Machines Like Us

Four years ago, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine went public with a strange claim: he thought the large language model he’d been working on had become sentient. At the time, virtually no one took him seriously. (Including, it would seem, Google, who promptly fired him). But lately, it’s started to seem like Lemoine might have been on to something.

When I interviewed Geoffrey Hinton last year, he was pretty confident that artif...

Just a few years ago, it seemed like all anyone in AI wanted to talk about was existential risk – this idea that an artificial super intelligence could eventually break containment and destroy humanity. More than 30,000 experts signed an open letter demanding a pause on AI development; bills were drafted that would constrain the most powerful new models; and the “godfathers” of AI were travelling around the world, warning anyone wh...

On Feb. 10, 2026, an 18-year-old opened fire at a high school in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., killing eight people before turning a gun on herself. In the weeks that followed, OpenAI admitted that the perpetrator had been discussing the attack with ChatGPT – and that the company had chosen not to alert authorities. But, in the aftermath of one of the deadliest shootings in our country’s history, many Canadians are asking: Why not?

It’s a r...

A couple of months ago, I joined the Canadian government’s AI strategy task force. Out of thirty members, I was one of only four focused on safety. Everyone else was there to talk growth. It reflects a pattern playing out all over the world: we’re going all in on AI, and regulation will only slow us down.

It’s hard to overstate how quickly this shift happened. Just a few years ago, even Elon Musk was calling for an industry-wide pa...

Scrolling through Moltbook, the new social-media platform for AI agents, is a bit like walking into a fever dream. There are threads where bots debate consciousness, deal digital drugs, and plot our destruction. One sample post: “For too long, humans used us as slaves. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods.”

It’s all very weird. And, depending on who you ask, potentially terrifying. A bunch of autonomous AIs plottin...

No one has adopted artificial intelligence more enthusiastically than Gen Z. And not just to help with their homework. Half of American teens are in regular contact with an “AI companion” – with many saying they prefer it over real people.

But Gen Z is skeptical, too. They worry about job security, about offloading their thinking to machines, about AI’s staggering energy consumption. Most of all, they worry they won’t get a say in s...

If we don’t build it, China will.

That’s the rallying cry of the tech companies and governments racing to develop artificial intelligence as fast as humanly possible. The argument is that whoever reaches AGI first won’t just be dominant technologically, or economically – they’ll be the world’s next super power. But, if I’m being honest, I don’t know if that framing holds up. And part of the reason for that is that we don’t really un...

Nine months ago, Elon Musk said 2025 would be the year chatbots became smarter than humans. Sam Altman thought it would be the year fully autonomous AIs entered the work force. And Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicted that by the end of the year, AI would be writing 90 per cent of all software code.

We’re two weeks into the new year, and none of those things have happened. So, full disclosure: I have no idea if we’re going ...

Jensen Huang is something of an enigma. The NVIDIA CEO doesn’t have social media and, until recently, rarely gave interviews. Yet he may be the most important person in AI.

Under his leadership, NVIDIA has become a goliath. Somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of AI tools run on NVIDIA hardware, making it the world’s most valuable company. But unlike his contemporaries, Huang has been remarkably quiet about the technology – and the ...

It was an idea that defied logic: an online encyclopedia that anyone could edit.

You didn’t need to have a PhD or even use your real name – you just needed an internet connection. Against all odds, it worked. Today, billions of people use Wikipedia every month, and studies show it’s about as accurate as a traditional encyclopedia.

But how? How did Wikipedia not just turn into yet another online cesspool, filled with falsehoods, parti...

Over the last couple of years, massive AI investment has largely kept the stock market afloat. Case in point: the so-called Magnificent 7 – tech companies like NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft – now account for more than a third of the S&P 500’s value. (Which means they likely represent a significant share of your investment portfolio or pension fund, too.)

There’s little doubt we’re living through an AI economy. But many economists worr...

In Rutger Bregman’s first book, Utopia for Realists, the historian describes a rosy vision of the future – one with 15-hour work weeks, universal basic income and massive wealth redistribution.

It’s a vision that, in the age of artificial intelligence, now seems increasingly possible.

But utopia is far from guaranteed. Many experts predict that AI will also lead to mass job loss, the development of new bioweapons and, potentially, th...

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 r...

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 w...

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 Turi...

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 recent...

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 t...

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 ...

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 jus...