Machines Like Us

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 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 – by switching to clean energy or driving electric cars – 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 world’s 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 Canada’s 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, it’s inevitably a little depressing. But with this book Dyer has also given us a different way of thinking about the climate crisis – and maybe even a road map for how technology could help us avoid our own destruction.

Mentioned:

“Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers” by Gwynne Dyer

“Scientists warn Earth warming faster than expected – due to reduction in ship pollution” by Nicole Mortillaro

“Global warming in the pipeline” by James Hansen, et al.

“Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” by Paul Crutzen

Further Reading:

Interview with Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Gwynne Dyer

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”

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.

Mentions:

“Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America,” by Julia Angwin

“What They Know” WSJ series by Julia Angwin

“The Bad News About the News” by Robert G. Kaiser

“The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work” by By Michael M. Grynbaum and Ryan Mac

“Seeking Reliable Election Information? Don’t Trust AI” by Julia Angwin, Alondra Nelson, Rina Palta

Further Reading:

“Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” by Julia Angwin

“A Letter From Our Founder” by Julia Angwin

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

“Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input,” Anthropic

Further Reading:

“The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws” by Chris Horton

“How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic” by Andrew Leonard

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)

“Workers could be the ones to regulate AI” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2023)

“The Financial Times and OpenAI strike content licensing deal” (Financial Times, 2024)

“Is AI about to kill what’s left of journalism?” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2024)

“Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (2020)

“The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade” by David H. Autor, David Dorn & Gordon H. Hanson (2016)

Further Reading:

“Beware AI euphoria” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2024)

“AlphaGo” by Google DeepMind (2020)

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

“Empirical Science Began as a Domination Fantasy” by Douglas Rushkoff

“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow

“The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron

“Can AI Bring Humanity Back to Health Care?,” Machines Like Us Episode 5

Further Reading:

“The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” by Marshall McLuhan

“Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” by Neil Postman

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman

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

“Google pauses Gemini AI image generation of people after racial ‘inaccuracies’” by Kelvin Chan And Matt O’brien

“OpenAI and Apple announce partnership,” OpenAI

Fairwork

“New Oxford Report Sheds Light on Labour Malpractices in the Remote Work and AI Booms” by Fairwork

“The Work of Copyright Law in the Age of Generative AI” by Kate Crawford, Jason Schultz

“Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring – and mostly secret” by Kate Crawford

“Artificial intelligence guzzles billions of liters of water” by Manuel G. Pascual

“S.3732 – Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024″

“Assessment of lithium criticality in the global energy transition and addressing policy gaps in transportation” by Peter Greim, A. A. Solomon, Christian Breyer

“Calculating Empires” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
 

Further Reading:

“Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence” by Kate Crawford

“Excavating AI” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen

“Understanding the work of dataset creators” from Knowing Machines

“Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond ‘Free’” by I. Arrieta-Ibarra et al.

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.

“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.

“Abridge becomes Epic’s First Pal, bringing generative AI to more providers and patients, including those at Emory Healthcare”

“Why Doctors Should Organize” by Eric Topol

“How This Rural Health System Is Outdoing Silicon Valley” by Erika Fry

Further Reading:

"The Importance Of Being" by Abraham Verghese

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.

“PRIME Study Progress Update – User Experience,” Neuralink

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

Cognitive Warfare – NATO’s ACT

The Ethics of Neurotechnology: UNESCO appoints international expert group to prepare a new global standard

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: “They fell in love with the Replika AI chatbot. A policy update left them heartbroken”

“Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots” by Maples, Cerit, Vishwanath, & Pea

“Learning from intelligent social agents as social and intellectual mirrors” by Maples, Pea, Markowitz