PODCAST · technology
Machines Like Us
by The Globe and Mail
Machines Like Us is a technology show about people. We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction will become our reality: robot best friends, bespoke gene editing, brain implants that make us smarter.Every other Tuesday Taylor Owen sits down with the people shaping this rapidly approaching future. He’ll speak with entrepreneurs building world-changing technologies, lawmakers trying to ensure they’re safe, and journalists and scholars working to understand how they’re transforming our lives.
Episodes
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Taylor Owen on The Decibel: The new AI moment we're in
This one's from The Decibel, The Globe and Mail's daily news podcast. Taylor was the guest, talking about the push to regulate AI and whether governments can keep up. We're between seasons, so we're running it here too. From The Decibel: After several reports of AI agents going rogue, calls for...
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Taylor Lorenz on the dark money buying your social feed
In early August, OpenAI hosted dozens of lifestyle creators at an upstate New York resort for a weekend they called Summer Club. There was beekeeping. There were farm-to-table dinners. And in between, there were sessions on how to use ChatGPT. The ensuing backlash was swift, especially against…
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Why does AI sound so much like religion?
For years, the debate about AI was mostly about what it could do, whether it could write, make convincing art, or beat us at our own games. The questions now are older and harder. What makes us human? How do we find meaning? If a machine can do more of the things we thought made humans special,...
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Demis Hassabis wanted to solve intelligence. Then came ChatGPT.
When Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, his mission was simple: solve intelligence, then use it to solve everything else. What began as a scientific quest would eventually become a fierce global AI race. Today, DeepMind is owned by Google and is one of the world’s leading AI labs....
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Can You Really Teach a Robot Empathy? This Roboticist Says Yes.
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...
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Age Gates & AI: Minister Marc Miller on The Safe Social Media Act
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....
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Canada’s AI minister to Big Tech: “We Won’t be a Digital Colony’
“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…
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We Can Now Bet on Almost Anything. Should We?
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…
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Social Media Bans Are Wildly Popular. They Might Also Be a Mistake.
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...
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Animals are Talking to Each Other. Can AI Help Us Understand Them?
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...
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Does 21st Century Politics Still Need Politicians?
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...
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Michael Pollan Says AI Isn’t Conscious – But Plants Might Be
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...
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Why Did We Stop Talking About The AI Apocalypse?
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...
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In the Wake of Tumbler Ridge, Can We Trade Privacy for Safety?
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...
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When Did Common Sense AI Policy Become Radical?
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...
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Bonus: Inside the New Social Media Platform for AI Agents
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...
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The Future According to Gen Z
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…
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Is China Winning the Technological Arms Race?
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…
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Four Predictions on How AI Will Transform Your World This Year
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...
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The Man Behind the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
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,...
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Wikipedia Won Our Trust. Can We Use That Model Everywhere?
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...
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Could an Alternative AI Save Us From a Bubble?
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...
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Can AI Lead Us to the Good Life?
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…
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How to Survive the “Broligarchy”
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....
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AI Music is Everywhere. Is it Legal?
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...
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Geoffrey Hinton vs. The End of the World
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…
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AI is Upending Higher Education. Is That a Bad Thing?
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...
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Jim Balsillie: ‘Canada’s Problem Isn’t Trump. Canada’s Problem Is Canada’
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...
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The Changing Face of Election Interference
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,...
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How Do You Report the News in a Post-Truth World?
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…
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A Chinese Company Upended OpenAI. We May Be Looking at the Story All Wrong.
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…
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Big Tech Hijacked Our Attention. Chris Hayes Wants To Win It Back.
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…
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New Spyware Has Made Your Phone Less Secure Than You Might Think
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,...
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A Computer Scientist Answers Your Questions About AI
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...
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Questions About AI? We Want to Hear Them
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...
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This Mother Says a Chatbot Led to Her Son’s Death
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...
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Bonus ‘The Decibel’: How an algorithm missed a deadly listeria outbreak
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...
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AI Has Mastered Chess, Poker and Go. So Why Do We Keep Playing?
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…
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How Silicon Valley Monopolized Our Imagination
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...
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Margrethe Vestager Fought Big Tech and Won. Her Next Target is AI
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...
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Bonus ‘Lately’: The Great Decline of Everything Online
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...
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Musk, Money and Misinformation: Tech & The U.S. Election
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...
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Emily St. John Mandel Imagines The Future
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...
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Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building it Anyway.
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…
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There’s a Way to Cool the Planet. Scientists are Terrified of It.
In 2015, 195 countries gathered in Paris to discuss how to address the climate crisis. Although there was plenty they couldn’t agree on, there was one point of near-absolute consensus: if the planet becomes 2°C hotter than it was before industrialization, the effects will be catastrophic. Despite...
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Gaza is a Window into the Future of War
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...
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Why Journalism Made a Devil’s Bargain with Big Tech
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...
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How to Hack Democracy
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...
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How AI Turbocharged the Economy (For Now)
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…
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Douglas Rushkoff Doesn’t Want to Talk About AI
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...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Machines Like Us is a technology show about people. We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction will become our reality: robot best friends, bespoke gene editing, brain implants that make us smarter.Every other Tuesday Taylor Owen sits down with the people shaping this rapidly approaching future. He’ll speak with entrepreneurs building world-changing technologies, lawmakers trying to ensure they’re safe, and journalists and scholars working to understand how they’re transforming our lives.
HOSTED BY
The Globe and Mail
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Machines Like Us have?
Machines Like Us currently has 55 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Machines Like Us about?
Machines Like Us is a technology show about people. We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction will become our reality: robot best friends, bespoke gene editing, brain implants that make us...
How often does Machines Like Us release new episodes?
Machines Like Us has 55 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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You can listen to Machines Like Us on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Machines Like Us?
Machines Like Us is created and hosted by The Globe and Mail.
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