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Machines Like Us

The Globe and Mail

Machines Like Us is a technology show about people. We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction will become our reality: robot best friends, bespoke gene editing, brain implants that make us smarter. Every other Tuesday Taylor Owen sits down with the people shaping this rapidly approaching future. He’ll speak with entrepreneurs building world-changing technologies, lawmakers trying to ensure

technology

All Episodes

00:50:10

AI is Upending Higher Education. Is That a Bad Thing?

Machines Like Us ·

2025/09/23

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

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01:09:02

Jim Balsillie: ‘Canada’s Problem Isn’t Trump....

Machines Like Us ·

2025/04/22

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

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00:51:03

Bonus ‘The Paul Wells Show’: Election Week 4 - It's a...

Machines Like Us ·

2025/04/18

We have a really exciting episode coming out on Tuesday: an interview with former RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie about the fight for Canada’s economic sovereignty. In the meantime, we wanted to share a conversation between Taylor and political journalist Paul Wells. Every week, Paul sits down with the people trying to solve the biggest problems in Canada and around the world. And this week, that person is Taylor. He joins Paul to discuss his work on election interference and share his wish list for the

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00:38:56

The Changing Face of Election Interference

Machines Like Us ·

2025/04/08

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

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00:37:03

How Do You Report the News in a Post-Truth World?

Machines Like Us ·

2025/03/25

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

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00:40:03

A Chinese Company Upended OpenAI. We May Be Looking...

Machines Like Us ·

2025/03/11

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

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00:30:19

Big Tech Hijacked Our Attention. Chris Hayes Wants To...

Machines Like Us ·

2025/02/25

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

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00:36:19

New Spyware Has Made Your Phone Less Secure Than You...

Machines Like Us ·

2025/02/11

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

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00:49:49

A Computer Scientist Answers Your Questions About AI

Machines Like Us ·

2025/01/28

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

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00:01:22

Questions About AI? We Want to Hear Them

Machines Like Us ·

2025/01/20

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

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00:48:35

This Mother Says a Chatbot Led to Her Son’s Death

Machines Like Us ·

2025/01/14

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

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00:26:47

Bonus ‘The Decibel’: How an algorithm missed a deadly...

Machines Like Us ·

2024/12/31

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

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00:35:34

AI Has Mastered Chess, Poker and Go. So Why Do We...

Machines Like Us ·

2024/12/17

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

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00:45:39

How Silicon Valley Monopolized Our Imagination

Machines Like Us ·

2024/12/03

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

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00:34:44

Margrethe Vestager Fought Big Tech and Won. Her Next...

Machines Like Us ·

2024/11/19

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

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00:34:41

Bonus ‘Lately’: The Great Decline of Everything Online

Machines Like Us ·

2024/11/05

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

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00:32:55

Musk, Money and Misinformation: Tech & The U.S. Election

Machines Like Us ·

2024/10/22

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

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00:38:32

Emily St. John Mandel Imagines The Future

Machines Like Us ·

2024/10/08

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

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00:41:49

Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for...

Machines Like Us ·

2024/09/24

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 startup founders promising that AI was going to revolutionize the way we

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00:43:35

There’s a Way to Cool the Planet. Scientists are...

Machines Like Us ·

2024/09/10

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

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