Show Notes
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.
More from Machines Like Us
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 regulation of this technology have grown louder. And some of the people advocating for more rules are the leaders of the frontier labs themselves, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. But how can governments, which tend to move slowly, regulate a technology that is changing at an increasingly quicker pace?
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 the female influencers. But the money pouring into AI marketing goes far beyond a luxury brand trip. Tech billionaires and super PACs are spending millions to quietly flood your social media feeds. Some have paid influencers for undisclosed deals pushing AI-positive and anti-China messaging. Others have gone so far as to fund radical anti-AI meme accounts that threaten their own CEOs – all to make their critics look unhinged. Tech and culture journalist Taylor Lorenz has spent more than a decade reporting on online creators. She’s been following the dark money behind these co-ordinated campaigns to buy up digital influence and shift the public debate around AI.
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, where does that leave us? These aren’t new questions, but rapid advances in AI have made them feel a lot more urgent. Even Pope Leo XIV chose artificial intelligence as the subject of his first encyclical. Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT and author of Tech Agnostic, has been asking these questions long before the machines showed up. He argues that we’re living in a moment with too much certainty, and that the most useful thing we could embrace right now might be doubt.
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.
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.