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The Current Transcript for February 1, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

IN THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: theme]

SOUNDCLIP

There’s been a lot of talk in the newspapers and on TV about a program that I put in motion to detain and question terrorists and extremists. This government does not torture people.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, of course, we know now that they did torture people during the Bush administration. But they called it enhanced interrogation or harsh interrogation. It was a program created under the guidance and oversight of psychologists. The American Psychology Association has since banned its members from participating in any military or CIA interrogations. But now the Pentagon wants them back. Is this a legitimate need, an ethical dilemma, or a lie they tell themselves? We're asking in a moment. And then we're listening to one of the world's biggest brains who's working on the implications of the rise of even bigger brains in the form of artificial intelligence.

SOUNDCLIP

We should not be confident in our ability to keep a super intelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever. Sooner or later it will out.

AMT: In half an hour, as part of our ongoing project Ripple Effect, Nick Bostrom joins me to talk about the future of humanity, when the machines we create start thinking faster than we ever will. We're also talking about the realities for a growing demographic today. The first generation of children with intellectual disabilities to be in the care of parents full time rather than in institutions. They are now out living those parent caregivers while siblings step in.

SOUNDCLIP

We don't have any aunts or uncles or brothers or sisters and he knows that without me he's very vulnerable.

AMT: We bring you the story of Helen and her brother Paul, emblematic of a growing number of families who feel they're falling through the cracks. Hear them in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Pentagon sparks debate on use of psychologists in interrogation

Guests: Anne Speckhard, Steven Reisner

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It was one of the most controversial decisions taken in the CIA's history. To subject terrorist suspects to what the agency called enhanced interrogation techniques, but what nearly everyone else calls torture. At secret locations around the world, known as Black Sites, America took the gloves off. Interrogators use methods like waterboarding.

VOICE 2: The country and the agency was just consumed with the fear and the dread that another attack was coming on the homeland.

AMT: Well, that was the former CIA lawyer John Rizzo speaking with the BBC in that report. Mr. Rizzo is known for his role in approving some of the CIA's most condemned programs during America's post-9/11 war on terror. Reports of detainee torture, or so-called enhanced interrogation, used during the Bush administration shocked the world and sparked a mass international outcry. Last week the world was reminded of these atrocities as news broke that the Pentagon is urging American psychologists to end their ban on involvement in interrogations. The American Psychological Association, the APA voted last summer to ban psychologists from any involvement in national security interrogations. Now that came after a report alleged that psychologists working for the CIA in the Pentagon's interrogation programs after 9/11 were used to protect the government from legitimate accusations of torture. The Pentagon says psychologists are needed to ensure interrogations abide by professional and international ethical standards and Anne Speckhard agrees. She is a psychologist. She is the director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. She's also an adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at Georgetown University. And we have reached her in Brussels, Belgium. Hello.

ANNE SPECKHARD: Hello.

AMT: What was your reaction when you heard that psychologists would be banned through the association from any involvement in interrogations relating to US National Security?

ANNE SPECKHARD: I was shocked and was offended because I, myself, had been involved with the detainee rehabilitation program. I helped write it for our 20,000 detainees and 100 juveniles. I worked hard to make sure that psychological ethics were upheld in that program and that we were educating our military members on how to do things right. So to have the APA me that if I helped with something in the future, I couldn't be a member of the organization or I would be violating an ethics code. And I found that very strange and frankly offensive.

AMT: So why should the ban end?

ANNE SPECKHARD: Well, it shouldn’t have been put in place at all. The point is we have an ethics code as psychologists. We all know what it is. If we want to ban something, we should ban exactly what we're against and I think most of us are against torture and inhumane treatment. But as far as helping our military, our police, anyone that's involved in national security for interrogations we for sure should be helping. A psychologist knows how to talk to people, they know how to get them to open up, they know how to treat them humanely and we should be guiding our military and helping them, because, frankly, the past administration, the Bush administration believed that torture was a good way to deal with people and we know from experience that people that are tortured oftentimes give false information. And you can get just as much by creating rapport and that's what psychologists do.

AMT: And yet psychologists played a role in developing some of the torture techniques employed post-9/11. Can you remind us?

ANNE SPECKHARD: Yes. The military wanted psychologists and, I believe, medical professionals to be present when they were torturing people and to legitimize it. And we’re in the business of telling the truth, speaking clearly, and communicating well, and also dealing with emotions. So, let's tell the truth. Torture is wrong. Being involved in designing a program that would torture someone and torture them in ways that don't show marks, like putting them in freezing cold or subjecting them to lack of sleep and loud music, things like that, it's just against human ethics and human rights so we shouldn't take part of it. But that is completely different than saying you shouldn't take part in an interrogation. An interrogation is asking a person, what do you know? How are you involved? Who else is involved? What kind of things can we expect to see? And those are things that all can be done in a humane way and if you are advising on how to torture another human being, you should be investigated and stripped of your APA standing. But if you're willing, as I was, to risk my life-- We were shot at when we were in Iraq. We were mortared. So we took risks with our lives to stand beside our military and advise them on how to treat people in a humane way and how to interact with them. And I can say, if I was asked again today to help the military in that way, even though I knew the APA would kick me out of the organization, I would say yes.

AMT: So tell us more about the work you did in Iraq. When were you there?

ANNE SPECKHARD: I was there from 2006 to 2007. I was in and out. So I didn't live there. My husband actually lived there two years. And I wrote for the military what became the detainee rehabilitation program, the psychological aspects of it and the Islamic challenge aspects. And the idea was that out of these 20,000 detainees, 800 juveniles that we had, at least 15 percent that were falling into extremist ideologies and believing that through violence directed at civilians that they could change the course of political events in their country. And our job was to design something that would begin to address that and show them, one, it’s not Islamic to set off a bomb in a crowded marketplace and kill civilians, especially other Muslim civilians, it’s not Islamic to behead someone. And to understand psychologically why they would have fallen into that and embraced those kind of things and if we could redirect their passions, their hopes, their desires into things that were nonviolent so that we could with confidence release them. What we need to remember is that the people that believe that torture is useful usually make a ticking bomb argument. And the ticking bomb argument is that by torture you get some information and maybe you can save lives. But we have to remember that we very rarely by torture get actionable intel that saves lives. And even if we did, by engaging in torture we radicalize a whole other group of people that will go in and do other violent acts.

AMT: What do you say to those who argue that it is impossible for psychologists to be involved in national security interrogations without at some point crossing an ethical boundary?

ANNE SPECKHARD: I completely disagree. I mean, we have doctors and psychologists too in prisons, everywhere. And, sure, you have to understand that you're working within a system but you have your own code of ethics, a personal one and a professional one, that when something's wrong you stand up and say it's wrong. And if you don't have the backbone to do that, then you should get out of the profession. If you are a real professional, you say no and you guide the organization to a higher level. And that's exactly why we need to be there.

AMT: You know, we're having this conversation in the context of what we know has gone on in the past. And even when you talk about being in Iraq you were working on those issues, of course, post-Abu Ghraib. But there was a time when nobody even admitted there was torture, that interrogations were not torture. The T-word. Donald Rumsfeld would not have thought any of that was torture. So if you have scenarios where psychologists are working with the military, how do you guard against the slippery slope

ANNE SPECKHARD: Well, if you're the APA, you create a hotline so that anybody can call up and report abuse anonymously and that the APA will work on your behalf to investigate it, so that they will go to the DOJ, they will go to the Senate, they will scream for you, so you don't personally have to expose yourself as a whistleblower. And they should make strong rules against torture that all of us know, here's the line. You know, if these things, which are very clearly defined, which most people agree are torture are occurring, you must leave the room. You must protest. You must document. You must report.

AMT: And so what types of techniques are ethically sound and effective when it comes to interrogation?

ANNE SPECKHARD: That you come into the room. You introduce yourself. You say what you’re there for. You give the person the opportunity to interact with you or not. And I can tell you, I worked with some guys from al-Qaeda that had been in the prison and they told me they resisted everyone that came to interrogate them until one guy walked into the room and said, oh, what’s that on your head? And the person that he was supposed to be interrogating had been wounded very badly during his arrest. He’d been beaten by the soldiers and he had been asking for this wound to be treated by the medical staff and everyone had ignored him. And this one person that said, what’s that on your head? And he said, I was wounded, I need to see medical. And he took him down to the doctor. They got his wound treated. And that person that he will supposed to be interrogating said, I saw a human being and I sat and talked with them and I told him everything he wanted to know. One of the things that heard consistently in the prison was, we were so surprised that you don't torture us. And, you know, there are some people that are never going to talk to you whether you torture them or whether you create great rapport with them. They're your enemy and they're never going to tell you anything. But don't be deceived and think that you're going to get reliable information by torturing them, because you're not.

AMT: Anne Speckhard, thank you very much for your perspective on all of this.

ANNE SPECKHARD: You’re welcome.

AMT: Anne Speckhard is a psychologist and the director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. She's an adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Georgetown University. She joined us from Brussels, Belgium. My next guest fought hard for the policy to prohibit psychologists from being involved in US national security interrogations. Steven Reisner is a psychologist and an activist. He's a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. He's also a member of the American Psychological Association Council of Representatives. He's not speaking for the association officially today. Stephen Reisner joins us from New York City. Hi.

STEVEN REISNER: Hi.

AMT: You heard Anne Speckhard’s arguments. What do you think?

STEVEN REISNER: Well, I think that she makes a good case for doing interrogations in a humane and non-torturous way. What she doesn't do is make a case for the role of psychologists directly involved in individual interrogations, which is what the American Psychological Association has found to be an unethical proposition. And that is what we’ve decided based on experience and based on ethics. We decided to limit that.

AMT: Well, explain a little more to me. Why do you support this ban? What's the danger?

STEVEN REISNER: Well, we've seen the danger. The danger, unfortunately, was plastered all over the headlines of newspapers across the country. Psychologists, when pressured by government to do bad things, are as susceptible as anybody else to doing such bad things except that psychologists have very specific skills. So they can do even more harmful things than others. So, what you had was enormous pressure to get information out of detainees. And you had psychologists using all of their skills to torture, to undermine the mental stability and the dignity of detainees across the board. Thousands were detained and thousands were tortured. The problem is that because we have unique skills we have unique ethical responsibilities to make sure that we only apply those skills in humane circumstances with the respect of the individuals with whom we work.

AMT: Now, psychologists actually helped create those interrogation tactics, did they not?

STEVEN REISNER: Well, yes, this is the biggest stain I think on the reputation of psychologists in history. What happened was that two psychologists in the CIA and the number of psychologists in the Department of Defense created an entire program aimed torturing and abusing detainees in the hopes of getting information out of them. And they made a fortune, the ones in the CIA, made $81,000,000 for their company and got absolutely nothing of use out of the detainees. The upshot is that the United States has been seen as a country that tortures and psychologists’ reputation has been sullied and we've been working very hard to restore it.

AMT: Have the psychologists who developed that of those torture techniques and then went on to be contractors and contract back in to the military, have they been held accountable?

STEVEN REISNER: No, they have not and that is one of the reasons why we created the new policy. Because we have decided that it is time to clearly be able to hold accountable any psychologist that does such things that violates the individual’s human rights. Those psychologists were acting in accordance with what the interpretation of US law was at the time. What those psychologists did was, according to the Justice Department, legal. And that's why we, at the American Psychological Association, determined that we wanted to have ethical standards that we, that psychologists, were held accountable to even when the law said to torture.

AMT: And, in fact, we know now that the Justice Department, the Bush administration worked really hard to get lawyers to write around the law to make it legal. So, were psychologists being used to legitimize torture, in your view?

STEVEN REISNER: Absolutely. The psychologist presence was made, you know, was indicated in this twisted law that came out of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. Because they said that if a psychologist is present and the psychologist indicates that these techniques are not going too far, then the interrogators can't be arrested or tried for torture. And so the psychologist says, as we all know now, said that waterboarding wasn't going too far, that putting people in small boxes with insects wasn't going too far, that slapping them and throwing them against the wall wasn't going too far, that all you needed was a psychologist present legitimizing the practices and everybody was protected. We decided that we didn't want psychologists in that situation ever again.

AMT: Now, we did reach out to the US Department of Defense and we got a statement and it says, I'm quoting here:

Reading:

The department has initiated discussion with the APA on the appropriate usage of clinically trained psychologists at detention facilities where interrogations take place. Given the early nature of the discussions it would be inappropriate to speculate where those conversations will lead.

End quote. What do you think of that?

STEVEN REISNER: Well, what I think of that is that the Department of Defense is trying to pressure the American Psychological Association into backtracking. They like having psychologists running their detention camps. They like the idea of psychologists helping to keep detainees docile when it comes to conditions that are in violation of international standards of human rights. But having psychologists present when detainees are being force fed against their human rights and international law protections, when they are being kept in detention, indefinite detention, without trial, without appropriate judicial processes, having psychologists treat the anxiety of those detainees when they're anxious because their human rights are being violated makes the psychologist a participant in a system of violation. And so, no, I do not believe the American Psychological Association is going to backtrack to do the bidding of the Department of Defense in this area.

AMT: And now American psychologists are still free to assist police interrogations, just not national security, Department of Defense, and CIA. How is that different?

STEVEN REISNER: Well, in domestic circumstances, people who are arrested have the benefit of United States constitutional protections and they're required to have representation by lawyers. There's an entire system that has developed to give protections to those prisoners. The detainees in national security interrogations are outside of this history of judicial and legal and international protection. There are some cases in this country where prisoners are considered to be treated outside of recognized international legal standards, such as the level of solitary confinement that's used for minors and for prisoner is in general, and I, actually, would like the American Psychological Association to look into that and join the UN in condemning solitary confinement. But at present, what we have experienced the abuse of detainees by psychologists, so we at the APA worked specifically to address that issue first and foremost.

AMT: Okay. Well, Steven Reisner, we’ll have to leave it there. Thank you for your views on this subject.

STEVEN REISNER: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Steven Reisner, psychologist and an activist, founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. He joined us from New York City. If you want to weigh in on this, please, tweet us. We’re @thecurrentcbc. Go online, cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link and let us know what you think of that.

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Artificial intelligence has potential to shape fate of humanity, says Nick Bostrom

Guest: Nick Bostrom

SOUNDCLIP

NICK BOSTROM: Some people think that some of these things as sort of science fiction, far out there, crazy. Ripple effect.

[Music: electronic]

The fate of humanity may depend on what this super intelligence does. Think about it, machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will need to make and the outcome could have potentially enormous consequences.

AMT: Well that is Nick Bostrom, a philosopher, a technologist, and one of the world's big thinkers on artificial intelligence or AI, as he says AI has the potential to shape the fate of humanity. It's predicted that sometime in the next 25 years or so, AI machines will match and in some ways surpass human intelligence. And the potential ripple effects of that are staggering. Corporations and governments are now spending billions of dollars on developing bigger and smarter AI technology. The goal is to create machines that think for themselves, but some warn that could go terribly wrong. And the warning is being sounded by the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking.

SOUNDCLIP

STEPHEN HAWKING: The primitive something that artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.

AMT: Well the thoughts of Stephen Hawking there. Averting that disaster is where Nick Bostrom comes in. He's the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute, which is based at Oxford University and Oxford, England. It's an institution dedicated to making sure we get it right when it comes to creating super intelligent computers. Nick Bostrom joins me from Oxford, England. Hello.

NICK BOSTROM: Hey, thanks very much.

AMT: Well I'm listening to Stephen Hawking there and it's pretty scary stuff, the end of the human race?

NICK BOSTROM: I think one has to look at it in the larger context where development of greater than human machine intelligence really would be a unique event in the history of life. If you think about what it is that makes us humans have this unique position on our planet, it's not that we have stronger muscles so sharper teeth it's that our brains were really just slightly cleverer than those of our great ape ancestors. And that has enabled us to develop all this technology, complex societies, and the rest of it. So if machines one day came to exceed human intelligence, then it seems possible that they also might be able to shape the future according to their preferences. Certainly that transition looks like it could be an extremely important one.

AMT: So before we go over any further, take me inside the Future of Humanity Institute, how do you spend your days doing things? What are you thinking and talking about?

NICK BOSTROM: The Future of Humanity Institute is a multi-disciplinary research center here at Oxford University. We have mathematicians, computer scientists, philosophers, economists trying to think carefully about big picture questions for humanity. That includes, as one major focus, the future of artificial intelligence. The reason for spending a lot of time thinking about the future of AI is that we have this concept of an existential risk. An existential risk being a way that things could go wrong that would either cause human extinction or would otherwise permanently destroy the long term potential for Earth originating intelligent life. So there's never been an existential catastrophe in all of human history or we wouldn't be here any longer and there will only ever have been either is zero or one of these. But if you think about the expected value of such a thing, the amount of value on the line if one of these occurred; so we tried to focus a lot of our research on trying to figure out what the main existential risks are and more importantly what we can do to reduce them. It looks like all the really big existential risks, certainly over a time scale off a few centuries or so, will arise from powerful new technological innovations that the human species might make. There are existential risk from nature, asteroids and super volcanic eruptions, and so on and so forth. But we've survived those for 100,000 years already so they just don't seem that likely to do a scene within the next century. But we will introduce entirely new kinds of hazards into the world through our creativity and ingenuity.

AMT: How far away are we from creating super intelligent computers that can think as well as a human?

NICK BOSTROM: Nobody knows. We did a survey a couple of years ago where we asked some of the world's leading AI experts what they thought about this. Specifically we asked, by which year do you think there is a 50 per cent probability that we will have human level machine intelligence? We defined human level here as the ability to perform practically every job, at least as well a normal human. The median answer to that question was 2040 or 2045 depending on precisely which group of experts we asked. But there is such uncertainty, it could happen a lot sooner or it could take a lot longer as well. There is certainly a non-trivial chance of it happening within the lifetime of some people who live on this planet today.

AMT: What would be the next step, the so-called intelligence explosion?

NICK BOSTROM: Yes. In terms of timelines, two questions, one is how far are we currently from sort of human level AI start can do all that we can do? If and when we do reach that level of capability then a second question is how long will it take from that point until we have computers that are radically super intelligent? I think that there is a good chance the second step, from human level to radical super intelligence, might be quite short. It might take a long time to get to human level AI but once we are there I think super intelligence will follow close on the heels.

AMT: And what could that look like?

NICK BOSTROM: At that point you really have the automation of all human intellectual labour, just as the Industrial Revolution automated many forms of human physical labour. We no longer needed horses or muscle power to drive the factories. With general machine intelligence you would have a similar phenomenon for intellectual labour. To us, there seems to be a giant difference between the village idiot and Albert Einstein in terms of intelligence. We think of those as the opposite ends of the sort of intelligence spectrum, we have dumb and smart. But if instead we're thinking about how hard it would be to replicate the performance of one of these individuals on a computer, it might be approximately as hard to develop an AI that can do what the village idiot can do, as to develop an AI that can do what Einstein can do. If you think about the village idiot and Einstein, they have almost exactly the same brain. It's still a three pound lump of matter, with approximately the same number of neurons operating at approximately the same speed. That really isn't that much different from a basic physiological point of view between different human brains and that accounts for all these differences we see in human performance. It might well be that if you think of AI development as a train that started maybe 60 or 70 years ago from zero capability when we first of developed computers, and then rolling along the track, gradually getting more capable, maybe now we are outside of the level off a spider or a mouse or something like that. At some point we will reach human-ville station, but the train might not slow down there, it might just swoosh right past into radically super intelligent territory. I think that's a fairly plausible class of scenarios that one should take seriously.

AMT: This is fascinating. Would we then be creating, in effect, a new life form?

NICK BOSTROM: The concept of life is really not that clearly defined, so it depends on what you sort of bake into it. Some people think that life is defined by being this evolutionary process involving reproduction, and death. AI doesn't need to be exactly like that. It would certainly be a new form of intelligence that could have a massive impact on the world, including all kinds of new technologies. That's why in that clip you played earlier, I said that it's the last invention that humans will ever need to make. Once you have machine intelligence that is better at the inventing than we are then our efforts become obsolete from that point on.

AMT: That is so profound.

NICK BOSTROM: Yes. Once you have super intelligence, you might soon get technological maturity. That is, all the possible technologies that we can see would be consistent with the laws of physics, basic material constraints, but we just haven't figured out how to build it. All of those possible technologies might become available shortly after you have super intelligent artificial minds doing the research and development.

AMT: And so let's get back to your institute, how do we make sure these machines are essentially on our side, that they will have the best interests of humanity at heart?

NICK BOSTROM: The answer to that is not known. The challenge of how to ensure that a super intelligent would actually be human friendly, that it would be on our side, is one that's going to involve a lot of possibly difficult technical challenges. And hopefully we will have solved those technical challenges by the time somebody figures out how to make machines that smart. But there is no guarantee of that because there is really this race on; there are a lot of people who are working on trying to make machines smarter and there is a much smaller number of people who are trying to figure out if you really succeeded in making machines truly smart, how could you then really smart machines being safe?

AMT: Can a machine have values or ethics in the way humans have?

NICK BOSTROM: I see no reason why they couldn't. Already today we can construct very simple artificial agents. You can give them different goals, different preferences, and they form the criteria by which they decide which course of action, which plan looks more promising than another. So the question is how you can scale that up so that it will also work when we have far more powerful intellect.

AMT: Can a machine be programmed or motivated to defer to humans interest?

NICK BOSTROM: I'm sure that there is some way for this to happen. Ideally it works on the first trial. You don't want to have a number of different super intelligences where your control method fails and then you know maybe eventually on the 20th attempt you finally succeed. We might only get one shot at this. Generally speaking though, I think it's fair to say that the idea that we could create some explicit list of everything we care about or some rules that would cover all possible cases that might arise and have that be the control system for super intelligence is hopeless, that just won't happen. You might have heard of the Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, it was the science fiction author Isaac Asimov who wrote a lot of novels and in those novels he had stories about robots and they were supposed to be guided by three inviolable laws. You must not allow humanity to come to harm, you must not allow an individual human to come to harm, and you must obey human orders and protect your own survival. But then his stories really are exploring the different ways in which conflicts can arise between these rules and how they can have unanticipated consequences. That general approach does not look promising, what looks more promising is the idea of using the AI's own intelligence to learn human values, to learn human preferences.

AMT: That raises a question, whose human values will it learn?

NICK BOSTROM: Indeed, yes. So there really are two big problems, two big questions, one is this technical question which is, supposing you knew precisely what value, what goal you would want the AI to pursue, how would you get that goal into the AI? But assuming a solution to that technical problem, then you're absolutely right, there is this second problem that arises which is the political problem really of which values do we decide to promote with the AI?

AMT: And then you only get a chance to solve the second problem once?

NICK BOSTROM: Potentially.

AMT: It raises all these questions. Last year I spoke to Geoffrey Hinton, the Canadian so-called godfather of deep thinking, we were talking about his concerns over AI. Listen to what he says about the politics.

SOUNDCLIP

The outcome of the advanced [unintelligible] intelligence will depend a lot on the political system and how it gets used. But I think it's extremely important, it's as important as the technology itself, taking all the funding out of social sciences and putting it into hard sciences is probably a mistake. We need to fund social scientists to figure out how this stuff is going to be used and how best to use it. It ought to be that when you get these wonderful new abilities, it's good for people. We need a political system where it's going to be good for people when we get better at doing things rather than bad for people.

AMT: So Nick Bostrom, what do you think? It kind of dovetails with what you're saying about the sort of mix of people you have and your institute, the role of social scientists, and politicians, and philosophers and all of this.

NICK BOSTROM: Yes I think all of those kinds of expertise could be relevant in different ways. Then there are other problems that you manage to have that are more a matter of will and preference. You have coordination problems, problems of war and peace, justice versus injustice, where it's not obvious that there is a technical fix but where you might really need people to politically come together to get behind some kind of approach that gives everybody a fair share. Those are the kinds of questions that are not automatically solved just by having higher levels of intelligence or higher levels of knowledge.

AMT: So if we follow this along, could we see that level of AI? Could they say, you don't get to fight, or they get this territory? Can they take it to a point where it would be almost like, for lack of a better word, a deity?

NICK BOSTROM: There’s, I think, two classes of scenarios as to what happens after you get super intelligence. You have what I call singleton scenario, where maybe the first super intelligence to be developed is just so overwhelmingly powerful and so far ahead of all other AIs that it can simply shape the future according to its preferences. It can prevent other rival AIs from arising and lay down the law. Then you have a different class of scenarios and multi-polar outcomes where, maybe at the end, you have AIs that are just vastly superior to anything that existed before but the transition is more gradual. So at no point along the way does any one system have such an immense advantage that it can just decide what will happen. And so in this kind of multi-polar outcome you have a different set of issues. So in a singleton outcome it's really curious if there's going to be this one AI that can just shape the future according to its desires. Then it matters a lot what the values and preferences of that one AI is. In the multi-polar outcome you might instead be worrying about competitive dynamics that might arise in this population of digital minds. You might wonder about evolutionary pressures operating on digital minds like what kind of mind will be selected in this ecology of hyper competitive digital minds. You might worry about different entities with AIs and AI developed weaponry and other means, if there are conflicts between those, what would that look like?

AMT: Okay. So let's talk a little bit more about what's happening, some countries are already developing autonomous killing machines or robots to be used in battle, you mentioned that, ones that can be trained to make kill decisions without human input. When you think of the AI going bad or rogue is there a scenario that frightens you?

NICK BOSTROM: I think the downside ranges all the way down to existential catastrophe where everything that we care about gets replaced by some different structure that maybe maximizes the preference of some artificial intelligence. And if those preferences don't match our preferences, then you might get something that by [unintelligible] something entirely meaningless and worthless like a world full of just paper clips or a world full of just computing machinery that calculates the decimal expansion of Pi to even greater precision or some other sort of random goal like that. Those are at the extreme downsides of this that one wants to make sure one puts in the work to avoid. I want also stress all the benefits that can come from –

AMT: Good because that was my next question. So what's the other side, what's the benefit?

NICK BOSTROM: In the short term, just a lot of benefits throughout the economy. All the places where we use information technology today: search, entertainment. You could imagine health care, diagnostic systems that could diagnose tumors at an earlier stage and make it possible to operate them. Recommender systems of different kinds like finding more about what a particular consumer wants and make sure they get presented with options that will actually be of value to them as opposed to random stuff. Self-driving cars. Just throughout the economy there are a lot of processes that can just be made to work better with smarter systems. And in the longer term the benefits are even more profound. All the things that we can only do with technologically mature means, like solve some of the primordial problems of human kind like disease and aging and our own biological and cognitive limitations, poverty, our confinement to this one planet Earth and its vulnerabilities. A lot of those things, in the longer term, I think could be overcome through the use of machine intelligence. You could even make a stronger case which is that the only way that humanity can, in the long run, realize its full potential is by passing through this keyhole of developing safe and friendly machine super intelligence.

AMT: Yes because you're making the case that it's a way to work with AI to improve our lives and our longevity, but it's about working with the AI as opposed to being pushed aside by the AI.

NICK BOSTROM: It's not so much that necessarily, at an advanced level, we would be working with the AI in the sense that the AI would need our labour in order to achieve its results. But it's more that the AI would be on our side; that it would be aiming to promote things that would be good for us.

AMT: And again we come back to who gets to control that?

NICK BOSTROM: Humans like to debate, and argue, and fight over who gets to control what, and who likes to own what. So I'm sure that as these things move closer there will be a lot of discussion about that. I’m more worried that this technical control problem might get unduly neglected. Even though that's a prerequisite for then having the privilege of being able to argue about exactly how much influence different groups and institutions should have.

AMT: What do you mean by unduly neglected, what does that mean?

NICK BOSTROM: Until the last year or two ago it was unduly neglected in the sense that aside from our research group here, and another small group at Berkeley, and a few scattered individuals, there was nobody else in the entire world working specifically on this super intelligence control problem. Now there has been some shift over the last year, and so there is now more funding, and more talent streaming into this field, and it's more recognized as a sort of important area to work in. Still, compared to the ultimate importance that this kind of work might have, it's still extremely neglected. If you look at how much money and research goes into any other like big challenge for humanity, global warming, I mean that would be orders of magnitude more than is going into this even though this might ultimately matter far more.

AMT: So it's important that we understand that and we as a society turn more of our attention, and our money, quite literally to that.

NICK BOSTROM: Yeah. And that we do so in the right way. So there has been much more awareness created over the last year or two about the future of machine intelligence and recognizing that there could be these kinds of risks that we need to look into. So at the moment I fear there is a fairly healthy level of understanding and awareness of that. Now I think the challenge is to channel that into actual constructive work to reduce the risks. So that then requires having people who work on this full time, do the whiteboard stuff, and all the other thing and actually start to make progress on it. I don't think there is necessarily a benefit to just continuously wringing one's hands about it, or stirring up more alarm or concern.

AMT: Or going to the sci-fi scenario [laughing]. And I guess it's important then for the general public then to get updates along the way too, on what you are thinking so that we can understand what the future might hold.

NICK BOSTROM: Yeah. Eventually as we move closer that the picture gets clearer. At this point, it's still a very low resolution picture where there are a lot of clouds and fog and uncertainty shrouding it, we only can catch glimpses. But as more work is done and as we move closer in time to the actual transmission, a lot more detail will come into view and then we can kind of update the accordingly.

AMT: Okay. Nick Bostrom, fascinating to talk to you; thank you for your time today.

NICK BOSTROM: Right, thank you.

AMT: Nick Bostrom, a philosopher, an author, he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in Oxford, England. Really important to hear what he had to say, what do you think? Tweet us, we are @thecurrentCBC. You can find us on Facebook, or go online www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link.

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Sister-turned-caregiver highlights lack of support for brother with Down Syndrome in 'failure report'

Guests: Helen Ries, Al Etmanski

[Music: Theme]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current. Paul Knoll, his sister Helen Ries, and her husband live together in Ottawa. Paul has Down syndrome and last year after their mother died, it changed their lives completely.

SOUNDCLIP

PAUL KNOLL: In the old days, my parents are my life. My family just died, so difficult to lose our parents.

In the old days, me and my mom and dad were always hiding Easter eggs, Easter eggs in the backyard.

HELEN RIES: He knows he only has me. I'm his only blood relative. We don't have any aunts or uncles or brothers or sisters, and he knows that without me, he's very vulnerable.

AMT: Well, that is Helen and Paul, before that Paul and Helen, sister and brother. Over the past year, Helen has stepped into the role of being Paul's caregiver and it has been quite a year. In fact, when she went to blog about the past years’ experiences, she decided to call that blog her failure report. What she wrote is both a call for reflection and a call to action, with a look at how families care for loved ones with intellectual disabilities and the role of community and government. Helen and Paul are part of an important demographic shift as increasing numbers of Canadians with intellectual disabilities outlive their parents. Helen Ries joins us from Ottawa. Hello.

HELEN RIES: Hi.

AMT: Tell me a little more about Paul.

HELEN RIES: Paul is 43-years old. He works at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. He's been there for almost 22 years delivering the mail and contributing in different ways in that workplace. Besides his work life, he's a very busy man. He loves the arts. I always say that my brother is a true Renaissance man. He's all about galleries, classical music and the good life.

AMT: We just heard him talk about your parents. He misses them.

HELEN RIES: Very much so, as do I.

AMT: It's got to be hard for both of you. You're grieving your mother at the same time as everything else in your life is changing.

HELEN RIES: That's right, yes.

AMT: Tell me a little bit about what that's been like.

HELEN RIES: Well, my mom died about a year ago this week. I guess the last year has really passed in a blur and you know, I've been trying to do two different things it feels like. One of them is to recover from the intense grief that I've been feeling and the other one is to build up a new life for me, my brother, and my husband so that we can have a sustainable life together and everybody can live happily. It's been quite arduous and I've been really struggling this year to try and get that all in order.

AMT: So your mother was a caregiver for Paul?

HELEN RIES: Yes. My mother and father were his primary caregivers his entire life. My father died in 2011 very suddenly, and my mother also died very suddenly.

AMT: Okay, so this was very unexpected. This wasn't something you were talking about over time, it just kind of happened.

HELEN RIES: That's right. Although I'm sure with many families who have a member who has an intellectual disability, the discussion of what would happen as the primary caregivers die, that is a discussion that our family sometimes would have. It always felt like a fictitious discussion, it never really felt like it would be something that would actually come true, and definitely not something that would come true so quickly.

AMT: What expectations did you have for yourself as you took over the role of Paul's caregiver?

HELEN RIES: I thought that being his caregiver could be very straightforward. I mean, our family was always very close so I always had an active part in my brother's life and my parents were very open with me so I thought it would be something that we could do; that I could pick up quite easily. So, my employer kindly gave me a year off of work unpaid that I could use to sort out all the things that I needed to sort out for Paul and since Paul's parents died, I thought that with Developmental Services, Paul would be a priority with Developmental Services which is, I believe, a branch of MCSS and funded by them.

AMT: And is that a provincial agency?

HELEN RIES: Of Ontario, that’s right.

AMT: Okay.

HELEN RIES: So, I thought that given Paul's situation was truly a crisis that we would perhaps qualify for some additional passport funds so that I could hire people to support Paul in his daily life and that that wouldn’t be something that I would have to do.

AMT: What is a passport fund?

HELEN RIES: So, passport funding is a funding model where families receive a certain amount of money per year to spend to help include their family members in the community. It is individually directed funding where the families can determine what is best for their family member and direct the funding towards what that might be. In my brother's case, he's a very active person in the community, and you know, I would use passport funding let's say, for an independent living support worker who might come and see Paul once a week and help him to ensure his clothes are clean. They don't do the work for them. The support worker doesn't do that work for them, they just support Paul in doing that work himself or ensure-- maybe they'll do batch cooking with him so he'll have some meals in the freezer that he can use when let's say, I'm not there to cook for him, or he just wants to eat something different.

AMT: And so, when you first took that year off to try to do all that, you were trying to replicate how your parents were with him, right? They were very hands on were they?

HELEN RIES: That's right. So, my brother is the first generation of people with intellectual disabilities who are really living in the community. My mother and father wanted for Paul the best life. They themselves didn't have any role models or any resources to help them do that because they were the first ones to do that. And so, the way they did it is by always being there to facilitate Paul's needs, taking him where he needed to go, helping him resolve problems and they did it out of love and compassion but I really think they probably did more for Paul than what he actually needed because he is a very capable person.

AMT: When you tried to do that, what happened?

HELEN RIES: That didn't really work very well for me at all. So, I tried to replicate what my parents did because I wanted to maintain a level of stability for my brother. But you know, I couldn't do it. I needed to live my own life and the more I was living in service to my brother the less successful it was. Also, I think my brother didn't want that. I mean, well I know he didn't want that. Who wants their sister in their face all day long? He became quite resentful of me and angry and I think it also compounded his grief.

AMT: I have another bit of tape. CBC Ottawa reporter, Hallie Cotnam was with you at home with Paul, so she recorded a bit more conversation and we picked a little bit of that. Let's listen.

SOUNDCLIP

HALLIE COTNAM: Do you like living with your sister and brother-in-law?

PAUL KNOLL: Yes, I do.

HALLIE COTNAM: Why?

PAUL KNOLL: Because I love them with all my heart, and I love it here. I like it so much. I'm so lucky my sister and my brother-in-law

HELEN RIES: What about when we fight?

PAUL KNOLL: This I don't like.

HALLIE COTNAM: [laughs] What do you fight about?

PAUL KNOLL: I don't know. I have no answer--do you mind?

HELEN RIES: No, I don't mind. Go ahead tell her what do we fight about.

PAUL KNOLL: About Facebook.

HALLIE COTNAM: What's the problem with Facebook?

HELEN RIES: Using it in the middle of the night.

HALLIE COTNAM: Who does that? Helen?

PAUL KNOLL: No, me.

HALLIE COTNAM: Okay. Instead of sleeping, you're on the computer?

PAUL KNOLL: Yes.

HALLIE COTNAM: You're not getting enough sleep?

PAUL KNOLL: Yes.

HALLIE COTNAM: Then are you crabby the next day?

PAUL KNOLL: No.

HELEN RIES:[laughs] Oh yes. That's the big problem, being crabby the next day.

AMT: Helen, how has your relationship with Paul changed in the last year?

HELEN RIES: I would say for the positive. Although I have always been a caring and compassionate sister with my brother, I think I never gave him enough credibility for knowing what he needs for himself in his own life. I always made a lot of assumptions and I didn't listen to him deeply and patiently. And so, in the last year I have learned to respect what he knows about himself. I've learned to let go of my bossy tendencies, big sister tendencies, and really let him be his own person and I think he appreciates that, as do I. I'm really starting to see what an amazing, I mean, I always knew he was an amazing guy, but I really see it more clearly now.

AMT: It's interesting. It's different to be a sibling caregiver than a parent caregiver.

HELEN RIES: It's very different. I have had people say to me, oh you're a mother now, and I really quite resent that because we are not at all in a hierarchical parental relationship. My brother, my husband and I are in a space sharing agreement in our house. We are equals, we have equal decision making authority. We decide on things together and work on things together. Of course I'm still making it sound very idealistic but you know, it's a work in progress, of course.

AMT: And so, have you gone back to work?

HELEN RIES: No. I can't go back to work. It's going to take a long time for me to resolve how our house flows and also learning what you need in terms of administration. Being a person with a disability in Ontario, it is a massive caseload. So basically I'm doing advanced case management for my brother and I need to recreate myself professionally in order to have employment where I'm working in a flexible schedule, preferably working from home, so I'm busy doing that right now.

AMT: What have you learned about the support system for caregivers, for people with disabilities?

HELEN RIES: Well, I've learned that there actually isn't one. So, the system, quote unquote “system” that we have is very dysfunctional. The two branches of MCSS that I have been working with are ODSP, the Ontario Disability Support Program, and Developmental Services. The programs are silo-ed, they don't talk to each other and it's-- really what they do is serve as a gate-keeping function. The people who work on the front line you know, they're good hearted and well-intentioned, but they really have nothing to offer families and it's been a year since my mum died, and we don't have anything, any valuable resources to use. The other pieces—

AMT: I'm going to stop you. What is MCSS?

HELEN RIES: Sorry, it is the Ministry of Community and Social Services.

AMT: Okay, again Ontario.

HELEN RIES: I only know the system in Ontario because—

AMT: Fair enough, this is what you are living through, right?

HELEN RIES: This is what I am living.

AMT: Okay. What do you need from them that you can't get?

HELEN RIES: What I need are some resources that have some value. So what I get offered are resources that don't match my ideology around what people with disabilities need.

AMT: Like what?

HELEN RIES: I'll give you a perfect example. I had a caseworker come swanning over to our house and they offer me as respite for my brother, to go to a farm outside of the city. My brother is not a dog. I don't care if the place has the word happy in it. My brother belongs in his community, so I need resources to support him so that he can be in the community and that I am not the only vehicle to do that.

AMT: Instead of that respite trip, what would you have liked them to say?

HELEN RIES: They could have provided me with a list, I think they do you have this actually, lists of independent living support workers that you can hire, but without any funding to hire them I can't do that. The other interesting piece that I found--I really believe in dialogue--and what I find very interesting is that nobody has ever sat down with me and said to me, what do you think your brother needs and let's try and draw up a budget. Let's have a conversation around how we can support your brother in the community. So, instead what it looks like is let's go through a reassessment and let's remind your brother, because it is a quote unquote “inclusive process”, which means that your family member needs to sit through this, and for two days let's remind that person how much he cannot do. This is basically what the reassessment process through Developmental Services does. It takes two days to complete and you sit in a room with a worker and it was question after question about what Paul cannot do and Paul was devastated by that. He still talks about it. He was doing self-harm after that interview and he still asks me sometimes, is the caseworker coming to take me away?

AMT: Was there any trust fund or anything that you had access to?

HELEN RIES: There is. So, my parents were very progressive. They were the first people in Ottawa to open an RDSP account. My parents did save for the Registered Disability Support Program. Paul can’t access that until he's older, until he's 65. My parents also saved a little bit of money in what's called the Henson trust. The Henson trust is a discretionary trust fund, where you can use that money to support that person in their life. So, I was under the impression that I would have as a non-discretionary trust, I would have access to that and be able to use that as I saw fit for my brother because my parents made me the executor of that trust. But actually, I can't do that. Paul can only receive $6000 above and beyond his ODSP payments.

AMT: ODSP Ontario—

HELEN RIES: --Disability Support Program. So, $6000 does not give you a lot of freedom and what I love about that is they call it a gift. I think that's just such a slap in the face that you know, you fund people at the poverty line or below and you have a line on the paper that is for a gift. It's not a gift, it's a contribution to support somebody living a smidgen above the poverty line.

AMT: If your parents had put that money in a different place, you would be able to access it to do more for your brother?

HELEN RIES: Well, you're still always accountable to ODSP. What they are perfect at, is it's the perfect poverty trap. You're always accountable for the flow of money around the family member with a disability. In a way, it would have been better if my parents had saved outside the Henson trust but they did what they thought was best in that moment. It is what it is, I just have to work with it.

AMT: Essentially you're saying that the provincial government, in this case, Ontario is responsible for this. It isn't actually open to what's actually happening out there, isn't actually addressing how things are evolving.

HELEN RIES: I don't think so. I mean, just from my year experience I think it's a very able-ist government. Their perspective is a hangover from the time when family members were institutionalized. It doesn't support being in the community, and the other piece is that the funding has gone to, I believe funding has gone to a lot of agencies and there are many agencies but they're not all created equal. If you're lucky, you get picked up by an agency who is also progressive and has the same ideologies that you do but there are an awful lot of very large agencies that still support the old model, that our family members should be warehoused, stuffed away somewhere, and not be seen.

AMT: Helen, thanks for sharing your experiences and your thoughts with us.

HELEN RIES: Thank you.

AMT: Helen Ries is caring for her brother Paul Knoll in Ottawa. She wrote a blog post about her first year as a sibling caregiver and we have posted a link to it on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Now we did ask for an interview with Helena Jaczek, Ontario's Minister of Community and Social Services. She was not available. Her office sent us a statement and I'll read it in part quote:

Reading:

In 2014, the Ontario government invested $810,000,000 over three years to improve developmental services, including providing new funding directly to clients and families. Approximately 20,000 adults are currently receiving direct funding through the passport program, allowing families to purchase the services they need including respite for caregivers.

End quote. Well, my next guest has spent three decades helping parents plan to ensure their children with disabilities have independence and freedom after their parents’ death. Al Etmanski is the co-founder of the Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network or PLAN. His organization is focused on just this issue, the long term future of people with disabilities and he joins us from Surrey BC. Hello.

AL ETMANSKI: Hi. Good morning.

AMT: When you hear about Helen's efforts and her frustrations, how representative is that of what families with people with disabilities are going through across the country?

AL ETMANSKI: Well, first of all, isn't she marvelous? And her relationship with her brother just shines through, so thank you for doing that. Alas, Helen is not alone. She's representative of tens of thousands of family members who are doing exactly what she's doing, which is taking care, lovingly, reciprocally, capably, caringly, and this is happening all over Canada. I've seen some stats Anna Maria, that suggests that 80 percent of the care for people with disabilities in Canada is done by family and friends. Only 20 percent is paid for, so Helen is representative of the backbone of our caring system for people with disabilities.

AMT: Is there anywhere that does it a little bit better in the country? Where she wouldn't face those same frustrations?

AL ETMANSKI: I don't think, I mean, I don't want to get into comparison of provinces. Some provinces do it better certainly, than others, but I think there's a fundamental flaw in the system, which is that it doesn't respect this abundance of care and resources that are available out there. It brings its funding and its service delivery apparatus from the mindset that we know best and we're going to tell you what to do and limit your options, as opposed to recognizing that people like Helen are in fact, the fundamental resource that they can draw on. So they never set the table in a way in which they allow for the full creativity and ingenuity of families to come into play.

AMT: Are there things that her experience points out that can be navigated ahead of time if you're a parent who's the primary caregiver and you know that that someone else will have to look after your adult child. Are there things that should be thought about that people don't usually talk about?

AL ETMANSKI: I think Helen has covered them in her conversation with you but on a very practical basis, it's very important to have a will in place and there are lots of resources in Canada to help with that. They can contact our organization and we can refer you to people across the country. What that does is preserve the amount of wealth you're leaving for the individual with the disability in a way through trusts and through the Registered Disability Savings Plan so that those resources are available for the individual. The second thing I would recommend, in our experiences, is to develop a personal network or a circle of friends or a circle of support. Can you imagine existing without the loving care of family and friends? None of us can. And sometimes we have to be much more intentional and conscious about that for our family members with disabilities. At least that's what we found. So that would be my second recommendation. There are many, many, many other things, but I think those two get you started because they address the two most fundamental handicaps of people with disabilities, and that is their social isolation and their poverty.

AMT: And she is the only sibling so yes, I mean there would be people without siblings who don't have a place to turn.

AL ETMANSKI: Yes, and everybody deserves number one, to be in friendship. And every single person with a disability that I've met wants to not only have a friend, but also has a contribution to make to that friendship. We kind of need a ripple effect in the disability world Anna Maria, similar to this marvelous series that you're running, more generally because if you peel behind what Helen is talking about here, she's got a mindset that she's offering to rethink how we support people with disabilities and their families and ripple effects start with that kind of shift of mind. How marvelous it would be if there was a legitimate conversation among families, people with disabilities, and their governments, in which they sat together as equals with respect for what each other brings to the table; that there was a significant redesign rather than this incremental catch as catch can response to crisis all the time. I know Helen is ready. I know families like Helen’s are ready and I know people with disabilities are, but we have no government that has really said we trust families and people with disabilities, you are the key to the redesign.

AMT: You were part of developing the Registered Disability Savings Plan policy, were you not? The RDSP?

AL ETMANSKI: Yes, that's right.

AMT: But that's for after 60, am I right?

AL ETMANSKI: No, it's actually not. There's a 10-year holdback in the funds, so if you put the money in today, then you have to wait 10 years if it's receiving a matching grant from government or the bond. And Anna Maria, the bond is $1,000 a year, no questions asked. You don't even have to put a contribution through. So, no. Our original conceptualisation was that it should be available as an assist before the individual got too old so that they can have the money and the wealth to do what they need to do now. There is a 10-year holdback but other than that, you can access the funds. Obviously a few more complications, but that is essentially it.

AMT: Okay, well Al, thank you for your perspective and it's important that we talk about this. Thanks for your time today.

AL ETMANKSI: Great piece. Thanks so much.

AMT: Al Etmanski co-founder of Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network or PLAN. He joined us from Surrey BC. He's written about his experience in advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities in his book. It's called Impact: 6 Patterns to Spread your Social Innovation. That's Al Etmanski in Surrey BC. Now we're interested in hearing your experience as a parent or sibling caregiver of someone with a disability. Send us an e-mail by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and then click on the contact link and let us know. You can always find us on Facebook or on Twitter. We are @thecurrentcbc. That's our program for today

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Feb.1, 2016 Episode Transcript

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