It’s become pretty easy to spot phishing scams: UPS orders you never made, banking alerts from companies you don’t bank with, phone calls from unfamiliar area codes. But over the past decade, these scams – and the technology behind them – have become more sophisticated, invasive and sinister, largely due to the rise of something called ‘mercenary spyware.’

The most potent version of this tech is Pegasus, a surveillance tool developed by an Israeli company called NSO Group. Once Pegasus infects your phone, it can see your texts, track your movement, and download your passwords – all without you realizing you’d been hacked.

We know a lot of this because of Ron Deibert. Twenty years ago, he founded Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that has helped expose some of the most high profile cases of cyber espionage around the world.

Ron has a new book out called Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy, and he sat down with me to explain how spyware works, and what it means for our privacy – and our democracy.

Note: We reached out to NSO Group about the claims made in this episode and they did not reply to our request for comment.

Mentioned:

“Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy,” by Ron Deibert

“Meta’s WhatsApp says spyware company Paragon targeted users in two dozen countries,” by Raphael Satter, Reuters

Further Reading:

“The Autocrat in Your iPhone,” by Ron Deibert

“A Comprehensive Analysis of Pegasus Spyware and Its Implications for Digital Privacy and Security,” Karwan Kareem

“Stopping the Press: New York Times Journalist Targeted by Saudi-linked Pegasus Spyware Operator,” by Bill Marczak, Siena Anstis, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, John Scott-Railton, and Ron Deibert

We’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about AI: how it’s changing war, how your doctor might be using it, and whether or not chatbots are curing, or exacerbating, loneliness.

But what we haven’t done on this show is try to explain how AI actually works. So this seemed like as good a time as any to ask our listeners if they had any burning questions about AI. And it turns out you did.

Where do our queries go once they’ve been fed into ChatGPT? What are the justifications for using a chatbot that may have been trained on plagiarized material? And why do we even need AI in the first place?

To help answer your questions, we are joined by Derek Ruths, a Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, and the best person I know at helping people (including myself) understand artificial intelligence.

Further Reading:

“Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building It Anyway,” Machines Like Us podcast

“ChatGPT is blurring the lines between what it means to communicate with a machine and a human,” by Derek Ruths

“A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going,” by Michael Wooldridge

“Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans,” by Melanie Mitchell

“Anatomy of an AI System,” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler“

Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, how has generative AI helped businesses?,” by Joe Castaldo

We spend a lot of time talking about AI on this show: how we should govern it, the ideologies of the people making it, and the ways it's reshaping our lives.

But before we barrel into a year where I think AI will be everywhere, we thought this might be a good moment to step back and ask an important question: what exactly is AI?

On our next episode, we'll be joined by Derek Ruths, a Professor of Computer Science at McGill University.

And he's given me permission to ask him anything and everything about AI.

If you have questions about AI, or how its impacting your life, we want to hear them. Send an email or a voice recording to: machineslikeus@paradigms.tech

Thanks – and we’ll see you next Tuesday!