Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2019

The Current Transcript for September 10, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think it's great to have robust debate, but you shouldn't be, you know we shouldn't have all these misogynistic attacks on social media and then even seeing things jump off line. I don't think that's okay.

LAURA LYNCH: Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has long been the target of online vitriol. But after a frightening real life verbal assault from a man driving by as she walked with her children, McKenna was assigned a security detail. She's not alone, other high profile women who assert the dangers of climate change are also facing threats and abuse. That's our top story today. After that.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Can at judge, an experienced judge, sit in front of a defendant and make an accurate judgment about whether that person is liable to commit another crime. And the answer is that they do a very, very poor job of it.

LL: Malcolm Gladwell's latest book is about strangers and just how badly all of us can mess up when it comes to judging them. From court to the court of public opinion, he says just look at the cases of Amanda Knox or Bernie Madoff. Also a preview of CBC's latest Uncover podcast and a chat with a top executive at Microsoft about disinformation, privacy and security. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

Back To Top »

'Disturbing' sexist abuse towards Catherine McKenna common for women climate experts, says scientist

Guests: Kim Cobb, Paul Pule, Aaron Brough

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Tick tock Barbie [bleep]

VOICE 2: How cute are you? You got a brain or did you [bleep] to a PhD.

VOICE 3: To all the Dumbocrats lying about climate change including this miserable [bleep]. Go [bleep] yourself.

LL: Those tweets are aimed at high profile women, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, Canadian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe and U.S. Democratic senator Kamala Harris. In the case of Catherine McKenna, she was recently assigned an RCMP security detail and she explained why on the CBC Ottawa Morning show.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think what was so worrying about this incident is that it was just at Lansdowne. It was the night, I was with my kids. They were skateboarding, going to see a movie, like most people do and a car stopped, and this guy was videotaping me calling me you know just swearing at me and I will say it is worse for women in climate. I'm not entirely sure why. I think climate is a very divisive issue unfortunately because I don't know misogyny and climate denial seem to go together.

LL: My first guest has been on the receiving end of similar vitriol. Kim Cobb is a climate scientist and director of the Global Change Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. And we've reached her in Atlanta. Hello.

KIM COBB: Hi. Thanks for having me.

LL: You heard those tweets that we have read out at the top of the show. How does that mirror your own online experience?

KIM COBB: Well certainly I don't pretend to be the victim of the vast quantities and qualities of vitriol that Catherine McKenna and even Katharine Hayhoe have experienced this, two of the most prominent women climate leaders in the world. But certainly I've had my taste over the years, and it definitely resonates with much of the online abuse that we are subject to as women in climate, as well as of course spilling over into real life, in the form of letters and emails and strange phone calls. So it's not just social media.

LL: What kinds of messages have you received?

KIM COBB: Oh all kinds of things. I mean obviously you read some of the tweets. They tend to be short, sweet, abusive, completely lacking substance. And generally you can brush those off. I find it the ones that land in my inbox, you know cc'd to the president of my institution, calling for my removal as a faculty member, or obviously the letters that come too, from all over the world, some of them full of kind of tirades, irate tirades, from individuals. And those ones hit a little bit closer to home obviously, as it took some amount of effort to do that.

LL: When this started, how did you react?.

KIM COBB: Well I think the first time I was really subject to a torrent - really a tidal wave of online abuse - was after a fairly common appearance on CNN in which I walked through the facts of climate change as they impact wildfires, as much as we know them. And I got back to my office, and my Twitter was blowing up, my email was overflowing, my phone was ringing off the hook. And I just had to weather that storm for three or three or four days. And it really puts you out of commission mentally because you begin to comb over and second guess yourself as an effective communicator, and you also begin to wonder how much threat you're actually willing to withstand before you, you know reach for help, in the form of police or your dean or provost to let them know what's going on. So it's very complex set of emotions that kicks in when these episodes first come at you. Over time you become a little bit more numb, because you get these kinds of things - not like that everyday but kind of a steady dribble and then there's a big tidal wave that come at you as well. But with experience you get better at brushing them off, because ultimately of course this is largely confined to people's outbursts far far away and they don't impact your life. Very disturbing to hear about Catherine McKenna's recent experience. That's harrowing.

LL: But do any of the insults still get under your skin?

KIM COBB: Yes, I mean some of them do and I really have to express, the worst of them are exactly the ones that were the worst from Catherine McKenna's experience, which is the ones that are somehow involving my children. And that's a line for me as it would be for for most people. It's one thing to come after me and my speech or my tweets or my thoughts or my work, it's an entirely different thing to start involving my children in that kind of attack. And so whether it's your children that are exposed and see it, in the case of Catherine McKenna walking down the street -- how horrifying, and very threatening physically -- but also just to be talking about them or incorporating them into my communication because that is part of who I am. I'm a mother of four, so sometimes I get to talk about that. And when I do, inevitably somebody is going to cross a line and start to bring my children into it for extra effect almost. And those are the ones that get under my skin and those are the ones that make me afraid to bring my whole self to my work.

LL: Do your male colleagues receive the same kind of online treatment?

KIM COBB: I know that they are subject to really incredible and sustained attacks as well. Obviously when we're facing the kind of gendered weapons that we are as women climate leaders, there's a whole other level of harm that can be done to people and that's exactly why they're leveraging those kind of gendered weapons, because we are people who are sensitive to that, and struggle against that probably on a daily basis anyway, walking in our shoes. So it is particularly disturbing and particularly effective, and I'm glad that we're talking about it today so that people can understand what it takes to be out there as a woman in something as divisive as climate

LL: And you're still active on Twitter and I'm wondering why you keep doing that, going on Twitter, knowing that these kinds of responses are going to continue.

KIM COBB: Well I think there are a couple things. So first of all when I first started getting involved in Twitter, like I don't know, seven or eight years ago, it was a very very different landscape. There were a couple figures who were very very prominent in climate, and my thought was, well, if more of us join this conversation we will diffuse the army of attacks and at least they will be spared a couple hits, right? And that was my thinking at the time and now, I'm there because there's this honest to god, global, large, vibrant community of people who are dedicated bringing truth and facts and data to the discussion on climate, as well as people who are lifting up voices around social justice and climate issues, around policy options and climate, more and more. So it's become so multi-dimensional that I learn so much every day from being on Twitter that I basically can't turn away, just from being a very engaged person on climate in a general sense.

LL: Okay we'll have to leave it there, but I thank you for your time.

KIM COBB: Thanks so much for having me in this conversation.

LL: Kim Cobb is a climate scientist and director of the Global Change Program at Georgia Tech and we reached her in Atlanta, Georgia. Our next guest argues it's no coincidence that climate change deniers and skeptics reserved so much of their vitriol for women. Paul Pule is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He's also the co-author of the book, Ecological Masculinities. We reached him today in Eugene, Oregon. Hello.

PAUL PULE: Hello. Good morning.

LL: How surprised are you to hear about Kim Cobb's experience as a climate scientist?

PAUL PULE: Kim's experience is actually very consistent with the responses that we're seeing from climate denialists all over the world. We do find that the trends are very heavily correlating memes defensiveness or a sense of entitlement with attacks on women and girls. And I think that one of the most visible examples of that we're seeing right now is the response that Greta Thunberb is experiencing having arrived in the United States recently.

LL: Let's just remind people who Greta Thunberg is. She is the young 16 year old woman who has been trying to raise the alarm on climate change and you're saying she's also been a big target.

PAUL PULE: Yeah absolutely. People are going after her looks. Her diagnosis of having Asperger's. The fact that she's come from a privileged family in Sweden that she's come over to the United States by yacht without generating a carbon footprint,but is going back by other means. There's been quite a lot of attention actually that's been focussed on the reasons why climate denialists think that she's not credible.

LL: OK but dig into the research for me. Are there statistics that show that men who are climate skeptics are also more likely to be sexist or engaged in sexual harassment?

PAUL PULE: Yeah so the essential correlation is that that a person who adheres to misogyny and is also a climate denier is essentially saying that I'm afraid, I've got something to lose and the way that I'm going to deal with that fear is by attacking others and the most vulnerable victims in the climate debate, of course the visible leaders, many of whom are women, young women and women researchers. And essentially what's happening is that the attacks take exactly the same form as family domestic violence of asserting power and control in order to silence the other person's voice. The other person in this case being of course female and that violence really coming through in various different forms as we've heard in your report so far.

LL: But one of the things that I'm curious about is this kind of thing where women are raising their voices and calling out certain what they see as inequalities in society has been around for decades. How do you know that you can link this to the debate about climate change?

PAUL PULE: So climate deniers are essentially, they recognize, there's a recognition that the system is breaking down and that what the climate data is is pointing to is exactly that message. And the way that the data has been stacked so heavily against the climate denial argument has galvanized people in that camp to turn the volume of their voice up so extremely and in many cases because they're also very well funded to expand the reach of their voice, so that they can actually swamp the debate and attempt to turn it into an equal debate. In other words a 50 50 split. If you actually look at the statistics on scientists reporting in favour of a climate emergency versus those against, those statistics very clearly it's approximately a 99 percent to 1 percent split.

LL: I just wonder who you're talking about here because you say they're very well-funded. Certainly you're not painting all men with the same brush.

PAUL PULE: No, no. I'm talking about some climate deniers who happen to be men who also have associations with some think tanks that are often quite well funded by people who have a lot to lose in the face of a climate emergency. And so they're funding, some of the funding is coming through in order to amplify the reach of of the voice of some of these individuals. Now that's on an organized level and then there are some individuals who just take it upon themselves as trolls because they're disgruntled. They're angry, they're looking for someone to blame. Their way of dealing with their feelings is to scapegoat. So I don't think that we can broad brush stroke at all none.

LL: Can you explain a bit more about this concept that you talk about industrial breadwinner masculinity that you put forward in your book.

PAUL PULE: Yeah. So this ties back to the comment I made earlier about concerns about the system breaking down. Industrial breadwinner masculinity is stood in comparison to eco-modern masculinities and then to a third way forward in our book, Ecological Masculinities. And in each of the three cases what we see a particular kinds of socialization is for masculine behaviours. And this is where gender gendered language is very tricky and confusing. And part of the reason I think that we see so much vitriol coming from certain sectors of the climate debate is because people tend to collapse the term masculinity or femininity with man and woman. In other words that if you use the term masculine you're actually talking about a man. You use the word feminine you're actually talking about a woman and in fact that's not the case. Masculinity is referred to socialization that are present in all of us femininity is or feminization refers to behaviours values are actions that are present in all of us as well. And really it's a reflection of the limitations of the English language in my view. So what we see is that people get very confused and will take it quite personally and get extremely defensive when we talk about the limitations of masculinity is in the modern construct industrial breadwinning masculinity as we define it in our book is really referring to the industrial means of production that are typically constructed on the behaviourism is of domination extraction assertion of power and control etc. of people who own those means of production and of people who work in those fields have a lot to benefit from socio-economically.

LL: Alright I want to add someone else's conversation because we're quickly running out of time. Aaron Brough is an associate professor of marketing at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. He's done research into gender and sustainable consumption decision making and co-authored a study in 2016 called "Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption. We've reached him in Logan, Utah. Hello.

AARON BROUGH: Hi Laura, how are you?

LL: Fine. Tell me about some of your research. What were some of the experiments you did?

AARON BROUGH: Yeah you bet. So the main takeaway from our research is that there's a stereotype that both men and women have that eco-friendly behaviours are feminine and because of the stereotype men are sometimes reluctant to go green to engage in eco-friendly behaviours. And we show that we can overcome this reluctance to some degree by in two ways by affirming the masculinity of men and also by rebranding eco friendly products as more masculine.

LL: Yeah. Tell me about the gift card experiment.

AARON BROUGH: Yeah you bet. So we, this was joint work with colleagues from four other universities and we did seven experiments that involved over 2000 participants in the U.S. and China and one of those was an experiment where we gave men a gift card to Wal-Mart, presented them with a gift card and there were two versions of the card that we had. One threatened men's masculinity because it was pink and had a floral design and the other card did not. And then after seeing the card all the men made a series of choices between green and non-green versions of the same products. So batteries, backpacks, lamps and what we found was that the men whose masculinity had been threatened by the pink card, they were more likely to make non-green choices, to choose the non-green version of each of the products.

LL: How do you know the pink card threatened their masculinity?

AARON BROUGH: Well so the idea was that we told them imagine you've received this gift card and that your colleagues have picked it out and said we thought this would just be perfect for you. And you know it was a pink card, it had a flower on it, very frilly font, right, a very feminine looking card.

LL: We're talking about a lot of stereotypes here. Where do you think the stereotypes you observed in your research come from?

AARON BROUGH: Yeah, that's a good question. So we didn't, you know the primary objective of our research wasn't to examine the origins of it, but rather to understand how it influences consumer decisions. But I think that there have been multiple factors that may have contributed to the development of the stereotype. You know one thing is we often refer to eco-friendly behaviours in a feminine way. Right. So we talk about Mother Nature or Mother Earth and we know that in fact women are more nurturing than men. They're more.

LL: Generally.

AARON BROUGH: Oriented. They're more pro-social, altruistic.And you know that manifests in their attitudes and their behaviours towards the environment. They have a smaller carbon footprint. They recycle more. They litter less. This has been well documented in research. And so it's possible that people observe these differences and over time a cultural expectation or norm develops.

LL: Right. You know what I am so sorry, but the time is getting so short, less than a minute left. Paul Pule, what do you think? Should we make climate action and environmental action feel more masculine?

PAUL PULE: I think the problem is actually systemic. I think that the Aaron's research is vital that we actually need to redefine the ways that we normalize masculinity as an identity, so that we're actually moving beyond these stereotypes of men being less caring and less recycling friendly and women more nurturing and more environmentally friendly. I think that actually we're all capable of of those kind of levels of care and that's what the message that we advocate for in the book.

LL: Alright gentlemen, I wish we had more time, but I thank you.

PAUL PULE: Thank you Laura.

AARON BROUGH: Pleasure.

LL: Paul Pule is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He's also co-author of Ecological Masculinities. And we reached him today in Eugene, Oregon. Aaron Brough is an associate professor of marketing at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University and he co-authored a study in 2016 called, "Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption. He was in Utah. The CBC News is next. Then Malcolm Gladwell has a new book about how we easily misjudge strangers. It's a lesson illustrated by many. Malcolm Gladwell is my guest after the news. I'm Laura Lynch and you are listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Can a stranger's demeanour tell you what they're thinking? Maybe not, says Malcolm Gladwell

Guests: Malcolm Gladwell

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: The shootings last March at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand was seen as a first. As one New York Times columnist put it, "Internet native mass shooting." So when social media platforms become a stage, what's the responsibility of tech companies to control what's going on behind the curtain? I'll talk about that with Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer with Microsoft. That's in half an hour. But first, how body language doesn't always communicate the truth.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: In my opinion they were projecting their own ideas about female decadence upon me. I very much believe that they thought they knew who I was before they knew me and they never really gave me a chance.

VOICE: Amanda Knox spent almost four years in an Italian prison. The American woman was accused of killing her roommate in a sex game that allegedly went wrong. The Current interviewed her in 2013.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: When I was in the police office, I was trying to hold it together so that I could answer questions nda in the meantime I was pacing. I was angry. I was swearing. Rafael had to pull me close to him to just calm me down and comfort me. And he did so in the way that he was used to in those days when we had to communicate more by gesture than by words because our languages were not the same. He kissed me. I reacted differently than the others and I reacted in a way that wasn't classically Italian.

LL: Eventually an Italian court set Amanda Knox free, but her case is just one of many cited in a new book by Malcolm Gladwell, illustrating what can happen when someone's behaviour doesn't match society's expectations. The book is called, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer with The New Yorker and he's the author of bestsellers like The Tipping Point and Outliers. He joins me from New York City. Hello.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Good morning.

LL: You write about this in the book. What went wrong in her case?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: What went wrong, so this is one of a number of I identified in the book several different mistakes when we're dealing with strangers. In her case it was that just as she describes that she was judged by both by the tabloid press, but also in particular by law enforcement and prosecutors in Italy. According to a set of assumptions about the way they thought she ought to behave and also she was judged by her own behaviour and says that they thought that if she was, if her facial expressions and her body language and her behaviour. She was kissing her boyfriend, she couldn't be grieving and upset. If she was angry, she was reacting in a way that didn't make sense to them because they thought that she would be you know morose and silent. Now I could go on in her, she wrote a really brilliant book where she kind of walks through all of the different ways her behaviour did not accord with their expectations. And this ties into a larger a larger understanding of human behaviour which is that we have this assumption that there is a predictable way in which people manifest their emotions. And it's not true. I have this really fun in the book where I talk about, I take an episode of the sitcom Friends and I have a psychologist who's trained in interpreting facial expressions walk through and note when any character on Friends has an emotion, does it register on their face? So when Joey is angry, does Joey show anger on his face? When Phoebe is surprised, does her jaw drop and do her eyes go wide? And invariably in Friends there is a perfect manifestation of your own internal emotional estate on your face. And I think we watch things like that and we think that's the way real life works, but in fact actual human beings don't behave that way. Right? I could be furious right now and you could look at my face and not know it and I would not be unusual. That seems like a minor problem, but you would be surprised by how many encounters between strangers go awry because we draw all kinds of false inferences from the information we gather from people's demeanour.

LL: Does that mean then as in Amanda Knox's case she was eventually freed, so there was an innocent person going to jail, but it is the reverse true? Can guilty people be freed because of that same mismatch in expectations?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Sure. I mean I have a long chapter on Bernie Madoff. You know the famous, the the worst Wall Street fraud in history. His career is the exact opposite of this, right. Here is someone who for the better part of two decades managed to bilk investors sophisticated investors around the world out of tens of billions of dollars. Why? Because he is someone who projected honesty and competence and sincerity and all those kinds of things and he was a he was a complete fraud. You could not, when people sat down with him with all kind routinely over the course of his career. People would come to him with doubts they would have his story didn't quite add up his returns were unbelievable and they would sit down with him. And you know the S.E.C. came in to the regulators came and saw him repeatedly and he would be so convincing that they would go away sort of shrugging and saying you know what I think Bernie's al ight. That's the opposite. Right? That's someone, that's the dishonest person who behaves, so whose behaviour so is in keeping with our expectations of what honesty looks like that we let all of our doubts fade away.

LL: There's another factor that you write about in this and that is something called default to truth. What do you mean by that?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. So this is a really interesting theory from a psychologist named Tim Levine. And Levine is trying to account for the this puzzling fact which has bedevilled psychologists for a very long time which is human beings are not good at detecting lies. So if we do we could do a good test is any number of ways and it has been done hundreds of times that basically we're slightly better than chance we're like at 52 percent in our ability to tell whether someone is is telling us the truth or lying. That's really low. It doesn't seem to make sense because you would think we would have evolved as human beings to be good at that. And the mind's explanation is the reason for that is not that we're just randomly guessing. It's that we have an overwhelming default to truth. We have an overwhelming inclination to regard the speech of others as truthful unless we are given overwhelming evidence to believe otherwise. And that explains a lot of really puzzling things about how you know con artists and child molesters and criminals of all kinds get away with the stuff they get away with because we start with this assumption that they are being truthful and we stick to that until we are doubts rise so high we can't ignore them. And Levine says that's actually a good thing, that's why we we've been able to create you know a functional civil society right. As in society isn't work, you can't, you don't put your child on the school bus in the morning unless you trust the bus driver implicitly. Right? You can't build a company unless you have faith in your employees. Nothing works about that faith, but it comes with a cost. And that is that occasionally we will be deceived by someone who is up to no good. And that's a I think a really important point because I think sometimes we penalize ourselves or we penalize people in a position of authority when they are duped by some kind of a criminal. And I think that's wrong. I think we have to understand that occasionally being duped is the price of being human and we have to accept that.

LL: I want to play another clip from an interview we did on The Current. This one was with Jeff Hancock. He's a founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He's a world wide authority on online deception, but he's also a former Canada Customs officer. Listen to what he told us about his abilities as a customs officer.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: You know I got to interview people, look through their things even and it was my first encounter with deception, sort of professionally, where there were times when people would be lying to me. You know all of my beliefs about deception were sort of proven to be wrong. You know I'd look and if somebody looked shifty or their eyes were up into the left, I'd be like okay, I'm going to send this person to secondary and get them searched. And there'd be nothing. It just turned out that person was nervous or they were looking at something up above my left shoulder. So those beliefs about deception got stripped away because we have a lot of these beliefs about you know the eyes or certain movements that people do that it turns out just aren't predictive of whether somebody is lying or not.

LL: Now we touched on this before. He's someone who's definitely not defaulting to truth, it's his job to pick out those who are lying, but still he had the believes that the body language could help. Why does that persist? That you can discern the honesty of someone by how they strike a pose or what their eyes look like.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: When it comes to our friends and our intimates, we don't use these kind of shorthand. You know if you're talking to your spouse and your spouse is telling you something and their eyes are you know avoiding your gaze, you don't assume they're lying because you know you're supposed really well you know oh that's something they do when they're nervous or that's something they do when they're distracted. But I think that maybe when it comes to people who are who we don't know and whose idiosyncrasies we're not familiar with we don't have any kind of we feel we have no choice but to rely on these very very crude measures of of of behaviour. And I think that's why we get in trouble remembering we as human beings we did not evolve to deal with strangers. We evolved in very small close knit groups to deal with intimates with family and friends and relatives and so it's like we're in this sort of odd situation in a modern world where we're forced to do something that we're not really built as human beings to do. I would add parenthetically that I would you know that clip was someone talking about dealing you know in a high stakes situation with someone in a customs line. But I take it one step further. I listen to that and I say when you're hiring someone for a job should you meet them. Right. Doesn't this don't the same problems affect the job interview because the job interview is based on the exact same assumption that I can meet you and observe you and reach a meaningful conclusion about the kind of person you are, but wait a minute, isn't that, haven't we just said that this is a deeply flawed encounter? I you know I just hired someone and I deliberately didn't meet her before hiring her for this precise reason.

LL: How's' it going?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: I was convinced. Really well so far.

LL: Okay good. That's the only other way is to have them on the job and actually see how they do.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes.

LL: Okay. But there's another area that you write about, It's consequential and all sorts of ways and it throws all of this up into relief. And this is our justice system because we expect our police our prosecutors and judges to be pretty good at determining whether someone's lying. I'm wondering what the data tells us about their abilities to detect truthfulness in people.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: When judges try to figure out whether someone should, someone accused of a crime should be given bail or should be put back in prison while they await trial. So what they're doing the judges asked to predict whether the person in front of them is likely to commit another crime if they're there if they're allowed to go free. When we do and recently researchers have done a very sophisticated analysis of trying to figure out how good is that decision right. Can you, can a judge, an experienced judge, stand in sit in front of a defendant and make an accurate judgment about whether that person is liable to commit another crime? And the answer is that they do a very very poor job of it. Surprisingly poor and that in fact artificial intelligence systems can do a much better job. And that's the case even though artificial intelligence systems of course do not meet the defendant face to face right. When a computer algorithm makes a judgment about whether someone should have better or not. All they have is the the bare facts of the person's criminal record. They don't have the evidence of their eyes. They can't talk to the defendant reach conclusions. So clearly everything that the judges are gathering from that face to face encounter is not useful. In fact it's more than that it's making them worse at making this crucial judgment about whether someone should be allowed to go free on bail. That's really a sobering finding and it suggests that we do need to restructure our attitudes and procedures in this area to bring about better outcomes.

LL: What would you do? I mean you can't have an algorithm or AI determining bail hearings.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well you can if you want. It can certainly assist the judge, right. You could have a situation where you have a judge which trained judges in the pitfalls of their face to face encounter and we give them access to the determination that the algorithm has made and we say weigh that heavily in your decision. Right. So I think we can help people. The last part of my book is about how law enforcement strategies might change if we take some of the lessons of talking to strangers to heart. There is a big opportunity here to be better and I don't think we have taken those opportunities yet. We have been we're still so in love with our ability to make sense of others that we think oh it's fine. You know a judge or a police officer or a job interview or they know what they're doing. They don't need to be aware of their limitations. And that's you know that's ostrich behaviour. It's not smart.

LL: I want to play you one more clip. Here is President George W. Bush in 2001 and he's talking about his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I'll answer the question. I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.

LL: So he saw in to Putin's soul and we know that the future between Putin and the United States wasn't so good.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: It did not age well. It did not age well that quote.

LL: What do you make of that President Bush saying he looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well it's not the first time that's happened. That's exactly what Neville Chamberlain did with Adolf Hitler in 1938, right? Went to Germany, looked Hitler in the eye, shook his hand and said I believe Hitler what he says he does not intend to make war in Europe. There is a long tradition of leaders overvaluing the evidence of these kind of face to face encounters and undervaluing all the evidence out there of someone's true intentions. If you wanted to make sense of Hitler in 1938, you could read Mein Kampf right. That's all you needed to know. The man laid it out right. Instead Chamberlain set the book aside and went and met and shook Hitler's hand and said you know It's the handshake that matters. In fact Chamberlain famously says of Hitler, the single thing that convinces him that Hitler is sincere when he says he doesn't want to start a war is that he gave him a firm handshake. Right, some craziness. But like the George Bush thing is no better. He looks Putin in the eye. Are you kidding me? Like it's, but that's you know these leaders sometimes I think they get, they're deeply enamoured of their own judgment and they think by virtue of the fact they have ascended to this high office that they are imbued with some kind of magical powers. And I think if there is any lesson to my book Talking to Strangers it is that human beings do not have magical powers when it comes to making sense of strangers. They would tdo well to be a little humble.

LL: OK. But what about professional counter-espionage people whose job consists of finding and jailing moles in their spy agencies? Have there been instances where their default honesty has also blinded them to spies that are right in their midst?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well that's the whole history of spying. I mean there are I could, I have, it's funny I was just writing a talk I'm going to give, it's sort of based on the book, but it's all about spying. And the history, if you read the history of spying, the whole history of spying is that spies never get caught. I mean they do eventually, but they usually get caught like you know Aldrich Ames who was maybe the most damaging spy of the post-war era who was working for the Soviets the entire time he was high up in Soviet counterintelligence at the CIA, he was a drunk, he had terrible job evaluations. He flouted CIA rules left and right. He was not a good spy. He was the anti James Bond. He was like this kind of blundering incompetence and it took the CIA 10 years to find him. You know I tell the story one of the stories that opens Talking to Strangers is this incredible story about how a guy defects from Cuban intelligence in 1987 and goes to the CIA and says I have a lot you know, I'm defecting, I'd like to tell you something about your spying operations in Cuba. He's like you know this one spy you have that has been so valuable, he was actually working for Castro. And they go oh no, I can't believe that. He goes oh and then this other guy, he's working for Castro. And he names 48 spies, virtually the entire contingent of spies the CIA is running in Cuba. And he saysevery single one of them is a double agent working for Fidel Castro. The CIA was duped not once, but 48 times. Right. Like this is, these are, this is the savviest presumably the savviest, most experienced, most deeply kind of appropriately paranoid and suspicious intelligence agency in the world and they were taken for a ride by for a decade by a little country in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. I mean there is nothing about any of these stories that lends credence to the idea that human beings are good at making sense of strangers.

LL: Do you think that that's improved? That since these stories happened or is it just continuing on in this way?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No. I think in fact the one, if we want to go down the spy, by the way I can, I love nothing more than talking about spies, the great lesson if you spend any time at all reading about this is that countries should just stop spying because you can never, it turns out the Cold War from a spy standpoint is a wash. That the Soviets knew all America's secrets and America knew all the Soviet secrets because both sides had spies deep in each other's intelligence apparatus who they couldn't find because they were really bad at finding them and who gave away the whole store. Like at a certain point you just say it's just not worth it, you should just read the newspaper. I mean literally that's you want to find out what's going on like you should just give up on his multibillion dollar you know espionage operation.

LL: Yay for journalism.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes. Yay for jouranlism.

LL: Right now there's so much partisanship though in the United States and the UK and beyond. Are we in a place where we really just don't even want to try to understand the stranger?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well we are in a moment in which I think will pass, where we have convinced ourselves that of the impossibility of dialogue between different camps and that's it is you know even in certainly in England, but even in America. If I, you know I am not a Trump supporter, I am like a you know I'm Canadian. I'm like a Liberal from southwestern Ontario. If I sat down with the most you know MAGA hat wearing Trumpian from Mississippi and we had a conversation, the truth is we would agree on way more than we disagree on, right. I mean the truth is that people who disagree in the context of North America, actually their disagreements are dwarfed by their agreements, but we have chosen at this point in time to only talk about the things that we don't have in common. That's a choice and we can make the choice to talk about the things we have in common. And I think we will go back to it because that's what we normally do in a democracy, but there was just this weird moment now where all people want to do is find excuses to disagree with each other. I think it's kind of crazy.

LL: You mentioned you're from southwestern Ontario, from Elmira in fact, and now living in New York City.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Shout out to Elmira.

LL: So do people in small towns treat strangers differently than they do in metropolises?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well there's fewer strangers. I mean growing up in Elmira there's very few true strangers and maybe being in a context where it is, well you do know so many of your neighbours so well, it's we know when we came, we arrived in Elmira from England in 1969. My mother was one of maybe the only black person in town, certainly one of the few. We were welcomed. Maybe it's easy to welcome an outsider when you are operating from a position of knowledge and trust of all of your neighbours, but also because I think and this is a really important point, we weren't perceived as strangers because we were part, Elmira is and was a deeply religious community. We were a family from a deep religious background and that allowed us to be seen as familiar. Right. We were part of their community by virtue of our faith and that's a really powerful and beautiful thing that religious faith does is it turns strangers into intimates. Right. It gives people a belief, an appropriate belief that they understand someone in a crucial way.

LL: Malcolm Gladwell I hope I get to meet you in person sometime, so we are not strangers. I appreciate the book and you coming on today. Thank you.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you so much.

LL: Malcolm Gladwell new book is called Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know. He was in New York City. Well coming up in our next half hour, a case that has haunted a journalist for two decades.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Sharmini is a top student at Woodbine Junior High who everyone says never gave an ounce of trouble. The police fear the worst, but hope for the best.

VOICE 2: On the weekend police found skeletal remains in a North York park.

VOICE 3: To me justice was never served. I think we know who did it and I'm in no position to point the finger, but I don't have to be a detective to put the dust together.

VOICE 4: He was very manipulative. He was very deceptive.

VOICE 5: I just don't think there is a shred of shame or humanity in him.

VOICE 6: Don't you have to acknowledge that he's not really the perpetrator? That he is innocent.

LL: The latest investigative podcast from the CBC Uncover is called Sharmini. Host and co-producer Michelle Shephard joins me in a couple of minutes. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

New CBC podcast looks at the 1999 murder of 15-year-old Sharmini Anandavel

Guests: Michelle Shephard

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Sharmini stuck out because she was such a vivacious, intelligent loving person.

VOICE 2: She was so kind. She just had a smile that could light up the room. She really did.

VOICE 3: Sharmini thinks she'll either be a lawyer or need a lawyer.

VOICE 4: We were just in class goofing around like in the morning and just listening to the Backstreet Boys.

VOICE 5: Sharmini is a top student at Woodbine Junior High who everyone says never gave an ounce of trouble. The police fear the worst, but hope for the best.

LL: The latest CBC Uncover podcast launches today. It's called Sharmini and it investigates a 20-year-old murder case in Toronto that remains unsolved. Journalist Michelle Shephard is the host and co-producer and she's with me here in our Toronto studio. Hello.

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: Hi Laura.

LL: Who was Sharmini?

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: Sharmini was a remarkable teenager. And I know often people are lionized after their they die or they've been killed, but everybody we talked to just said how special she was. She was in grade 9, a few weeks away from graduating from her Grade 9 graduation when she went missing in 1999, June 12th, 1999. And she was on her way to a job that police later discovered didn't exist. And the theory is that whoever abducted and killed her used that job to get her out of the apartment to lure her away and she she basically disappeared and her remains were found four months later.

LL: So what is your connection to the case?

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: I was a pretty new reporter at The Toronto Star. This was one of the first big crime cases I did. And for some reason it just really stuck with me, for you know like you I've covered many many stories over a couple of decades now. But I think for well for a few reasons, I think it stuck with me. One because her family was just so lovely. They were really really wonderful and I kept in touch with her father over the years, just you know on anniversaries of when she went missing or when she was found, I'd send an email. And I just really felt for them. The other reason is that it was never solved. There was never an arrest in the case and I was really fortunate over my career that I was able to stick with stories from start to finish and often for for many, many years. So this always bothered me that it was unresolved. And I think the third reason is that there was a prime suspect in the case and 20 years ago, along with a colleague, we interviewed him. And that story always stuck with me too and hearing what happened with him over the years.

LL: Alright. We'll get to that, but first I want to play a clip from the podcast. This is Sharmini's friend, Atusa.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's like a parent's nightmare. Sorry. Because as immigrants all our parents ever told us those like we left everything behind for you to have a good education here and for someone to leave their country to come here for a better life and then for that to happen. Like it's probably like a parent's nightmare.

LL: Sounds like a nightmare for Atusa too. It's still pretty raw. What was it like to talk to friends and family after all these years?

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: It was amazing. I mean 20 years is a long time. And when I met some of her friends years ago they were just kids and now you know Atusa and we interviewed her along with her friend Dina and they are moms themselves now. And they're in their 30s and it is amazing how fresh it is when they start talking about it and how many people were impacted by her murder. And again you know 20 years ago we did what we could for a reporting on a crime story, but having this almost a year to really investigate it, you really realize what one crimes or the ripple effects and how many people that can touch and shape their lives.

LL: And it was important for you to name the series for her.

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: Absolutely. We really wanted to try and make this about Sharmini,to honour her memory. Of course it's a crime podcast and we're looking into the details and it's investigative in that sense. So you know we go into the justice system and the crime itself and the nice thing about a podcast is you do have so much time. So you know over six episodes, it's almost three hours to really get into the nuances of the story. But it was really important for myself and producer Kathleen Goldhar and Ilina Ghosh, just to make sure that we always had Sharmini front and centre.

LL: Atusa talks about the fact that Sharmini was the child of immigrants, what factor does that play in this?

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: Well I think you know in so far as what she said there, that it was so sad that her parents had really struggled to give her and her brothers this new life in Canada. They fled Sri Lanka where at that time there was a terrible civil war ongoing and they worked so hard like so many new immigrants to the country. They really really struggled when they got here. And Sharmini was going out doing her part trying to help as well. And you know we talked to one of her brothers, both her brothers, one of them said you know that was really what hurt too. That she was, she wanted this extra money to help out and that's where she was going that day for a job.

LL: So you describe the community as marginalized.

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: At that time I mean it was a really interesting time actually within the Tamil community and some of the other stories I'd been working on, on the crime beat had been about I don't know if you remember this, but there was quite a street war going on at that point between two gangs the VVT and AK Cannon and they were had a mainly Tamil membership. So there was a lot of focus on the community and that was actually one of the the things the factors that clouded the case at first. That some other media reports were saying oh well this must be part of the gang war or oh this must be an arranged marriage. Quite frankly kind of racist sentiments that were fuelling it. And I was a pretty green reporter, but I knew pretty much right from the beginning that this looked like a stranger abduction and I felt so sorry for the family that they had to endure that.

LL: Here's another clip from the podcast. This is the Toronto Police Detective Matt Crone.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: He could tell you details about what time he arrived at a place to cut the grass, how he cut the grass. Like east west or north south, when he had a coke to drink, where he put his coke, while he was still cutting grass like tremendous detail.

VOICE 2: But there were a couple of hours on that Saturday where Tippet's story becomes vague.

VOICE 1: There's this period of time, this substantial period of time where his vehicle was burning oil. So he sat in a strip mall with the hood open to let his car cool down, but which is nonsensical because you'd say well why didn't you just go to your next lawn cutting and let it sit there and cool. No explanation.

LL: And that is Toronto Police Detective Mac Crone talking about the main suspect in the case Stanley Tippet. Without giving away too much, what can you tell us about him?

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: Well I think as you can you can tell from that clip this was somebody that had been on the police radar from the beginning. He was a former neighbour of Sharmini's family. He lived a couple, a floor below and he had moved out just a couple of weeks before she went missing. Any he knew her. I think I said earlier, I misspoke when I said this, all this pointed to a stranger abduction. What police had said from the beginning that probably she was taken by somebody she knew. So it was an abduction. It didn't have to do with you know gang warfare or something else. It was an abduction, but they did believe it was somebody she knew and police believed it was him.

LL: Now you actually speak to him in the podcast. What was that like?

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: I did I actually spoke to him 20 years ago with a colleague. We did an initial interview with him. And so when Kathleen and I started doing this podcast, the first step we took was to see if he would talk to us and we reached out to Corrections Canada. And you probably know it's really difficult to get into prisons. I know I tried for two years with Omar Khadr interviews and other interviews and I haven't had success. And this was relatively easy. He agreed right away to the interview and we actually had to slow down the process just because we need to be more prepared before going in. But he did give us extensive interview over two visits in two different facilities. It was about six hours in total. And I walked him through the whole case.

LL: We can't leave this without talking about the family. How are they reacting to the news of the podcast being made?

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: They've been lovely as they always are. We visited, I went to see the dad as soon as we decided we're going to do this and to let him know and to see his thoughts. He decided, he said he would ask his family if they wanted to participate, but he basically gave his blessing. He was happy that we were remembering Sharmini. They came back and said that they didn't want to participate, but then a couple months later one of her brothers sent me a text and he said they changed their mind. And it was really special to spend time with the brothers because I last saw them when they were 17 and 13 and they're now 37 and 33. One of them is is a dad. They're both doing really really well. They're just wonderful guys. So I'm thinking about them a lot today. I know this is going to be tough for them to have it revisited.

LL: Michelle thank you very much.

MICHELLE SHEPHARD: Thanks.

LL: Michelle Shephard is a journalist and the host and co-producer of the new CBC Uncover podcast, Sharmini. She was in our Toronto studio.

Back To Top »

Microsoft's Global President Brad Smith and the promise — and perils — of the digital age

Guests: Brad Smith

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's a big shock. Still I can't believe that I'm alive. We couldn't even breathe from the smoke and the bullets flying everywhere. He was standing and aiming at them whenever he hear any noise coming from anywhere. He would shoot towards it calmly and he was shooting and shooting, shooting, shooting and shooting.

LL: That was the view from a witness who was inside the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand last March. The attack left 51 people dead, but all of that shooting was viewed from outside too from around the world as the shooter broadcast the massacre. Jacinda Arden is the prime minister of New Zealand.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Initially the live stream was watched by only a few hundred people live, but then shared and spread at such a pace that YouTube recorded one upload per second to their platform within that first 24 hour period. The social media dimension to the attack was unprecedented.

LL: Prime Minister Arden in May was just, as she was just coming out of a meeting trying to bring that kind of thing to an end. Politicians met with tech industry leaders to come up with an agreement called the Christchurch Call. It's a commitment to end the use of social media for organising and promoting terrorism and violent extremism. My next guest was at that meeting in Paris. Brad Smith is Microsoft's Global President and the company's chief legal officer. He's the co-author of the new book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age. Brad Smith joins me from Redmond, Washington. Hello.

BRAD SMITH: Hello. How are you?

LL: Fine, thanks. What did you think when you saw that the attack in Christchurch, New Zealand was being live streamed?

BRAD SMITH: I think it was an inflection point, unfortunately, for all of us who use the Internet because for the first time we really saw a terrorist use the Internet as a stage and unfortunately potentially even motivated by the opportunity to use the world in that way to stage the attack itself. It quickly became a galvanizing moment that has really led first prime minister Ardern and then government leaders around the world including Prime Minister Trudeau you know to call for action. And one of the stories that we talk through in detail in our book is how the events in Christchurch quickly reverberated around the world and changed what we in the tech sector needed to do.

LL: And I want to talk about that ,but first I just want to ask you what did the online streaming of the mass shooting tell you about how technology can be weaponized?

BRAD SMITH: Unfortunately any tool can be used as a weapon. You know even a broom can be used to hit somebody over the head. The Internet has become so ubiquitous it has become so interwoven with our daily lives that the Christchurch attack really illustrated the way it can be used in a manner that its inventors never intended never imagined. But it is a weapon that can be put to that use and we have to respond to that.

LL: You've talked about the existential threat we could face if more of these digital tools become weapons. Tell me what you mean by that.

BRAD SMITH: Well in some ways it starts with things that are relatively easy to imagine. We've each lived in the world with cyber attacks. We saw the want to cry attack in 2017 launched by North Korea impact 150 countries around the world. We share the story of patients who were literally going into surgery at a National Health Service hospital in the United Kingdom only to have their operation cancelled because all of the computers had failed. But then we quickly see a jump from those kinds of attacks to real threats to democracy with Canada obviously facing a federal election only two months from now we suddenly live in a world where ministers need to safeguard our voting our fundamental processes that may be abused by disinformation as we saw in 2016 in the United States. That too has turned email into a weapon. It has turned social media into a weapon. And unfortunately it just keeps going from there in terms of some of the uses and abuses that terrorists or hostile governments or others are putting forward with technology.

LL: As you mentioned earlier, the events in Christchurch galvanized politicians around the world and media companies as well and you actually met with Jacinda Arden just days after. Tell me what happened.

BRAD SMITH: We had a long planned trip to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. We arrived there just a week and a half after the Christchurch attack and we had the opportunity during the day in Wellington to sit down with Jacinda Ardern with a number of members of her cabinet and she basically put forward the question, what can we do to make sure that we do everything we can so this doesn't happen again? So it doesn't affect people in New Zealand or any other country. And from that conversation we agreed to work together on what two months later was signed in Paris including by Prime Minister Trudeau, the Christchurch call. A call to action by tech companies and by governments to work together in an on a number of new ways to harden our defences to put technology to use to have more humans in the loop to control live streaming so that at a minimum it will be far more difficult for someone to do to the world or to a mosque or a church or synagogue what that terrorists did on the 15th of March this year in Christchurch.

LL: Let let's talk about the issue of trust when it comes to technology companies because you describe in the book where data is stored. These enormous places where data is stored in Washington state for Microsoft. With all of the data that comes with so much responsibility and I'm wondering in the aftermath of episodes such as Cambridge analytics and its use of people's personal information from Facebook, how much faith do you and how much faith should people have the data and privacy can be protected?

BRAD SMITH: We've entered a world where we are going to need more rules. I think it's really as straightforward as that. The only way to give the public the ability to trust technology the way the public needs to and deserves to trust technology is to ensure that no technology is above the law to ensure that no company is above the law. And you can only do that by definition if you have strong laws. But the technology keeps changing and we've gone through these waves of privacy protection since the 1990s. We're going to need a third way of a new wave with new and stronger rules especially given the ubiquitous data that now resides in the cloud about each and every one of us.

LL: Well we can talk about new laws and new rules but the other part of the distrust I think for people and even for your companies like yours is of government because we know from past episodes such as when Edward Snowden released classified documents from the NSA, that government can sometimes do things to undermine the privacy of data. I'm wondering what impact that had on you when you first learned of the release of those documents.

BRAD SMITH: Frankly to some degree an element of surprise and even shock because we were not fully aware of how much data the U.S. government in 2013 was accessing and I think one of the really important dimensions of privacy as we enter a new decade in 2020 is that there are issues for companies and how they deal with privacy and data. There are issues for governments and when they access data and we recognize readily that governments do need data to catch criminals to thwart terrorists. But there needs to be a balance and there needs to be protection for the democratic freedoms that have long been at the heart of our nation's Microsoft trust the U.S. government. I think we live in a world where we should put everyone to the test every day. We should ask people what kind of commitment they're prepared to live up to. But we need to test people. We need to hold governments accountable just as citizens and governments absolutely need to hold companies accountable.

LL: You mentioned earlier that we are just weeks away from an election here in Canada. There's going to be one in the U.S. next year. We're faced with an unprecedented amount of misinformation that could affect the outcomes of both the elections. What are companies like yours doing to make sure that democracy, the true exercise of democracy isn't ported.

BRAD SMITH: One of the things that we launched at Microsoft last year is a program that we call Defending Democracy. It really has three elements. One is to protect candidates and political parties so that their e-mail can't be hacked and they can't be thwarted the way say the Clinton campaign was in the United States in 2016 or the French presidential campaigns were in 2017. The second is really to address voting. I think your candidate has a bit of an advantage for a national election because it does continue to use paper ballots but in the United States in particular there are many states where there are voting machines that are being used that do not have the security protection they need. But we've created a program called election guard to address voting and then we're collecting information.

LL: What does election guard do?

BRAD SMITH: What we've designed is what is now an open source based technology, really the future in our view of voting. It combines the best of computer and paper technology so that someone would go in they would fill out a ballot. They would get a paper copy of it to deposit but they would also get a receipt to take home. That would have an alphanumeric code and you would always be able to go back online to make sure that your vote had been recorded and tabulated correctly. And by definition if each individual vote is tabulated correctly then you can also verify that the entire vote was tabulated correctly. So we do foresee a better future for voting but it is going to take substantial work and some investment by provinces by countries by cities around the world to get their information. In some ways I think misinformation is the toughest challenge of all. One of the really eye opening experiences we had was visiting Estonia. This was the very first country to be attacked in a cyber attack by Russia. And it was 12 years ago and living next door to Russia they have experienced firsthand all of the kinds of ways that information can be misused. And you know what we've all learned is just how sophisticated the Russian disinformation attacks have been. In many ways they are as innovative and as fast moving as tech companies themselves. One of the steps that we described that we believe we need to take is going to be a new set of laws that will address the risk of disinformation that will impose new responsibilities on tech companies including a company like Microsoft with our social media service LinkedIn. This is a problem that unfortunately I think is going to be with us for as long as governments feel they can benefit from deploying it.

LL: I just want to shift to events in Hong Kong for a moment because I'm struck by the effort that protesters are taking to disguise their appearances to knock down towers that are believed to be used for facial recognition. How much do tech companies bear responsibility for that kind of threat against what should be regarded as free speech in protest?

BRAD SMITH: I think the facial recognition issue is quite possibly the fastest moving technology issue that we've seen in the last two or three decades. We do need legal protections around facial recognition. We need protection to ensure there is not bias and discrimination. We need to protect people's privacy and public spaces and commercial establishments. And we need to recognize that facial recognition can be deployed by governments to undermine the ability of citizens to assemble to protest peacefully. And we're witnessing what that means in places around the world where people feel the need now to protest by covering their face.

LL: And yet you say that there need to be new rules, but why can't companies actually step forward right now and try to put the brakes on the use of this kind of technology?

BRAD SMITH: One of the really interesting episodes for us at Microsoft was hearing from our own employees and putting in principles and safeguards on our own development and sale of facial recognition technologies. We have turned down the opportunity to do deals with some police departments or some governments in other countries where we felt that the technology was just too immature to work well or could be put to work in a way that would put people's fundamental rights at risk. And it's always a challenge in any industry when you start thinking about not selling your product to someone who wants to buy it. But this is technology that requires exactly that kind of conversation and it needs it now. We actually need to be focussed on this with a sense of urgency.

LL: We've talked a lot about how technology can be a weapon and the perils it can bring, but when you look at what we're facing today, where do you see the opportunity for technology being a tool for good?

BRAD SMITH: If you think about the issues the world faces today, technology is one of our most important tools for solving the problems we need to solve. When we think about environmental change and sustainability, artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful tools that we have to address carbon use, to address water use, to improve biodiversity. When we think about the needs of people with disabilities AI is just a game changer. Already we're offering services where people can use the camera in their smartphone and then have the speaker tell them what the camera is seeing and if you're blind having an AI powered camera that can see, absolutely makes your life better. But it's not something that we can rely on just to work by itself to solve the world's problems, it really requires that we come together to seek these advances and to address these challenges.

LL: Brad Smith, I thank you very much for your time.

BRAD SMITH: Well thank you. Thank you very much.

LL: Brad Smith is Microsoft's Global President and the company's chief legal officer. He is the co-author of Tools and Weapons: The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age. He was in Redmond, Washington. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. And now here's some music that may be familiar to adults of a certain age.

[Music]

LL: CBC TV's The Friendly Giant was beloved by children from 1958 to 1985. Alongside the giant were his trusty sidekicks, Jerome the Giraffe and Rusty the Rooster. The man behind those puppets was Rod Coneybeare. He died last week at the age of 89. Rusty, Jerome and the Friendly Giant get the last word today. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Clip from CBC's The Friendly Giant]

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Sept. 10, 2019 episode transcript

More Stories Like This