Machines Like Us

Human beings have always loved to gamble. Archaeological 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% 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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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 to place 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.

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.