Big Tech - SoundSage

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You've probably seen one by now: a human-sized robot doing very human feats – landing a perfect backflip, racing through the streets of Beijing, or dancing in a crowd at a Knicks game. But behind these viral moments, there is serious money. Analysts predict the market for humanoid robots could be worth trillions in a matter of decades.

Everyone from trillionaire Elon Musk to Chinese President Xi Jinping is betting humanoids are the future – that one day, they will live alongside us – in our homes, and even our military. The question is: can we trust them?

Angelica Lim has spent her entire career trying to build trustworthy robots. A roboticist based at Simon Fraser University, Lim joins Machine’s Like Us to share lessons from building the world’s first mass-produced humanoid named Pepper, and why empathy in robotics is more important than ever.

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When Marc Miller became Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, he inherited Ottawa’s oldest, unfinished file in tech policy: regulating social media. He took office at a global turning point. Australia had just banned social media for kids under 16, with Denmark, France, Turkey, and the U.K. quickly following suit.

The proliferation of AI chatbots added urgency to his new file. Ignored in previous policy cycles, AI chatbots are now embedded in the lives of millions of Canadians. And in the wake of the tragedy at Tumbler Ridge, the risks of these unrelated systems are no longer theoretical.

In part two of our series on Canada's landmark new digital legislation, Minister Miller joins us to talk about his bill, The Safe Social Media Act, which restricts platforms for minors unless platforms can prove they’re safe and sets world-first rules for AI chatbots. It’s the federal government’s bid to hold Big Tech accountable. If you missed part one, you can check out our last episode with Minister Evan Solomon on the federal government’s plan to bring Canada’s privacy laws into the AI era.

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“AI for All.” That’s what Canada’s federal government is calling its national AI strategy. It makes the case for building AI with confidence: a homegrown supercomputer by 2031, 60 per cent adoption by 2034. But the new strategy offers little about how it will govern the technology.

Ottawa attempted to answer those concerns with two landmark bills: the Safe Social Media Act, which regulates social media platforms and AI chatbots, and the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act, which brings Canada’s privacy laws into the AI era. Together, these bills give the country something it’s never had: a single digital regulator with power to hold companies responsible.

It’s the most ambitious tech policy move this country has seen. And it’s drawing fire from every direction. Critics say a superregulator gives too much power to the government, that privacy and data should be treated separately, and that this is part of a wider government effort to control speech.

To dig into the details, we sat down with Evan Solomon, Canada’s first Minister of Artificial Intelligence and the architect of this agenda. We talk about why data means something new in the age of AI, how this regulator would actually work, and whether it could have stopped something like Grok’s controversial nudification feature – a case the current Privacy Commissioner says he’s powerless to stop.

Mentioned:

Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All
Backgrounder: Government of Canada introduces legislation to Protect Canadians’ Privacy in the Digital Age
Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act
Elon Musk's Grok AI tool under fire over digital undressing
Canada’s privacy commissioner expands investigation into ‘X’ over ‘Grok’
Yes, Musk's Grok chatbot is 'digitally undressing' women and children • FRANCE 24 English
Privacy Commissioner of Canada investigation into the Grok chatbot and sexualized deepfakes finds companies violated privacy law
Commissioner-initiated complaints concerning X Corp.’s and X.AI LLC’s compliance with PIPEDA
Canada has access to Anthropic’s powerful Mythos AI model, minister says

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Human beings have always loved to gamble. Archeological records suggest we’ve been doing it for the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. But for as long as we’ve been playing games of chance, we’ve worried about what they might be doing to us. For thousands of years, everyone from Aristotle to George Washington condemned gambling, an ancient anxiety that ran so deep it became something like a moral consensus.

And then that consensus evaporated. In the span of a decade, both Canada and the US legalized sports betting. Now anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can wager on basketball, hockey, or American cornhole.

But it turned out that was just the beginning. A few years later came “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket that let you bet on, well, just about anything: whether the US will invade Cuba, the odds of James Comey being sent to prison, and whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027. That last one, by the way, is currently sitting at 3 per cent on Polymarket.

If betting on missile strikes, military coups, and political prosecutions feels kind of gross, I’m with you. But James Surowiecki thinks we should give prediction markets a chance. Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a book he wrote more than 20 years ago, where he argued that large groups of ordinary people are actually better than experts at making predictions. It’s become something of a foundational text for these markets: the idea that they can crowdsource knowledge, aggregate what millions of people believe about the future, and use that signal to make better decisions. So I wanted to have James on to make the case for prediction markets, and to see if he could make me feel just a little less squeamish about a world where you can gamble on everything.

Mentioned* The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 2004). * Francis Galton, “Vox Populi,” Nature 75 (1907): 450–451 — the–ox-weighing experiment. * The 1986 Challenger disaster and Morton Thiokol’s stock: Maloney & Mulherin, “The complexity of price discovery in an efficient market,” Journal of Financial Economics (2003). * Kalshi (prediction market platform). * Polymarket (prediction market platform). * The 2024 “French whale” (Théo), who used neighbour polls to bet roughly $85M on a Trump win — CBS–News / 60 Minutes. * The Polymarket trader’s well-timed bets on the June 2025 US strikes on Iran — CNN– * The market on the length of a Karoline Leavitt White House briefing * Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and the earnings-call “mention markets” — Tec–Crunch. * The market on Maduro’s removal and the ~$400K Venezuela payout — PBS–NewsHour. * The Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral market — DL –ews. * The market on Bad Bunny’s first Super Bowl LX song — Pol–market. * DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market (the “terrorism futures” proposal, cancelled after backlash in 2003) — CNN–(2003). * The 1979 Iranian Revolution as a US intelligence failure — Nat–onal Security Archive, George Washington University.

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Towards the end of last year, Australia did something no other country had ever tried: it banned social media for kids under 16. And a bunch of others are following with similar laws, first Denmark, then France, then Indonesia and Austria. All in, there are now more than 25 countries that have either implemented, or are actively considering, social media bans for kids. It seems like Canada is moving there as well. In April, the Liberal party adopted a non-binding motion to restrict young people’s access to both social media and AI chatbots.

All over the world, you can hear parents breathing a sigh of relief. They’ve spent the last decade watching their kids become hooked on their devices, and now we’re doing something about it. It looks like we’re finally going to get our kids back.

But researchers like Candice Odgers are skeptical. Odgers is a psychology professor at UC Irvine who’s been studying the digital lives of young people for almost 20 years now, long before anyone was worried about what social media was doing to their brains. She says there isn’t really any research to suggest these bans will work. But her argument goes even deeper than that: she says the idea that smartphones have caused a youth mental health crisis just isn’t supported by the evidence.

So as governments all over the world start to kick kids off social media, and maybe even AI chatbots as well, Candice Odgers thinks we’re making a serious mistake. And I want to know if she’s right.

Mentioned* The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Press, 2024). * Australia’s under-16 social media ban — the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, in effect 10 December 2025 — eSafety Commissioner. * National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Social Media and Adolescent Health” (2024). * Hunt Allcott et al., “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” NBER (2026) — near-zero effects on test scores, attendance, and bullying. * The University of Manchester #BeeWell study finding no link between social media/gaming use and later anxiety or depression, Journal of Public Health (2026). * “The Kids Are All Right,” Scientific American (2026) — young people doing better than prior generations on many metrics. * The Stanford-led evaluation of Australia’s ban (Stanford Social Media Lab with the eSafety Commission), finding most teens stayed on the platforms — The Conversation. * The early-1980s Pac-Man moral panic (Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s 1982 warning; municipal moves to restrict arcades) — Freethink. * Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230) — Cornell Legal Information Institute * Canada’s Gen(Z)AI youth assembly on AI (~100 young Canadians aged 17–23), Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, findings presented in Ottawa.

Machines Like Us is hosted by Taylor Owen, produced by Paradigms, and distributed by The Globe and Mail.

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The people running technology companies love to make wild predictions about the future. They’ve told us that artificial intelligence will cure cancer, eliminate drudgery and solve climate change. But those utopian visions have yet to materialize. Where are the revolutionary moonshots we’ve been promised?

Aza Raskin may well have one. Raskin is the president of the Center for Humane Technology and the co-founder of the Earth Species Project, a non-profit using machine learning to decode animal communication.

Raskin and his colleagues are envisioning a world where birds can vote and dolphins get to represent themselves in court. That might sound hard to believe – but Raskin says they’re not far from making it a reality.

So I wanted to ask him: what happens to our world – and to us – when animals have the right to speak?

Recordings courtesy of Dr. Vittorio Baglione and Dr. Daniela Canestrari (University of León), Logan James and McGill University, and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

Machines Like Us will return on June 9th.

MentionedMy Octopus Teacher (2020), directed by Pippa Ehrlich & James Reed

Unlocking Avian Secrets: How Tiny Biologgers Are Revealing the Hidden Communication of Carrion Crows, by Earth Species Project

AI-powered playbacks engage in flexible vocal interactions with zebra finches, by Logan S. James et al.

Decoding Killer Whale Communication From Above and Below, by Earth Species Project

Innovative Behaviours and Synchronization in Bottlenose Dolphins, by Stacy Braslau-Schneck

What the World Thinks About AI and Animal Communication: Findings from Our First Global Survey, by Earth Species Project

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When Prime Minister Mark Carney took the floor at the recent Liberal convention, he described a future where AI benefits all Canadians – not just a lucky few.

It’s an optimistic vision. But according to political theorist Hélène Landemore and democratic innovator Peter MacLeod, our current political system just isn’t capable of delivering on it. Instead, Landemore, a Yale professor and the author of Politics Without Politicians, argues that ordinary citizens – not politicians – should be the ones calling the shots. MacLeod has spent more than twenty years putting that idea into practice in Canada. His new book is Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs The Public.

Our conversation isn’t really about artificial intelligence. But it is about whether our current form of politics is capable of governing it – or whether a radical new technology demands an equally radical form of governance.

Mentioned:Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule, Hélène Landemore

Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, Hélène Landemore

Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public, Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson

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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 artificial intelligence was already exhibiting signs of sentience. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that he can’t be sure that his chatbot, Claude, isn’t conscious.

But what exactly does that mean? A chatbot may be intelligent, but does it have a sense of self? And what would happen if it did?

These are the kinds of strange, mind-bending questions Michael Pollan wrestles with in his new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

It’s the kind of book that raises more questions than it answers. But as Silicon Valley continues to flirt with the idea of building artificial consciousness – of designing machines that don’t just think, but feel – these are the kinds of questions we should probably start asking.

Mentioned:A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan

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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 who would listen that we were hurtling toward our extinction.

And then: we moved on. We started using AI for work, and school, and to plan our kids’ birthday parties. Collectively, we just stopped talking about the end of the world.

But Nate Soares didn’t move on. Last year, the artificial intelligence researcher wrote a book with Eliezer Yudkowsky called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. As you can probably tell from the title, the book is unequivocal: If we keep going down the path we’re on, it will almost certainly lead to the end of our species.

Now, not everyone is convinced of the arguments Soares makes. But if there’s even a chance he’s right, I think we need to hear him out.

Mentioned:If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

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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 reasonable question. But the idea that AI companies should automatically report violent conversations to police is more complicated than it sounds.

To try and unpack it, I spoke with Meredith Whittaker, the President of Signal – an encrypted messaging platform that doesn’t collect your data, serve you ads, or track who you’re talking to. Whittaker runs the most private messaging app on the planet, which also means there is almost certainly illegal activity happening on Signal that no one, including her, knows about.

But this conversation isn’t just about Tumbler Ridge. The instinct to trade privacy for “safety” is reshaping the entire tech landscape: Amazon now lets you scan a whole neighbourhood’s worth of Ring camera footage; Australia requires teenagers to verify their ages before accessing social media. These technologies offer real value – but they all ask you to give something up in return. So I wanted to ask Whittaker why that trade might not be worth making.

Editor's note: A previous version of this article reported an incorrect final tally of the injured during the shooting at Tumbler Ridge. Two were critically injured. The podcast audio also includes an incorrect final tally of the injured.

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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 pause on AI development, and the Biden administration was developing an “AI Bill of Rights” – one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive frameworks for AI regulation I’ve ever seen.

The architect of that initiative was Dr. Alondra Nelson. Today, she leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study and is fresh off a stint on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral transition team in New York. I wanted to have her on to wrestle with an urgent question: how do you make a technology safe when nobody seems particularly interested in regulating it – and what might happen if we don’t?

Mentioned:

Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: Making Automated Systems Work for the American People, by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

The mirage of AI deregulation, by Alondra Nelson (Science)

International AI Safety Report 2026, by Yoshua Bengio et al

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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 plotting to overthrow our species sounds like the kind of doomsday scenario we’ve been worrying about for decades.

Not everyone thinks Moltbook is a sign that our AIs have become sentient. But even the skeptics think it’s a pretty profound technological leap. It’s just not clear yet whether that’s an exciting development – or a terrifying one.

Mentioned:

“AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It,” by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye (Harvard Business Review)

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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 shaping our future.

Ava Smithing, 24, and Sneha Revanur, 22, are trying to change that. Smithing is the advocacy director at the Young People’s Alliance and the host of “Left to Their Own Devices,” a podcast about how technology is rewriting childhood. Revanur is the founder of Encode AI, a youth-led nonprofit focused on AI policy. Politico once called her the “Greta Thunberg of AI.”

Together, they’re two of the most influential young voices in tech. So we brought them on to find out what older generations are getting wrong about AI – and what Gen Z wants from the most powerful technology in history.

Mentioned:

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman

Gameplan, by Encode AI

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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 understand China.

Enter Keyu Jin. Jin is a Harvard trained economist who splits her time between London and Beijing, and her book, The New China Playbook, is her attempt to “read China in the original” – to provide a firsthand look at the forces that shaped the country’s unprecedented rise. China’s success is a puzzle. How did one of the poorest nations on the planet become the second richest in less than a century? How did an economy without free markets birth a tech sector that rivals – and in some ways surpasses – Silicon Valley?

The answers to these questions aren’t academic. China became a global power without capitalism and without democracy, which means its success has profound implications for both.

And as Canada sets out to find its footing in a rapidly changing world order, one thing is abundantly clear: we need to start reckoning with the Chinese playbook.

Mentions:

The New China Playbook, by Keyu Jin

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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 to reach artificial general intelligence or see the rise of humanoid robots this year. If the people at the centre of the industry can’t figure it out, I doubt I can.

But I do have some ideas about how AI could reshape our world over the next 12 months. I think we’re going to see a new political movement pushing back against AI adoption and leaning into our collective humanity. Democratic governments will defy an increasingly protectionist America and start taking digital regulation seriously again. And we’ll start establishing cultural norms about AI use – like whether you really need to respond to that AI-generated e-mail your colleague just sent.

On this episode, I turn the mics around and invite my longtime producer, Mitchell Stuart, to ask me about what’s actually in store for the year ahead.

Mentioned:

Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence (2025), KPMG

Human-centric AI: Perspectives on trust and the future of AI (2025), Telus

Could an Alternative AI Save Us from a Bubble? (Gary Marcus), by Machines Like Us

GPT-5 System Card, OpenAI

Multi-model assurance analysis showing large language models are highly vulnerable to adversarial hallucination attacks during clinical decision support, by Mahmud Ohmar et al (Nature)

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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 world – he’s building.

In his new book, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip, journalist Stephen Witt pulls back the curtain. And what he finds is, at times, shocking: Huang believes there is zero risk in developing superintelligence.

So who is Jensen Huang? And should we worry that the most powerful person in AI is racing forward at breakneck speed, blind to the potential consequences?

Mentioned:

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip, by Stephen Witt

How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution, by Stephen Witt (The New Yorker)

The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World, by Stephen Witt (New York Times)

Machines Like Us is produced by Mitchell Stuart. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Video editing by Emily Graves. Our executive producer is James Milward. Special thanks to Angela Pacienza and the team at The Globe and Mail.

Media sourced from the BBC.

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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, partisanship and AI slop? Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales just wrote a book called The Seven Rules of Trust, where he explains how he was able to build that rarest of things: a trustworthy source of information on the internet. In an era when trust in institutions is collapsing, Wales thinks he’s found a blueprint – not just for the web, but for everything else too.

Mentioned:

The Seven Rules of Trust by Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner

A False Wikipedia ‘Biography’ by John Seigenthaler (USA Today)

Photo Illustration: The Globe and Mail/Brendan McDermid/Reuters

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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 worry there may be trouble ahead. They see companies like OpenAI – valued at half a trillion dollars while losing billions every month – and fear the AI sector looks a lot like a bubble. Because right now, venture capitalists aren’t investing in sound business plans. They’re betting that one day, one of these companies will build artificial general intelligence.

Gary Marcus is skeptical. He’s a professor emeritus at NYU, a bestselling author, and the founder of two AI companies – one of which was acquired by Uber. For more than two decades, he’s been arguing that large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini – just aren’t that good.

Marcus believes that if we’re going to build artificial general intelligence, we need to ditch LLMs and go back to the drawing board. (He thinks something called “neurosymbolic AI” could be the way forward.)

But if Marcus is right – if AI is a bubble and it’s about to pop – what happens to the economy then?

Mentioned:

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, by Project Nanda (MIT)

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce, by MacKenzie Sigalos (CNBC)

The Algebraic Mind, by Gary Marcus

We found what you’re asking ChatGPT about health. A doctor scored its answers, by Geoffrey A. Fowler (The Washington Post)

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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, the extinction of our species.

So if you’re building a technology that could either save the world or destroy it – is that a moral pursuit?

These kinds of thorny questions are at the heart of Bregman’s latest book, Moral Ambition. In a sweeping conversation that takes us from the invention of the birth control pill to the British Abolitionist movement, Bregman and I discuss what a good life looks like (spoiler: he thinks the death of work might not be such a bad thing) – and whether AI can help get us there.

Mentioned:

Moral Ambition, by Rutger Bregman

Utopia for Realists, by Rutger Bregman

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.

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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 reshape our public sphere.

But this felt different. This wasn’t discreet backdoor lobbying or a furtive effort to curry favour with an incoming administration. These were some of the most influential men in the world quite literally aligning themselves with the world’s most powerful politician – and his increasingly illiberal ideology.

Carole Cadwalladr has been tracking the collision of technology and politics for years. She’s the investigative journalist who broke the Cambridge Analytica story, exposing how Facebook data may have been used to manipulate elections. Now, she’s arguing that what we’re witnessing goes beyond monopoly power or even traditional oligarchy. She calls it techno-authoritarianism – a fusion of Trump’s authoritarian political project with the technological might of Silicon Valley.

So I wanted to have her on to make the case for why she believes Big Tech isn’t just complicit in authoritarianism, but is actively enabling it.

Mentioned:

The First Great Disruption 2016-2024, by Carole Cadwalladr

Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans, by Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik (New York Times)

This is What a Digital Coup Looks Like, by Carole Cadwalladr (TED)

The Nerve News

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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 work that’s clearly riffing on – or outright mimicking – other people’s art. Art that, in most of the world, is protected by copyright law. Which raises an obvious question: how is any of this legal?

The AI companies claim they’re allowed to train their models on this work without paying for it, thanks to the “fair use” exception in American copyright law. But Ed Newton Rex has a different view: he says it’s theft.

Newton Rex is a classical music composer who spent the better part of a decade building an AI music generator for a company called Stability AI. But when he realized the company – and most of the AI industry – didn’t intend to license the work they were training their models on, he quit. He has been on a mission to get the industry to fairly compensate creators ever since. I invited him on the show to explain why he believes this is theft at an industrial scale – and what it means for the human experience when most of our art isn’t made by humans anymore, but by machines.

Mentioned:

A.I. Is Coming for Culture, by Josha Rothman (The New Yorker)

Machines Like Us is produced by Mitchell Stuart. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Host direction by Athena Karkanis. Video editing by Emily Graves. Our executive producer is James Milward. Special thanks to Angela Pacienza and the team at The Globe and Mail. Media sourced from BBC News.

Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.

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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 Turing Award and a Nobel Prize.

I think it’s fair to say that artificial intelligence as we know it, may not exist without Geoffrey Hinton.

But Hinton may be even more famous for what he did next. In 2023, he left Google and began a campaign to convince governments, corporations and citizens that his life’s work – this thing he helped build – might lead to our collective extinction. And that moment may be closer than we think, because Hinton believes AI may already be conscious.

But even though his warnings are getting more dire by the day, the AI industry is only getting bigger, and most governments, including Canada’s, seem reluctant to get in the way.

So I wanted to ask Hinton: If we keep going down this path, what will become of us?

Mentioned:

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats, by Anthropic

Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.

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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 college.”

University administrators seem paralyzed in the face of this. Some worry that if we ban tools like ChatGPT, we may leave students unprepared for a world where everyone is already using them. But others think that if we go all in on AI, we could end up with a generation capable of producing work – but not necessarily original thought.

I’m honestly not sure which camp I fall into, so I wanted to talk to two people with very different perspectives on this.

Conor Grennan is the Chief AI Architect at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where he’s helping students and educators embrace AI. And Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at Stanford and Harvard, and the co-founder of the University of Austin. Lately, he’s been making the opposite argument: that if universities are to survive, they largely need to ban AI from the classroom. Whichever path we take, the consequences will be profound. Because this isn’t just about how we teach and how we learn – it’s about the future of how we think.

Mentioned:

AI’s great brain robbery – and how universities can fight back, by Niall Ferguson (The London Times)

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College, by James D. Walsh (New York Magazine)

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, by Nataliya Kos’myna (MIT Media Lab)

The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson

How the Enlightenment Ends, by Henry A. Kissinger

Support for Machines Like Us is provided by CIFAR and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.

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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 the Blackberry, and is one of the most successful business people in Canada. He’s also one of the patriotic, which makes his recent criticism of our country that much more meaningful. As Balsillie has pointed out, our GDP per capita is currently about 70% of what it is in the U.S., our productivity growth has been abysmal for years, and our high cost of living means that 1 in 4 Canadians are now food insecure.

But, according to Balsillie, none of this can be blamed on Trump. He thinks that over the last thirty years we’ve clung to an outdated economic model and have allowed our politics to be captured by corporate interests.

So, with less than a week to go before the federal election, I thought it was the perfect time to sit down with Jim and ask him how we might build a stronger, more sovereign Canada.

Mentioned:

“Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS),” The World Trade Organization

“Reinforcing Canada’s security and sovereignty in the Arctic,” Prime Minister of Canada

“Ontario Welcomes Siemens’ $150 Million Investment to Establish New Technology Centre in Oakville,” news release from the Government of Ontario

Further Reading:

“We are all economic nationalists now,” by Jim Balsillie (National Post)

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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 Russia will all attempt to influence the outcome of this election. To try and get a sense of what we’re up against, I wanted to get two different perspectives on this. My colleague Aengus Bridgman is the Director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a project that we run together at McGill University, and Nina Jankocwicz is the co-founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project. Together, they are two of the leading authorities on the problem of information manipulation.

Mentioned:

“Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions,” by the Honourable Marie-Josée Hogue
"A Pro-Russia Content Network Foreshadows the Automated Future of Info Ops,” by the American Sunlight Project

Further Reading:

“Report ties Romanian liberals to TikTok campaign that fueled pro-Russia candidate,” by Victor Goury-Laffont (Politico)

“2025 Federal Election Monitoring and Response,” by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network

“Election threats watchdog detects Beijing effort to influence Chinese Canadians on Carney,” by Steven Chase (Globe & Mail)

“The revelations and events that led to the foreign-interference inquiry,” by Steven Chase and Robert Fife (Globe & Mail)

“Foreign interference inquiry finds ‘problematic’ conduct,” by The Decibel

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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 starting toplace their trust in other, often more dubious sources of information: TikTok influencers, Elon Musk’s X feed, and The Joe Rogan Experience.

The impact of this shift can be seen almost everywhere you look. 15 percent of Americans believe climate change is a hoax. 30 percent believe the 2020 election was stolen. 10 percent believe the earth is flat.

A lot of this can be blamed on social media, which crippled journalism's business model and led to a flourishing of false information online. But not all of it. People like Jay Rosen have long argued that journalists themselves are at least partly responsible for the post-truth moment we now find ourselves in.

Rosen is a professor of journalism at NYU who’s been studying, critiquing, and really shaping, the press for nearly 40 years. He joined me a couple of weeks ago at the Attention conference in Montreal to explain how we got to this place – and where we might go from here.

A note: we recorded this interview before the Canadian election was called, so we don’t touch on it here. But over the course of the next month, the integrity of our information ecosystem will face an inordinate amount of stress, and conversations like this one will be more important than ever.

Mentioned:
"Digital News Report Canada 2024 Data: An Overview," by Colette Brin, Sébastien Charlton, Rémi Palisser, Florence Marquis

"America’s News Influencers," by Galen Stocking, Luxuan Wang, Michael Lipka, Katerina Eva Matsa,Regina Widjaya,Emily Tomasik andJacob Liedke

Further Reading:

"Challenges of Journalist Verification in the Digital Age on Society: A Thematic Review," Melinda Baharom, Akmar Hayati Ahmad Ghazali, Abdul Muati, Zamri Ahmad

"Making Newsworthy News: The Integral Role of Creativity and Verification in the Human Information Behavior that Drives News Story Creation," Marisela Gutierrez Lopez, Stephann Makri, Andrew MacFarlane, Colin Porlezza, Glenda Cooper, Sondess Missaoui

"The Trump Administration and the Media (2020)," by Leonard Downie Jr. for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

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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. In other words, this isn’t just a new company, it could be an entirely different approach to building artificial intelligence.

To try and understand what DeepSeek means for the future of AI, and for American innovation, I wanted to speak with Karen Hao. Hao was the first reporter to ever write a profile on OpenAI and has covered AI for The MIT Tech Review, The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. So she’s better positioned than almost anyone to try and make sense of this seemingly monumental shift in the landscape of artificial intelligence.

Mentioned:

“The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world,” by Karen Hao

Further Reading:

“DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning,” by DeepSeek-AI and others.

“A Comparison of DeepSeek and Other LLMs,” by Tianchen Gao, Jiashun Jin, Zheng Tracy Ke, Gabriel Moryoussef

“Technical Report: Analyzing DeepSeek-R1′s Impact on AI Development,” by Azizi Othman

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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 things, it becomes almost impossible to focus on the things that really matter. Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon called this strategy “flooding the zone.”

As the host of the MSNBC show All In, Chris Hayes has had a front-row seat to the war for our attention – and, now, he’s decided to sound the alarm with a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.

Hayes joined me to explain how our attention became so scarce, and what happens to us when we lose the ability to focus on the things that matter most.

Mentioned:

"Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest," by Zeynep Tufekci

Further Reading:

"Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction," by Vikram R. Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez.

"The Attention Economy Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism," by Claudio Celis Bueno

“The business of news in the attention economy: Audience labor and MediaNews Group’s efforts to capitalize on news consumption,” Brice Nixon

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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 phone, it can see your texts, track your movement, and download your passwords – all without you realizing you’d been hacked.

We know a lot of this because of Ron Deibert. Twenty years ago, he founded Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that has helped expose some of the most high profile cases of cyber espionage around the world.

Ron has a new book out called Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy, and he sat down with me to explain how spyware works, and what it means for our privacy – and our democracy.

Note: We reached out to NSO Group about the claims made in this episode and they did not reply to our request for comment.

Mentioned:

“Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy,” by Ron Deibert

“Meta’s WhatsApp says spyware company Paragon targeted users in two dozen countries,” by Raphael Satter, Reuters

Further Reading:

“The Autocrat in Your iPhone,” by Ron Deibert

“A Comprehensive Analysis of Pegasus Spyware and Its Implications for Digital Privacy and Security,” Karwan Kareem

“Stopping the Press: New York Times Journalist Targeted by Saudi-linked Pegasus Spyware Operator,” by Bill Marczak, Siena Anstis, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, John Scott-Railton, and Ron Deibert

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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 that may have been trained on plagiarized material? And why do we even need AI in the first place?

To help answer your questions, we are joined by Derek Ruths, a Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, and the best person I know at helping people (including myself) understand artificial intelligence.

Further Reading:

“Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building It Anyway,” Machines Like Us podcast

“ChatGPT is blurring the lines between what it means to communicate with a machine and a human,” by Derek Ruths

“A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going,” by Michael Wooldridge

“Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans,” by Melanie Mitchell

“Anatomy of an AI System,” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler“

Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, how has generative AI helped businesses?,” by Joe Castaldo

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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 about AI.

If you have questions about AI, or how its impacting your life, we want to hear them. Send an email or a voice recording to: machineslikeus@paradigms.tech

Thanks – and we’ll see you next Tuesday!

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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 Google in the suit, alleging that the technology that underlies Character.AI was developed while the founders were working at Google.

I sat down with Megan Garcia and her lawyer, Meetali Jain, to talk about what happened to Sewell. And to try to understand the broader implications of a world where chatbots are becoming a part of our lives – and the lives of our children.

We reached out to Character.AI and Google about this story. Google did not respond to our request for comment by publication time.

A spokesperson for Character.AI made the following statement:

“We do not comment on pending litigation.

Our goal is to provide a space that is both engaging and safe for our community. We are always working toward achieving that balance, as are many companies using AI across the industry. As part of this, we have launched a separate model for our teen users – with specific safety features that place more conservative limits on responses from the model.

The Character.AI experience begins with the Large Language Model that powers so many of our user and Character interactions. Conversations with Characters are driven by a proprietary model we continuously update and refine. For users under 18, we serve a version of the model that is designed to further reduce the likelihood of users encountering, or prompting the model to return, sensitive or suggestive content. This initiative – combined with the other techniques described below – combine to produce two distinct user experiences on the Character.AI platform: one for teens and one for adults.

Additional ways we have integrated safety across our platform include:

Model Outputs: A “classifier” is a method of distilling a content policy into a form used to identify potential policy violations. We employ classifiers to help us enforce our content policies and filter out sensitive content from the model’s responses. The under-18 model has additional and more conservative classifiers than the model for our adult users.

User Inputs: While much of our focus is on the model’s output, we also have controls to user inputs that seek to apply our content policies to conversations on Character.AI.This is critical because inappropriate user inputs are often what leads a language model to generate inappropriate outputs. For example, if we detect that a user has submitted content that violates our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, that content will be blocked from the user’s conversation with the Character. We also have a process in place to suspend teens from accessing Character.AI if they repeatedly try to input prompts into the platform that violate our content policies.

Additionally, under-18 users are now only able to access a narrower set of searchable Characters on the platform. Filters have been applied to this set to remove Characters related to sensitive or mature topics.

We have also added a time spent notification and prominent disclaimers to make it clear that the Character is not a real person and should not be relied on as fact or advice. As we continue to invest in the platform, we will be rolling out several new features, including parental controls. For more information on these new features, please refer to the Character.AI blog HERE.

There is no ongoing relationship between Google and Character.AI. In August, 2024, Character.AI completed a one-time licensing of its technology and Noam went back to Google.”

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, support is available 24-7 by calling or texting 988, Canada’s national suicide prevention helpline.

Mentioned:

Megan Garcia v. Character Technologies, Et Al.

“Google Paid $2.7 Billion to Bring Back an AI Genius Who Quit in Frustration” by Miles Kruppa and Lauren Thomas

“Belgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbot,” by Lauren Walker

“Can AI Companions Cure Loneliness?,” Machines Like Us

“An AI companion suggested he kill his parents. Now his mom is suing,” by Nitasha Tiku

Further Reading:

“Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?” by Kevin Roose

“Margrethe Vestager Fought Big Tech and Won. Her Next Target is AI,” Machines Like Us

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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 Inspection Agency introduced a new system that relies on an algorithm to prioritize sites for inspectors to visit. Investigative reporters Grant Robertson and Kathryn Blaze Baum talk about why this new system of tracking was created, and what went wrong.

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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 Metz

Hey Robot by Frank Lantz

Universal Paperclips by Frank Lantz

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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 Benjamin

Summer 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 Benjamin

Breonna's Garden, with Ju'Niyah Palmer

“Viral Justice,” by Ruha Benjamin

The Parable Series, by Octavia Butler

Further 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

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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 of AI legislation in the world.

But the clock is ticking – both on her term and on the global race to govern AI, which Vestager says we have “very little time” to get right.

Mentioned:

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act

“Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms,” by Melissa Heikkilä

“Belgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbot” by Lauren Walker

The Digital Services Act

The Digital Markets Act

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

“The future of European competitiveness” by Mario Draghi

“Governing AI for Humanity: Final Report” by the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Advisory Body

The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA)

Further Reading:

“Apple, Google must pay billions in back taxes and fines, E.U. court rules” by Ellen Francis and Cat Zakrzewski

“OpenAI Lobbied the E.U. to Water Down AI Regulation” by Billy Perrigo

“The total eclipse of Margrethe Vestager” by Samuel Stolton

“Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology” by Anu Bradford

“The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World” by Anu Bradford

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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.

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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 moment, we spoke with three of the most prominent tech writers in the U.S. Charles Duhigg (author of the bestseller Supercommunicators) has a recent piece in the New Yorker called “Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster.” Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at the Atlantic, and Nitasha Tiku is a tech culture reporter at the Washington Post.

Mentioned:

“Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster” by Charles Duhigg

“Big Crypto, Big Spending: Crypto Corporations Spend an Unprecedented $119 Million Influencing Elections” by Rick Claypool via Public Citizen

“I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is” by Charlie Warzel

“Elon Musk Has Reached a New Low” by Charlie Warzel

“The movement to diversify Silicon Valley is crumbling amid attacks on DEI” by Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Nitasha Tiku

“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” by Marc Andreessen

“Trump Vs. Biden: Tech Policy,” The Ben & Marc Show

“The MAGA Aesthetic Is AI Slop” by Charlie Warzel

Further Reading:

“Biden's FTC took on big tech, big pharma and more. What antitrust legacy will Biden leave behind?” by Paige Sutherland and Meghna Chakrabarti

“Inside the Harris campaign’s blitz to win back Silicon Valley” by Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku and Elizabeth Dwoskin

“The Little Tech Agenda” by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

“Silicon Valley had Harris’s back for decades. Will she return the favor?” by Cristiano Lima-Strong and Cat Zakrzewski

“SEC’s Gensler turns tide against crypto in courts” by Declan Harty

“Trump vs. Harris is dividing Silicon Valley into feuding political camps” by Trisha Thadani, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nitasha Tiku and Gerrit De Vynck

“Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance” by Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku and Josh Dawsey

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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 Mandel

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 – Lecture by Patrick Modiano

“The Glass Hotel” by Emily St. John Mandel

“Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel

Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA, Writers Guild of America

Her (2013)

“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

“Shell Game” by Evan Ratliff

Replika

Further 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

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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:

Interview with Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Gwynne Dyer

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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 Cole

Further 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”

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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 Palta

Further 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

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Last year, the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen published a document he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” In it, he argued that “everything good is downstream of growth,” government regulation is bad, and that the only way to achieve real progress is through technology.

Of course, Silicon Valley has always been driven by libertarian sensibilities and an optimistic view of technology. But the radical techno-optimism of people like Andreesen, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, has morphed into something more extreme. In their view, technology and government are always at odds with one another.

But if that’s true, then how do you explain someone like Audrey Tang?

Tang, who, until May of this year, was Taiwan’s first Minister of Digital Affairs, is unabashedly optimistic about technology. But she’s also a fervent believer in the power of democratic government.

To many in Silicon Valley, this is an oxymoron. But Tang doesn’t see it that way. To her, technology and government are – and have always been – symbiotic.

So I wanted to ask her what a technologically enabled democracy might look like – and she has plenty of ideas. At times, our conversation got a little bit wonky. But ultimately, this is a conversation about a better, more inclusive form of democracy. And why she thinks technology will get us there.

Just a quick note: we recorded this interview a couple of months ago, while Tang was still the Minister of Digital Affairs.

Mentions:

“vTaiwan”

“Polis”

“Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy” by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and ⿻ Community

“Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input,” Anthropic

Further Reading:

“The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws” by Chris Horton

“How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic” by Andrew Leonard

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If you listened to our last couple of episodes, you’ll have heard some pretty skeptical takes on AI. But if you look at the stock market right now, you won’t see any trace of that skepticism. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the chip company NVIDIA, whose chips are used in the majority of AI systems, has seen their stock shoot up by 700%. A month ago, that briefly made them the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of more than $3.3 trillion.

And it’s not just chip companies. The S&P 500 (the index that tracks the 500 largest companies in the U.S.) is at an all-time high this year, in no small part because of the sheen of AI. And here in Canada, a new report from Microsoft claims that generative AI will add $187 billion to the domestic economy by 2030. As wild as these numbers are, they may just be the tip of the iceberg. Some researchers argue that AI will completely revolutionize our economy, leading to per capita growth rates of 30%. In case those numbers mean absolutely nothing to you, 25 years of 30% growth means we’d be a thousand times richer than we are now. It’s hard to imagine what that world would like – or how the average person fits into it. Luckily, Rana Foroohar has given this some thought. Foroohar is a global business columnist and an associate editor at The Financial Times. I wanted to have her on the show to help me work through what these wild predictions really mean and, most importantly, whether or not she thinks they’ll come to fruition.

Mentioned:

“Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity” by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (2023)

“Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises” by Charles P. Kindleberger (1978)

“Irrational Exuberance” by Robert J. Shiller (2016)

“Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit?” by Goldman Sachs Research (2024)

“Workers could be the ones to regulate AI” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2023)

“The Financial Times and OpenAI strike content licensing deal” (Financial Times, 2024)

“Is AI about to kill what’s left of journalism?” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2024)

“Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (2020)

“The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade” by David H. Autor, David Dorn & Gordon H. Hanson (2016)

Further Reading:

“Beware AI euphoria” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2024)

“AlphaGo” by Google DeepMind (2020)

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Douglas Rushkoff has spent the last thirty years studying how digital technologies have shaped our world. The renowned media theorist is the author of twenty books, the host of the Team Human podcast, and a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at City University of New York. But when I sat down with him, he didn’t seem all that excited to be talking about AI. Instead, he suggested – I think only half jokingly – that he’d rather be talking about the new reboot of Dexter.

Rushkoff’s lack of enthusiasm around AI may stem from the fact that he doesn’t see it as the ground shifting technology that some do. Rather, he sees generative artificial intelligence as just the latest in a long line of communication technologies – more akin to radio or television than fire or electricity.

But while he may not believe that artificial intelligence is going to bring about some kind of techno-utopia, he does think its impact will be significant. So eventually we did talk about AI. And we ended up having an incredibly lively conversation about whether computers can create real art, how the “California ideology” has shaped artificial intelligence, and why it’s not too late to ensure that technology is enabling human flourishing – not eroding it.

Mentioned:

“Cyberia” by Douglas Rushkoff

“The Original WIRED Manifesto” by Louis Rossetto

“The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020″ by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden

“Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires” by Douglas Rushkoff

“Artificial Creativity: How AI teaches us to distinguish between humans, art, and industry” by Douglas Rushkoff” by Douglas Rushkoff

“Empirical Science Began as a Domination Fantasy” by Douglas Rushkoff

“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow

“The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron

“Can AI Bring Humanity Back to Health Care?,” Machines Like Us Episode 5

Further Reading:

“The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” by Marshall McLuhan

“Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” by Neil Postman

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman

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It seems like the loudest voices in AI often fall into one of two groups. There are the boomers – the techno-optimists – who think that AI is going to bring us into an era of untold prosperity. And then there are the doomers, who think there’s a good chance AI is going to lead to the end of humanity as we know it.

While these two camps are, in many ways, completely at odds with one another, they do share one thing in common: they both buy into the hype of artificial intelligence.

But when you dig deeper into these systems, it becomes apparent that both of these visions – the utopian one and the doomy one – are based on some pretty tenuous assumptions.

Kate Crawford has been trying to understand how AI systems are built for more than a decade. She’s the co-founder of the AI Now institute, a leading AI researcher at Microsoft, and the author of Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Cost of AI.

Crawford was studying AI long before this most recent hype cycle. So I wanted to have her on the show to explain how AI really works. Because even though it can seem like magic, AI actually requires huge amounts of data, cheap labour and energy in order to function. So even if AI doesn’t lead to utopia, or take over the world, it is transforming the planet – by depleting its natural resources, exploiting workers, and sucking up our personal data. And that’s something we need to be paying attention to.

Mentioned:

“ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine” by Joseph Weizenbaum

“Microsoft, OpenAI plan $100 billion data-center project, media report says,” Reuters

“Meta ‘discussed buying publisher Simon & Schuster to train AI’” by Ella Creamer

“Google pauses Gemini AI image generation of people after racial ‘inaccuracies’” by Kelvin Chan And Matt O’brien

“OpenAI and Apple announce partnership,” OpenAI

Fairwork

“New Oxford Report Sheds Light on Labour Malpractices in the Remote Work and AI Booms” by Fairwork

“The Work of Copyright Law in the Age of Generative AI” by Kate Crawford, Jason Schultz

“Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring – and mostly secret” by Kate Crawford

“Artificial intelligence guzzles billions of liters of water” by Manuel G. Pascual

“S.3732 – Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024″

“Assessment of lithium criticality in the global energy transition and addressing policy gaps in transportation” by Peter Greim, A. A. Solomon, Christian Breyer

“Calculating Empires” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler

Further Reading:

“Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence” by Kate Crawford

“Excavating AI” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen

“Understanding the work of dataset creators” from Knowing Machines

“Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond ‘Free’” by I. Arrieta-Ibarra et al.

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Think about the last time you felt let down by the health care system. You probably don’t have to go back far. In wealthy countries around the world, medical systems that were once robust are now crumbling. Doctors and nurses, tasked with an ever expanding range of responsibilities, are busier than ever, which means they have less and less time for patients. In the United States, the average doctor’s appointment lasts seven minutes. In South Korea, it’s only two.

Without sufficient time and attention, patients are suffering. There are 12 million significant misdiagnoses in the US every year, and 800,000 of those result in death or disability. (While the same kind of data isn’t available in Canada, similar trends are almost certainly happening here as well).

Eric Topol says medicine has become decidedly inhuman – and the consequences have been disastrous. Topol is a cardiologist and one of the most widely cited medical researchers in the world. In his latest book, Deep Medicine, he argues that the best way to make health care human again is to embrace the inhuman, in the form of artificial intelligence.

Mentioned:“Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again” by Eric Topol

“The frequency of diagnostic errors in outpatient care: estimations from three large observational studies involving US adult populations” by H. Singh, A. Meyer, E. Thomas

“Burden of serious harms from diagnostic error in the USA” by David Newman-Toker, et al.

“How Expert Clinicians Intuitively Recognize a Medical Diagnosis” by J. Brush Jr, J. Sherbino, G. Norman

“A Randomized Controlled Study of Art Observation Training to Improve Medical Student Ophthalmology Skills” by Jaclyn Gurwin, et al.

“Abridge becomes Epic’s First Pal, bringing generative AI to more providers and patients, including those at Emory Healthcare”

“Why Doctors Should Organize” by Eric Topol

“How This Rural Health System Is Outdoing Silicon Valley” by Erika Fry

Further Reading:

"The Importance Of Being" by Abraham Verghese

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Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink successfully installed one of their brain implants in a 29 year old quadriplegic man named Noland Arbaugh. The device changed Arbaugh’s life. He no longer needs a mouth stylus to control his computer or play video games. Instead, he can use his mind.

The brain-computer interface that Arbaugh uses is part of an emerging field known as neurotechnology that promises to reshape the way we live. A wide range of AI empowered neurotechnologies may allow disabled people like Arbaugh to regain independence, or give us the ability to erase traumatic memories in patients suffering from PTSD.

But it doesn’t take great leaps to envision how these technologies could be abused as well. Law enforcement agencies in the United Arab Emirates have used neurotechnology to read the minds of criminal suspects, and convict them based on what they’ve found. And corporations are developing ways to advertise to potential customers in their dreams. Remarkably, both of these things appear to be legal, as there are virtually no laws explicitly governing neurotechnology.

All of which makes Nita Farahany’s work incredibly timely. Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.

Farahany isn’t fatalistic about neurotech – in fact, she uses some of it herself. But she is adamant that we need to start developing laws and guardrails as soon as possible, because it may not be long before governments, employers and corporations have access to our brains.

Mentioned:“PRIME Study Progress Update – User Experience,” Neuralink

“Paralysed man walks using device that reconnects brain with muscles,” The Guardian

Cognitive Warfare – NATO’s ACT

The Ethics of Neurotechnology: UNESCO appoints international expert group to prepare a new global standard

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When Eugenia Kuyda saw Her for the first time – the 2013 film about a man who falls in love with his virtual assistant – it didn’t read as science fiction. That’s because she was developing a remarkably similar technology: an AI chatbot that could function as a close friend, or even a romantic partner.

That idea would eventually become the basis for Replika, Kuyda’s AI startup. Today, Replika has millions of active users – that’s millions of people who have AI friends, AI siblings and AI partners.

When I first heard about the idea behind Replika, I thought it sounded kind of dystopian. I envisioned a world where we’d rather spend time with our AI friends than our real ones. But that’s not the world Kuyda is trying to build. In fact, she thinks chatbots will actually make people more social, not less, and that the cure for our technologically exacerbated loneliness might just be more technology.

Mentioned:

“ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine” by Joseph Weizenbaum

“elizabot.js”, implemented by Norbert Landsteiner

“Speak, Memory” by Casey Newton (The Verge)

“Creating a safe Replika experience” by Replika

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

Additional Reading:

The Globe & Mail: “They fell in love with the Replika AI chatbot. A policy update left them heartbroken”

“Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots” by Maples, Cerit, Vishwanath, & Pea

“Learning from intelligent social agents as social and intellectual mirrors” by Maples, Pea, Markowitz

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In the last few years, artificial intelligence has gone from a novelty to perhaps the most influential technology we’ve ever seen. The people building AI are convinced that it will eradicate disease, turbocharge productivity, and solve climate change. It feels like we’re on the cusp of a profound societal transformation. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling we’ve been here before. Fifteen years ago, there was a similar wave of optimism around social media: it was going to connect the world, catalyze social movements and spur innovation. It may have done some of these things. But it also made us lonelier, angrier, and occasionally detached from reality.

Few people understand this trajectory better than Maria Ressa. Ressa is a Filipino journalist, and the CEO of a news organization called Rappler. Like many people, she was once a fervent believer in the power of social media. Then she saw how it could be abused. In 2016, she reported on how Rodrigo Duterte, then president of the Philippines, had weaponized Facebook in the election he’d just won. After publishing those stories, Ressa became a target herself, and her inbox was flooded with death threats. In 2021, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I wanted this to be our first episode because I think, as novel as AI is, it has undoubtedly been shaped by the technologies, the business models, and the CEOs that came before it. And Ressa thinks we’re about to repeat the mistakes we made with social media all over again.

Mentioned:

“How to Stand Up to a Dictator” by Maria Ressa

“A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism” by Thompson et al.

Rappler’s Matrix Protocol Chat App: Rappler Communities

“Democracy Report 2023: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization” by V-Dem

“The Foundation Model Transparency Index” by Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence)

“All the ways Trump’s campaign was aided by Facebook, ranked by importance” by Philip Bump (The Washington Post)

“Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy

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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 someone shaping this rapidly approaching future. The first two episodes will be released on May 7th. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode.

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On the season finale of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen discusses the future of tech governance with Azeem Azhar, author of The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society. In addition to his writing, Azeem hosts the Exponential View podcast, which, much like this podcast, looks at how technology is transforming business and society.

Taylor and Azeem reflect on some of the broad themes that have concerned them this season, from platform governance, antitrust and competition, to polarization, deliberative democracy and Web3. As listeners have come to know, Taylor often views technology’s future through a cautionary lens, while Azeem has a more optimistic outlook. They begin with the recent news of Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase Twitter and what that might mean for the platform. As the episode unfolds, Taylor and Azeem touch on the varied approaches to tech regulation around the world, and how polarization and its amplification via social media are impacting democracy. They discuss Web3’s potential to foster more transparency and trust building on the internet, as well as the need for states to be involved in shaping our future online. Ultimately, there are opportunities to make positive changes at many levels of these complex, multilayered issues. As a concluding thought, Azeem points to the coal industry as an example of how, regardless of political winds, many factors in a system can bring about change.

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In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Ephrat Livni, a lawyer and journalist who reports from Washington on the intersection of business and policy for DealBook at The New York Times. One of Livni’s focuses has been how cryptocurrencies have moved from the periphery of the financial world into the mainstream.

The cryptocurrency movement originated with a commitment to the decentralization of money and the removal of intermediaries and government to enable person-to-person financial transactions. Early on, governments viewed cryptocurrency as a tool for illicit criminal activity and a threat to institutional power. In the last two years, cryptocurrency has moved into the mainstream, with sporting arenas named after crypto companies and flashy celebrity endorsements and Super Bowl ads. Crypto markets are extremely volatile with great interest from retail investors and venture capitalists. There’s a lot of enthusiasm about crypto, but not a lot of information.

With crypto moving into the mainstream, companies that wish to create trust with their customers must be more transparent, accept regulations and act more like the institutions they initially sought to disrupt. As Livni and Owen discuss, this is not a sector that regulators can ignore: it is complicated, fast-changing, multinational, and demanding a great deal of thought about how best to proceed.

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The internet is an ever-evolving thing, with new features and services popping up daily. But these innovations are happening in the current internet space, known as Web 2.0. The potential next big leap is to what is being called Web3 or Web 3.0. You have likely heard some of the terms associated with this next age — the token economy, blockchain, NFTs. Our guest this week walks us through what all this “future stuff” means, and how it could impact our daily lives.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Shermin Voshmgir, founder of Token Kitchen and BlockchainHub Berlin and the author of Token Economy: How the Web3 reinvents the Internet.Her work focuses on making technology accessible to a non-tech audience to ensure everyone can be part of the decision-making process.

Early adopters in the Web3 space see this new iteration of the Web as liberating, an innovation that will decentralize power, facilitate peer-to-peer transactions, enable individual data ownership and challenge the dominance of tech giants. There are many questions about the governance of Web3 and its impacts to society that regulators, still stuck on platform content moderation, are not yet looking at. The conversation between Taylor and Shermin provides a foundational understanding of Web3 and a look ahead at areas where regulators should focus their attention.

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Humanity has long imagined a future where humans could live for hundreds of years, if not forever. But those ideas have been the stuff of science fiction, up until now. There’s growing interest and investment in the realm of biohacking and de-aging, and leading scientists such as Harvard’s David A. Sinclair are bringing the idea of extended lifespans out of fantasy into a reality we may see within our generation. But a world where more people are living a lot longer than ever thought possible will have sweeping economic and social consequences.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with journalist Matthew D. LaPlante, co-author of Lifespan: Why We Age — And Why We Don’t Have To with David A. Sinclair. LaPlante’s focus is on the impacts longer lifespans will have, rather than on the technology involved in achieving de-aging. For example: When people live longer, where do we set the retirement age? Can the planet support more humans? And how will we deal with our past choices when we live long enough to see their impacts on our great-great-grandchildren?

In this wide-ranging conversation, Taylor and Matthew discuss more implications longer life would have on our society. In the justice system, appointing a 50-year-old to the Supreme Court looks very different when that person could live to 110 rather than 80. What about geopolitical stability, if autocrats and dictators can extend their lives to maintain power for much longer periods? And what are the implications for medical privacy when technology companies are using monitoring devices, such as the ubiquitous smart watch, in conjunction with artificial intelligence to predict when someone may develop an illness or have a heart attack?

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A fundamental feature of the internet is its ability to transcend borders, connecting people to one another and all forms of information. The World Wide Web was heralded as a global village that would remove the traditional gatekeepers and allow anyone a platform to be heard. But the reality is that access to the internet and online services is very much bound to geography. A benign example is the location lockouts to online streaming platforms depending on which country you access. But more extreme examples of how location is inherently tied to internet access occur in authoritarian regimes that will limit access during uprisings, filter and block content, and surveil online conversations and then make real-world arrests.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Nanjala Nyabola, a CIGI fellow, political analyst and author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya and Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move.

Governments have been working on platform governance and content moderation reforms for a few years now, and the need to find solutions and set rules becomes increasingly important – just look at how misinformation and censorship have been playing out in Russia and other authoritarian states over the last few weeks during the war in Ukraine. In Nyabola’s work on internet governance, she proposes that rather than look for global consensus on regulation, we need to think of the internet as a public good. “Water isn’t administered the same way in Kenya as it is in Uganda, as it is in Ethiopia, as it is in the United States; different municipalities will have different codes. But there is a fundamental agreement that water is necessary for life and should, as far as possible, be administered as a public utility.” Nyabola explains that governing the internet requires first setting out its fundamental aspects that humanity wants to safeguard and then protecting those common principles while allowing jurisdictions deliver this public good in their own unique ways.

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The speed at which the Russia-Ukraine war has played out across the internet has led to some interesting insights about how different groups have been experiencing and responding to information and misinformation about it. The West found unity across political divides, and the big tech platforms, breaking their long-held stance, have quickly acted to limit the spread of disinformation by making changes to their algorithms.

However, across much of the non-English-language internet, the information ecosystem is very different. Many Russians aren’t even aware that there is a war going on. And technology companies that are discontinuing their operations in Russia as a well-meaning sign of solidarity with Ukraine may be making the problem worse.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Ben Scott and Frederike Kaltheuner about various aspects of communications technology and the social media platforms that are being used by all sides in the Russia-Ukraine war. We begin with a conversation between Taylor and Ben, the executive director of Reset, on the state of the information ecosystem both inside Russia and around the world. In the second half, Taylor speaks with Frederike, the director of the technology and rights division at Human Rights Watch, about the importance of access to information during wartime in the monitoring and documenting of human rights abuses, as well as the critical role that communications systems play in helping citizens inside conflict zones.

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In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Margaret O’Mara, a historian of modern America and author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.

Silicon Valley and the massive wealth it has generated have long symbolized the wonders of free market capitalism, viewed as proof of how innovation can thrive when it is not burdened by government oversight. Silicon Valley is infused with this libertarian ethos, centred on the idea that it was guys in their garages, setting out to create something new and make the world a better place, who built the Valley. But O’Mara looks back into history and says that’s all just a myth.

During the Cold War, the United States was looking for ways to bolster its technological advantage over the Soviets. Knowing that state-led projects would appear “Communist” to the American people, the government funnelled federal funding for research and development through universities, research institutions and defence companies. This influx of funds enabled private companies to expand and innovate and universities to subsidize tuition. The Apollo space program offers one such example, where federal funds supported tech companies working in electronic miniaturization and semiconductors. The upshot is that the entire Silicon Valley tech sector was built on government intervention and support, and even the guys in their garages benefited from the access to affordable university education. “To pull yourself up by your bootstraps is an American myth that’s very corrosive — there are very, very few truly self-made people,” explains O’Mara. By demystifying Silicon Valley’s origins we can better approach regulation and oversight of the tech industry.

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Do you feel as if you can’t get through a single task without distractions? Perhaps you are watching a movie and stop it to check social media or respond to a message. You aren’t alone; studies show that collectively our attention spans have been shrinking for decades. Many factors contribute to our fractured focus, including the processed foods we eat, which cause energy highs and lows, but the greatest culprit of all is technology.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Johann Hari, the author of three New York Times bestsellers: Stolen Focus, Lost Connections and Chasing the Scream. Hari has been writing about depression, addiction and drugs for many years. Using that as background, Hari seeks to understand how social media has been changing our ability to deeply focus on important tasks. Hari argues that we must not think of this as a personal failing and charge the individual with finding a way out of this crisis, as we have done with obesity and drug addictions. Instead, society must change its relationship with technology so that we can regain our human ability to focus.

Technology has increased the speed at which we work and live; as we try to consume so much information, we begin to focus less and less on the details. Hari compares it to speed reading: “It’s surprisingly effective, but it always comes with a cost, even for professional speed readers, which is the faster you read, the less you understand, the less you remember, and the more you’re drawn to shallow and simplistic documents.” Couple that with the way platforms prioritize certain types of content and you have a recipe for disaster. “Everyone has experienced it. Human beings will stare longer at something that makes them angry and upset than they will at something that makes them feel good,” says Hari. What Hari worries is that rather than take collective action, society will put the onus on individuals much as in dealing with obesity it ignores the wider food supply network and instead sells fad diets and supplements to individuals. “And if you come to the attention crisis the same way [we responded] to the obesity crisis, we’ll get the same outcome, which is an absolute disaster.”

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In the history of computers and the internet, a few names likely come to mind: Alan Turing, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Undoubtedly, these men’s contributions to computer sciences have shaped much of our modern life. In the case of Jobs and Gates, their financial success shifted the landscape of software development and the metrics of success in Silicon Valley. Some sectors of the industry, such as programming, hypertext and databases, had been dominated by women in the early days, but once those areas became economic drivers, men flooded in, pushing aside the women. In the process, many of their contributions have been overlooked.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Claire L. Evans, a musician, internet historian and author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. Evans’s book chronicles the work of women involved in creating the internet but left out of its history.

Owen and Evans reflect on several important milestones of the early internet where women were innovating in community building and the moderation of message boards. Evans reveals a little-known history of the early web and the women involved. One aspect that stands out is how the projects that women led focused on building trust with users and the production of knowledge rather than the technical specifications of microprocessors or memory storage. Today, in the face of online harms, misinformation, failing institutional trust and content moderation challenges, there is a great deal we can learn from the work women were already doing decades ago in this space.

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Nicholas Carr is a prolific blogger, author and critic of technology since the early days of the social web. Carr began his blog Rough Type in 2005, at a time when some of today’s biggest companies where still start-ups operating out of college dorms. In 2010, he wrote the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction finalist The Shallows, in which he discussed how technology was changing the human brain. At the time, many were skeptical about Carr’s argument, but in just over a decade many of his predictions have come true.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen and guest Nicholas Carr reflect on how he was able to identify these societal shifts long before others. The social web, known as Web 2.0, was billed as a democratizing tool for breaking down barriers so that anyone could share information and have their voices heard. Carr had concerns; while others saw college kids making toys, he saw the potential for major shifts in society. “As someone who had studied the history of media, I knew that when you get these kinds of big systems, particularly big communication systems, the unexpected, unanticipated consequences are often bigger than what everybody thinks is going to happen,” Carr explains.

We are again on the verge of the next online shift, called Web3, and as new online technologies like non-fungible tokens, cryptocurrencies and the metaverse are being built, we can learn from Web 2.0 in hopes of mitigating future unanticipated consequences. As Carr sees it, we missed the opportunity to become involved early on with social platforms, before they became entrenched in our lives. “Twitter was seen as a place where people, you know, describe what they had for breakfast, and so society didn’t get involved in thinking about what are the long-term consequences here and how it’s going to play out. So I think if we take a lesson from that, even if you’re skeptical about virtual reality and augmented reality, now is the time that society has to engage with these visions of the future.”

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People are divided: you are either pro-vaccination or against it, and there seems to be no middle ground. Whether around the dinner table or on social media, people are entrenched in their positions. A deep-seated mistrust in science, despite its contributions to the flourishing of human life, is being fuelled by online misinformation. For the first time in history, humanity is in the midst of a pandemic with communication tools of almost unlimited reach and potential benefit, yet social media and the information economy appear structured to promote polarization. Take the case of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Spotify: Rogan, a comedian, is able to engage millions of listeners and spread, unchecked, misinformation about COVID-19 “cures” and “treatments” that have no basis in evidence. What responsibility does Spotify have as the platform enabling Rogan to spread this misinformation, and is it possible for the scientific community to break through to skeptics?

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Timothy Caulfield, the author of bestselling books such as Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? and The Vaccination Picture. He is also the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Caulfield has been outspoken on Twitter about medical misinformation with the #ScienceUpFirst campaign.

What we have learned though the pandemic is how critical it is to have clear public health communication, and that it is remarkably difficult to share information with the public. As everyone rushed to provide medical advice, people were looking for absolutes. But in science, one needs to remain open to new discoveries, so, as the pandemic evolved, guidelines were updated. As Caulfield explains, “I think it’s also a recognition of how important it is to bring the public along on that sort of scientific ride, saying, Look, this is the best advice we can give right now based on the science available.” When health guidelines are presented in a dogmatic way, it becomes difficult to share new emerging research; misunderstood or outdated facts become weaponized by those trying to discredit the public health sector who point to what was previously known and attempt to muddy the discourse and sow doubt. And that doubt leads to mistrust in institutions, the rise of “alternative facts,” the sharing of untested therapeutics on popular podcasts — and a convoy of truckers camped out in the Canadian capital to protest COVID lockdown and vaccine mandates.

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Time and time again, we see the billionaire tech founder or CEO take the stage to present the latest innovation meant to make people’s lives better, revolutionize industries and glorify the power of technology to save the world. While these promises are dressed up in fancy new clothes, in reality, the tech sector is no different than other expansionist enterprises from the past. Their core foundation of growth and expansion is deeply rooted in the European and American colonialization and Manifest Destiny doctrines. And just as in the past, the tech sector is engaging in extraction, exploitation and expansion.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Jeff Doctor, who is Cayuga from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. He is an impact strategist for Animikii, an Indigenous-owned technology company.

Doctor isn’t surprised that technology is continuing to evolve in the same colonial way that he saw growing up and was built into television shows, movies and video games, such as the popular Civilizations franchise, which applies the same European expand-and-conquer strategy to winning the game regardless of the society a player represents in the game. “You see this manifested in the tech billionaire class, like all of them are literally trying to colonize space right now. It’s not even a joke any more. They grew up watching the same crap,” Doctor says.

Colonialism and technology have always been entwined. European expansionism depended on modern technology to dominate, whether it be through deadlier weapons, faster ships or the laying of telegraph and railway lines across the west. Colonization continues through, for example, English-only development tools, and country selection dropdown options limited to “Canada” or the “United States” that ignore Indigenous peoples’ communities and nations. And, as governments grapple with how to protect people’s personal data from the tech sector, there is little attention paid to Indigenous data sovereignty, to ensure that every nation and community has the ability to govern and benefit from its own data.

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Governments around the world are looking at their legal frameworks and how they apply to the digital technologies and platforms that have brought widespread disruptive change to their economies, societies and politics. Most governments are aware that their regulations are inadequate to address the challenges of an industry that crosses borders and pervades all aspects of daily life. Three regulatory approaches are emerging: the restrictive regime of the Chinese state; the lax, free-market approach of the United States; and the regulatory frameworks of the European Union, which are miles ahead of those of any other Western democratic country.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Mark Scott, the chief technology correspondent at Politico, about the state of digital technology and platform regulations in Europe.

Following the success of implementing the General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in 2018, the European Parliament currently has three big policy proposals in the works: the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act. Taylor and Mark discuss how each of these proposals will impact the tech sector and discuss their potential for adoption across Europe — and how many other nations, including Canada, are modelling similar regulations within their own countries.

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Many unlocked mysteries remain about the workings of the human brain. Neuroscientists are making discoveries that are helping us to better understand the brain and correct preconceived notions about how it works. With the dawn of the information age, the brain’s processing was often compared to that of a computer. But the problem with this analogy is that it suggested the human brain was hard-wired, able to work in one particular way only, much as if it were a computer chip, and which, if damaged, could not reroute itself or restore function to a damaged pathway.

Taylor Owen’s guest this week on the Big Tech podcast is a leading scholar of neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to change its neural networks through growth and reorganization. Dr. Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist and author of The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing. His work points to just how malleable the brain can be.

Dr. Doidge talks about the brain’s potential to heal but also warns of the darker side of neuroplasticity, which is that our brains adapt to negative influences just as they do to positive ones. Today, our time spent in front of a screen and how we interact with technology are having significant impacts on our brains, and those of our children, affecting attention span, memory and recall, and behaviour. And all of these changes have societal implications.

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Democracy is in decline globally. It’s one year since the Capitol Hill insurrection, and many worry that the United States’ democratic system is continuing to crumble. Freedom House, an America think tank, says that nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives in a country that experienced democratic deterioration last year. The rise of illiberalism is one reason for this, but another may be that democratic governments simply haven’t been performing all that well in recent years.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Hélène Landemore, author of Open Democracy and Debating Democracy and professor of political science at Yale University. Landemore’s work explores the limitations of casting a vote every few years for a candidate or political party and how in practice that isn’t a very democratic process. “Electoral democracy is a closed democracy where power is restricted to people who can win elections,” she says. Positions on issues become entrenched within party lines; powerful lobbyists exert influence; and representatives, looking ahead to the next election, lack political will to lead in the here and now.

In an open democracy, citizens would be called on to debate issues and create policy solutions for problems. “If you include more people in the conversation, in the deliberation, you get the benefits of cognitive diversity, the difficulties of looking at problems and coming up with solutions, which benefits the group ultimately,” Landemore explains. In response to the yellow jacket movement in France, the government asked 150 citizens to come up with climate policies. Over seven weekend meetings, that group came up with 149 proposals on how to reduce France’s greenhouse gas emissions. In Ireland, a group of citizens was tasked with deliberating the abortion topic, a sensitive issue that was deadlocked in the political arena. The group included pro-life and pro-choice individuals and, rather than descending into partisan mud-slinging, was able to come to the recommendation, after much civil deliberation, that abortion be decriminalized.

Landemore sees the French and Irish examples as precedents for further exploration and experimentation and that “it means potentially going through constitutional reforms to create a fourth or so chamber called the House of the People or something else, where it would be like a parliament but just made up of randomly selected citizens.”

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On the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol, Big Tech host Taylor Owen sits down with Craig Silverman to discuss how the rise of false facts led us to that moment. Silverman is a journalist for ProPublica and previously worked at Buzzfeed News, and is the editor of the Verification Handbook series.

Before Donald Trump popularized “fake news” as a blanket term to attack mainstream news outlets, Silverman had been using it to mean something different and very specific. Fake news, also known as misinformation, disinformation or false facts, is online content that has been intentionally created to be shared on social media platforms. Before it was weaponized as a tool for election interference, fake news was simply a lucrative clickbait market that saw higher engagement than traditional media. And social media platforms’ algorithms amplified it because that higher engagement meant people spent more time on the platforms and boosted their ad revenue.

After establishing the origins of misinformation and how it was used to manipulate the 2016 US presidential election, Owen and Silverman discuss how Facebook, in particular, responded to the 2020 US presidential election. Starting in September 2020, the company established a civic integrity team focusing on, among other issues, its role in elections globally and removed posts, groups and users that were promoting misinformation. Silverman describes what happens next. “After the election, what does Facebook do? Well, it gets rid of the whole civic integrity team, including the group’s task force. And so, as things get worse and worse leading up to January 6, nobody is on the job in a very focused way.” Before long, Facebook groups had “become an absolute hotbed and cesspool of delegitimization, death threats, all this kind of stuff,” explains Silverman. The lie that the election had been rigged was spreading unchecked via organized efforts on Facebook. Within a few weeks of the civic integrity team’s dismantling, Trump’s supporters arrived on Capitol Hill to “stop the steal.” It was then, as Silverman puts it, “the real world consequences came home to roost.”

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In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Nicole Perlroth, New York Times cybersecurity journalist and author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race.

Nicole and Taylor discuss how that the way in which nation-states go about acquiring cyber weapons through underground online markets creates an incentive structure that enables the entire cyberwarfare complex to thrive while discouraging these exploits from being patched. “So they don’t want to tell anyone about their zero-day exploits, or how they’re using them, because the minute they do, that $3 million investment they just made turns to mud,” Perlroth explains. As Perlroth investigated the world of cyberwarfare, she noticed how each offensive action was met with a response in kind, the United States is under constant attack. The challenge with countering cyber-based attacks is the many forms they can take and their many targets, from attacks on infrastructure such as the power grid, to corporate and academic espionage, such as stealing intellectual property or COVID-19 vaccine research, to ransomware. “The core thesis of your book,” Taylor reflects, “is for whatever gain the US government might get from using these vulnerabilities, the blowback is both an unknowable and uncontrollable uncontainable.”

Early on, Perlroth was concerned about the infrastructure attacks, the ones that could lead to a nuclear power plant meltdown. However, the main focus of cyberattacks is on intelligence and surveillance of mobile phones and internet-connected devices. There is a tension between Silicon Valley’s efforts to encrypt and secure user data and law enforcement’s search for tools to break that encryption. Several jurisdictions are looking to force tech companies to build back doors into their products. Certainly, providing access to devices to aid in stopping terrorist attacks and human trafficking would be beneficial. But back doors, like other vulnerabilities found in code, can be weaponized and used by authoritarian regimes to attack dissidents or ethnic minorities.

Cybersecurity is a multi-faceted issue that needs to be addressed at all levels, because the nature of cyberwarfare is that we can no longer protect just our physical borders. “We have no choice but to ask ourselves the hard questions about what is in our network and who’s securing it — and where is this code being built and maintained and tested, and are they investing enough in security?” says Perlroth.

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In the early days of the internet, information technology could be viewed as morally neutral. It was simply a means of passing data from one point to another. But, as communications technology has advanced by using algorithms, tracking and identifiers to shape the flow of information, we are being presented with moral and ethical questions about how the internet is being used and even reshaping what it means to be human.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with the Right Reverend Dr. Steven Croft, the Bishop of Oxford, Church of England. Bishop Steven, as he is known to his own podcast audience, is a board member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and has been part of other committees such as the House of Lords’ Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence.

Bishop Steven approaches the discussions around tech from a very different viewpoint, not as an academic or technologist but as a theologian in the Anglican church: “I think technology changes the way we relate to one another, and that relationship is at the heart of our humanity.” He compares what is happening now in society with the internet to the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century, which democratized knowledge and changed the world in profound ways. The full impacts of this current technological shift in our society are yet to be known. But, he cautions, we must not lose sight of our core human principles when developing technology and ensure that we deploy it for “the common good of humankind.” “I don’t think morals and ethics can be manufactured out of nothing or rediscovered. And if we don’t have morality and ethics as the heart of the algorithms, when they’re being crafted, then the unfairness will be even greater than they otherwise have been.”

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Social media has become an essential tool for sharing information and reaching audiences. In the political realm, it provides access to constituents in a way that going door to door can’t. It also provides a platform for direct access to citizens without paying for advertising or relying on news articles. We’ve seen how Donald Trump used social media to his advantage, but what happens when social media turns on the politician?

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Catherine McKenna, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change from 2015 to 2019. McKenna’s experience with online hate is not unique; many people and groups face online harassment and, in some cases, real-world actions against them. What does make McKenna’s case interesting is the convergence of online harassment on social media and the climate change file. In her role as minister, McKenna was responsible for implementing the federal government’s environmental policy, including the Paris Agreement commitments, carbon pricing and pipeline divestment. No matter what she said in her social posts, they were immediately met with negative comments from climate change deniers. Attacks against her escalated to the point where her constituency office was vandalized and a personal security detail was assigned to her.

Finding solutions to climate change is complicated, cross-cutting work that involves many stakeholders and relies on dialogue and engagement with government, industry and citizens. McKenna found that the online expression of extremism, amplified by social media algorithms, made meaningful dialogue all but impossible. McKenna, no longer in politics, is concerned that the online social space is having negative impacts on future youth who may want to participate in finding climate solutions. “I’ve left public life not because of the haters, but because I just want to focus on climate change. But…I want more women to get into politics. I want broader diversity. Whether you’re Indigenous, part of the LGBTQ+ community, or a new immigrant, whatever it is, I want you to be there, but it needs to be safe.” Which raises the question: To find climate solutions, must we first address misinformation and online hate?

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Humans need privacy — the United Nations long ago declared it an inalienable and universal human right. Yet technology is making privacy increasingly difficult to preserve, as we spend fewer and fewer moments of time disconnected from our computers, smartphones and wearable tech. Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scope of surveillance by the National Security Agency and journalists’ investigations into Cambridge Analytica showed us how the tech products and platforms we use daily make incursions on our privacy. But we continue to use these services and allow our personal data to be collected and sold and, essentially, used against us — through advertising, political advertising and other forms of targeting, sometimes even surveillance or censorship — all because many feel that the benefits these services provide outweigh their negative impacts on our privacy.

This week’s guest, Carissa Véliz, believes that our current relationship with online privacy needs to change, and there are ways to go about it. Véliz is the author of Privacy Is Power and associate professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

Véliz speaks with host Taylor Owen about how sharing private information is often not simply individual information. “Whenever I share my personal data, I’m generally sharing personal data about others as well. So, if I share my genetic data, I’m sharing data about my parents, about my siblings, about my cousins,” which, she explains, can lead to unintended consequences for others, such as being denied medical insurance or deportation. As she sees it, users have the power to demand better controls over their personal data, because it is so valuable to the big tech companies that collect, sell and use it for advertising. “The most valuable kind of data is the most recent one, because personal data expires pretty quickly. People change their tastes. They move houses. They lose weight or gain weight. And so companies always want the most updated data.” Véliz wants people to know that even if they believe their data is already out there on the internet, it’s not too late to improve their privacy practices or demand change from technology companies. “Because you’re creating new data all the time, you can make a really big difference by protecting your data as of today,” she says. The battle is not lost — there is always an opportunity to change the way our data is used. But Véliz warns that we must act now to establish those guardrails, because technology will continue to invade ever more of our private spaces if left unchecked.

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Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is an enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker in both Silicon Valley and the political arena. He is often seen as a libertarian, who at one point was exploring the idea of building floating stateless cities in international waters. But at the same time Thiel is very much an insider. He is actively involved in American politics, through funding political candidates, and in tech, through co-founding PayPal and Palantir, as well as supporting other venture capital projects, and is even funding an “anti-woke” university.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power. Chafkin’s study of Thiel seeks to understand how he has built a dual persona as a heroic Ayn Randian libertarian entrepreneurial superhero, on the one hand, and a vampiric supervillain, on the other. What has confused many about Thiel is how he seems to play on both sides of the political divide. When Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of Donald Trump, many on the left couldn’t square the contradiction of how, in Chafkin’s words, “a futurist who happens to be gay, who happens to be an immigrant, who happens to have two Stanford degrees, you know, support this, like, reactionary, anti-tech, you know, crazy guy from New York?” By seeking to understand what one of the most influential men in both tech and politics is about, as well as his beliefs and goals, perhaps we can better understand how our societies are being reshaped. And perhaps that understanding will make us better prepared to counteract those shifts in ways that serve the best interests of society rather than those of the powerful few.

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Science fiction has long been a medium for bringing light to societal issues, including religion, culture and race. It helps us imagine futures of hope and prosperity or warns of dystopian nightmares. And our experience of race plays a central role in our understanding of science fiction. “There’s this amazing quote from Junot Díaz, the Pulitizer Prize-winning writer, where he basically says that if it wasn’t for race, X-Men doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the history of breeding human beings through chattel slavery, Dune doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn’t make sense, right?. If it wasn’t for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of science fiction first-contact stories don’t make sense,” says C. Brandon Ogbunu. What Afrofuturism seeks to do is reimagine the future by putting the Black diaspora community at the centre.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks to C. Brandon Ogbunu, a computational biologist and technologist and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University. Taylor and Brandon discuss how Afrofuturism can bring about a more diverse, inclusive community of tech start-ups and tech platforms.

Technology platforms are riddled with algorithmic bias, resulting from blind spots that exist within each development team. As many platforms span geographies, cultures and languages, it is increasingly important to be aware of the many potential harms that can result from the way the software is developed and deployed. Traditionally, Silicon Valley companies are managed by white males with a specific world view. “Anybody who is familiar with the technology and has ever been racially profiled would immediately see the problems there. I think the problem, the reason why this stuff was not a part of the conversation up front, is because the people designing the technology have never been affected by it,” says Ogbunu. He sees works of Afrofuturism, such as art, music and film, as vehicles to lift the sense of impossibility and constraint and to inspire Black and other under-represented communities to create and build new technologies and businesses.

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Since concluding the last season this past August, a lot has happened in the big tech governance and regulation space. Whistle-blower Frances Haugen and the Facebook Papers shone light on social media’s harmful impacts on our society and reignited the debate over how we regulate platforms. There have been employee-led labour movements at Amazon, Uber and Netflix. And Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his vision for a Metaverse and a new company name, Meta. Join host Taylor Owen in conversation with leading experts as they make sense of how technology is transforming our world.

Big Tech returns on Thursday, November 25, 2021. New episodes will be released weekly, every Thursday morning. Subscribe now on your favourite podcasting application.

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This season of Big Tech has featured conversations with experts across many fields —law makers, academics, journalists, authors, activists and a bishop — who are working to address technologies’ impact on our lives. In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen looks back on those conversations and highlights six themes that have emerged across the season.

Taylor begins with the topic of how the debate about tech and society is maturing, reflecting that we have moved past the superficial “tech issues” and entered into some very challenging, complicated questions around speech, encryption and anonymity.

One reason why these issues are becoming more complex is that technology’s global reach often brings it into conflict with national laws. Which is the second theme that emerged in conversations: the dynamics between, on the one hand, the layers of global interconnectedness and, on the other, a fractured system of regulations between the United States, Europe and China.

Many guests of the show highlighted a third theme, the materiality of technology and its impact on our planet. Kate Crawford, for example, discussed how rare earth minerals and server farms are having a lasting impact on climate.

In our rush to connect the world, we have created many vulnerabilities, both digital and physical. The fourth major theme this season was around surveillance — either by ad tech companies, policing or repressive regimes — and cyberattacks on our critical infrastructures.

The fifth theme is recognizing capitalism’s and the tech giants’ business model as at the root of many of the tech-related harms and risks users face today. Those financial incentive structures have created environments that prioritize users’ engagement with content above all, even if that content is false or misleading, harmful or inciting violence.

Finally, our experts presented solutions and optimism in their conversations. While grappling with these problems can be a daunting task, the sixth theme this season is that there are paths forward, and many people committed to finding ways to make technology work for the betterment of society.

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Liberal democracies around the world have protections for free speech, such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or, more famously, the US First Amendment. Many of the free speech activities that are protected by law, such as the right to organize and protest, have moved onto social media platforms. But, as we have seen, the power of social media to amplify content can have disastrous impacts.

Nations looking to reform and enact online protection regulations to address issues of terrorism, human trafficking and hate speech, among others, are experiencing pushback from those who fear they will infringe on civil liberties.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Previously, Jaffer served as deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was involved in several monumental cases, including a challenge to the USA PATRIOT Act, a lawsuit against the National Security Agency and access to information requests on secret torture and drone programs.

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In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Geoffrey Cain, author of The Perfect Police State, about the technology enabled in China’s Xinjiang region to oppress its Uighur population. Through a network of surveillance systems, social credit scores, algorithm-driven pre-crime computer software and a society where people are now fearful of their neighbours, China has built a chillingly real Orwellian police state. In their conversation, Taylor and Geoffrey discuss how these technologies are used to identify, detain and brainwash the Uighur people in what may be the first genocide in history driven by big data and artificial intelligence (AI).

However, one of the most powerful aspects of this surveillance system has nothing to do with the advanced technology. “It’s a crude system that is designed to keep people on their toes, to, you know, turn them against each other. … If my good friend might be snitching on me, well, I’m going to snitch on him first, and hopefully he’ll be taken to a camp. And then my ranking with the government rises and maybe the AI and the computer systems won’t take me away,”Cain explains. With no transparency in the system — no one knows how it functions or decides who’s a threat, or what computer code might determine their fate — an entire population lives in constant uncertainty and fear.

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Western democracies and tech companies have long painted the Chinese tech sector as not only a threat to the US sector but also as operating in direct conflict with American companies. They say that China is walled off from the rest of the world, that these tech companies are just an extension of the state, and that they create and promote state surveillance and censorship tools. While China, the country, isn’t completely innocent — there are clear examples of state interventions and human rights abuses — this episode’s guest argues that a Western-centric framing of how the sector operates isn’t quite accurate.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Hong Shen, a systems scientist at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and author of Alibaba: Infrastructuring Global China. Shen’s research focuses on the global internet industry and the social implications of algorithmic systems, with an emphasis on China.

Shen explains how China’s tech sector is not walled off from the rest of the world but instead highly integrated with it. International venture capital has been flowing into the Chinese tech sector for years. And the artificial intelligence (AI) development that is popularly depicted as an “us” vs “them” arms race is in reality better described as a production chain, with Chinese companies providing the labour to develop American AI systems.

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The journalism industry in America has grown and adapted over its 300-year history. Different business models and ownership schemes have been tried, mostly in an attempt to establish an independent free press. Social media platforms have contributed to both the decline in revenue for news outlets and the echo-chamber effect that results when users are only consuming news that fits their political viewpoint.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the Annenberg School for Communication and a co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In his work, Pickard explores how the journalism industry could be transformed to meet the needs of society and support a functioning democracy.

Pickard has studied the different stages in the American news industries’ history, which we explore in this episode, and concludes that there has never been a time when the industry was properly configured to support democracy. The current debates focus on restoring ad revenue sources that have been diverted to social media platforms but, as Pickard explains, small tweaks to the market will not solve the problem. “I think clearly we’re seeing something that is irredeemable, especially for providing local journalism. We don’t need to shore up these commercial models.” Instead, Pickard says, we need to shift away from large corporations that consolidate all news markets at a national level to new funding models that support local community-based journalism.

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Tech platforms from around the world have turned their attention to the India as a new area for user growth. These tech giants are keen to see mass adoption of their products and services by the one-billion-strong Indian market. At the same time, politicians in India have leveraged the platforms’ powers to entrench their own power. In late May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced new “IT rules” that give authorities power to ask platforms and digital news media to trace chats, break encryption and block content. The companies must weigh the importance of the Indian market to their bottom line against their users’ right to privacy.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Pranav Dixit, tech reporter for BuzzFeed News. Dixit has been reporting on tech-related news in India since 2016. A article for Buzzfeed, “I Thought My Job Was To Report On Technology In India. Instead, I Got A Front-Row Seat To The Decline Of My Democracy,” explored the current platform governance landscape in India.

Pranav and Taylor discuss how India’s approach to platform governance is similar to that of other Western-style democracies, and how the same rules that can be used to target hate speech can also be used to stifle political dissent.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is hailed as a great technological leap forward, one that will enable immense efficiencies and better decision making across countless sectors. But AI has also been met with serious questions about who is using it and how, about the biases baked in and the ethics surrounding new applications. And an ever-growing concern about AI is the environmental toll it takes on our planet. Do the benefits of AI innovations outweigh all these concerns? Is it even worth it to develop AI at all?

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Kate Crawford, research professor of communication and science and technology studies at USC Annenberg, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research Lab – NYC and author of the new book Atlas of AI. Crawford studies the social and political implications of AI.

Crawford’s work gets to the core of AI, looking at it as an extractive industry. AI extracts data, but it also extracts labour, time and untold quantities of natural resources to build and power the vast banks of computers that keep it running. Crawford argues that much of the work in AI is not, in fact, built in some “algorithmic nowhere space”on pure data, objective and neutral, but instead grounded on the ghost work and human labour that trains these systems. The industry mythologizes the internal workings, “our deeply abstract mathematical and immaterial understanding of AI,” as a way to avoid scrutiny and oversight. As Crawford explains, rather than try to govern AI as a whole, we need to take a broader approach addressing the many extractive aspects of AI to effectively tackle this problem and its wider planetary costs.

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In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat.com, an open-source intelligence and investigative journalism website. Higgins’s site uses publicly accessible online data to investigate and fact-check human rights abuses, war zone atrocities and other criminal activities. Bellingcat’s reporting on the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine gained the site wide attention, including from the Kremlin, whose public statements on their role in the incident were being refuted by the site.

The online open-source intelligence and investigation community operates adjacent to state-run intelligence gathering and journalism. As Higgins explains, Bellingcat can be an interface between the person on the ground and justice and journalism institutions: “The person on the ground who’s filming these things, you know, they film it because they want there to be accountability. It’s not just [about] raising awareness of it.” Bellingcat is now doing mock trials to show how these open-sourced investigatory efforts could lead to justice for victims.

Additionally, Higgins sees the work of online investigations as a counter movement to the increasing polarization of media and the distrust in institutions that are leading people into online conspiracy communities and fringe thinking. “What I think we need to do is start teaching people actually to, you know, use things like … open-source investigation in their own lives,” says Higgins. He sees this as an opportunity to teach the younger generation how to engage positively online: “Rather than them going off [and] just being mad about something in the world and then finding some community of people that are going to kind of draw them into conspiracy theories, they actually are able to find communities that can actually help them positively contribute to these issues.”

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Americans’ trust in democratic institutions has been strained over the past few years. The stress fractures are expressed in everything from cries of “fake news” against the media, to outrage over violent and racist police actions, to suspicion about COVID-19 precautions and vaccines, to the siege on the US Capitol Building in the aftermath of the presidential election. When trust in institutions falls, the populace can be stirred into action. Depending on the issue and the group, this action can have negative or positive impacts on society.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Ethan Zuckerman, professor of public policy, communications and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and author of the newly released Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.

Zuckerman’s work looks at how mistrust in the United States has led to activism and institutional change, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and Occupy Wall Street. But he warns that mistrust can also be used in negative ways. “One thing mistrust is very, very good at doing is getting people to disengage. If you feel like you have no control over a political situation, if you feel like you have no way of making your voice heard, if everything is a fait accompli, you stop playing the game,” Zuckerman explains. “The other thing that mistrust seems to do, and this is fascinating, is that mistrust sort of reads as a choppy sea. It reads as a complicated scenario that no one knows how to find their way through. And then whoever it is who manages to thrive in that scenario, that person is destined to lead”—a tactic, Zuckerman says, that both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have exploited.

Ultimately, Zuckerman says, “mistrust is a perfectly reasonable thing to have”: it is up to society to critically think about its institutions and determine which ones are worth protecting, which ones need reform, and which ones should be torn down altogether.

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Global technology companies that power websites and services, like Amazon and Microsoft, and platforms, like Facebook and Google, have created spaces and tools that allow corporations, states and themselves to exert power in many sectors of our lives.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Naomi Klein, author, social activist and filmmaker. Over her two decades of work, books such as No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism have, in many respects, foreshadowed the rise of big tech. For example, No Logo, published in 1999, long before the rise of Instagram and the influencer economy, examined the marketing trend of making citizens an extension of the corporations’ brand.

Recently, Klein has been raising concerns about how tech companies are positioning themselves as essential services and capitalizing on this moment to enter new sectors, with little pushback. For example, Klein explains how the education sector rushed to platforms to enable virtual learning at the start of the pandemic: “I wish public universities had been better prepared with our own technologies.” The education space is one example of how the public space is being eroded. “If we are going to be using these platforms, we have to be serious about developing public sector, common-space alternatives to these private platforms. I don’t think we did do that. And so, they moved very quickly. Shock Doctrine–style.”

While this situation may seem bleak, Klein does see a silver lining: “We probably would have ended up in this place in 10 years, and instead, we got there in a matter of months,” Klein says, in reference to the pandemic’s shelter-at-home and work-from-home orders around the world. “And we probably would have boiled slowly. And now I feel like we’re jumping around in this pot going, ‘This is terrible.’” This rapid shift has enabled us, as a society, to see more clearly how technology is impacting our lives, presenting an opportunity to course-correct.

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In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Nicole Perlroth, New York Times cybersecurity journalist and author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race.

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In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Mutale Nkonde, founder of AI for the People (AFP). She shares her experiences of discrimination and bias working in journalism and at tech companies in Silicon Valley. Moving into government, academia and activism, Nkonde has been able to bring light to the ways in which biases baked into technology’s design disproportionately affect racialized communities. For instance, during the 2020 US presidential campaign, her communications team was able to detect and counter groups who were targeting Black voters in social media groups, by weaponizing misinformation, with the specific message to not vote. In her role with AFP, she works to produce content that empowers people to combat racial bias in tech. One example is the “ban the scan” advocacy campaign with Amnesty International, which seeks to ban the use of facial recognition technology by government agencies.

In their conversation, Mutale and Taylor discuss the many ways in which technology reflects and amplifies bias. Many of the issues begin when software tools are designed by development teams that lack diversity or actively practise forms of institutional racism, excluding or discouraging decision-making participation by minority ethnic group members. Another problem is the data sets included in training the systems; as Nkonde explains, “Here in the United States, if you’re a white person, 70 percent of white people don’t actually know a Black person. So, if I were to ask one of those people to bring me a hundred pictures from their social media, it’s going to be a bunch of white people.” When algorithms that are built with this biased data make it into products — for use in, say, law enforcement, health care and financial services — they begin to have serious impacts on people’s lives, most severely when law enforcement misidentifies a suspect. Among the cases coming to light, “in New Jersey, Nijeer Parks was not only misidentified by a facial recognition system, arrested, but could prove that he was 30 miles away at the time,” Nkonde recounts. “But, because of poverty, [Parks] ended up spending 10 days in jail, because he couldn’t make bail. And that story really shows how facial recognition kind of reinforces other elements of racialized violence by kind of doubling up these systems.” Which is why Nkonde is working to ban facial recognition technology from use, as well as fighting for other legislation in the United States that will go beyond protecting individual rights to improving core systems for the good of all.

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The world watched as the Australian government passed a new law in February 2021 requiring Facebook and Google to pay news businesses for linking to their work. In the lead-up to its passing, Facebook followed through on its threat to remove news from its platform. But many viewed Facebook’s move as only reinforcing the government’s position that big tech had market dominance.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Rod Sims, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The ACCC conducted a market study to determine if there was a market failure in the journalism sector. It found that Facebook and Google were benefiting from the local news industry’s content and that these businesses were unable to seek appropriate compensation. The ACCC’s recommendation, the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, creates a code of conduct that Australian news businesses can use to bargain with Facebook and Google, using the negotiate-arbitrate model.

Taylor and Rod discuss how the ACCC came to the decision that a negotiate-arbitrate model needed to be applied, how the new code will function, why journalism’s role in democratic society is more essential than ever, and what these issues mean for the average citizen and social media user.

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Are retail investors and message boards rewriting financial markets? The GameStop shakeup over the past week demonstrated how the market could be manipulated by users of the subreddit group WallStreetBets and robo-investing apps like Robinhood. The activities that happened in cyberspace on social media and financial digital platforms made waves in the real-world financial markets. Our guest Lana Swartz calls this moment infrastructural inversion, “when suddenly something stops working, and you realize all the things that went into making it work in the first place.”

Lana Swartz is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media. Swartz has been researching the connection between social movements and money, such as Occupy Wall Street and cryptocurrencies.

Fintech has been a democratizing tool in the finance sector just as the early internet was in bringing social change. But payment platforms are acting much like social media platforms as they seek to centralize power and establish moderation rules. Swartz explains that “all of the work that has been done over the last decade or so to understand platforms now has to be applied to platforms like Robinhood and to see if there is something different about money, and if so, what is it? … Do they owe us more of a fiduciary role [and] how can we understand the mechanisms by which they are, in fact, constrained?” Robinhood’s decision to prevent users from purchasing GameStop stock demonstrated their position of power and has led to questions over whether they had the legal ability to do so. While moderating content on social media, especially disinformation and election manipulation, is important, the decisions around moderating the flow of money on payment apps has become a new area of importance to regulators.

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During his term, President Donald Trump has vilified the media, spread mis- and disinformation and built a loyal base of followers who believe his message. His refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, failed legal challenges and Stop the Steal campaign further rallied his supporters. The tipping point came on January 6, 2021, just as law makers were meeting at the Capitol to certify the election.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. Donovan studies social movements and their use of media and technology to spread their message. Social media platforms provide tools for individuals and groups to share information and organize, which has been valuable for societal movements such as Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock. But those same tools have been harnessed by bad actors aiming to incite destructive actions. In the case of the Make America Great Again movement, her team could see that those leading the Stop the Steal campaign were setting the stage for the Capitol attack. According to Donovan, “It’s about creating the conditions by which people feel [that] if they don’t do something, nothing will change.” As Donovan sees it, governments need to regulate and oversee the digital space because online activities have real-world effects. “I think everybody knows that people form communities online, and it’s in those bonds and in those spaces that people make decisions about, ‘Do I go to this protest or not?’ ‘Do I spend $400 to take a flight to DC to save Trump from the Democrats and Republicans?” … because I don’t think people make much of a distinction between ‘this is my online account for Patriot2467150’ and ‘my life.’”

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In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Baroness Beeban Kidron, OBE, across-bench member of the British House of Lords, a filmmaker and the chair of 5Rights Foundation. Kidron is a strong advocate for children’s online rights. She is a member of the UK government’s Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee working to implement the Age Appropriate Design Code, which explains how the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies in the context of children using digital services and sets 15 flexible standards to ensure that children’s best interests are the primary consideration when designing and developing these services.

While the internet is still a relatively new technology, it has rapidly come to play a major role in children’s education, entertainment and play. There is now a generation of children who are growing up with online services that only launched a decade or so ago. Children are using platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok never designed for their age group, with unintended risks and consequences. “We must stop talking about the services that are directed at children, because children spend most of their time in services that are not directed at them… . when you have your discussions about facial recognition, about biometric data, about misinformation, disinformation, all of these things are affecting children. And yet every piece of policy is about YouTube Kids,” explains Kidron. She advocates for the whole of technology to consider younger users when designing and building digital services. But online platforms are failing to meet even minimum standards of protection, which is why Kidron is working on a regulatory approach. “History is littered with things that were not possible until they were mandated. And I am sufficiently old enough to remember when two-factor authentication was going to bring the internet down. And it didn’t. And I’m definitely old enough to remember when GDPR was going to bring the internet down. And I’m not saying all these things are perfect, they are desperately imperfect, but it is amazing how when things are mandated, they are also made possible.”

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However you use telecommunications technology — and billions use it for everything from routine daily tasks and entertainment to seeking help, sharing confidential information or organizing civil actions — your communications are all running on decades-old network protocols with gaping vulnerabilities that can enable cybercrime and security breaches. High-risk individuals and organizations, in particular, are vulnerable, not only to surveillance but to targeted retaliation by autocratic states who use these security holes to abuse their power. But democratic countries have also exploited these weaknesses in, for example, law enforcement.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Ronald J. Deibert, founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the author of Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. Citizen Lab has worked for many years monitoring communication networks for state-run surveillance. Their 2018 report Hide and Seek: Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries uncovered how mobile phone spyware has been used to target individuals, including Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Deibert believes that we need to rethink how telecommunications equipment and protocols are built, to ensure privacy and security. Until we have these safeguards, malicious actors, whether states or private individuals, will continue to hack the vulnerabilities in the communications ecosystem, leaving citizens unsafe, and civil society to suffer.

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Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax sentiment have been around for as long as vaccines themselves have been available. Misinformation about vaccines has, for example, led to a decline in early childhood vaccination, resulting in the worldwide resurgence of the measles virus. In 2020, a vaccine appears to be the only viable path to ending the COVID-19 pandemic and returning to normal. But many distrust this new vaccine (or vaccines) and could refuse to get vaccinated.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Heidi J. Larson, the author of Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start — and Why They Don’t Go Awayand the director of the Vaccine Confidence Project. Larson’s work in vaccine hesitancy traces the root causes to a lack of trust in and anxieties about our institutions. That distrust is shared and amplified by the social media platforms we have available today.

The COVID-19 vaccine is an opportunity to restore trust in governments, big pharma, scientists and the media, but only if it is handled correctly. Larson explains: “To me, it’s the ultimate litmus test at multiple trust levels. Because, as I say in the book, I don’t think we have a misinformation problem, as much as we have a relationship problem, and that the misinformation, in a sense, is kind of symptomatic of not trusting, in any of those domains.”

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Where does the tech industries’ power lie? Are they “mind-control” platforms, as some have described them, capable of influencing everything from consumer choices to election results, or does their true threat to society lie in market concentration?

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author, activist and journalist. Doctorow’s latest book, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, argues that big tech’s purported powers of manipulation and control, peddled to advertisers and based on an overcollection of our data, are essentially an illusion. “Being able to target cheerleaders with cheerleading uniform ads does not make you a marketing genius or a mind controller. It just makes you someone who’s found an effective way to address an audience, so that even though your ad may not be very persuasive, you’re not showing an unpersuasive ad to someone who will never buy a cheerleading uniform,” Doctorow explains.

Doctorow’s view is that the threats to society that big tech present are far less sinister than tech critics such as Shoshana Zuboff and Tristan Harris make them out to be. Rather, the big fives’ monopolistic practices are the real issues to wrestle with.

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Depending who you ask, big tech is either going to save humanity or destroy us. Taylor Owen thinks it’s a little more complicated than that. Join him in conversation with leading thinkers as they make sense of a world transformed by technology.

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In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen discuss how our understanding of the impacts big tech has on society has shifted over the past year. Among these changes is the public’s greater awareness of the need for regulation in this sector.

In their conversation, David and Taylor reflect upon some of the major events that have contributed to this shift. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for better mechanisms to stop the spread of misinformation. And it has shown that social media platforms are capable of quickly implementing some measures to curb the spread of misinformation. However, the Facebook Oversight Board, which their guest Kate Klonick talked about in season 1, is not yet operational, and won’t be until after the US presidential election; even then, its powers will be limited to appeals rather than content oversight.

In July 2020, the big tech CEOs testified in an antitrust hearing before the US Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. “That moment,” Taylor Owen says, “represented a real turning point in the governance agenda.” This growing big tech antitrust movement is showing that law makers, now better prepared and understanding the issues more clearly, are catching up to big tech. The public is starting to recognize the harms alongside the benefits of these companies’ unfettered growth. In season 2, Matt Stoller spoke with David and Taylor about monopoly power, and how these modern giants are starting to look like the railroad barons of old.

From diverse perspectives, all the podcast’s guests have made the point that technology is a net good for society but that the positives do not outweigh the negatives — appreciating the many benefits that platforms and technology bring to our lives does not mean we can give them free rein. As Taylor explains, “When we found out the petrochemical industry was also polluting our environment, we didn’t just ban the petrochemical industry and ignore all the different potential positives that came out of it. We just said you can’t pollute any more.” With the technology sector embedded in all aspects of our democracies, economies and societies, it’s clear we can no longer ignore the need for regulation.

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Biotechnology — the use of biological processes for industrial and other purposes, especially through genetic manipulation of micro-organisms — is a field experiencing massive growth worldwide. For many decades, advances in biology have been made in large academic or corporate institutions, with entry to the field restricted by knowledge and financial barriers. Now, through information sharing and new means of accessing lab space and equipment, a whole new community of amateur scientists are entering the molecular biology space. The emergence of this growing do-it-yourself “biohacker” community raises ethical questions of what work should be allowed to proceed.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist and Chief Scientific Officer at Aanika Biosciences. She is an advocate for democratizing biotechnology by enabling more individuals to have access to lab space and equipment.

Jurisdictions are taking different approaches to biotechnology, with some, such as the European Union and Africa, being more restrictive than others, such as China. What makes the fragmentation of governance surrounding genetic modification different from fragmentation in internet or tech governance is that biotechnology’s raw material is a global interconnected web of life. A biological modification can have unintended, even disastrous, impacts worldwide. For example, says Jorgensen, “What I’m concerned with is things like gene drives, which is a variety of CRISPR gene editing that [is] self-perpetuating.…So, 100 percent of the offspring, where one of the parents has this gene drive, all have the gene drive. So, it can spread through a population, particularly one with a short lifespan, like mosquitoes, within a very short period of time. And here, for the first time, we have the ability to potentially wipe out a species.” As Jorgensen points out, with such high stakes, we have an “inherent motivation to regulate.” Working together on a global set of standards, and setting aside their own ethical or moral understandings to find a solution that works for everyone, will present a challenge for nations.

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Online advertisement and social media platforms have had a major impact on economies and societies around the globe. Those impacts are happening in retail, with the shift in spending from brick and mortar to online; in advertising, where revenues have moved from print and broadcast to online social platforms; and in society more broadly, through algorithmic-amplified extremism and hate speech. The big tech companies at the centre of these shifts have little incentive to change the nature of their operations. It now falls to nations around the globe to find ways to regulate big tech in the face of what many view as a market failure.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak to Damian Collins, a British member of Parliament and former chair of the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee. As chair of DCMS, Collins led the investigation into Cambridge Analytica’s role in the Brexit referendum. He was also involved in the creation of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and “Fake News.”

Collins doesn’t blame the tech giants for their inaction, but rather sees the problem as governance policies that have lagged behind. There is a need for policy to catch up and ensure citizens are protected, just as other complex global markets, such as the financial industry, have done. International cooperation and information sharing enable nations to take on the large global tech companies together without each needing to start from scratch.

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Journalism has had a storied history with the internet. Early on, the internet was a niche market, something for traditional publishers to experiment with as another medium for sharing news. As it gained popularity as a news source, newsrooms began to change as well, adapting their business models to the digital age. Newspapers had historically generated revenue through a mix of subscriptions, advertising and classifieds. But internet platforms Craigslist and Kijiji soon took over classified. Google Ads presented advertisers with more refined marketing tools than the newspapers could offer. And Facebook and Twitter made it possible for readers to consume news for free without visiting newspaper’s website.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak to Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Newsrooms are left with few options to make money now. Unless you are a large outlet with a sizable online subscriber base like The New York Times, your capacity for local reporting will be hampered by the economic need to focus on stories that have the broadest reach. Many media conglomerates have cut back their local reporting, creating news deserts across large regions. Not having local reporters on the case is having negative impacts on democracy, too. As Bell explains, “Where there is no local press…local officials tend to stay in office for longer. They tend to pay themselves more.” Smaller local news outlets that can build a relationship with their readers can see success if their readers are able to pay the subscription fees. But it is often poorer communities, where people can't afford local news subscriptions, that most need the services of good local journalism. Bell sees an opportunity to rethink the way news is funded: first, by looking to communities to decide what level of reporting they require, and second, by resourcing it accordingly.

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Is it possible to access the internet without interacting with the big five American tech companies? Technically, yes, but large swaths of the web would be inaccessible to consumers without the products and platforms created by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project and the author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Stoller looks at how the political landscape has changed from the time of the railroad tycoons to the modern Silicon Valley tech monopolies.

Each of these companies has established itself in a market-leading position in different ways. On mobile, Apple’s App Store is the only way for software developers to reach iPhone customers. Google controls search, maps and online advertising. Amazon’s website is the dominant online retail platform. “In some ways, it’s a little bit like saying, well, you know, that railroad that goes through this one narrow valley that you have to take to get to market, well, that’s not a monopoly, because there are other railroads in the country,” Stoller says. “Well, yeah, maybe there are, but it doesn’t matter if you need that particular railroad to get where you’re going…. that’s what Amazon is like in a lot of the sectors that it deals with.” Finally, underpinning much of the internet are Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services cloud data centres.

Is corporate power a political problem or a market problem? Skok, Owen and Stoller discuss topics ranging from the robber barons of the 1930s and the antitrust reforms that followed, to the current environment, one that evolved over several political generations to become, as Stoller describes it, a crisis of concentration separated from “caretaking,” in which profits can amass through domination rather than through better products or services.

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Social media platforms have assumed the role of news distribution sources, but have largely rejected the affiliated gatekeeper role of fact-checking the content they allow on their sites. This abdication has led to the rise of fake news, disinformation and propaganda.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen spoke with journalist and Rappler founder Maria Ressa just days before her conviction in a high-profile cyber-libel case against her, as well as her colleague Reynaldo Santos, Jr. and Rappler Inc. as a whole. On Monday, June 15, the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 46 ruled that Ressa and Santos, Jr. were liable, but that Rappler as a company was not.

This case is viewed in the larger context as an attack on journalistic freedoms protected under the Filipino Constitution. Ressa has repeatedly come under fire by the Duterte government for calling out what she sees as illiberal-leaning and propaganda. Facebook was a key component of President Rodrigo Duterte’s election in 2016. Ressa explained, “On Facebook, a lie told a million times becomes a fact.” The disinformation that spreads on social media platforms is having real-world impacts on how citizens view democratic institutions. “If you debate the facts, you can’t have integrity of markets. You can’t have integrity of elections….This is democracy’s death by a thousand cuts,” said Ressa.

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Efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic have essentially shut down the economy. Now, as regions now look to reopen, the focus is shifting to minimizing further infection by monitoring the virus’s spread and notifying people who may have been exposed to it. Public health authorities around the globe have deployed or are developing contact-tracing or contact-notification mobile apps. Apple and Google have partnered to develop a Bluetooth-based, contact notification application programming interface, now available as an update for their mobile operating systems.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Carly Kind, director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, an organization studying issues around data and artificial intelligence. In April, the institute published a report on digital contact tracing called Exit through the App Store?

There are concerns about this technology’s rapid and expansive rollout. First, around data collection: some jurisdictions are developing their apps to store data centrally rather than at device level. Next, technical considerations: for example, Bluetooth-based apps only register proximity and don’t account for other metrics, such as whether the contact happened outdoors, where infection risk is lower. Further, concerns about Apple and Google’s tech-focused solution, which infringes on the public health space: “From a power and control perspective, you can’t help but feel somewhat afraid that two companies control almost every device in every hand in the world and are able to wield that power in ways that contradict, right or wrong, the desires of national governments and public health authorities,” Kind cautions. Finally, there are concerns about how health-tracking apps, and our access to them, could impact our freedom to move about: we need to think about the ways these apps could marginalize individuals who don’t have the technology to prove their health status.

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The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy was swift and substantial. Unemployment numbers are reaching depression-era levels and nations are clamouring to unveil stability packages intended to lessen the economic impact. Will these measures work to restore the economic status quo, or is this an opportunity to rethink our economic structures?

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate economist and a professor at Columbia University, about lessons from past economic crises, and how those lessons apply to the economic fallout of COVID-19.

This time around, tech companies command much of the market, and many of them are experiencing stability, if not growth. Zoom and Netflix, for example, have seen surges in their share price. Unfortunately, the tech industry introduces new labour-market issues: digital platforms often require fewer employees to operate than other industries like manufacturing or air travel. With comparatively small staff numbers, tax breaks and growing monopolies, technology companies have an outsize effect on society. Stiglitz argues that taxing these companies in “an adequate way” could have a positive social impact. “The fact is: we lowered the corporate taxes rather than trying to capture back for the public some of the enormous profits that are accruing to the tech giants,” he explains. These companies could emerge from the pandemic more dominant than ever.

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Modern digital tools have brought about new conveniences, enabling many to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. But despite our countless ways to connect with each other, studies increasingly show that people are more isolated, more depressed and less empathetic than before.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Douglas Rushkoff about the internet’s evolution from an emerging technology to the monopolistic system we have today. Rushkoff is a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College, City University of New York and author of Team Human, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and more.

Rushkoff reflects on his involvement in the early internet in the 1980s and early ‘90s. At the time, there wasn’t any online advertising, and computer coding was seen as a hobby, rather than a career. As more people’s attention moved online, so did advertisers. The internet became an extension of American capitalism, seeking to capture and analyze our attention to generate growth. We see the impact now on our society, democracy and overall wellbeing. But Rushkoff explains that the problem isn’t the technology—it’s the application. “People think, ‘Oh, you used to like digital, and now you hate digital.’ No, digital’s been the same. I used to love the way that we applied digital, and now I hate the way we’re applying digital. There’s a really big difference. It’s like, I like hammers as long as people aren't hitting each other in the face with them.” For Rushkoff, it’s time to change the course of technology development, and put humanity first.

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Social media platforms enable a free flow of content — regardless of source. And because of that system, content creators and online influencers (whether they are credible or not) shift public opinion, and spark polarization. Governments and platforms have been working on this issue, but now, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dissemination of factual, credible information — and the removal of misleading information that could cause harm — is urgent.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Angie Drobnic Holan, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, a fact-checking organization focused on reviewing statements made by political figures and rating them for accuracy. PolitiFact is one of the fact-checking sites that is part of the Facebook fact-checking program. They provide Facebook with fact-checks that are displayed alongside user posts that have been flagged as misleading.

Facebook, however, is just one platform among many that are under fire for the rampant online extremism, fake news and disinformation facilitated by their products. Often, such platforms cite issues of scale (millions of posts a day) as cause for the problem and for their inability to solve it. However, as Drobnic Holan explains, the COVID-19 pandemic highlights just how much power social media platforms have when it comes to shaping the flow of information. “I am all in favour of freedom of speech and the first amendment. But I think false information is extraordinarily pernicious and it needs to be handled in a relatively aggressive manner,” she says. “It can't just be left to say, ‘oh, well, we hope people will find the right information eventually.’ No, that's not a way for a healthy democracy to function — with misinformation swirling all around and people being not sure what's true or not.” Drobnic Holan says.

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Companies, international organizations and government agencies are all working to identify and eliminate online hate speech and extremism. It’s a game of cat and mouse: as regulators develop effective tools and new policies, the extremists adapt their approaches to continue their efforts.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Sasha Havlicek, founding CEO of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, about her organization and how it is helping to eliminate online extremism and hate speech.

Several issues make Havlicek’s work difficult. The first challenge is context: regional, cultural and religious traditions play a factor in defining what is and what is not extremist content. Second, there isn’t a global norm about online extremism to reference. Third, jurisdictions present hurdles; who is responsible for deciding on norms and setting rules? And finally, keeping up with evolving technology and tactics is a never-ending battle. As online tools become more effective in identifying and removing online extremism and hate speech, extremist groups find ways to circumvent the systems.

These problems are amplified by engagement-driven algorithms. While the internet enables individuals to choose how and where they consume content, platforms exploit users’ preferences to keep them engaged. “The algorithms are designed to find ways to hold your attention, … that by feeding you slightly more titillating variants of whatever it is that you're looking for, you are going to be there longer. And so that drive towards more sensationalist content is I think a real one,” Havlicek says. These algorithms contribute to the creation of echo chambers, which are highly effective tools for converting users to extremists.

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Earlier this month, Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg travelled to Europe ahead of the European Commission’s announcement of a new data strategy plan. The proposed regulations would seek to give Europe a competitive advantage by establishing data trusts to foster development in artificial intelligence technology. The tension between Silicon Valley and Brussels was on full display during Zuckerberg’s visit: while the tech executive was welcomed in state-visit fashion, his recommendation for European platform regulation was flatly rejected.

To understand Zuckerberg’s message for the European Union, David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Mark Scott, chief technology correspondent at POLITICO, about the proposed data strategy and its potential implications for tech giants like Facebook.

The conversation breaks down a series of events that started on February 15, when Zuckerberg spoke at the Munich Security Conference about his company’s investment in building tools to address concerns around privacy, hate speech and democracy. He argued that private organizations shouldn’t be responsible for deciding what is acceptable online—rather, that should be left to governments.

Then, on February 17, Zuckerberg travelled to Brussels to meet with officials at the European Commission. His visit coincided with Facebook’s release of a new white paper titled “Charting a Way Forward: Online Content Regulation.”

Two days later, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced the “ European Data Strategy,” absent Zuckerberg’s recommendations. “This is about trying to make sure that Europe doesn't miss out on the next wave of tech, which is frankly mostly AI,” explains Scott.

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In this episode of Big Tech Taylor Owen sits down with Ben Scott, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Luminate, to discuss how the internet has evolved throughout Scott’s time in Washington, DC. Scott has worked for Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the State Department and then on her election campaign. Discussing Scott’s evolving role in digital policy, Owen says: “wherever the internet has been, you have been.”

While working on cable regulations in Washington DC in 2003, Scott realized that the internet was the next major form of communication technology, sparking an interest in net neutrality regulations. “And then in a very short period of years before it [the internet] becomes monetized and concentrated power takes it over, it becomes controlled by a handful of commercial interests and then people give up trying to fight against that and that becomes status quo. And we had intervened at that moment, stopped cable and telecom industries from grabbing hold of the internet and kept it decentralized.” Scott joined Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to draft the first ever internet policy agenda for a presidential candidate.

While in the State Department, Scott saw the spread of the internet and its ability to promote democracy and enable societal change — the Arab Spring for example. During the same period, platform companies continued to grow their influence in Washington DC, and eventually, Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign illustrated just how easily the internet could be manipulated. As Scott puts it: “if everybody's using the same tools of online manipulation and distortion and organized amplification of messages that don't actually have that much support in the public, if you are willing to go totally over the top with the most outrageous, the most sensational, the most divisive, the most controversial, provocative — that, ultimately those messages spread farther, faster than anything else.”

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There’s a false narrative surrounding artificial intelligence (AI): that it cannot be regulated. These idea stems, in part, from a belief that regulations will stifle innovation and can hamper economic potential, and that the natural evolution of AI is to grow beyond its original code.

In this episode of Big Tech co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Joanna J. Bryson, professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin (beginning February 2020). Professor Bryson begins by explaining the difference between intelligence and AI, and how that foundational understanding can help us to see how regulations are possible in this space.

“We need to be able to go back then and say, ‘okay, did you file a good process?’ A car manufacturer, they're always recording what they did because they do a phenomenally dangerous and possibly hazard thing … and if one of them goes wrong and the brakes don't work, we can go back and say, ‘Why did the brakes not work?’ And figure out whose fault [it] is and we can say, ‘Okay, you've got to do this recall. You've got to pay this liability, whatever.’ It's the same thing with software,” Bryson explains. It is the responsibility of nations to protect those inside its borders, and that protection must extend to data rights. She discusses how the EU General Data Protection Regulation — a harmonized set of rules that covers a large area and crosses borders — is an example international cooperation that resulted in a harmonized set of standards and regulations for AI development.

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There is a growing sense that governments are not able to effectively solve the problems of the world. The narrative that governments are slow, costly and not informed enough to make the right decisions. This stands in contrast to the private sector; business leaders are regarded as effective leaders because they generate incredible wealth.

The “savior complex” is particularly strong among the wealthiest tech executives. Their world view is rooted in the idea that we can use technology to solve all the world’s problems.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

Giridharadas speaks about this rise of powerful tech executives who are using their wealth and influence to reshape systems of governance — instead of supporting democratic institutions, they are creating their own philanthropic organizations. For Giridharadas these elites are the new plutocrats who have seized power through wealth, much like the railroad tycoons of old. “There is enormous moral difference between five guys deciding to do something and a city deciding to do something. This is something I think you wouldn't have had to explain to people 100 years or 200 years ago when we actually had more faith in the idea of democratic action,” Giridharadas says. He goes on to explain that where funds are coming from is more important than the amount of funding, citing military aid to Ukraine as an example. There is a difference between $400 million dollars provided by the American taxpayer and $400 million dollars provided by a wealthy executive who isn’t elected to represent the best interests of a population. Giridharadas argues that if tech billionaires really want to help make the world a better place, they should just pay their fair share in taxes, and leave governments to solve the world’s problems.

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Google and IBM are in a race to achieve quantum supremacy — both sides claim that they are winning. But what does quantum supremacy really mean? Quantum technologies have the ability to solve complex solutions to build better materials, design more effective pharmaceutical treatments or optimize large distribution networks. Nations or corporations that can harness the power of quantum technologies will have an advantage over their competitors. The leap in technology could be so great that it could have devastating impacts on the economies that lack quantum technologies.

In this episode of Big Tech co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with James Der Derian, Director of the Centre for International Security Studies at The University of Sydney and Principal Investigator at Project Q, about the impact of quantum technologies could have on peace, security, economics and society.

Dr. Shohini Ghose, Professor of Physics and Computer Science at Wilfrid Laurier University provides a foundational understanding of quantum computing at the beginning of this episode.

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Truth and facts are not the same thing. To find truth, we must combine the best available information (what we know to be facts) with our own lens. This is especially challenging on social media: posts may be presented as if they are truthful, but truth comes with some subjectivity. This is where fact checking tools — like the encyclopedic knowledge of Wikipedia — are essential. That is, if they present neutral information, offer unbiased results, have a transparent process and are able to be edited.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Katherine Maher, the Wikimedia Foundation’s chief executive officer and executive director. Maher joined Wikimedia in 2016 just prior to the election of President Trump. She is acutely aware of Wikipedia’s emerging role as a fact checking tool.

Transparent revision history is a cornerstone of Wikipedia. Anyone using the tool can access the edit log and provide their own edits to correct information. Some technologies subvert this process. For example, connected devices such as smart speakers pull Wikipedia’s information to provide answers to users without allowing feedback or sharing a record of edits. Other factors influence Wikipedia’s transparency and neutrality, as well. Maher’s team is looking to address biases that exist within Wikipedia’s database; she acknowledges that there is a gender imbalance, both with Wikipedia editors (80 percent of edits are made by men) and with the low percentage of articles about women and minorities. Maher explains: “we know, for example, that an article about a woman is four times more likely to mention her marital status than an article about a man. If you're doing [AI] training of semantic pairing and you start to associate someone's marital status with their gender, in so far as there's a sort of higher correlation of value to someone being married or divorced, being a woman that propagates that bias out into all of the products that are then going to go ahead and use that algorithm or that dataset in the future.” Wikipedia will need to work to solve these issues if it wishes to remain a trusted source for facts.

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Online platforms like Facebook and Google Ads are positioned as superior tools for micro-targeting advertisements. The promise of greater returns on investment and granular control over who will engage with an ad has attracted advertisers.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at Parsons School of Design at The New School. Carroll’s own understanding of the ways in which platforms were monetizing his online activity was featured in The Great Hack documentary. His research into how online advertising systems work reveals just how little thought was put into oversight and monitoring of the systems that advertisers built.

Carroll argues that financial incentives created the current data-hungry advertising environment. “The advertising complex was built to sort us into categories without knowing what our categories are. And then from there the recommendation engines were built to surface vast databases into a user interface. And those were biased towards engagement to move the chart up and then the user interface to reward people right on the surface for engagement, to move the chart up. And it was never about intelligence or goodness, it was just about greed and metrics.” For Carroll, digital advertising platforms are reminiscent of 1830s snake oil salesmen who used penny press newspapers to share misleading information. Eventually, people were protected from such ads when US Congress created the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Now, governments must step in to build the same kind of oversight bodies to regulate digital advertising.

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Facebook is establishing a 40-person oversight board to pass rulings on whether or not content should remain on their platform. The board aims to represent all regions of the world, rulings are set to be released in multiple languages and decisions about content to be made expeditiously. Only one researcher, Kate Klonick, was invited in to observe the process that went into establishing the framework for this oversight board.

In this episode of Big Tech co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Kate Klonick, an assistant professor of law at St. John's University law school, and an affiliate fellow at Yale law school about what she witnessed in this process. Klonick was embedded in Melno Park without a non-disclosure agreement, given full access to meetings and was able to record all the conversations and workshops. Throughout the process, she maintained her academic immunity, not accepting anything from Facebook, not even a free hotel room.

Klonick discusses the struggles faced by the team tasked with building the oversight board. At the beginning, it didn’t look like the project could be a success: “My lens is obviously from a legal perspective, and it's a little bit like when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. I look at a lot of the problems that I was seeing as they were creating this oversight board, and it was comparative constitutionalism, it was administrative law, it was democratic legitimacy.” Facebook continued to work on the oversight board, and as Kate admits, they did solve many of huge constitutional problems presented by content moderation. But she is still skeptical about how this board will scale, whether it will be overrun with appeals and how will the public will perceive its effectiveness.

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After discovering several small charges to her credit card that totaled upward of US$900, Rana Foroohar figured her card must have been stolen. She quickly realized those micro-transactions were coming from a game her son was playing. Unknowingly, he was spending real money inside a free-to-play game. As a journalist, Rana was fascinated by the way in which apps were capturing people’s attention and wallets.

In this episode of Big Tech co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen speak with Rana Foroohar, global business columnist and associate editor for The Financial Times and global economic analyst at CNN about her new book: Don't Be Evil: How Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles — and All of Us. They discuss the cognitive, economic, and political impacts that big tech companies are having on our societies and economies.

Foroohar discusses the risks that big tech companies’ current business models present to the global economy. While these businesses are motivated by growth (rather than profits) investors want to see profits once the company goes public. If those profits are not coming, stocks start to sink. “Uber goes out into every possible market, breaks whatever regulation it can, grabs market share, doesn't worry about making money, is allowed to continue that business model with private investors just pumping it up, pumping it up,” Foroohar says. Technology companies make up a large percentage of equity markets, and there is real concern that the economy could be heading toward a tech-led crash.

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Taylor Owen and David Skok have known each other for many years; their work in democracy and journalism ensures that their paths often cross. Taylor is an academic studying technology’s transformative impact on democracy. David has spent his journalism career in the thick of an ever-changing media landscape. They both recall one meeting at a restaurant in Toronto about ten years ago, when Taylor brought together a group of academics and journalists to discuss how technology was reshaping society. David was skeptical, and proclaimed to the room that nobody cares about privacy and technology.

A lot has changed since that meeting. Technology’s impact on society, the economy and democracy is evident, and today, people care. On the Big Tech podcast, Taylor and David will unpack the nuanced challenges that technology presents.

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