligence within a couple of years. Elon Musk has said he’ll land rockets on Ma

Margrethe Vestager Fought Big Tech and Won. Her Next Target is AI

Nov 19 2024 34 mins  
Margrethe Vestager has spent the past decade standing up to Silicon Valley. As the EU’s Competition Commissioner, she’s 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 world’s most powerful anti-trust watchdogs coming to an end, Vest

Bonus ‘Lately’: The Great Decline of Everything Online

Nov 05 2024 34 mins  
We’re off this week, so we’re bringing you an episode from our Globe and Mail sister show Lately. That creeping feeling that everything online is getting worse has a name: “enshittification,” 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

Musk, Money and Misinformation: Tech & The U.S. Election

Oct 22 2024 32 mins  
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 Val

Emily St. John Mandel Imagines The Future

Oct 08 2024 38 mins  
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 recen

Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building it Anyway.

Sep 24 2024 41 mins  
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 in

There’s a Way to Cool the Planet. Scientists are Terrified of It.

Sep 10 2024 43 mins  
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

Gaza is a Window into the Future of War

Aug 27 2024 41 mins  
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

Why Journalism Made a Devil’s Bargain with Big Tech

Aug 13 2024 42 mins  
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