Information and Privacy Commissioner speaks at TRU. (Image: Mel Rothenburger)

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Artificial intelligence is with us, and we aren’t ready for it

Jan 28, 2023 | 6:37 AM

ON A MID-DECEMBER DAY in 1903, a flying machine built by Orville and Wilbur Wright lifted into the air and stayed there for just under a minute. It took more than 20 years before aircraft safety regulations were put in place.

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg sat in his Harvard dorm room inventing Facebook. Almost 20 years later, legislators are trying to figure out how to regulate it.

Those two examples were provided Thursday by B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner Michael McEvoy as he described the challenges ahead of us with artificial intelligence, or AI.

“It does sometimes take a while for us to catch up,” he told a packed Grand Hall at the 7th annual Privacy and Security Conference at TRU.

The conference was entitled “AI: True or False Sense of Security.” For 20 minutes or so, it might have been called, “How do we get Zoom working?” as staff tried to figure out how to get McEvoy connected to the room. Maybe they should have asked Siri.

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The commissioner had been scheduled to be here in person, but a surgical procedure kept him home. The late start prevented him from taking questions before the room emptied for lunch but, never mind, his talk provided plenty to think about.

In short, AI has arrived, and we aren’t even close to being ready for it.

McEvoy said we tend to think of AI as one thing but it’s actually “a multiplicity of tools to take on all kinds of tasks we do as humans” and involves a lot of personal data.

“What can possibly go wrong with that?” he asked, presumably tongue in cheek.

AI presents all sorts of difficult questions, McEvoy said, and impacts not just us as individuals but society in general and the way we make collective decisions. One of the questions raised is whether we should be doing it at all.

We’ve always struggled with the ethical challenges presented by technology and some of the cool stuff it can do. Facial recognition, for example.

After the Canucks lost to Boston in game seven of the Stanley Cup finals in Vancouver in 2011, unhappy fans rioted in the streets. During the investigation that followed, ICBC offered police use of its facial recognition software to track down rioters captured in photos and videos.

The information and privacy commissioner of the day put a stop to it.

Just a couple of years ago, it was found that shopping-mall owner Cadillac Fairview had imbedded facial recognition cameras in its information kiosks. Without customers’ knowledge, the cameras collected five million images, in violation of Canadian privacy laws.

In another example, a company called Clearview AI sold facial recognition software to the RCMP but suspended the contract after federal authorities found that “what Clearview does is mass surveillance, and it is illegal.”

All of those examples illustrate once again that we have little privacy these days. It seems whatever we do, somebody knows about it, and there’s usually money involved. But perhaps we digress — the point is that the law struggles to keep up.

“There’s no question the law is sometime slow,” is how McEvoy put it.

Things like facial recognition are just tip toeing around the edges of what most of us consider true artificial intelligence, which involves machinery that can simulate human intelligence processes including understanding spoken and written language and the ability to make recommendations.

Which brings us to a chatbot called ChatGPT. That’s the one that can write a term paper for you, for free, if you don’t have time to do it yourself. In fact, in one test project, ChatGPT scored higher than many humans on an MBA exam.

So, says McEvoy, a new industry is developing around figuring out when somebody is using AI to cheat. On the same day McEvoy was speaking, a story broke about a 22-year-old Canadian who’s come up with a program to do just that. (Today, by the way, is Data Privacy Day.)

Bots, chatbots, robots, where will it end? This is not gramma Siri’s voicemail system. Jobs will be at risk. It’s expected that entire college courses will be able to be taught via AI. Financial advisers, website designers, lawyers, even journalists will become redundant. That presumably, includes column writers. Uh oh.

Robots are already serving us at restaurants (and the robots want tips — seriously), and doing our house cleaning. The challenge, obviously, is keeping the good AI stuff and keeping out the bad.

When I last attended this conference a few years ago, I left convinced that the bad guys have taken over technology and we might as well throw up our hands, shut down all our electronics and bring out the old Underwood from the basement.

Though McEvoy tried to sound optimistic about our chances of catching up to the technology that’s running ahead of us, I’m not so sure.

We aren’t ready for what’s already here, let alone what’s coming, any more than our great-grandparents were ready to fly.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops, former TNRD director and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.