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

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.

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

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.

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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

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.

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.