The Changing Face of Election Interference

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, o ...  Show more

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 ...  Show more

The global online ad racket; Ed Butler investigates how criminals are ripping off advertising firms to the tune of billions every year.Andrew Lissimore the CEO of a Canadian company that sells high-end headphones tells us what happened when he hired an ad-tech firm to organise ta ...  Show more

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Advertising is everywhere. By some estimates, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements each day. Whether we realize it or not, "adcreep"―mod ...  Show more

It's no secret that the ad industry is huge. Advertisers spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year attempting to convince people they should buy a given product or service -- and these same forces also work around the clock to leverage the latest in neuroscience and tech ...

In Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals, 2020), Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising--the beating heart of the internet--is at risk of c ...  Show more