Machines Like Us

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...

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 jus...

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 h...

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 develope...

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...

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...

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 o...

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 list...

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 ...

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 tec...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 industry is, well, all in. The stage was filled with star...