Machines Like Us

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 a lot of people, the game represented a turning point – the moment where humans had been overtaken by machines.But Frank Lantz saw that game and was invigorated. Lantz is a game designer (his game “Hey Robot” is a recurring feature on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon), the director of the NYU game center, and the author of The Beauty of Games. He’s spent his career thinking about how technology is changing the nature of games – and what we can learn about ourselves when we sit down to play them.Mentioned:“AlphaGo”“The Beauty of Games” by Frank Lantz“Adversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIs” by Tony Wang Et al.“Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern“Heads-up limit hold’em poker is solved” by Michael Bowling Et al.Further Reading:“How to Play a Game” by Frank Lantz“The Afterlife of Go” by Frank Lantz“How A.I. Conquered Poker” by Keith Romer“In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future” by Cade MetzHey Robot by Frank LantzUniversal Paperclips by Frank Lantz

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 those, exactly?In her latest book, Imagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin argues that our collective imagination has been monopolized by the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world. But, she says, it doesn’t need to be that way.Mentioned:“Imagination: A Manifesto,” by Ruha BenjaminSummer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), directed by Questlove“The Black Woman: An Anthology,” by Toni Cade Bambara“The New Artificial Intelligentsia,” by Ruha Benjamin“Race After Technology,” by Ruha BenjaminBreonna's Garden, with Ju'Niyah Palmer“Viral Justice,” by Ruha BenjaminThe Parable Series, by Octavia ButlerFurther Reading:“AI could make health care fairer—by helping us believe what patients say,” by Karen Hao“How an Attempt at Correcting Bias in Tech Goes Wrong,” by Sidney Fussell“Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines,’” by Joy Buolamwini“The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence,” by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres

Margrethe Vestager, the EU's Competition Commissioner known for her fierce stance against big tech, dives into the urgent need for AI regulation. She discusses her landmark victories against giants like Apple and Google, emphasizing the importance of accountability in AI decision-making. Vestager outlines the risks of unregulated AI, including discrimination and lack of transparency, and stresses the necessity for human-centric governance. With her tenure winding down, she highlights the race for comprehensive global legislation to protect citizens and ensure trust in technology.

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 decay isn’t inevitable. It’s a symptom of corporate under-regulation and monopoly – practices being challenged in courts around the world, like the US Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Google.Cory Doctorow is a British-Canadian journalist, blogger and author of Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as speculative fiction works like The Lost Cause and the new novella Spill. Every Friday, Lately takes a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day. It’s hosted by Vass Bednar. Machines Like Us will be back in two weeks.

Nitasha Tiku, a tech culture reporter at the Washington Post, anchors the conversation alongside Charlie Warzel from The Atlantic and bestselling author Charles Duhigg. They discuss how Silicon Valley has evolved into a political powerhouse, with crypto donations swaying elections. The trio examines Elon Musk's controversial role in shaping narratives and the rising threat of misinformation, especially regarding AI's impact on politics. They also ponder the implications for democracy, as the tech landscape shifts under the weight of growing right-wing influence.

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 be best known for Station Eleven, which was made into a big HBO miniseries in 2021. In Station Eleven, Mandel envisioned a very different future. One where a pandemic has wiped out nearly everyone on the planet, and the world has returned to a pre industrial state. In other words, a world without technology.I think speculative fiction carries tremendous power. In fact, I think that AI is ultimately an act of speculation. The AI we have chosen to build, and our visions of what AI could become, have been shaped by acts of imagination.So I wanted to speak to someone who has made a career imagining other worlds, and thinking about how humans will fit into them.Mentioned:“Last Night in Montreal” by Emily St. John Mandel“Station Eleven” by Emily St. John MandelThe Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 – Lecture by Patrick Modiano“The Glass Hotel” by Emily St. John Mandel“Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John MandelSummary of the 2023 WGA MBA, Writers Guild of AmericaHer (2013)“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood“Shell Game” by Evan RatliffReplikaFurther Reading:“Can AI Companions Cure Loneliness?,” Machines Like Us“Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building it Anyway.,” Machines Like Us“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

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 work, and government officials saying AI was going to supercharge the economy. And then there was Yoshua Bengio. Bengio is one of AI’s pioneering figures. In 2018, he and two colleagues won the Turing Award – the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize – for their work on deep learning. In 2022, he was the most cited computer scientist in the world. It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to suggest that AI as we know it today might not exist without Yoshua Bengio. But in the last couple of years, Bengio has had an epiphany of sorts. And he now believes that, left unchecked, AI has the potential to wipe out humanity. So these days, he’s dedicated himself to AI safety. He’s a professor at the University of Montreal and the founder of MILA - the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.  And he was at this big AI conference too, amidst all these Silicon Valley types, pleading with the industry to slow down before it’s too late. Mentioned:“Personal and Psychological Dimensions of AI Researchers Confronting AI Catastrophic Risks” by Yoshua Bengio“Deep Learning” by Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing“International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI” “Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?” by R. Ren et al.“SB 1047: Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act”Further reading:“‘Deep Learning’ Guru Reveals the Future of AI” by Cade Metz“Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence” “This A.I. Subculture’s Motto: Go, Go, Go” By Kevin Roose“Reasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriously” by Yoshua Bengio

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 CrutzenFurther 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 ColeFurther 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 PaltaFurther 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