AI is poised to impact the political process in profound ways. How do we navigate this uncharted territory? Hosts Beth Coleman and Rahul Krishnan are joined by experts Peter Loewen and Harper Reed to unravel the potential influence of AI on democracy and the spread of misinformation.

About the hosts:

Beth Coleman is an associate professor at U of T Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and the Faculty of Information. She is also a research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Coleman authored Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds using art and generative AI.

Rahul Krishnan is an assistant professor in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He is a Canada CIFAR Chair at the Vector Institute, a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a faculty member at the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM).

About the guests:

Peter Loewen is the director of U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and a professor in the department of political science in the Faculty of Arts & Science. He is also the associate director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. His research focuses on how politicians can make better decisions, how citizens can make better choices and how governments can address the disruption of technology and harness its opportunities.

Harper Reed is a technologist who served as a chief technology officer for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Reed has pioneered crowdsourcing at Threadless.com, founded Modest Inc. and guided the software team at PayPal. His most recent venture was General Galactic Corporation.

The rapid advance of AI writing tools, image generators and text-to-video models opens a new world for creative possibilities. It also raises questions about the role of the artist, the nature of creativity – and ethics.

Hosts Beth Coleman and Rahul Krishnan dive into these topics with guests Sanja Fidler and Nick Frosst.

About the hosts:

Beth Coleman is an associate professor at U of T Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/) and the Faculty of Information. She is also a research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (http://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/). Coleman authored Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds (https://k-verlag.org/books/beth-coleman-reality-was-whatever-happened/) using art and generative AI. 

Rahul Krishnan is an assistant professor in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He is a Canada CIFAR Chair at the Vector Institute, a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a faculty member at the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM https://tcairem.utoronto.ca/). 

About the guests:

Nick Frosst is a co-founder of Cohere (https://cohere.com/), a Toronto-based startup that develops large language models for enterprise use. Frosst did his undergraduate degree in computer science and cognitive science at U of T and was the first employee of Geoffrey Hinton’s Google Brain lab in Toronto. He is the singer in an indie rock band called Good Kid (https://goodkidofficial.com/). 

Sanja Fidler is vice president of AI research at NVIDIA (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/research/), leading the company’s research lab in Toronto. She is also an associate professor of mathematical and computational science at the University of Toronto Mississauga and an affiliate faculty member at the Vector Institute, which she co-founded. The co-author of more than 130 scientific papers in computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing, she has received the University of Toronto’s Innovation Award and the Connaught New Researcher Award, among other accolades. Fidler completed her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto.

While a lot of the news around AI is doom and gloom, the potential for positive innovation in health care offers a hopeful perspective. Hosts Beth Coleman and Rahul Krishnan are joined by University of Toronto experts Christine Allen and Andrew Pinto to talk about the transformative power of AI in health care, from revolutionizing primary care to advancing drug development.

About the hosts:

Beth Coleman is an associate professor at U of T Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/) and the Faculty of Information. She is also a research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/). Coleman authored Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds (https://k-verlag.org/books/beth-coleman-reality-was-whatever-happened/) using art and generative AI.

Rahul Krishnan is an assistant professor in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science (https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/) and department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine (https://temertymedicine.utoronto.ca/). He is a Canada CIFAR Chair at the Vector Institute, a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a faculty member at the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM https://tcairem.utoronto.ca/).

Guests

Andrew Pinto is the founder and director of the Upstream Lab (https://upstreamlab.org/), a research team focused on addressing social determinants of health, population health management, and utilizing data science for proactive care. Pinto is a family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto, and associate professor in the department of family and community medicine in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine and at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Christine Allen is a professor in U of T’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. She is a member of the scientific leadership team of the Acceleration Consortium (https://acceleration.utoronto.ca/) at U of T. Allen is a co-founder and CEO of Intrepid Labs Inc. (https://intrepidlabs.tech/), a company that is accelerating pharmaceutical drug development through integration of AI, automation and advanced computing.

Safe and Accountable

Hosts Beth Coleman and Rahul Krishnan navigate the challenging terrain of AI safety and governance. In this episode, they are joined by University of Toronto experts Gillian Hadfield and Roger Grosse as they explore critical questions about AI’s risks, regulatory challenges and how to align the technology with human values.

Hosts

Beth Coleman is an associate professor at U of T Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/) and the Faculty of Information. She is also a research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/). Coleman authored Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds (https://k-verlag.org/books/beth-coleman-reality-was-whatever-happened/) using art and generative AI.

Rahul Krishnan is an assistant professor in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science (https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/) and department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine (https://temertymedicine.utoronto.ca/). He is a Canada CIFAR Chair at the Vector Institute, a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a faculty member at the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM https://tcairem.utoronto.ca/).

Guests

Gillian Hadfield is a professor of law and strategic management in the Faculty of Law (https://www.law.utoronto.ca/) at U of T and is the inaugural Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society. She holds a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for AI and served as a senior policy adviser to OpenAI from 2018 to 2023.

Roger Grosse is an associate professor of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and a founding member of the Vector Institute (https://vectorinstitute.ai/). He is a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and was part of the technical staff on the alignment team at Anthropic, an AI safety and research company based in San Francisco.

University of Toronto researchers Rahul Krishnan and Beth Coleman dive into the world of AI – how far we’ve come, where we are heading and the potentially profound impact for society.

What Now? AI is a University of Toronto podcast series that dives into the world of artificial intelligence. Join hosts Beth Coleman and Rahul Krishnan as they explore – and demystify – the transformative potential of AI and its impact on society with the help of leading experts from the university.

Coleman is an associate professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at U of T Mississauga and U of T’s Faculty of Information. She is also a research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Krishnan is an assistant professor in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of medicine. He is also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute and Canada Research Chair in computational medicine.

01:24 Geoffrey Hinton's warning about AI

03:21 Regulating a multi-billion dollar industry

04:50 How is AI being trained?

05:58 AI as a tool

07:08 What can we learn from chatbots?

08:28 Who watches the Watchmen?

Director of the Citizen Lab, Ron Deibert sits down with Randy to breakdown everything from privacy and propaganda, to how to solve marital problems and intricacies of being a Libra.

Jeffrey Rosenthal, Professor of Statistics, was born on Friday the 13th. He joins Randy to talk about luck, chance, Markov's chain - and no that’s not a 90's band - and play a round of rock, paper, scissors!

Beth Coleman, Associate Professor of Data & Cities joins Randy to dive into “smarter cities” and what a more human-centered city could be.

Edward Jones-Imhotep, is a historian of the social and cultural life of machines. He and Randy talk tech, Black androids, social order, and slow disasters.

Randy Boyagoda and Clémentine Van Effenterre dive deep into economic policies and protests, privilege and class divisions, and the new shape of work across the globe.