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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

We’re a few weeks into a federal election that is currently too close to call. And while most Canadians are wondering who our next Prime Minister will be, my guests today are preoccupied with a different question: will this election be free and fair? In her recent report on foreign interference, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue wrote that “information manipulation poses the single biggest risk to our democracy”. Meanwhile, senior Canadian intelligence officials are predicting that India, China, Pakistan and Russia will all attempt to influence the outcome of this election. To try and get a sense of what we’re up against, I wanted to get two different perspectives on this. My colleague Aengus Bridgman is the Director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a project that we run together at McGill University, and Nina Jankocwicz is the co-founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project. Together, they are two of the leading authorities on the problem of information manipulation.

If you’re having a conversation about the state of journalism, it’s bound to get a little depressing. Since 2008, more than 250 local news outlets have closed down in Canada. The U.S. has lost a third of the newspapers they had in 2005. But this is about more than a failing business model. Only 31 percent of Americans say they trust the media. In Canada, that number is a little bit better – but only a little. The problem is not just that people are losing their faith in journalism. It’s that they’re starting to place their trust in other, often more dubious sources of information: TikTok influencers, Elon Musk’s X feed, and The Joe Rogan Experience. The impact of this shift can be seen almost everywhere you look. 15 percent of Americans believe climate change is a hoax. 30 percent believe the 2020 election was stolen. 10 percent believe the earth is flat. A lot of this can be blamed on social media, which crippled journalism's business model and led to a flourishing of false information online. But not all of it. People like Jay Rosen have long argued that journalists themselves are at least partly responsible for the post-truth moment we now find ourselves in. Rosen is a professor of journalism at NYU who’s been studying, critiquing, and really shaping, the press for nearly 40 years. He joined me a couple of weeks ago at the Attention conference in Montreal to explain how we got to this place – and where we might go from here. A note: we recorded this interview before the Canadian election was called, so we don’t touch on it here. But over the course of the next month, the integrity of our information ecosystem will face an inordinate amount of stress, and conversations like this one will be more important than ever.

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, it’s 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 – DeepSeek-R1 – is just as powerful as ChatGPT but was developed at a fraction of the cost. In other words, this isn’t 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 she’s better positioned than almost anyone to try and make sense of this seemingly monumental shift in the landscape of artificial intelligence.

Do I have your attention right now? I’m guessing probably not. Or, at least, not all of it. In all likelihood, you’re 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 – but our brains, it turns out, can only absorb so much. Politicians like Donald Trump have figured out how to exploit this dynamic. If you’re constantly saying outrageous things, it becomes almost impossible to focus on the things that really matter. Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon called this strategy “flooding the zone.” As the host of the MSNBC show All In, Chris Hayes has had a front-row seat to the war for our attention – and, now, he’s decided to sound the alarm with a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s 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.

It’s become pretty easy to spot phishing scams: UPS orders you never made, banking alerts from companies you don’t bank with, phone calls from unfamiliar area codes. But over the past decade, these scams – and the technology behind them – have become more sophisticated, invasive and sinister, largely due to the rise of something called ‘mercenary spyware.’ 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 – all without you realizing you’d 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 – and our democracy.

We’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about AI: how it’s changing war, how your doctor might be using it, and whether or not chatbots are curing, or exacerbating, loneliness. But what we haven’t 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 they’ve 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.

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 it’s affecting your life, we want to hear them. Send an email or a voice recording to: machineslikeus@paradigms.tech Thanks – and we’ll see you next Tuesday!

In February, 2024, Megan Garcia’s 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 – 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 “harmful dependency” on the chatbot that, coupled with a lack of safeguards, ultimately led to her son’s death. They’ve 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 – and the lives of our children.

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.

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. After the match, Lee Sedol retired, saying that losing to an AI felt like his entire world was collapsing. He wasn’t alone. For a lot of people, the game represented a turning point – 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 “Hey Robot” 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. He’s spent his career thinking about how technology is changing the nature of games – and what we can learn about ourselves when we sit down to play them.

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 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 doesn’t need to be that way.

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, Vestager has turned her attention to AI. She spearheaded the EU’s AI Act, which will be the first and, so far, most ambitious piece of AI legislation in the world. But the clock is ticking – both on her term and on the global race to govern AI, which Vestager says we have “very little time” to get right.

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 your charger is different from your BFF’s. According to Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the memorable moniker, this digital decay isn’t inevitable. It’s a symptom of corporate under-regulation and monopoly – practices being challenged in courts around the world, like the US Department of Justice’s 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. It’s hosted by Vass Bednar. Machines Like Us will be back in two weeks.

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 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 “Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster.” Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at the Atlantic, and Nitasha Tiku is a tech culture reporter at the Washington Post.

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 recent of which is Sea of Tranquility – 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.