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The Current Transcript for January 4, 2018

Host: Geoff Turner

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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Democracy is going to work for you only if it reflects your values and your vision. Everything is at stake in this election.

GEOFF TURNER: As you hear from that campaign video, when Kristyn Wong Tam ran for Toronto City Council last fall, she hopes to be part of a Greek tradition of Canadian democracy. But she says their campaign went from the high road straight into the gutter, thanks to social media. In a few moments we'll hear her concerns about what she calls a Trump-esque turn in Canadian politics. Plus:.

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I witnessed about 40 percent of my department getting laid off and the reason they were given was automation. And then we learn that further automation was going to occur.

GT: When Tory Sharman lost her job in banking. She joined a growing club: Skilled Workers Pushed Aside by Automation. And if one Toronto company gets its way the ranks of that club are about to swell with lawyers. In half an hour we'll hear about what happens when robots move into the courthouse. Also:

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if I am alone in this problem is going to continue being there. But what if we have a thousand girls like Nice, who have not undergone circumsision, more voices that can speak for other girls, all over Africa.

GT: In an hour, we'll revisit a story about one woman's campaign to gather voices against female genital mutilation. I'm Geoff Turner and you were listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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'I was shaken': What an alleged social media smear campaign against a Toronto councillor means for democracy

Guests: Kristyn Wong Tam, Elizabeth Dubois

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GT: Kristyn Wong Tam, thank you so much for joining us today.

KRISTYN WONG TAM: Thank you very much.

GT: Kristyn Wong Tam is a Toronto city councillor. Now with the federal action coming up this year. Politicians right across the country will be dealing with similar concerns about abuses on social media. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter have pledged again and again to improve monitoring and shut down misinformation. The federal government tried to prevent political interference with its new election law, Bill C-76 which received Royal Assent last month. But our next guest says it's not clear that any of these efforts will be enough. Elizabeth Dubois is an assistant professor of communications at the University of Ottawa and she is in our Halifax studio today. Hello.

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Hello.

GT: What do you make of Kristyn Wong Tam's account of the role that social media played in the harassment and abuse that she talked about?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: You know there is a bunch of things tied in here. So if we're talking about harassment and the abuse that that the councillor face obviously that is a problem. And this is something that we know from outside of politics. Women particularly women who are not white end up being abused and harassed more than anyone else on these platforms and there aren't good ways to deal with it. But what makes this case even more interesting and more troubling as was pointed out is the risk to our democratic systems when it attacks can be made and coordinated needed, in order to spread - not only harassment and abuse but disinformation when it approaches that might be leading to voter suppression might come forward. And particularly interesting is this idea of a paid advertisement in Facebook being made by someone who presumably was not a registered third party and claims to be from outside of Canada. That's very questionable in terms of what should be allowed and what is considered legitimate free political speech in an election period. That said, we don’t have really good data and so this council coming out and giving this story, as difficult as it is for her, it's helpful for us to be able to see that. And we need to know more about what exactly is happening and house so that we can better address it without infringing on things like free speech.

GT: Now in her piece, Ms. Wong Tam, now she frames it in terms of the trumpeting of American politics, the idea that this is the infiltration of a US style of political disinformation. Does that make sense to frame it that way or is this a borderless phenomenon?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: I think 'Trumping', the term evokes a few different ideas which might be helpful for getting people interested. But when we look at how people are making use of social media and other digital media around the world, we see a lot of experimentation. And it is not coming just from the US. And it's also not coming just from the alt right. It's coming from people who want to get their political message out, get their candidate to win or some other candidate to lose in elections, in democracies around the world. And so I think we need to be careful about assuming that because we in Canada happen to get a whole lot of American news rared necessarily being infiltrated by this U.S. approach, because were actually seeing it in a variety of places from a variety of people across the political spectrum.

GT: Now Kristyn Wong Tam mentioned having some of that misinformation distributed through paid ads on Facebook. And we asked Facebook Canada for comment on this. And part of what they said is that: "In preparation for Canada's federal action in 2019 we launched the Canadian election integrity initiative, which includes third party fact checking, increased transparency, investing in digital media literacy and providing the tools and resources to help political parties, candidate and their teams safeguard their accounts." End Quote. Now we know Facebook has been trying to tackle this issue for a while. Overall how would you rate those efforts in Canada?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Yes. So Facebook is definitely trying to make efforts towards ensuring the integrity of elections to the extent that any one organization can. They have been under a lot of pressure from governments in the U.S., in the UK, in other parts of Europe. The new Bill C-76 is starting to put pressure in certain ways. And Facebook is trying. But at the same time Facebook is this large multinational country that is not based in Canada. And their Canada is small and so there are a bit ready to really make sure that the specific Canadian context is addressed and taken care of, I think it’s unclear. We don’t have a lot of transparency around what these programs are putting in place are, how they work, what the evaluation criteria are - for example - when they’re trying to determine whether or not something is harassment or whether or not something is in fact a political advertising it. So, yes, it's great that we're seeing these steps being made. But, no, we don't have enough information to be able to really know if this is enough or even where their short comings might be.

GT: Sticking with Facebook for a moment, I want to play a clip for you Richard Allan Facebook vice president of policy solutions. He testified in front of a British parliamentary committee last fall. In this clip he's responding to one of the Canadian MPS who asked him about people trying to interfere with elections here in Canada.

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I think we are in a much better place today, sitting here in front of you, than we were two years ago. You will have an election in Canada next year. There will be problems. There will be people who cheat and work around the system. But we will catch most of them. And our goal is, I think shared with you, is that the Canadian election should not be seen to have been unduly influenced by online activity through our platform. We share absolutely that goal. We are making the investments. We can't guarantee that there will not be instances where there are people who cheat that we catch and have to take down during the campaign.

GT: What do you think about that? Are you as confident as he is about the integrity of the election?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: So he points out, I think very rightly, that there is no guarantee here. There is no way to be absolutely certain that no bad actors are going to be able to do things that could be problematic. The certainty there - of, yes, Facebook will be able to catch anybody doing those things quickly - I think is a good aim. I don't know if that is going to happen, but the best that can be done is to make that effort. I think it is important to realize though two years ago, four years ago at no point word Facebook official have come out and said, "Oh we would like for democracy to be under minded influence". So the fact that they're stealing it explicitly now is great but we also need to remember that they thought they were doing a good enough job back then also.

GT: It seems like we're always playing catch up with social media campaigns. The twists and turns are always a step ahead of what we as a society or what government regulators are able to cope with. Where are the new frontiers of online campaigning that you see coming, that maybe we should be paying more attention to before they happen?

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: Yeah. So I see two big weapons. One of them is the use of instant messaging apps. There has been an election recently in Brazil. There's been a variety of examples of disinformation being spread in various countries in Asia, all through WhatsApp. And WhatsApp, they're not used as much in Canada, is increasingly popular. We also have a bunch of other instant messaging tools that we make use from Facebook Messenger to iMessage to simple text messaging. And these messages are usually private, often encrypted, a lot harder to track. So we could imagine an example of a voter suppression message being sent around via instant messaging. Really really hard for elections candidate to know that somebody is coordinating an effort to get people to the wrong polling stations, which is completely illegal and very problematic. And so I think this instant messaging component is going to be a major one. The second issue I think we need to be trying to get ahead of is the role of third parties in Canada is changing. And I say third party is using the terminology that elections Canada would use. These are political actors who are not necessarily running for office themselves. So a union could be a third party in an election. A non-profit or a charity organization like Lead Now or Ontario proud might be registered third parties. And these organizations are making use in really interesting, innovative and possibly quite valuable ways to engage people through social media and email and instant messaging and these other digital tools. But the problem is we don’t know how to track what they're doing what counts or what doesn't count in the relatively strict definition of advertising.

GT: Elizabeth I'm going to have to let you go there. Thanks for joining us.

ELIZABETH DUBOIS: My pleasure.

GT: Elizabeth Dubois is an assistant professor of communications at the University of Ottawa. The CBC News is next. Then, artificial intelligence is learning new skills every day and it's not just manual labor, jobs that could be replacing next. Think bankers and lawyers even radio hosts. Im Geoff Turner and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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Robo-lawyers and iDoctors? How AI could do jobs we once thought couldn't be automated

Guests: Benjamin Alarie, Ajay Agrawal

GT: Hello I'm Geoff Turner and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. [Music: Theme].

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I'm not doing self-checkout you can't make me, all the grocery stores. They're switching over. Is anybody here good at self-checkout? Can anybody handle it? Woo! You're just like, right in the front row, "We can do it!" How do you? I mean, I didn't take a cashier training course! I don't know how to do it! They say that like robots are taking all our jobs. No, we're just like doing the jobs that you don't want to be jobs anymore, grocery stores. I didn't take, I didn't read the manual. I don't know how UPC technology works! Grocery stores are like, you just do it, you can do it now. Just form a line. We don't want to pay cashiers. Do it. One at a time! There's a lot of rules. Everyone's just in line, like HOW DO YOU DO THIS??? This is SO inconvenient.

GT: Well you don’t have to spend too long in a grocery store to hear a view like Andy Peters has there, but its not stopping Canadian retailers from investing heavily in self-serve technology. First, it was gas pumps, then, automated teller machines. And increasingly automation is working its way into professional jobs too. Now you might scoff at the idea that a robot could be a lawyer. It’s true that we haven't seen robots arguing a case in front of a judge, but they are taking on some legal tasks that used to be done by humans. Benjamin Alarie is the Osler chair and business law at the University of Toronto. He is also the co-founder and CEO of a high tech startup called Blue J Legal. He's here with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

BENJAMIN ALARIE: Good morning Geoff.

GT: So when did you get the idea of bringing automation into the world of law?

BENJAMIN ALARIE: Well as towards the end of 2014, and I got totally excited about what we could do using machine learning new algorithms in using case data to predict how judges will decide future cases.

GT: Now I think it's probably fairly obvious to people the advantages of a robot in a situation like an automobile assembly line work. Where does artificial intelligence have the advantage in the world of law?

BENJAMIN ALARIE: Well I think the possibilities are manifold. I've spent much of the last several years focusing on how we can translate the volume of case law that the courts are deciding every year tens of thousands of cases are decided. This produces a large written textual record of how judges are reasoning about cases and resolving cases, and the promise that I am exploring - and that we're exploring at Blue J Legal - is how do we mine that information for insights into how judges are likely to decide future cases. And it represents a massive amount of information. If you think about how many cases law students study over the course of a law degree, or lawyers will encounter in private practice, the numbers are relatively small. Over the course of a law degree you might study 1000. You might study 2000 cases in detail over the course of that degree. But of course every year there are hundreds of thousands of cases decided by the courts. And so your most exposed to a very thin layer of cases. Carefully selected cases by people like me, law professors, to to be subjected to further study to get insight. What's amazing as lawyers are able to do as well as they are able to do using that thin slice of information to predict how judges are going to decide future cases. So we're developing technology that will allow lawyers to have a different way of appreciating what's happening in the courts and that level up their advice using these different approaches.

GT: But I think people probably imagine that case law being full of new science and that people like you, law professors, bring to the young new lawyer's insights into the human particularities of all those cases. How do you give that to a computer?

BENJAMIN ALARIE: Folks who recognize that every case is unique are absolutely right. Every case is unique it has its own nuance, which is why the best pairing of how to predict how a judge is going to decide a future case is to use the information from all the cases and pair that with a human expert who can identify what specifically unique are likely to be unique about a given situation. So it's not the case that every single or litigated dispute is perfectly unique. Of course there's enough consistency and enough similarities across cases that we actually have a functioning legal system. If it were true that every case were perfectly unique then we could get no insight from past cases. The common law system just wouldn't work at all. And so one premise of the common law is that there are like cases and like cases should be treated the like and there are different cases in different cases may or may not be treated differently. The trick is to use statistics, machine learning, big data to figure out what makes alike case alike and what makes a different case different in a way that's going to lead a court to reach a different conclusion.

GT: Now in the old days I would look at- if I was in legal trouble - I would look at the back of the phone book and call somebody up and make an appointment for that slip and fall that they had. What would Or the user experience be for someone encountering your software?

BENJAMIN ALARIE: So our software is targeted specifically professional. So we have software for employment issues that come up all the time that you would see an employment lawyer for. We have software that addresses tax issues, so it's being used by leading accountants, leading law firms, by the government. And so we're providing our tools to the service providers themselves who are using these tools to make their advice better, to make sure that they're not missing anything. They keep up with the latest cases. They're really honing their analysis of these situations for the benefit of clients. So unfortunately for you looking up the service provider you should be looking to the back of the phone book if you can find a phonebook, nowadays.

GT: I still have to call, so...

BENJAMIN ALARIE: Yes. You'd be doing that you'll be doing the same thing. The difference is that whomever you're calling is likely to be using these kinds of technologies to inform you the advice. And so the benefit to you, as a legal consumer, is that the advice that you're going to get is going to be more informed by all of the case law. Because you wouldn't have been willing to pay a lawyer to do the volume of research to read thousands of cases because this is totally impracticable and too expensive for you to pay for. And so you're going to get advice that's better tailored to your situation, informed by of the case law. It's going to be less costly potentially to you, or the same cost, but of a higher quality.

GT: Now as we heard in that clip off the top, I think the primary concern for many people around automation and artificial intelligence is what it means, what sort of implications it has for employment. What will this mean for the legal profession? Should people should people be worried about their jobs?

BENJAMIN ALARIE: I don't think anyone should be worried about their jobs in the legal profession. I don’t think anyone should be worried about the availability of legal services. In fact I think this is really a good news story. And here's why: So it falls into the point that I was making in response the last question which is that this is likely to make legal services available more quickly, less expensively and at a higher quality to individuals who need to get access to legal advice. And so what that means is, one way of thinking about this is that the value per unit of time spent by a lawyer to the client is going to be higher. And so if you are a consumer this is fantastic news, because it means the billable rates are likely to stay the same. Maybe they'll rise a little bit but the value that you'll get as a consumer is actually higher. So the surplus that you experience - so this is the idea of consumer surplus. An economist would say the consumer surplus is actually higher. So the benefit to the client goes up because the quality of the representation will be greater. What that also means is that in equilibrium the quality of legal advice that will be demanded by the market will actually increase as well. So there'll be an increased demand for legal services. And this is fantastic because right now we have a situation in which many academic commentators, judicial commentators are saying that we have an access to justice crisis. And so we have on the one hand an apparent surfeit of lawyers and student seeking articling positions and they're not necessarily all finding the work that they would like to have. But we have a large swath of the Canadian population who are not able to access affordable legal services. How do you square those two ideas in your mind? How can we have both too many lawyers and too much demand for legal services and legal representation? And the matter is through the instrumentality of technology, so we can actually provide more legal services that are at a more attractive price point in a way that doesn't demand more of lawyers and require 80 hour workweeks, and that sort of thing. We can actually do better using technology and that's my vision of how things are going to be going to be moving forward.

GT: Now we don't have a lot of time left but I know part of that vision of yours for the future it involves something you call a legal singularity. Just briefly what do you mean by that?

BENJAMIN ALARIE: So the legal singularity it's different from a technological simulate singularity which some of the listeners may be familiar with, which is the idea that technology become so powerful that it's actually able to improve itself and you get runaway technological improvement. The legal single areas as I see it and as I've written about it involves eliminating all legal uncertainty. And so you can imagine Blue J Legal bringing absolute clarity to the law everywhere on demand. So one of the things that irks me - and I suspect it irks others - is this prevailing sense of legal uncertainty. So in lots of circumstances people will say, "Well I can't do that because of liability reasons. I can't do that because of various legal excuses". But I think we all walk around with a kind of an ambient fear about what the legal system requires of us. What are our duties? What are our obligations? What are our rights? What we ask for and amend legitimately? The legal singularity will be a situation in which there is no uncertainty about what your legal standing is. That will still invite questions of politeness, manners, how we interact with each other, but there won't be that legal uncertainty that cannot pervades our consciousness in the way that it is right now.

GT: Thank you so much for joining us today.

BENJAMIN ALARIE: Thanks Geoff. It's my pleasure.

GT: Benjamin Alarie is the lower chair in business life at the University of Toronto. He is also the co-founder and CEO of a high tech start-up called Blue J Legal. And he was here in our studio with me. Now the legal filed is not the only one being transformed by artificial intelligence. Advances in machine learning are finding their way into all kinds of different businesses and organizations. My next guest thinks a lot about how to take advantage of these new advances. Ajay Agrawal is a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is also the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab a seed stage for science based companies, and he's the co-author of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. And we've reached him in London, U.K. Hello.

AJAY AGRAWAL: Hi Geoff.

GT: Now you just heard Ben Alarie describing how his software predicts how judges will rule in court cases. How does this system compare with other types of artificial intelligence that you've seen in your work?

AJAY AGRAWAL: Well his system is a great example of the deployment of prediction technology. I think that's one of the things that has been most interesting in the recent renaissance in artificial intelligence has been all the things that we've discovered there can be reformulated as prediction problems. So for example we never thought of translation as a prediction problem, but now that artificial intelligence or A.I.'s are doing translation the way they do it is through a prediction, predicting how a sentence in English would be spoken in French. We never thought of driving as a prediction problem, but we've now developed autonomous vehicles using a prediction effectively predicting how a human would react under a certain set of driving conditions. Ben's example is one of predicting judge behaviour. There's all sorts of A.I.'s in medicine and other professional services, each one that has taken a human activity often done by what we've viewed as white collar professionals that were doing were doing things that could be automated. And we are starting to automate them because we can reformulate the thing they're doing as a prediction problem.

GT: Now in the past jobs that require a high level decision making, like legal's jobs, they were considered safe from automation. So why is this new wave of automation different?

AJAY AGRAWAL: I think that one way to characterize what White-Collar people do is around making decisions. And decision making is predicated on two things. One is prediction and one is judgment. And why there's been so much interest in how A.I. may impact white collar jobs is becauseA.I.is a prediction technology. And from an economics perspective, one way to think about the rise in the capabilities ofA.I.is to think about it as a drop in the cost of prediction. So it's made machine prediction really cheap. And therefore there is a lot of opportunity to replace human prediction with machine prediction, because a lot of those predictions are being made by white collar workers in professional jobs that we're seeing A.I.'s creep into those areas.

GT: It almost feels as though Ben's system is somehow merging those things, that it's predicting judgment.

AJAY AGRAWAL: Well you know what was interesting, when Ben was answering your question he talked about how judges—his A.I.'s trying to predict how judges are likely to decide on a future case. And then as you pointed out that every case is distinct. And he replied that's exactly why the A.I.'s are coupled with lawyers because they are effectively predicting which prior cases are the most relevant to the current case. But then there's still a requirement of the human to deploy their judgment over what are the unique bits in this case that would lean it one way or the other. And so one of the things that we've been spending a lot of time now doing is trying to decouple in different professions in the decisions they make, what parts are predicated on predictions and what parts require judgment. Because A.I.'s do prediction. They don't do judgment. And so for example setting up this interview, probably people the CBC used some AIs, probably Google search or something, to do some research and find out if Ben would be a good- search for who would be good speakers and you found Ben, you found me. And you probably found some other people, and then somebody deployed their judgment to decide, okay, you know for this particular story line that these two would be the ones would be more suitable for that particular angle you wanted to take on this, on the show. So you combined and judgment to arrive at a decision to have Ben and I.

GT: I feel like you just peered into the soul of The Current story production process.

AJAY AGRAWAL: AIs will do that, too, Geoff.

GT: What's allowed machines to become so better at prediction? I think in the science fiction version of AI, there's kind of some magical element to it, but it sounds as though this has more to do with simple computing muscle. The power to store way more information and have access to way more information than any one human possibly could.

AJAY AGRAWAL: So I think it's the combination of at least three things. One thing is just a lot more data collected in digital format. So in the case that Ben described, he's leveraging the fact that all this case laws already in digital format and can be machine read. The second is that there's been increases in compute and advances in the hardware for doing computations. And third and the one that's had the most coverage in the popular press recently are advances in the algorithms. And that's where Canada has played such a leading role on the research side, is in effectively advances in computational statistics which is what all this is.

GT: Now these prediction machines are being used in all kinds of fields including the movie industry. This is the Nadira Azermai, after working as a production assistant on 'Gigli', which we will recall is one of the worst Hollywood flocks of all time. She created an A.I. system that analyzes screenplays to see how much money they will make. Have a listen to this.

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A computer is very objective. It will tell you in a very honest way what your script is about or how is your script perceived. So where the computer is lacking, humans make up for it, and the other way around. So I think like I said that within five years of course we're going to see A.I. written film, but not solely written by A.I. but rather in a collaborative process. I think it's definitely coming.

GT: Is it just me or is there something a little creepy and a little sad about the idea of computers being used to make what we think of as artistic decisions, like what movie to make?

AJAY AGRAWAL: Yes, I mean, I guess beauty is in the eye beholder and maybe people of our vintage view that as sad. I suspect younger kids may view this as exciting. And the question is - first of all from a consumption perspective - if you and I watch two films and we reach out to see which one we liked better, and one was made by Q and one was made by machine, and we picked the one that was made by machine without not knowing that, would we like it less after we found out that it was made by machine? Maybe. But I think you know there are all kinds of things. Like I suspect that the CBC used to have hundreds of people that were effectively like library librarians and now Google or some permutation of a search engine is doing most of that work, and yet nobody is singing the blues at CBC, longing for the old days when there were hundreds of librarians running round the building. So I suspect that there will be short term reminiscence for things that we used to do by humans that are subsequently done by machines. But remember all of this is demand driven. So if people really want human made movies, there'll be a demand for human movement and will get human made movies. But I suspect that there will be some very significant changes around the corner, in terms of how things are done. Because it will turn out that we don’t actually want all the things we say we want. I was speaking a while ago at a conference where somebody was talking about travel agents. And there was a time where travel agents were convinced that everybody would always want to buy their airline tickets from a travel agent because they knew all the nuances of travelling and the destination and the hotels and they were a font of information. Similarly people that ran bookstores told me the same thing that you know everybody wants to come in and touch a book and feel a book and browse a book before they buy it. But it turns out most people actually, when given a choice, view others, value other things even more; like convenience and being able to book a flight from their couch or order a book from their office. So we say all kinds of things, but you economists use a term which is 'revealed preference'. And the 'revealed preference' is how you answer a survey and more how are you actually allocate your scarce time and your dollars.

GT: Now there are philosophical implications here too. What does it say to you about human nature if a computer - and we don't have much time left - but if a computer can predict our behavior with such accuracy, where are we headed?

AJAY AGRAWAL: That's a good question. And I think people that are deeply into this, that have a reasonably good sense of the trajectory and are right at the frontiers seeing how fast it's moving, a number of them-- I'm surprised how many people on the computer science side are questioning the idea of free will. Because many of them have the view that we are much more predictable than we think we are. And so therefore it's not surprising that machines can ultimately anticipate what we want and what we're going to do. And a great description that I have heard is that an individual ant of an anthill may feel like it's very unique, each one is a snow flake. But as you stand further back from the anthill, the aggregate motion of all the heads is quite predictable. It's not obvious that we are so much more sophisticated. We think we are. But I think what we're starting to see in terms of how wellA.I.'sare able to predict so many things that we do, that we're not quite as unique as we think.

GT: Ajay Agrawal, Thanks you so much for sharing your insight on this.

AJAY AGRAWAL: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Geoff.

GT: Ajay Agrawal is a professor at the Rotman School of Management and the co-author of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. I'm Geoff Turner and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

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Meet the Kenyan woman urging village elders to abandon female genital mutilation

Guest: Nice Nailantei Leng'ete

GT: Hello, I'm Geoff Turner, in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current. This next conversation deals with a sensitive topic. It is a cultural tradition with a long history in Kenya's Maasai community, and it goes by a deceptively simple name there - they call it 'the cut'. But there is nothing simple about it. The cut is female genital mutilation done to girls as young as 8 or 9, as a way to control girls' and women's sexual activity. Despite years of campaigning against FGM from international organizations, it now appears to be the women within the community who are bringing about some powerful change. Nice Nailantei Leng'ete is spearheading much of the effort. She is a Maasai woman from Kenya who has been fighting against FGM since she was 8 years old. She now works to suggest alternatives to the cut - so aspects of the ritual are preserved, but without the mutilation... And her work is making a difference. Nice Nailantei Leng'ete was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2018, and she spoke with Anna Maria on a visit to Toronto in November.

NNL: Yes at the time because mostly they look at your physical appearance. Sometimes you might even go when you're younger, seven, eight or nine, depending with your body size. When you're short it means you will go later, but if you are tall physically, you'll go earlier. And it's also a way of preparing you to be strong because when you're undergoing the cut, there are things that you're not supposed to do, one of them is crying or even moving your body. You're called a coward or there's no man from that community who is going to marry you.

AMT: So you're six or seven years old and you see this, what do you remember from those early ceremonies witnessing it?

NNL: I remember a lot of things because one, I saw girls that I knew, girls I was with in school together. These girls were sad because I saw a lot of pain in them, but because culture is demanding for them to undergo and culture is telling them that you cannot cry. They couldn't cry when it's being performed there, but immediately they are taken to their rooms, you could see them crying. I could look at them and that's when I saw like this is something that is very painful. It's bringing a lot of problems. And again neighbor saw death in this communities, that's why I was not comfortable with it.

AMT: So you knew that there was a lot of pain involved and you didn't want that.

NNL: I was scared of that and I never wanted also to leave school and become someone's wife.

AMT: So when you were eight-years-old and it was your turn to be cut, what happened?

NNL: I was supposed to undergo the cut together with my three cousins and my sister who was two years older than me. So it was a group of five girls. These ceremonies are very expensive sometimes times to conduct, that's why they like having many girls together. And when it was my time, I had so many mixed reactions. One I've seen that in my community happening because of circumcision. I've seen girls undergoing a lot of pain. I've seen them being married when they are young. Even in school where I was because I was interacting with girls from different communities, when they know you're from my community. They were girls bath together in big bathrooms. They want to come and look at you and make jokes at you and laugh at you and that's traumatised other girls from my community and they were not also comfortable staying in school. They had to drop out of school. So as a young girl, I have seen all these and that's why I was like, I don't want to undergo the cut. But then again my family will not agree, they were saying it's a must for you. We don't want shame in our family, so you know very well as a girl, you cannot be considered a woman if you have not undergone the cut.

AMT: So you ran away?

NNL: And I had to run away, not one time, but two times. The first time I ran away and stayed in my mother's sisters place. I was beaten when I was found there.

AMT: And you ran away with your sister that first time?

NNL: Yes the first time.

AMT: And they beat you when they found you?

NNL: When they found me we were beaten by my uncle and a group of men and that's why the second time my sister did not run away because she was tired of the beatings and then again she was two years older than me. So she said maybe if I stay, they will leave you. So it was a way of sacrificing herself to undergo the cut, so that I'd be left out.

AMT: And so they did it to your sister.

NNL: They did it to my sister and later she got married.

AMT: And she was 10 when she had this done to her?

NNL: Yes.

AMT: How old was she when she got married?

NNL: I think about 13.

AMT: 13?

NNL: Yeah, but she left school immediately. She stayed at home and then when she was about 13, she got married.

AMT: Did the two of you talk about this together before this happened?

NNL: At that time, we were discussing with my sister because even her, she wanted to continue with her education. She never wanted to be circumcised and you know being married and all that. That's not the life she wanted, but because she saw I was younger than her and we were beaten, I think she just said, let me undergo so that they leave you. So she never wanted, but she just did it for me.

AMT: But it was a little more complicated for you because they still wanted to cut you.

NNL: Yeah.

AMT: How did you get out of it?

NNL: So even the second time when I ran away, now I didn't go to my mother's sister's place. I went first to school, stayed there, but later on I came to my grandfather because, remember school is not my home. I said I need to go and talk to my family and the first person I'll go and talk to is my grandfather.

AMT: And again this is because your mother and father have died, so your grandfather is the elder in your family.

NNL: Yes he was the elder in my family and I knew he was also respected because he's an elder by the family. So once he starts supporting me, I don't think there is anyone else who will come and you know force me to undergo the cut again.

AMT: And how did you convince him that you shouldn't have to have this?

NNL: So the first time I went to my grandfather I remember I started postponing my circumcision time. I told them give me more time so that I can have time to go to school. So I knew deep down in my heart, I don't want to undergo, but I need to push it because I need to stay in school. I came back to him again after some time because I kept on going back to him and I say I will run away, never come back and even become a street child or something. That's when he started realizing after two years, I think she's serious. Let's just give her the opportunity to go to school. When she wants to come and get circumcised, she will come. So my grandfather called my family, called my uncle and said let's leave her. Let her stay the way she wants to stay and that's how I got support from my grandfather.

AMT: And because he was an elder, they had to respect his wishes for you?

NNL: Yeah once an elder speaks in our community because they're highly respected, they give guidance to the community, you cannot go against them. Whatever what they say is final to everyone.

AMT: You were able to convince your grandfather. That's quite something because he's a very traditional man in your community. Is that your power of persuasion? Is that his openness? Was it a combination? What do you think made him agree with you?

NNL: One, I will say it's one of the greatest thing he did to me and that's why he is one of the people who keep on inspiring me throughout my journey to continue doing what I'm doing. But I will say my grandfather is one person I will say, he's a good listener. He listens and he doesn't want to see people undergoing pain, even up to now and then the other thing is that he was going to church because again in church remember circumcision is not allowed in the Bible for girls.

AMT: You make the point that when you got to the boarding school, you realized not all girls were getting circumcised, did not go through FGM. So where does the tradition come from with your Maasai community, why does it happen there?

NNL: It's not only the Maasai community that practices FGM. We have many other communities back in Kenya and Africa, which are practicing female genital circumcision or mutilation, but we all have different reasons. So to speak for the community that I come, one of the reasons in my own community is the right of passage from girlhood to womanhood. So it means that they are making you an elder. So it's like you're having a certificate for marriage. It means that you are no longer a child, you are now a grown woman. So you are ready for marriage. That's one reason. The second reason is also a way of reducing prostitution because Maasai people are cattle keepers. So when there's drought, men move with cattles from one place to another, but women and children are left back home and the only time they will come back is when there's rain and all that, there's no drought. So at one point when they went men with cattles and stayed somewhere for a few months, other men from another village realized that men from this village are not there. So they came, slept with our women, so by the time other men are coming, they found a few women there pregnant. So they said we need a way of punishing our women, so that next time when we go anywhere for some time, they just, you know they're like, they want to own them. You know they don't go around sleeping with other men.

AMT: Control.

NNL: So it was a way of reducing prostitution.

AMT: And so it was so entrenched in the tradition of the community and what you're saying is also in the boys and young men because they believed their wives had to have this done to them?

NNL: Yes.

AMT: Or they weren't worthy?

NNL: Yes.

AMT: So you were fighting all of those values when you decided to fight this?

NNL: Yes.

AMT: So how did you start to convince people, what happened?

NNL: In this work, it's about changing culture and it's about changing behaviour, which is never easy because it's a very sensitive cultural issue. So it's not something that you talk to people in a day and then they change. It takes years, because one, remember I'm a woman from this community. I'm not even allowed to talk in front of men and making it worse, I ran away from circumcision and they saw me in my own village you know because I had other challenges growing up, they are seen as a bad example. Even not having children or friends that I can play with because I was seen as that bad girl in the whole society and all that. And that's when I realized, if I'm alone this problem will continue being there. I'll be seen as the bad example. But what if we have a thousand girls like Nice, who have not undergone circumcision. More voices that can speak for other girls all over Africa, that's the only way we'll be able to make a lasting change and all that. So I went to cultural leaders because that's when I met AMREF Africa in my own place and they came to my cultural leaders. They said we need a girl and a boy who has gone to school and we want them to undergo a sexual and reproductive rights training for one week to be trained as a peer educator. And they came to my elders, but we had so many boys who have gone to school, but I was the only girl who has gone to school and that's how they chose me. So after the training, I went back to cultural leaders and I said I have a message for the younger men. But they said you are crazy, you cannot come and talk in front of men. I went back to them. I kept on going back to them for like three years until later they said now we need to listen to her.

AMT: Three years you tried to get them to speak to you and they refused every time?

NNL: Yes.

AMT: You mentioned AMREF, remind us what that is.

NNL: African Medical and Research Foundation, it's a health organization that I worked with back in Kenya.

AMT: Okay so you started working with them, even at that young age?

NNL: Yes.

AMT: So how old were you when you finally got an audience with the elders?

NNL: I think at that time I was 17, 17 years. That's when they actually started listening to me. And when now I was able to convince young men, I used them to reach the cultural leaders together. But at the same time, I was talking to women in my village, I was talking to girls in my village, I was talking to circumcised and older women and everyone. And that's how in my own village for the first time we were able to come up together, as a community, and we were able to start an alternative rite of passage movement, where we are simply saying, let's retain the good part of our culture because we have so much that is good in our culture, that we don't have to do away with. And in the whole process of circumcision, what we hate is the cut. All the rituals, blessings from cultural leaders, people dressing in their traditional clothes, us dancing and singing our beautiful songs, it's not harmful, it's good.

AMT: So before we talk more about the alternative ceremony, I just want to go back to what you did to convince people. When you first started talking to other girls your age and to the women who had already gone through FGM, what kind of reaction did you get?

NNL: You see any time you are starting to work a community or when we want start to raise awareness on issues of female genital mutilation or even issues of child marriage, you can never start with that topic because it's very sensitive. So we'll start discussing maybe development of the community or maybe the importance of girl child and boy child education. We also have many other topics on sexual and reproduction right issues that we start tackling because remember, men in this community, as long a girl has undergone circumcision, they're allowed to have multiple sexual partners. And as a girl because culture is saying this is oh you should be, you cannot say no. You can't say no, you have to accept. So it's important for you to also tackle HIV and AIDS topic with these men, importance of condom usage and all those things. So as you're doing other topics, that's when you see if the dialogue is becoming open. When you see now it's open, you start bringing out sensitive issues like you know female genital mutilation and its effects.

AMT: Were the women that you talked to then, were they in favor of their daughters not going through this then? Did they want their daughters to be spared?

NNL: Yes, not all of them because it takes time for people to understand what I was saying, but at least I started getting a good support from women first, that was saying enough is enough. We don't wan't to see this pain anymore, we want our girls to have the right to education.

AMT: And I would imagine the conversation with the men would vary depending on their ages, but tell me a little bit about the kinds of conversations you would be able to have eventually with teenage boys and older men. How did you bring them around?

NNL: The conversation will be different when I'm talking to men who are like 25, from the age of 25 to 35 and all that because now these men are the ones who are waiting for these girls to be married and to be circumcised, so that they can marry them.

AMT: That's right and they still have that attitude that that's what they need.

NNL: And they still have that attitude like i cannot marry a girl who has not undergone circumcision. So it's equally important first to even convince them so because if you don't convince them girls also need assurance, they'll be like if you don't agree to undergo the cut, then who will marry us and all that. So it's important also to talk to these men and make them understand what problem does these female genital mutilation even causes to you know when they're having intercourse with their partners and all that because these are some of the things they know, they see, but sometimes they don't probably get to understand that one of the reasons is because of you know female genital mutilation that was done to them. So sexuality or sex is one of the interesting topics, again the pain that these women, it's causing to these women is one of the topics that is really interesting to the young warriors and it's one of the things that we used to change them, but another thing is also use of videos. We have FGM videos that we show men because remember they don't know how circumcision is down for girls or women because they are not allowed to be there. They don't even know. They just know that a girl has undergone circumcision. They don't know where it's cut or what is being done to them. And once they see these video, that's when they see the pain that these girls undergo. And that's when they start saying I'll not allow my daughter or I'll not allow my sister to undergo the same. So I think video is one of the powerful tools also that we've been able to use.

AMT: That is so interesting and so you got them to the point where they were willing to accept alternate ceremonies.

NNL: Yes.

AMT: And you celebrate women coming of age, you do all of that still. Tell me a little bit more. Does that ceremony, how often does that ceremony happen?

NNL: We do the ceremony three times a year because that's when circumcision happens. Circumcision mostly happen on the months of April, August and December. So that is the time that we also have our alternative rites of passage ceremonies and trainings, whereby we bring girls from different villages together. They undergo a three-day training on sexual and reproductive rights issues, issues of you know importance of education, effects of FGM and child marriage, teenage pregnancies and then on the last days, now when the community comes together because all of them they have awareness. We've been training them for years because it's a whole process, it takes like four years to get there. So on the actual day of the ceremony, what are we simply saying, let's impress the good part of our culture. We are only replacing the cut with education because we cannot make any change if we are not investing in education for our girls the same way we're investing in the education for boys. And I don't think it's only on issues of female genital mutilation, but any form of gender-based violence, I think education is the is the way to go. It is equally important.

AMT: Yeah and that's extraordinary because you found a way in. Once you're in and having the discussion, you change even more things for women and men. How big is the Maasai community in Kenya?

NNL: The Maasai community in Kenya, the total population is about 2 million, but we also have the Maasai community in Tanzania who are the majority because we are one, like about three million. And that's why in our alternative rites of passage now, we are both working in the Maasai community in Kenya and Tanzania because our culture is the same and that's how we've been able to reach over 16,000 girls.

AMT: I was just going to ask you, how many girls have not been cut because of this work?

NNL: We've been able to reach over 16,000 girls who are now women without the cut. But that said, there's a lot to be done yet because remember in each year, over 2 million girls are still at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation. So we are now trying to see how we can scale up to other African countries and see how we can make better change and make sure that we are saving our girls and make sure that all of them are free from FGM by 2030.

AMT: The key is that it's coming from within inside. It's not people from other countries saying what you're doing, you are bad people, it's saying there's another way to think about. You're hurting us.

NNL: Yeah.

AMT: Yeah. It's extraordinary. It's incredibly hopeful that you can make that kind of change.

NNL: It is. And there is hope for Africa. That's how I see it because right now we are in the process, I'm still mentoring more girls, more voices. Now I'm not doing it alone. We have cultural leaders who are coming up as champions, defending the rights of their grandchildren and girls. We now have more men who are coming up agreeing to marry uncircumcised ladies, who are now speaking up. We have women who are joining me. We have young girls who are coming up. So the 16,000 girls I've also been able to reach is not my effort only. It's a combined effort from all these community members who are now doing it day and night. They are not sleeping and these are the people that need support, so that they are able to scale up these work to other places.

AMT: How old are you now?

NNL: I'm 27 and soon turning 28.

AMT: So it's been 20 years, since this really became you're aware of it and you.

NNL: Yeah.

AMT: And you were so persistent. You understood how to bargain with your grandfather. You waited until the elders would see you. It's extraordinary what you've done and I know you're saying other people are working with you and what you've done collectively, but even what you've done by yourself. So why do you think you had the will and the courage, not only to speak up for yourself as a little girl, but to keep speaking up? Why do you think you did that?

NNL: One of the things to remember someone else, that is my sister, sacrificed herself to undergo circumcision, so that I'd be left out. So where I am today it's because one person cared for me. My grandfather also supported me and that's why I'm like I could not do it for her, but it doesn't mean I have to keep quiet. I have others sisters all over Kenya and Africa who are still undergoing the same thing and I don't want to see any one of them undergoing the cut. And then also even in my journey, running away is not a solution or fighting with your family. We all love our families. We want to be around our fathers, our mothers, our grandfathers and all that. So I wanted to come up also with a way that involves the whole community to be part of the change because we also have girls with disabilities, who are blind, who cannot walk, where will they run to? So we need a sustainable solution whereby our parents, our community is understanding, that we are not just girls. We also matter and that's why whenever I see the 16,000 girls in school, they give me more power and more energy and that's why I keep on doing what I'm doing right now.

AMT: Where is your sister now?

NNL: She's still in my village. We are all there with her. She's a mother of three sons. Yeah, I have three nephews.

AMT: And you're talking to them as well, aren't you?

NNL: They're my best friends, my sister and my grandfather.

AMT: I'm just wondering when you see the women who you have grown up with, who have been able to escape the cut and whose fathers have agreed that they don't want that for their daughters. I'm just wondering how that makes you feel when you see that? You lost your own father very young, but when you see that kind of protectiveness turned the other way. What do you think?

NNL: If I see the ones who were after me, the younger girls, all of them are now in school. They're enjoying, so that means they have people who are caring. They are parents. Their fathers are supporting them to be where they are today. So I'm seeing a lot of change happening and I've seen like the enrollment of girls in schools have really gone up. So a lot of change is really happening and I'm seeing male support a lot. I'm seeing fathers supporting their daughters. I'm seeing cultural leaders supporting these you know daughters from these villages. I'm seeing everyone coming up and saying enough is enough, we need to do something for our girls.

AMT: What do you see in your own future? Do you want to get, you're already politically involved. Where do you see yourself going with all of this?

NNL: Right now, two things that I'm supposed to do and one of the things I'm doing now is we are building a leadership academy for the girls, for training young leaders. It's called A Nice Play. So it will be nurturing talents here, we'll be mentoring girls on leadership skills. We don't want them to learn later, we want them to start learning when they are young. It will also be a place, like an entrepreneurial training center, whereby women will be trained on different economic activities, so that they are able to take care of their families and after that I'm going to politics because that's where the power is. That's where you have the power to gain for the rights of these women and girls back in parliament in Kenya.

AMT: That's very encouraging to hear and you're very inspiring to talk to.

NNL: Thank you so much.

AMT: It's really great to have your voice on our program and thank you for using your voice. It's an honour to have you here.

NNL: Thank you so much for having me.

GT: Nice Nailantei Leng'ete is an activist campaigning against female genital mutilation. She now works with the organization AMREF Health Africa. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Today - Oscar-winning actor Michael Caine is on the program. And remember - you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Finally today, we heard about some of the professional jobs that Artificial Intelligence could be encroaching upon soon. Earlier this season on The Current, we looked into the way that AI is being used... to compose music. We'll put a link to that segment on our website today - including our interview with Taryn Southern --- who used AI to compose all the music on her recent album. Here's some of how that sounds. This is her song, "Break Free." I'm Geoff Turner, in for Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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