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The Current Transcript for January 21, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: If there are not checks and balances in place, there's a propensity to misuse this technology and it's something that we do not want to see happen.

MATT GALLOWAY: That technology is an app that allows you to take a picture of someone and search through a vast online database for matches. The photos in that database have been grabbed from your social media accounts. Police forces, including perhaps some in this country, are using the app to solve crimes. Critics say the technology could be the end of anonymity. Are you frightened yet? In 30 minutes, we'll explore why so many people already are. And then.

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VOICE: One of my first students was a Grade 6 student whose mom was told you could never learn math. He was afraid of the subject, years behind. Last year, we went out to celebrate the fact that he's now a fully tenured math professor.

MG: John Mighton is convinced that anyone can learn math and if we all do, we could have a more just world. The mathematician is here in an hour and he will put me, certainly no math whiz, to the test. But we begin with alarm bells over a mystery virus, concerns about it spreading and echoes of the SARS crisis. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Lessons learned in SARS outbreak will help global response to coronavirus, say infectious diseases specialists

Guests: Ramy Inocencio, Allison McGeer, Isaac Bogoch

MG: It could be no worse than the common cold or it could be SARS all over again, that 2003 outbreak of respiratory illnesses that killed almost 800 people worldwide, sparking fears of a global pandemic. Chinese public health officials are reporting around 300 cases of a new strain of Coronavirus. At least six people have died thus far. Most of the cases which come with pneumonia like symptoms have been found in the Chinese city of Wuhan. But new ones have surfaced in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. The World Health Organization is holding an emergency meeting in Geneva tomorrow to decide if the outbreak is an international public health emergency. Ramy Inocencio is a correspondent for CBS News and he is in Wuhan, China. Ramy, good morning.

RAMY INOCENCIO: Hi. Good morning.

MG: What is it like in Wuhan right now?

RAMY INOCENCIO: You know, here in Wuhan, if you didn't know any better walking the streets, you would think like it's a normal winter day here. Most people actually aren't wearing masks, but when you get to the area that is widely considered ground zero, the seafood market where this disease was believed to have jumped from an animal to a human, then you start seeing people wearing more masks and crowds actually gathering in that area. Those people are actually vendors who are trying to recoup losses because the whole entire seafood market is closed. But, you know, looking around the streets, it seems to be business as usual, a few masks here and there. But with that said, this is also wintertime and pneumonia season.

MG: Tell me about the market. Describe that market for me.

RAMY INOCENCIO: It is a one story, blue and white structure and all around it there were actually gates pulled down over the doors. The reason for this, of course, is because it's been shuttered ever since this epidemic has exploded. Usually on a normal day, there will be people streaming in and out, buying seafood and other kinds of live animals there, but right now, there is a security presence around the whole entire building and you really can't get close to it, which actually tried to do some filming outside and we were promptly shooed away by one security officer, but there were many around there.

MG: I the concern that the virus could spread from that market or what are the security agents concerned about?

RAMY INOCENCIO: Right. The beliefs, the wide belief here is that that live animal market, that seafood market is ground zero for this new corona virus. The reason for that is because when you think about it, this is this is a wet market and there's a lot of the lot of animals, a lot of also bloodied animals going around here and when people are squeezed in trying to buy things, it just really sets up the stage. It sets up the conditions for easily transmittable diseases. It has already happened in the past as we know it back in 2003 with SARS. And so a lot of people say it was just a matter of time and that these wet markets are the issue that needs to be resolved in the future to try to stop this from happening.

MG: The initial cases seem to be coming at, as you say, from that market. There have now been cases of human to human transmission. How is that being covered in China? And to your perspective, why is that significant?

RAMY INOCENCIO: It has been covered openly. That much is certain. The top China expert who helped expose SARS back in 2003. He came out and said that he sees evidence, clear evidence that there is human to human transmission. With that said, experts say that the possibility of this is still fairly low. But he pointed to issues, for example, in the coastal province of Guangdong, saying that people there got infected by this Corona virus and they never went to Wuhan, but they did have family members who went to Wuhan. So the idea is that there was human to human transmission going on there. In addition, there are about 15 hospital workers who were also infected. Now, they themselves did not go to Wuhan. They're not in Wuhan, but they got infected by this as well. So this is mounting evidence that there is human to human transmission going on.

MG: How is the Chinese leadership addressing this?

RAMY INOCENCIO: President Xi Jinping did come out and made his first comments on Monday saying that the country has to resolutely figure this out. He said that the health and safety of the people is of paramount importance. These are words that you would normally expect from a leader. It is notable that it did take him more than three months to come out to say something. The first case came out and was reported on September 30th of last year, and only in the past week or so since we've been seeing more and more cases, not just in China, but out of China. And remember, out of China, they can't control that narrative. They started to appear, for example, in Thailand, in Japan and now in South Korea and another now confirmed in Taiwan. This is something that they can't hold back.

MG: This weekend is the beginning of the Chinese New Year, and the government there estimates that something like 3 billion trips are going to be taken. What are the concerns around that?

RAMY INOCENCIO: This is known as the world's biggest migration of humans. It's almost unfathomable, three billion trips. The idea that they're travelling not just across China to go see family, to go see friends, but also overseas, this is a major, major concern. According to one estimate, about 60 to 65,000 people from Wuhan itself, for example, will go to the United States and just over the next few weeks about 5000 are expected to visit from Wuhan to the U.S. So this is a concern that people will be spreading this virus and it may be difficult to stop, almost impossible to stop once it goes beyond borders.

MG: Are additional precautions being taken given the scale and the size of that travel?

RAMY INOCENCIO: Yes, we've been seeing, at least here at the Wuhan Airport that there has been thermal imaging set up even before passengers take off for their flight. Now usually what we're used to seeing is when we arrive at an airport, we get the thermal image, seeing our red, orange and yellow images coming up on a screen, but this is something new that has also happened. This kind of screening is also happening at train stations. It's also happening at some bus stations. Not only that, of course, as you'd expect, airports elsewhere outside of China have also started to screen, notably Australia is one of them, as well as Singapore.

MG: Ramy, I appreciate this. Thank you so much.

RAMY INOCENCIO: You bet.

MG: Ramy Inocencio is a correspondent for CBS News. He was in Wuhan where this outbreak began in China. As we mentioned, this Coronavirus outbreak is evoking memories of the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003. That epidemic infected thousands of people worldwide and killed hundreds, including 44 in Canada, most of them in Toronto. Dr. Allison McGeer was at the centre of Toronto's response to SARS. She is an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital and professor of public health at the University of Toronto. And Dr. Isaac Bogoch is an infectious disease physician and scientist at Toronto General Hospital. Good morning to you both.

ISAAC BOGOCH: Good morning.

ALLISON MCGEER: Morning.

MG: Allison, we'll start with you. How concerned are you by what seems to be unfolding in China? This is a story that's that's evolving not just week by week, but day by day and almost hour by hour.

ALLISON MCGEER: Well, and that's the key word evolving. It's simply too uncertain to know exactly where it's going or what's going to happen. On the other hand, you know that the virus is going to do what it likes and there's not much we can do about that. You caught that discussion about, you know, things getting outside of borders. Viruses don't care about borders. Okay. So the spread of this virus does not depend on people moving or what's happening. The spread of this virus depends on what the characteristics of the virus are and what it's going to do. At the moment we don't have evidence that it's going to become sustainable in human populations and as long as that's not there yet, it may cause considerable anxiety for the next few weeks as we watch it. But it's not going to become a pandemic.

MG: How how would you compare this to the early days of the SARS outbreak?

ALLISON MCGEER: So, you know, the way I look out at the SARS epidemic actually started with a cluster of cases related to markets in Guangzhou, different city in the beginning of December of 2002. We didn't hear about it until March of 2003. So in if this is similar and you know, it has some similarities, but it's clearly not identical, we'd be back at the beginning of December in 2002. So we're way ahead of the game relative to SARS on transparency. We're also way ahead of the game in terms of being able to identify the virus and better understand it. So we have lots of advantages this time.

MG: I guess and just finally on this point, before we get to Isaac, people hear Chrono Virus, they hear scientists saying that the genetic code of this is more similar to SARS than anything else that we've seen and they wonder how significant that is, whether we're seeing a repeat, a copycat of what we saw in 2002 and 2003.

ALLISON MCGEER: It's a really interesting question. I think that the chances that we're actually seeing a repeat with a virus that we is is related, but substantially genetically different. I think are actually pretty small. You know, they we've seen SARS and then we saw Mers in Saudi Arabia. SARS and Mers also have similarities, but they're very different in terms of how they affect people and what happened. So I don't think we're gonna see a repeat of SARS, I think we're seeing something different.

MG: Isaac Bogoch, at least six people have now died from this Coronavirus. Around 300 cases have been confirmed. What does this tell you about the severity of this particular virus?

ISAAC BOGOCH: This tells us a few things first. First all, we know that certainly in individuals who have, you know, other medical comorbidities may be at risk of having a more severe infection. But I really think one of the key features here is we're not entirely sure what the denominator is. So we don't really know how many people are infected with this virus who are just, you know, walking around who might have a very mild infection. And sometimes we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg in the reported cases because those might be the people that are coming to medical attention. So it's hard to know what the full spectrum of illnesses and I think that's one of the one of the big remaining questions. There's a few remaining questions, but that's one of the big remaining questions with this virus. What is the full spectrum of illness? What proportion of people have a very severe infection compared to people that might have a more mild infection?

MG: How well is China doing when it comes to sharing information around us?

ISAAC BOGOCH: I think the answer would be good. It's good. I don't think it's perfect, but by all means, I think this is significantly better than what we've seen in the past.

MG: What else could be done?

ISAAC BOGOCH: Well, I mean, I don't think there's nefarious causes here. I really think that, you know, this might involve communication between, you know, local, provincial and federal public health and medical authorities, but you know, we have been getting some good information from China. In fact, as Dr. McGeer pointed out, you know, from the time we knew this was an outbreak to the time this virus was genetically sequenced and made publicly available was something like two weeks. I mean, this is unprecedented. So there has been some excellent communication from Chinese authorities. It would be nice to see some epidemic curves and it would be nice to have a better understanding of the full spectrum of illness, but they might not have that information yet.

MG: BC's provincial health officer said this morning that she has no doubt that this will be coming to Canada, that there will be cases in Canada. Is that, do you agree with her?

ISAAC BOGOCH: Well, I personally wouldn't bat an eye if there was a case imported to Canada. I mean, you know, we know that there's exported cases. We know that infections can start in one side of the world and land in any other part of the planet within 24 hours and certainly there would be other locations that would be more likely destinations for this virus. But of course, we have a large population of individuals who travel to and from China here in Canada and, you know, I think we're certainly prepared and braced for this infection, should it be imported. The probability is low, but certainly not impossible.

MG: Allison, you said that viruses don't care about borders. We've seen confirmed cases now outside of China, in South Korea, Thailand and Japan. How concerning is that?

ALLISON MCGEER: You know it tells you that people travel. And it tells you that the world surveillance system is working, right. So there's a good news, bad news side to this right.

MG: I'm getting a thumbs up from Isaac.

ALLISON MCGEER: The bad news is it's spreading in and there's probably more cases than accounting, which we knew, OK, but still. But the good news is that, you know, we know where it's going, people are watching. And if this is a virus where containment works, where identification of cases and preventing spread works as it did for SARS, then that kind of surveillance is what is necessary. and the fact that we're detecting those cases is good.

MG: What happens this weekend when the Lunar New Year celebrations begin and as we heard, something like three billion trips, the largest human migration on the planet begins to unfold. How could that affect the spread of this?

ALLISON MCGEER: It's a really interesting question. I don't, I'm not sure that it's going to make things worse in terms of the number of cases. What it's likely to do is make it more distributed. So there it may not be that there are more cases. It's just that cases will be spread around in it as long as we know that, as long as we're prepared for it. Then I don't think it's a make or break situation. As I said that that make or break in the situation is the characteristics of the virus. And we don't know those yet. But we also one of the things that some of the Chinese experts were saying yesterday is that the virus appears to be changing and that's what happened with SaaS. And if the virus is changing, its characteristics may also be changing and we're just going to have to wait.

MG: What does that when the virus changes, I mean, for those of us who know are watching this and people who are wondering whether they will get infected by the virus, what does that mean when it changes?

ALLISON MCGEER: Well, so let's give the SARS example. Like the the original SARS virus was a virus that where you got infected in the wet markets from animals. It was not transmitted from person to person in the original outbreaks. Over the next three months the virus actually changed to become transmissible from human to human. So we went from a virus that was an animal virus that infected humans accidentally to a virus that could be spread from human to human. As it turned out, the characteristics of that virus, the way it spread, meant that we could contain it and get rid of it. That was great okay, but this virus could be doing something similar, probably not the same thing, but something similar. So it starts off not being transmissible to person to person and becomes transmissible. And if it's doing that, we just have to wait and see where it's going.

MG: What are the preparations and what have we learned? You were at the centre of SARS, I remember covering that story. I remember being in the middle of it in hospitals with friends and family. What did we learn through the SARS experience that will be applied in this situation?

ALLISON MCGEER: Oh, how long have you got? Yeah, a very large number of things at a global level in communications that we're watching, at the level of, you know, detection of viruses and understanding how to do diagnostic tests for viruses, at the level of hospitals and how we identify people and how we manage them. It's a very long list of things that make us unquestionably much better prepared for, as Isaac said, whatever's coming at us.

MG: Are the preparations that would be happening in hospitals now, Isaac, in advance of this?

ISAAC BOGOCH: Absolutely. And you know, yesterday we heard from Dr. Tam, who's essentially Canada's public health doctor, just outlining the really the federal, but also touching on provincial and even local preparations for this. And certainly at the local level, you know, where the where the rubber hits the road, hospitals are well aware. There's been a lot of communication from provincial health labs in terms of how to acquire and process samples if we're suspecting this.

MG: Will people see that in hospitals? That they step into a hospital in this country today?

ISAAC BOGOCH: So a lot of good public health is typically invisible. And people might not know that there are preparations in place, but there certainly are. There's been a lot of communication about this from all levels of all levels of government. But as Dr. McGeer points out, you know, if someone comes into hospital with an influenza like illness, regardless of if they're coming from Wuhan or China or elsewhere in China, you know, based on our experience with with SARS, people are managed in an appropriate manner so that they don't, in fact, health care workers and they don't infect other people.

MG: How cautious are you just in even talking about this? People hear snippets of news, they read a headline, they hear half bits of things, they follow things on the Internet. How cautious are you just so that people don't hit that panic button?

ISAAC BOGOCH: Yeah, I mean, I really think information is power. And the more we talk about this and the more we're open about it and the more we discuss what we know and of course, more importantly, what we don't know, I think is extremely valuable. And, you know, this can enable health care providers and also the general public to manage by fact.

MG: Allison, what's the question that you will be wanting answered? What will you be watching for in the days ahead?

ALLISON MCGEER: You know, I think the big question with this virus is, is there sustainable transmission within human populations? It's a go, no go. Now, having said that, okay the information is going to eke out. You know, like Isaac, I don't think people are hiding information. This a centre of a big outbreak. It's really hard to get organized data out of big outbreaks, okay.

MG: And given what we've gone through before, people are going to be paying very close attention to this.

ALLISON MCGEER: People are going to be paying very close attention and, you know, we're just going to have to see whether that happens or not. With our fingers firmly crossed that it's not going to happen.

MG: Isaac, in the remaining minute that we have, the one question that you want answered as well.

ISAAC BOGOCH: I'd also echo the the extent to which human to human transmission occurs and the efficiency of human to human transmission will really be one of the driving forces for this. The other thing, too, is I'm obviously very curious, as I'm sure everyone else is, what's the source? And is there ongoing transmission from a common source to humans? But the human to human transmission piece is key.

MG: Good to have you both here this morning. Thank you.

ISAAC BOGOCH: Thanks for having us.

MG: Dr. Alice McGeer is an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Isaac Bogoch is a clinician investigator with Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. Obviously, more on this as the story unfolds at cbcnews.ca and here on your CBC Radio. The CBC News is next. And then, why are police forces using a controversial new facial recognition program? We'll try and find out. And later, John Mighton's mission to make maths accessible. John Mighton believes that this is something anyone can master.

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VOICE: At all levels from early childhood development right up to brain scans of mathematicians, the researchers suggesting that maths is accessible to any brain.

MG: Any brain. What's going wrong with how we teach maths and why is it so important to fix it? You'll hear from John Mighton coming up. My name is Matt Galloway and this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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The end of anonymity? Facial recognition app used by police raises serious concerns, say privacy advocates

Guests: Kashmir Hill, Michael Arntfield, Brenda McPhail

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, how anyone, including your humble correspondent, could become a maths whiz with the right kind of teaching. But first, a new police tool that scrapes the Internet for photos of suspects and has privacy advocates worried.

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VOICE 1: The manhunt here in New York City after a bomb scare shut down a major subway station during the morning commute. Soon after the NYPD releasing these surveillance images.

VOICE 2: These 19 men went on social media to have sexual conversations with kids.

VOICE 3: In today's cyber age, we're dealing with the new breed of criminal.

MG: That's an ad for the company, Clearview AI. Clearview uses online images to help police track down criminals. If you've never heard of this company, well, you're not alone. The company has worked hard to keep a low corporate profile, which is ironic because profiles are a big part of Clearview's business. Kashmir Hill is a technology reporter for The New York Times. She took a deep dive into Clearview's work. Kashmir, good morning.

KASHMIR HILL: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What exactly does Clearview AI do?

KASHMIR HILL: So Clearview is a company that has scraped the web of 3 billion photos from public websites like Facebook, Venmo, Instagram, educational sites, employment sites in order to create a big public based database where it now has a facial recognition app that it can run on all those photos. So you can take a photo of somebody and it will bring back all of the photos it scraped of that person along with links to those sites.

MG: Just to be clear, where are these pictures coming? When you see it scraped the photos from those sites, these are photos that people would have posted up on their social media accounts or what have you?

KASHMIR HILL: Yeah, I mean, it's maybe photos you posted on public social media account or, you know, photos that people have posted of you. Like, for example, I saw a tax professional site among the results that were coming in on the app. And so, yeah, it's just photos that are up on the web. And this is something people have long feared would happen because we have put so many photos of ourselves out there. But companies that were capable of building a tool like this, like Google have said, you know, this is the one technology they held back because it could be used in such a bad way. But now it's been done. That tab has been broken and Clearview AI has been working with over 600 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and Canada and other places for the last year. And no one had any idea except for the company itself and the police until this article came out this weekend.

MG: Which rattled a lot of people and was shared all around the world. Tell me a little bit, just briefly about the company itself. Who started this thing up?

KASHMIR HILL: So it's founded by a technologist named Hoan Ton-That, who is from Australia and Richard Schwartz, who is kind of a longtime New Yorker who worked for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the 1990s, he was the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News. The two, Hoan is 31, richard is 61. They met at a event at the Manhattan Institute, which is a conservative think tank in New York, and discovered they had a lot in common and decide to build this facial recognition app together. It's funded by Peter Thiel, among other investors. And Peter Thiel, of course, is famous for backing Facebook and Palantir, the surveillance company. And I mean, as I was looking into this company, I just was amazed by how quickly it grew. You know, the two founders met in 2016, and they only really got a product up and running in 2018. And so over the course of a year, they have just spread like wildfire through law enforcement.

MG: As you did your research, what did you think when you when you first not only figured out what Clearview was doing, but also who was buying the product? Who had access to this database of three billion photos?

KASHMIR HILL: Well, as you mentioned, it was hard to do my research on the company initially. When I first was tipped off to the company by a couple of FOIA researchers who thought turn up in public records requests. When I went to the company's website, it was closed to the public. It was only accessible by law enforcement. It had an address that was just a couple of blocks away from the New York Times office and when I walked over there, I discovered that the building didn't exist. When I checked LinkedIn, they had a fake employee that later turned out to be a fake name that was being used by one of the founders, and they wouldn't return any of my calls or emails. And I was reaching out to a lot of people I found affiliated with the company. And so I ended up going instead to the users of the tool. So I started reaching out to police departments that I had determined were using it. And in a couple of cases, I was able to talk to detectives who used the app. And I was sceptical at that point because of how little I could find on the company. I was like, maybe this is just snake oil or fake, but the police officers said it was incredible. That it had helped them solve dozens of cases, dead end cases that they had abandoned. They went back and ran the suspect's photos through the app and were able to identify them. And they just said it worked so much better than the government provided databases they had been using before that only have mug shots and driver's licence photos and only really work when you're, you have a photo that's just a head on photo of the person. In this case, you know, it could be a partial photo, the person be wearing glasses, a hat and I saw that for myself when the company eventually started talking to me. I did an interview with their founder and he ran the app on me and it pulled up photos of me that I didn't know were online.

MG: Photos of you that you'd never seen before.

KASHMIR HILL: Photos I'd never seen before. And then I covered my face. I covered my mouth and my nose with my hand and he took another and it still pulled out seven photos of me, including one from ten years earlier, and I was just shocked at how well this face recognition algorithm works.

MG: You mentioned police forces in the United States are using this and also say that some Canadian police forces are using this. Who's using it here in Canada?

KASHMIR HILL: A condition of the interview with officers who are using it in Canada is I cannot say where they are, who they are, but it is being used to solve many cases of murder, murder cases, identity fraud cases, child exploitation cases. I mean, it's just any case where you have a face of somebody and you don't know who that is, you can run it through the app and according to the company, it works up to 75 percent of the time. Three out of four searches, it's going to find a match.

MG: What concerns you the most about how this technology could be used in the future and who might use this technology?

KASHMIR HILL: I have a lot of concerns. I mean, I think that face recognition to solve crimes is a great tool. And I definitely want police to be able to solve these crimes. One thing that worried me was just how the technology works, that it was this kind of a little known company. Most of the departments had done no vetting of them and they're sending sensitive information, you know, police suspects, victims, to the company servers and so the company has this vast database of everyone that the police department is interested in. And in my case, they actually abused that power. While they weren't talking to me, it turned out that anytime I talked to a police officer, I would ask them to run my photo to see what the results were and the police officers would then get a call from the company saying, are you talking to the media? So they were actually tracking who was talking to me while they weren't talking to me. So I found that a bit disturbing. That's a power they could certainly abuse in terms of manipulating results or kind of knowing who's in trouble. And then as I was talking to an investor behind the company, into officers, they all predicted that this is an app that will be in public hands, either Clearview's app or another company's copycat version of it and that we'll all have this power within the next five years.

MG: An early investor told you that there's never going to be privacy and sure, this might lead to some sort of dystopian future, but you can't ban it.

KASHMIR HILL: Right.

MG: That's terrifying to a lot of people, I would think.

KASHMIR HILL: I know, it was a quote where my jaw kind of dropped as he was saying it. But I you know, I've always kind of thought that face recognition may be ubiquitous just because of, you know, the advance in technology and all the photos of ourselves. But if that were truly the reality, it would you would end public anonymity. If you were in a restaurant having a sensitive conversation about family secrets or work secrets, astranger next to you could snap your photo and know who you are, and understand that conversation in context. And I mean, that's I don't know, that's terrifying to me because I'm a reporter and I'm always afraid of getting scooped. But you can imagine, you know, stalkers using this tool. I just really malicious use cases. I mean, it would be nice to go to a cocktail party and never have to worry about remembering anyone's name, but I think that the harms may outweigh the benefits.

MG: Kashmir, good to talk to you about this. Thank you.

KASHMIR HILL: Thank you for having me on.

MG: Kashmir Hill, technology reporter for The New York Times. She mentioned that there are police services here in Canada that are using this technology, although wouldn't say who. We did reach out to a number of police forces in Canada to see which might be using Clearview AI's products. The Vancouver police say they've never used or tested facial recognition from Clearview AI and have no intention of doing so. The Toronto Police Service says it does use facial recognition, but not through Clearview AI. The Ontario Provincial Police say they have used facial recognition technology for various types of investigations, but they wouldn't specify which product they use. Similarly, the RCMP would not comment on which techniques it uses, but the RCMP did say and this is a quotation, "we continue to monitor new and evolving technology."Privacy advocates may be concerned. According to my next guest though, this could be a useful tool in catching criminals. Michael Arntfield is a criminologist and former police officer. Michael, good morning to you.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Good morning.

MG: What do you make of the services that Clearview A.I. is offering?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Well, I think, as you mentioned, facial recognition has to some extent already been used for years by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This obviously, based on the results that these anecdotally been provided about and are in the article about cold cases being solved literally in seconds, obviously presents a new, I think, expediency to matches and a way to sort of circumvent attempts to obscure the face or just shortcomings in the quality of the image. So this, I think is a more sophisticated tool, based on what we've heard, which obviously will be appealing to law enforcement, where quite frankly in a great deal of investigations whenever using any biometric data, whether it be a face or fingerprints or movement of of how somebody emulates or even DNA and for that matter. There's always a second step verification process required, so you want the first step to be as accurate as possible. So I think you should assuage listeners concerns that I mean, if a match gets made that someone is instantly locked up and there's no due process. Like a fingerprint, this needs to be corroborated independently by someone as part of sort of a peer review process before any further action is undertaken.

MG: Tell me more about facial recognition. As I mentioned, there are a lot of police forces in this country that are using it already. How important is it in catching criminals?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Well, I mean, it's hugely important. I mean, the first sort of breakthrough in terms of in Canada, at least in terms of understanding that automated systems for identifying people as as people become as individuals and offenders sort of become more itinerant is with licence plate scanning, which of course allowed for people stationary and mobile scanning of vehicles on the road, whereas the licence plate was scanning within, you know, half a second, you had to register donor information that the insurance information. And these are not places that are being queried because they've done anything suspicious that's been done at random. So, you know, privacy advocates said, well, you know, this is somewhat arbitrary and we're just going fishing. And, you know, the courts have said you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, we already know that. You're on a road operating a vehicle. You have lessened degree of privacy, certainly in a vehicle than, say, versus your home, that's also well-established. So we have the groundwork laid for the fact that this is efficient, that this is minimally invasive, and that whatever the optics are, that the return is utilitarian in that the the upsides far outweigh the downsides and are in the public interest interest, quite frankly.

MG: The optics here though are that there are three billion pictures that have been scooped up from various social media sites, they're stored in a database that people can access. How is that not a massive invasion of privacy?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Well, I think we're deluding ourselves if we think that we have any privacy whatsoever. I mean, people throw around the word, this is Big Brother. I mean, if you know anything about Orwellian fiction or dystopian sci-fi, the dystopian future is one where technocracy and private corporations sort of usurp the government in controlling day to day affairs and regulating behaviour and we're already there. So, I mean, three billion images for use by police in apprehending offenders and cold case files versus, I'm sure, far, far more than that already in the troves of of Alphabet inc and the various media conglomerates that control the technologies we use day to day and we know are trafficking it, and we know are selling it to advertisers.

MG: So your point is that privacy is already gone. The horse, as they say, has left the barn.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Precisely. And at this point, I mean, people who get up in arms when they hear that there's a practical law enforcement application to it and invoke wrongly terms like Big Brother and tI'm not sure why. Because, I mean, again, there has been no ruckus about what's been going on already, with these companies. So to think that now we can actually use this for a productive purpose, for a public safety purpose, I'm not sure now -- why is the alarm being sounded now?

MG: What about when it ends up not in the hands of the police, but it ends up as Kashmir saying, maybe in the hands of a stalker, maybe in the hands of somebody who is spying on somebody else or who's listening in on other people's conversations? Isn't that an alarm bell that should be ringing loudly as we see the spread of this technology?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: So that is the one concern I do have, which is why, quite frankly, these types of overt relationships with partners, with law enforcement while outwardly appearing, you know, sort of surreptitious and Clark cloak and dagger and weird. In reality, that's the type of containment I think you want. My worst case scenario would be just getting in the hands of, for instance, a lobbying group or political consulting group who could, for instance, obtain information from polling stations at demonstrations and begin engaging in what we now refer to as dioxin, which is identifying and publicly releasing their name, image and corresponding financial family information of those people on the Internet, which quite frankly, as we know, places these people in extreme danger. And that is the foremost misuse I see of this system.

MG: Michael, we'll leave it there. It's good to hear from you. Thank you.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Thanks for having me on.

MG: Michael Arntfield is a criminologist, former police officer. Brenda McPhail is director of the Privacy Technology and Surveillance Project with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. She's been listening to these conversations and is with me in our studio in Toronto. Good morning.

BRENDA MCPHAIL: Good morning.

MG: How comfortable are you with what Clearview AI seems to be doing?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: I'm profoundly uncomfortable with what Clearview AI.

MG: Profoundly uncomfortable and why is that the case?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: Well, this is exactly the sort of scenario that we have been concerned about for a long time and that people have been saying, no, no, it's OK, big tech is being careful. We're moving forward cautiously on this. Look our technology companies are even calling on our regulators to think about this before we implant these technologies and then you've got a hot shot startup who comes in with a fake it till you make it attitude and puts this technology out there in the wild.

MG: A technology that police services and we heard from Michael on this, say works. And we heard he saw him saying that that you can solve crimes, cold cases in seconds and the police services that are using this technology, according to Kashmir Hill's reporting, are delighted with it. Shouldn't if you took it society and the benefits to society, shouldn't that be considered as a plus?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: It should absolutely be considered, but it needs to be weighed. The benefits of what we get from this technology need to be weighed against what we lose. We had the reporter at the beginning of the story identifying that what you lose if this technology gets out into the wild is the possibility of any anonymity in public ever. That's something that we need to think about.

MG: Michael's point is that, I mean, I'll use that phrase again that horse has left the barn. We live in a society, it doesn't matter whether you're in a big city or in a small community where there are cameras everywhere, things happen and not just social media, in terms of what you're uploading, but that your movements are marked, your movements are recorded. Have we already given up a reasonable expectation of privacy?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: We have not. Our courts agree that we have not. It's actually not true that our courts have said we have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public because we do. It's limited. It's less, but it exists. And one reason that we're holding firm on that line is because we have a charter of rights and freedoms that says that if you're human, you deserve a certain threshold of rights.

MG: How complicit are we in this? The app works in part by scooping up these photos off the Internet, off social media sites, publicly available photos that we presumably have uploaded. So how complicit are we in this?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: I think rather than thinking of it as complicity, I think of it as being duped. We have been told for a long time, hey, if you share this, it's convenient. If you share this, it's fun. If you share this, it's OK because all of our platforms have terms of service that won't let anybody do anything bad with your photos. And here you've got an app that is in complete defiance of all those terms of service, scooping up the images that you put up to share with your friends and your family and your loved ones, handing them over to law enforcement and rendering you subject to search, millions of times a day, potentially across the number of police services that are using it.

MG: We asked Facebook about Clearview AI and the statement that Facebook sent reads in part, "Scraping Facebook information or adding it to a directory are prohibited by our policies. We are reviewing the claims about this company and will take appropriate action if we find that they are violating our rules." What do you make of that statement?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: Well, the short version of that is they have a responsibility to do something to protect their customers. And if they don't that speaks volumes about their corporate attitude towards profit over people.

MG: What is that responsibility, whether it's Facebook or YouTube or Venmo, to ensure that the photos that you might upload stay on that site and don't end up elsewhere?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: They have actually entered into a contract with individuals. It's a take it or leave it contract that we don't have any choice but to accept their terms, which places the onus on them to respect it and to safeguard our privacy.

MG: The other argument that people might make is and people make this around privacy issues all the time, if you've done nothing wrong, then what are you worried about? If the police run your photo and you're innocent, you're not going to come up. If you are somebody who has done something and they run your photo and that photo comes up, then you are going to get caught because you're guilty. What do you make of that argument?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: The argument that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about is passé. Honestly, if you have nothing to hide, what do you have to lose? And what we have to lose is our privacy, our ability to be anonymous, our ability to function as a dignified human without being watched, without being listened to, without being tracked. And it's different when law enforcement does those things because they've got a great deal of power over us, up to and including taking away our liberty.

MG: This is an attitude, I think, that a lot of people might share, though. We went out and spoke with some students at the University of Toronto for their thoughts on this technology. Have a listen to what they said.

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VOICE 1: There is a lot of cybercrime happening now and there's a lot of threats, especially to younger children with predators and such. I believe that this will help solve that.

VOICE 2: I have an international student visa. So in case if I protest anywhere, like it could be revoked or something.

VOICE 3: Yes, I am OK with the idea of being monitored just because I don't think I do have anything to hide. And also, I think like government officials and people who are taking advantage of the sort of technology are not using it to spy on every single individual, but only individuals that sort of pose a threat to national safety.

VOICE 4: It's an invasion of privacy. Like, I don't feel comfortable knowing that people know what my face looks like and they can just pick me out of a crowd and know my name and my history and my background. So that's creepy is the word I would use.

MG: Is it creepy or is it more than that?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: It's creepy and it's dangerous. It's a threat to democracy. It's a threat to the fundamental freedoms that we value in a democracy.

MG: Do you think that students concerned that one student's concern about attending a protest and being picked up because, you know, they were at that protest, is that something that's a legitimate concern?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: That's an extremely legitimate concern. We know in other countries in the world that and potentially in Canada that protesters are very much monitored. And we also know that if people are afraid to stand up in public and protest and to speak out for what they believe in, that governments cannot be properly held to account. So it's a fundamental risk if people are afraid to attend a protest.

MG: And yet the cameras are everywhere, the photos have been uploaded. Yet now they're being scraped, but they're there. Where are we at just finally in this in this conversation around privacy in this country?

BRENDA MCPHAIL: Well, when we talk about the cameras being out there right now, we have laws governing who gets to access this data and what it gets to be used for. They're not always followed. There's problems with enforcement, but we have rules that underlie this. What happens with this kind of AI technology and this app is that those rules are being tossed out the window. The way the data is collected is probably against Canadian law and then we've got law enforcement agencies using it without confirming that the use of the tool is compliant with Canadian law. That's a big problem.

MG: Brenda McPhai, thank you. Ben McPhail, director of the Privacy Technology and Surveillance Project with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. We did ask Clearview AI for comment on this. We didn't hear back. We'd love to hear from you. Is privacy a long gone subject of concern or something that you are worried about? Let us know at cbc.ca/thecurrent or on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC. And coming up in about 90 seconds, right after your regional update, I'm going to get a crash course in dividing fractions. %One of the concepts that might put people off math, but according to John Mighton, it does not need to be that way. And if we did a better job teaching math, the world would be a better place. All of that coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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When 'math is accessible to any brain,' we can make better political, social choices, says mathematician

Guests: John Mighton

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. John Mighton says anyone can be good at math. Now, full disclosure, I've always thought that I was not a good math student, so this should be an interesting challenge for him. John Mighton is the founder of JUMP Math. It stands for Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies. He has a new book. It's called All Things Being Equal: Why Math is the Key to a Better World. And John Mighton is with me in our Toronto studio. John Mighton, good morning.

JOHN MIGHTON: Good morning.

MG: I can be good at math? Really?

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah. If you gave me a couple hours, I think you'd believe that.

MG: Really?

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah.

MG: Why do you believe that anyone can be good at math?

JOHN MIGHTON: There's a couple of reasons. I mean, there's a lot of new research now in cognitive science that suggests that maths is different from other subjects. And I can get into that in more depth. But it's it's more accessible to the human brain than other subjects. And that's surprising to a lot of people. Another reason is, I mean, I've seen this. I've seen students who struggle, succeed over and over. So one of my first students was a remedial grade 6 student whose mom was told he could never learn maths and he was afraid of the subjects years behind. Last year, we went out to celebrate the fact that he's now a fully tenured maths professor. Why? Yeah. So I've seen radical changes in the brain in people who learn maths, and I actually struggled myself and I've seen those changes in myself.

MG: You said that you write this in the book that you didn't show an aptitude for math until you were 30 years old.

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah, about 30.

MG: So what was happening before that?

JOHN MIGHTON: You know the research suggests you can't get really good at something unless you practice efficiently. And I was afraid to practice or, you know, make too much of an effort because I was afraid of meeting my limits. I had a very fixed mindset. I thought you had to be born with ability to do well. And I really didn't want to find what my limitations were. So I didn't work hard enough. Sometimes I'd do well, but then I'd do terribly. I think a lot of people are like that. They won't make the effort because they're afraid that they will discover that they don't have the ability.

MG: What changed when you became 30 years old?

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, it was a series of accidents. I mean, I'm a playwright and I was struggling as a playwright in the beginning and saw I notice in a you know, at a job office for a maths tutor. I thought, well, maybe I could tutor Grade 6 or work, because at that point I was reading a lot of science and I was getting more interested in maths. I thought maybe I could tutor at a low level. And I started doing that. And it was a revelation to me that by explaining the maths and working at it over and over at my own pace, things that were mysterious to me became easier and easier.

MG: You said something at the beginning of this that's interesting. You said that math is easier than other subjects. The assumption from a lot of people is that math is one of the harder subjects at school.

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah, and that's the case I make in the book. We have to we have to drop that myth because at all levels from early childhood development right up to brain scans of mathematicians, the research is suggesting that maths is accessible to any brain. So I'll give you an example that had brain scans of mathematicians a couple of years ago and they thought they were using very high level semantic processing, complex linguistic areas of the brain. They got a surprise. They found mathematicians are using the same very primitive part of the brain that has the same sense of space, a number that kindergarten kids do. And I could have told you that because mathematicians proved 100 years ago that all maths can be reduced to very simple concepts or steps that anyone can understand.

MG: So if that's the case, why is it that so many of us think we're bad at math? We have this idea it's difficult. I couldn't do it. And when you are faced, if you're a parent with your child's homework, you throw your hands up often in the air because you don't know what they're doing and you assume that that you couldn't wrap your head around. So why is that the case?

JOHN MIGHTON: I think there's a couple reasons. One is maths is more like a ladder than other subjects. You know, if you miss something, it's very hard to go on. And unfortunately, teachers are my heroes. They've been responsible for the growth of jump maths. But teachers are sometimes asked to do things that aren't really well supported by evidence in the science of learning. So, you know, for example, if you want kids to become great problem solvers, which we which I do and we do it jump, you might think we'll start with the complex multi-step problems, but that's not a very efficient way to learn. It's better to start with more gradually, with more scaffolding problems and where you develop the basic skills and concepts and work your way up.

MG: What happens if you miss one of those steps on the ladder? If you're in school and you point to grade 3 as a key step in in that maths ladder that you need to be on, and if you miss that step, things happen. So what happens if you miss the step?

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, a couple of things. If you start to miss some of the foundational concepts, you simply can't think or solve problems. You can't see the deep structural problems. You can't developmental representations. If you've missed foundational concepts. But the other thing that I think is really overlooked, there's research that suggests as early as grade one, kids know where they are in the hierarchy. They know if they're in the very group, you know, anthropologists call human status seeking primates. If we're good at one thing, it's knowing where we are in a pecking order. And there's research that suggests as early as grade one, no matter how good a teacher is, a child knows that. They have different expectations for them. And so if not everyone could learn bath. You might think, well, those kids are gonna have to adapt to being new in the inferior group. But if, as the research suggests, everyone could learn maths, then we couldn't have devised a better way of shutting down the brain. Because once you decide you're in the inferior group, you stop engaging working. You stop remembering things. Eventually you develop anxieties by grade 3 or grade 4 and it makes it very hard for your brain to work.

MG: And so what's happening specifically in Grade 3? In that year of learning and learning about math, what's going on?

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, I think that's where all of the foundations for later problem solving are stylish or most of them, I mean, especially in multiplication and division, understanding, beginning to understand patterns and even the foundations of algebra. A lot happens in Grade 3 and I think also around that age, kids really start deciding whether they're going to engage in math or not.

MG: You write about the pride that we often have in math illiteracy. What drives you around the bend when it comes to people championing the fact that they aren't good at math?

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah, I mean, first of all, it flies in the face of science because everyone, even adults, it's never too late to learn maths. And if you have a good teacher who can lay down the foundations for you and scaffold the learning into steps, you can manage or unravel the concepts in the thread, you can understand, then anyone can move forward. So that drives me crazy. But it's also, you know, no one would say I'm not literature or I can't read. They wouldn't be out about exactly because we understand how important reading is. And I don't think people understand how important mathematics is. And that's one of the arguments are making in the book at every level in our society math is much more important than people think.

MG: Tell me about JUMP Math. You mentioned you're a playwrite. You did a little bit of tutoring, struggled with your understanding of how good you could be in maths until the age of 30. What is JUMP Math?

JOHN MIGHTON: I eventually went back to school and got a doctorate in math and when I was finishing I thought I should give something back to my local community. So I started a tutoring club in my apartment. And at first we were helping very challenged kids. I had a girl arrive the first day who literally couldn't count by twos, was working about a grade one level in grade six, and three years later she went into academic grade nine maths and then skipped a year. So began to think that maths was this tool for equity, for really closing the gap between students and almost rewiring the brain. And then teachers eventually invited us to come into the classroom. And I got another surprise because I'm a playwright. I thought of the class as an audience. And the only advantage we have of putting kids in a group is they'll never get more excited together. Dirkheim calls it collective effervescence when we all feel a sense of wonder or curiosity together and I saw that happening in these classrooms and I realized it was far more efficient to teach kids in group than one on one tutoring because that group excitement allows the brand to work much more efficiently. And I think I see kids asking to stay for recess to to do maths. I just couldn't believe how excited they got together. And that's one of the tragedies when we think that kids are very different in maths, that we have to differentiate widely between kids because we don't get that group effect. And if teachers are allowed to use evidence based methods of instruction, they can close the gap very quickly and then take advantage of that excitement that comes with the groups.

MG: You've said this a couple of times. Evidence based methods of instruction. What are those evidence based methods and how are they different perhaps than what's being taught in the classroom now or how it's being taught?

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, there's evidence, for instance, that suggests that kids can easily get overwhelmed by too much information, whether it's in words or pictures. Sometimes if your pictures are too complex and they don't highlight what you want the kids to see, they can be very distracting and kids don't see it. But we often pick resources that are very cluttered or full of cartoons or complex diagrams. So that's one example. Another is that the research suggests that we learn best through efficient practice and we need practice all the research on expertise. And this isn't just about jump maths or me. This is well established beyond my experience or my opinions. We can't we can't become experts without practice, but the practice has to be efficient. So what does that mean? Well, for example, if you want to learn chess, you might think, well, just play chess over and over again, because that's the goal. That's what I want to get to. But it turns out that's not a great way to learn. It's better to start with many games with a few pieces that have been well designed to draw your attention, say, to a pattern or the weakness of a position. And if kids are directed and play those games, it's not like they're learning in a rote way. They're struggling. They're solving problems, but they're within the zone that they can handle and work efficiently. And they eventually developmental representations where they can look at a positions home that's I'm not even going to try that. So there they become much more efficient thinkers. And that's the way they become great problem solvers. It's not by playing the full game. And so in maths, if you want kids to solve EQAO style problems.

MG: That's the standardized test here in Ontario.

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah, that's the Ontario standardized test or any kind of state or provincial tests. People think, well, let's start with the test questions and just get the kids to do those, but unfortunately, though, if the learning isn't well, scaffold and efficient then the kids just give up. They don't learn efficiently and they never want to see a test problem again. But we've shown in JUMP that you can scaffold the learning so that they become independent problem solvers and confident problem solvers.

MG: At the risk of talking about numbers on the radio, can you give me an example of this? I mean, a simple example that would help people understand what that efficient repetition would look like.

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, I can give example. It might be a bit of a risk because a lot of people don't understand if you divide six by a half, right? A lot of people don't understand why you flip the fraction over and multiply. And I once asked about 700 teachers why you could do that and someone yelled out because you get the right answer. Sometimes teachers even say we'd like a good explanation.

MG: So, I mean, if you take number six and then divide it by a half as a fraction.

JOHN MIGHTON: Most people think that means give me half the chocolate bar doesn't mean give me half the chocolate bar. If you had six pieces of chocolate, let's say, and you divide it by half, if you had six pieces of chocolate and you divide it by two, one interpretation of that is make groups of size two, give everybody two pieces. And if you had six, I hope you can see everyone would get, you could divide it among three people because you've got two pieces, two pieces. I hope that's okay. I know you're a bit phobic about math.

MG: Oh, no, no, no. But this is fun because you're teaching me something.

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah, okay. Now, what if it was six divided by one? That's a kind of strange thing to do, but you're dividing it into pieces of size one, like so you'd have six pieces you could give away. So if it's six divided by a half, you could actually break every piece into two, I hope you can see that. So if you did that for all six pieces, can you imagine how many pieces you'd have?

MG: You'd have 12 pieces.

JOHN MIGHTON: Oh, my God. Brilliant.

MG: Matt Galloway called brilliant in mathematics. That should be written down.

JOHN MIGHTON: So imagine how proud you feel if you're in a class of kids and you feel you can't do maths and suddenly you're allowed to answer a question like that. And then I could challenge I say, what if you divide by a third? How many pieces could you cut every piece into?

MG: 18.

JOHN MIGHTON: Oh, my God. You jumped right to the answer. I was just expecting three. Yeah. But 18, you'd have 18 pieces. And then the other thing is the psychology of learning is critical. So if you were one of my students, I'd say, now I'm going to really challenge you. I'm gonna give you a question I can't even draw. What if it was six divided by one over a hundred? How many? You know, how many pieces would you have?

MG: 600.

JOHN MIGHTON: Right. Exactly. Because there's 100 pieces in each.

MG: Because you'd flip it over and multiply.

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah. And that's why you'd flip the bottom and multiply it. Now look how quickly that happened. And a lot of people enter grade seven, eight and they never come out understanding why you'd flip. If I had an hour I could teach you it in full depth in all different situations and so on. So why are kids arriving in high school without any understanding of something that's absolutely trivial? That's the question.

MG: That sense of anxiety is a real thing for people. That sense of anxiety around math. And it's not just not understanding, it's that the idea of looking at some of the problems that are in this book would make them physically sick.

JOHN MIGHTON: That's why I was afraid even to do that with you, because it's much easier if I can draw it and the anxiety shuts down the brain. So if you get nervous for a second, you can't think anymore. So I'm glad you survived that exercise. But, you know, imagine if you're working with a kid and you can actually draw it and you can lead them gradually. You know, a lot of people think if you lead in manageable chunks or steps like that then it's rote. It's not rote. That's where the brain works most efficiently. We can only handle one or two variations at a time. And the research is very clear on that. If I if I if I jumped ahead to now, what if not the on the top of the fraction isn't one anymore. What if it's two. I could have overwhelmed you easily and made you anxious and so that's the key is keeping the student in a zone that they can be confident and think.

MG: Why isn't that being taught in schools then? Why is it that often, whether it's in grade 3 or later grades, that students will feel that anxiety, feel overwhelmed? And if they can afford it, their parents will figure out some alternate solution like tutoring to put the child into so that they can get caught up.

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, I think there's two reasons. I think that the science of learning is just beginning to make its way into the school system. And I think that until recently when when people adopt programs like districts adopt programs, they don't have to look at the research behind it. I mean, jump maths, participate in a very large randomized controlled trial in which we showed that kids can progressed more quickly on problem solving because we think that resources should be tested rigorously before they go into the school system. And so teachers are my absolute heroes. I don't even know how they survive in the classroom when they're often having to do things that create these hierarchies or gaps. So teachers need access to this research and to evidence based resources and it will make teachers lives much more easier.

MG: What happens if people aren't learning and they outsource some of that education to you know, the tutoring industry? Do you worry about that?

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah, I worry deeply about the tutoring industry. It's a booming industry and I think it's masking problems. There's less impetus in the school system to adopt evidence based methods because of the tutoring industry and also, it's very inequitable. And the whole theme of my book is about equity that we can easily establish, you know, intellectual equity if we really taught kids according to their full potential.

MG: What is intellectual equity?

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, it's always been a mystery to me why our society, with all our wealth and knowledge, has had so much trouble eradicating material poverty. And I argue in the book that one of the reasons is we've missed a deep root cause, which I call intellectual inequality. To give you an example, we did a case study in a private school once where when we tested the kids coming to Grade 5, there was a three grade level difference between the top and the bottom. And the average mark was in the 50 fourth percent on these test centre tests when the teacher tried to equalize the classroom, made all the kids feel they could succeed, made them feel equal. And this was reported in York Times a year later. The lowest mark was in the 90 fifth percentile on the average in the 98. So that's what I mean about intellectual poverty. Even in private schools, you can see a three grade level difference between top and bottom students as early as grade five. We could eradicate that in a matter of years as we showed in that case study.

MG: The title of your book is Why Math is the Key to a Better World. What is that better world that can come out of people knowing more and understanding more about mathematics?

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, it's it's a complicated question. But one thing is, you know, when you learn maths, you learn all kinds of things that transfer to every hour of your life. So you learn to think logically, to create arguments, to look for hidden presuppositions, to see patterns, make, you know, make inferences. But you also learn about risk and probability. So we had a financial crisis because people didn't understand what would happen if their mortgage rates went up slightly. And we have an environmental crisis because people can't add up the consequences of their actions because we're so afraid of maths or numbers. So that's one area where we really suffer as a society is, you know, people think it's it's not that important if they're numerate or not. It's not just about handling numbers. It's about being able to think deeply and having the confidence in yourself to think deeply.

MG: You give an example of a politician who is talking about the jobless rate in the United States. You walk us through that and how had we understood the numbers better, we would have and people would've been able to make better choices.

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah. Now, I can't remember the exact numbers, but this politician claimed it was something like 95 million people were looking for work. And the population of the U.S. is around 300 million is a little more than that. So that would be about a third of the U.S. population. And if you look at the working population, it would be about a half. So there'd be about maybe 200 million people of working age and close to 100 million the politician is claiming are looking for work. That's about a 50 percent unemployment. And, you know, when I saw those numbers, I thought that can't possibly be right because I could do an estimate. But very few media, let's call the politician on that claim. It just passed by. And that's a tragedy. I think within a few weeks, most adults could develop the skills they need to be able to think their way through some of those arguments.

MG: You say a couple of things about politics in this. One is that if people want to run for office, they should have knowledge of maths.

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah. I mean, we'd have a much healthier society if people couldn't didn't immediately seise on the first explanation of an event. If they were trained in probability, they'd learn to consider all the possibilities. If they had a basic sense of numbers, they could recognize mistakes like the one I talked about. And more deeply, if people were confident in their problem solving abilities, they would actually think deeply about the problems before they arrived at an opinion even.

MG: You also say that maths is the one area of discourse where it's impossible to create fake news. Is that just because, as they say, the numbers don't lie?

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah. Because everything in maths can be reduced to principles that everyone can agree on. I mean, in very high levels of maths, sometimes there's more debate. But in the kind of maths we would use in ordinary life, people could agree very quickly and we'd have much healthier political debates.

MG: You believe that? I mean, given how nasty the political tone of the debate is right now, you think that there would be a healthier debate if if people were able to understand the numbers better?

JOHN MIGHTON: Yes, because I think that they would be much more dispassionate. If they learned to create arguments in maths, they would realize they have to think through every possibility before they seise on one. They would also have more respect for science. And you know, if 98 percent of the engineers in the town said this bridge is going to collapse, you wouldn't put your kids in a car and drive over it, even if two percent said it won't collapse. We know that we would respect those. Nears and think there's a risk there. But with climate change, 98 percent of the scientists on earth can say we're we're at risk and people argue, well, because two percent say we're not, we don't need to do anything.

MG: I guess, do you worry that, you know, somebody could manipulate statistics, for example, that they could lead people, the numbers might be right, but the way that they're treated, the way that they're spun, could lead people down a different path?

JOHN MIGHTON: Yes. And that's why that can happen, but that's why I think we need to respect scientists more. You know, if there's a radical claim being made or there's a claim that's about something is very important to the whole world, you would want to look at bodies of experts who actually know the statistics and trust that they can give you a clear answer.

MG: Part of that better world that you're also hinting at is comes through the idea of wonder. And what kids have and what we olds don't have anymore. What is that sense of wondering and why is it so powerful?

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah. When I think of both the losses we face as a society by not educating kids according to their full potential. We all know the economic losses and even maybe the risk to our political systems. But I think the deepest loss comes because we don't really keep us alive. The sense of wonder and curiosity that kids are born with. And once I taught this behavioural class of very violent students and I taught them how to read binary codes and they went nuts, they thought their little code breakers. And then at the end, they did a magic trick that's connected to the code. Now I want to come up and do it. And on the third lesson like that, these kids who were thought to be unteachable cheered when we came in. Jerry, when he walked into the classroom, they cheered because they were so excited to be solving problems, to be meeting challenges in front of their peers.

MG: What did that tell you?

JOHN MIGHTON: It breaks my heart because I've been seeing this kind of thing for 20 years. It tells me there's just as inestimable potential in children, not only for learning, but for a sense of wonder and curiosity that will drive them to ask to say for recess to do to solve more puzzles. We all want to meet challenges, solve puzzles, exercise every part of our brain, and we lose that sense of efficacy and curiosity through failure. Every year, kids are told this is an important topic. Your parents think it's important. Your teachers think it's important, but you can't learn it. What does that do to people? The kind of sense of learned helplessness we develop through years of failure. You know, we think kids would be stunted if they couldn't see any beauty in a mountain or a star, but the vast majority of people graduate from high school not being able to see any beauty in the invisible structure of the world in incredibly elegant and beautiful world that you can only see through mathematics. And that's a great tragedy for me. Kids enjoyed doing maths as much as sports, playing sports or creating art, if they're allowed to succeed.

MG: If they're allowed to succeed.

JOHN MIGHTON: Exactly.

MG: You were in the film Good Will Hunting.

JOHN MIGHTON: Yeah.

MG: And you had a line in Good Will Hunting, but you added something to the line in Good Will Hunting. What did what did you say in that film? Because it speaks to this idea of kids being allowed to succeed.

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, the writers of the film were very generous. They let me say most people never get to see how brilliant they can be. They don't find teachers who believe in them. They get convinced they're stupid. And that's not a criticism of teachers, because teachers want to help every child. They need to be enabled to do that in mathematics.

MG: It's a really powerful message. For people who are listening and they might have the anxiety around math, they worry that they couldn't learn this or they worry that they couldn't help their kids learn this. What would you say to them? I mean, where do they start?

JOHN MIGHTON: Well, I think read about the research. Encourage your kids. If your child doesn't understand something you're saying, ask is it because I'm not explaining it well. And teachers can do the same thing. Like if you assume that every child could learn math, then is the problem with the student or your lesson? Could you actually equalize the classroom? Could you scaffold more to get every kid understanding things? Parents or teachers. Start with the assumption that if a child's not learning, they can and you have to do something to make that happen.

MG: I appreciate the lesson this morning. I will say, I mean, in reading this book, as somebody who has had anxiety around mathematics and that was the lowest mark that I ever received in school, I was wondering whether I would find myself scrambled by some of the things that are in here. But that idea that you, if you do it gradually, you can learn is a really powerful one. John, thank you.

JOHN MIGHTON: Thank you very much.

MG: John Mighton is the creator of JUMP Math and his new book is called All Things Being Equal: Why Math is the Key to a Better World. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One for Q. The visual artist Shirin Neshat is on the program. Iranian-Canadian artist in exile. Iranian artist in exile. She has a huge retrospective of her work that's happening right now in LA, a visual work. There's images, there are films and you'll hear all about that coming up on Q, in just a few moments time. We were talking to John Mighton about math and how he believes that anyone can learn to be good at math. We'll leave you with a song that's about where it all begins. Just a few simple numbers. It's Feist. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Song: "1234" by Fiest]

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Jan. 21, 2020 episode transcript

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