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.

My 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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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