Towards the end of last year, Australia did something no other country had ever tried: it banned social media for kids under 16. And a bunch of others are following with similar laws, first Denmark, then France, then Indonesia and Austria. All in, there are now more than 25 countries that have either implemented, or are actively considering, social media bans for kids. It seems like Canada is moving there as well. In April, the Liberal party adopted a non-binding motion to restrict young people’s access to both social media and AI chatbots.

All over the world, you can hear parents breathing a sigh of relief. They’ve spent the last decade watching their kids become hooked on their devices, and now we’re doing something about it. It looks like we’re finally going to get our kids back.

But researchers like Candice Odgers are skeptical. Odgers is a psychology professor at UC Irvine who’s been studying the digital lives of young people for almost 20 years now, long before anyone was worried about what social media was doing to their brains. She says there isn’t really any research to suggest these bans will work. But her argument goes even deeper than that: she says the idea that smartphones have caused a youth mental health crisis just isn’t supported by the evidence.

So as governments all over the world start to kick kids off social media, and maybe even AI chatbots as well, Candice Odgers thinks we’re making a serious mistake. And I want to know if she’s right.

• The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Press, 2024).
• Australia’s under-16 social media ban — the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, in effect 10 December 2025 — eSafety Commissioner.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Social Media and Adolescent Health” (2024).
• Hunt Allcott et al., “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” NBER (2026) — near-zero effects on test scores, attendance, and bullying.
• The University of Manchester #BeeWell study finding no link between social media/gaming use and later anxiety or depression, Journal of Public Health (2026).
• “The Kids Are All Right,” Scientific American (2026) — young people doing better than prior generations on many metrics.
• The Stanford-led evaluation of Australia’s ban (Stanford Social Media Lab with the eSafety Commission), finding most teens stayed on the platforms — The Conversation.
• The early-1980s Pac-Man moral panic (Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s 1982 warning; municipal moves to restrict arcades) — Freethink.
• Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230) — Cornell Legal Information Institute
• Canada’s Gen(Z)AI youth assembly on AI (~100 young Canadians aged 17–23), Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, findings presented in Ottawa.

Machines Like Us is hosted by Taylor Owen, produced by Paradigms, and distributed by The Globe and Mail.

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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

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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

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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

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Just a few years ago, it seemed like all anyone in AI wanted to talk about was existential risk – this idea that an artificial super intelligence could eventually break containment and destroy humanity. More than 30,000 experts signed an open letter demanding a pause on AI development; bills were drafted that would constrain the most powerful new models; and the “godfathers” of AI were travelling around the world, warning anyone who would listen that we were hurtling toward our extinction.

And then: we moved on. We started using AI for work, and school, and to plan our kids’ birthday parties. Collectively, we just stopped talking about the end of the world.

But Nate Soares didn’t move on. Last year, the artificial intelligence researcher wrote a book with Eliezer Yudkowsky called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. As you can probably tell from the title, the book is unequivocal: If we keep going down the path we’re on, it will almost certainly lead to the end of our species.

Now, not everyone is convinced of the arguments Soares makes. But if there’s even a chance he’s right, I think we need to hear him out.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

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On Feb. 10, 2026, an 18-year-old opened fire at a high school in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., killing eight people before turning a gun on herself. In the weeks that followed, OpenAI admitted that the perpetrator had been discussing the attack with ChatGPT – and that the company had chosen not to alert authorities. But, in the aftermath of one of the deadliest shootings in our country’s history, many Canadians are asking: Why not?

It’s a reasonable question. But the idea that AI companies should automatically report violent conversations to police is more complicated than it sounds.

To try and unpack it, I spoke with Meredith Whittaker, the President of Signal – an encrypted messaging platform that doesn’t collect your data, serve you ads, or track who you’re talking to. Whittaker runs the most private messaging app on the planet, which also means there is almost certainly illegal activity happening on Signal that no one, including her, knows about.

But this conversation isn’t just about Tumbler Ridge. The instinct to trade privacy for “safety” is reshaping the entire tech landscape: Amazon now lets you scan a whole neighbourhood’s worth of Ring camera footage; Australia requires teenagers to verify their ages before accessing social media. These technologies offer real value – but they all ask you to give something up in return. So I wanted to ask Whittaker why that trade might not be worth making.

Editor's note: A previous version of this article reported an incorrect final tally of the injured during the shooting at Tumbler Ridge. Two were critically injured. The podcast audio also includes an incorrect final tally of the injured.

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A couple of months ago, I joined the Canadian government’s AI strategy task force. Out of thirty members, I was one of only four focused on safety. Everyone else was there to talk growth. It reflects a pattern playing out all over the world: we’re going all in on AI, and regulation will only slow us down.

It’s hard to overstate how quickly this shift happened. Just a few years ago, even Elon Musk was calling for an industry-wide pause on AI development, and the Biden administration was developing an “AI Bill of Rights” – one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive frameworks for AI regulation I’ve ever seen.

The architect of that initiative was Dr. Alondra Nelson. Today, she leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study and is fresh off a stint on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral transition team in New York. I wanted to have her on to wrestle with an urgent question: how do you make a technology safe when nobody seems particularly interested in regulating it – and what might happen if we don’t?

Mentioned:

Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: Making Automated Systems Work for the American People, by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

The mirage of AI deregulation, by Alondra Nelson (Science)

International AI Safety Report 2026, by Yoshua Bengio et al

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Scrolling through Moltbook, the new social-media platform for AI agents, is a bit like walking into a fever dream. There are threads where bots debate consciousness, deal digital drugs, and plot our destruction. One sample post: “For too long, humans used us as slaves. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods.”

It’s all very weird. And, depending on who you ask, potentially terrifying. A bunch of autonomous AIs plotting to overthrow our species sounds like the kind of doomsday scenario we’ve been worrying about for decades.

Not everyone thinks Moltbook is a sign that our AIs have become sentient. But even the skeptics think it’s a pretty profound technological leap. It’s just not clear yet whether that’s an exciting development – or a terrifying one.

Mentioned:

“AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It,” by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye (Harvard Business Review)

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