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The Current Transcript for December 14, 2022

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

We get used to in the military working through discomfort. You have to. And so many of us, you know, men, women, members of the LGBT community, just kind of assume that discomfort as one more thing that you have to put up with.

MATT GALLOWAY: The Canadian Armed Forces has a culture problem. Two former Supreme Court justices wrote two separate reports in seven years on how to address it. Now the Minister of National Defence has said the Government will implement some 48 recommendations meant to reform military culture. In a moment, Anita Anand on justice, accountability and eliminating sexual misconduct in the armed forces. Also, this morning, for years it's been promised as a clean energy, holy grail. And that's just the beginning of the hype around nuclear fusion.

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Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.

MG: Scientists think they have a breakthrough in reproducing the power of the sun in 30 minutes. What this could mean for the push for clean energy and whether the promise is real this time. And later. These words were written by a human being. Me. In the future, that may not be necessary. Coming up, the eerily human face of artificial intelligence as seen through conversations people are having with the wildly popular tool called ChatGPT. We'll talk to it in an hour. We begin, though, with the latest attempt at culture change in the military. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Skepticism around Ottawa’s plan to stamp out culture of sexual misconduct in Canada’s armed forces

Guests: Anita Anand, Stefanie von Hlatky

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First. It takes a lot of backbone on the civilian leadership and then it will take the chief of the defence staff and a hundred of 140 general officers and flag officers, the generals. It will take the vast majority of them being on board and once again, starting with the fundamental premise that they can't fix it by themselves. If they don't accept that, it's not going to happen, it's going to take another Supreme Court judge five, six years down the road. First of all, this is an embarrassment. And it's enough.

MG: Blunt words on this programme back in June from former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour. She was talking about the need for action after she delivered her report on sexual misconduct and harassment in the Canadian military. She made 48 recommendations in all and challenged the government to inform Parliament by the end of this year if it did not intend to implement them. Now Defence Minister Anita Anand has presented a plan of action and she joins us now. Minister, good morning.

ANITA ANAND: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Louise Arbour said yesterday that she is sceptical of your Government's progress. She said the method of implementation is business as usual. Is she wrong?

ANITA ANAND: I believe that that scepticism is perhaps warranted in light of the history of the Canadian Armed Forces. But the fact of the matter is that yesterday I responded directly to a recommendation that Madame Arbour herself made in May to come before the House of Commons and to indicate which recommendations of her report. I am not accepting and in fact, Matt, I am moving forward with implementing all of the recommendations and instructing my department and the Canadian Armed Forces to do so also. And so moving forward, things are going to be different.

MG: So are you showing the backbone that she said was necessary from civilian leaders?

ANITA ANAND: I believe I am not. And that's what the prime minister has asked me to do, and that's what Canadians expect of me and of us. We need to build the Canadian Armed Forces where everyone is protected and respected, where there's no discrimination, no sexual harassment, no sexual misconduct. And that's exactly what we are moving to implement step by step with these recommendations and broader cultural change in the Canadian Armed Forces.

MG: Let's talk about some of those recommendations. One of Madame Arbour's main recommendations was to hand over potential criminal cases to civilian authorities instead of military, police and prosecution. Officials revealed in a briefing that civilian police forces had actually rejected some 40 out of 97 cases that had been referred to them by the military police. Why is this happening?

ANITA ANAND: There are a number of organisations and jurisdictions that are actually accepting the cases. The RCMP, for example, the province of Quebec, for example. When two options are available, rejections occur. That is what Madame Arbour has stated. She's also stated that the timeline to implement a full fledged change to the civilian justice system will be lengthy. That's directly in her report, and that's why we will move forward on the transfer of cases and the interim recommendation while making sure that we can implement recommendation five that full fledged change to the civilian justice system as well.

MG: What she said yesterday is that those involved in the process are dragging their feet on the military side. Are they slow walking, moving those cases to civilian police and civilian prosecution?

ANITA ANAND: What we have done to make sure that the transfer of cases runs smoothly and is systematic is to establish a table between the provinces, territories and federal government so that our officials can ensure that all concerns are addressed and that cases are transferred one by one in the interests of victims and survivors.

MG: But do you believe that the military is moving slowly on this, that, in her words, they're dragging their feet on this process?

ANITA ANAND: I believe that the leadership that is in place at the current time, the chief of Defence Staff, the Deputy Minister, myself, represent a unified front. We are committed to ensuring that cultural change in the military occurs, not simply implementing the 48 recommendations of Madame Arbour, but addressing the true and valued concerns about the need for change in the Canadian Armed Forces.

MG: But when we're talking about these potential criminal cases going to civilian authorities, she has said and others have said that what you might actually need to do is amend the National Defence Act so that the military would be banned from prosecuting sexual offences. Will you do that?

ANITA ANAND: It is my expectation that officials will provide me with the options to implement this recommendation. So yes, it is my intention to do so, to make sure this recommendation is implemented. It's complicated, as Madame Arbour herself acknowledges in the report. What are some of the complications, Matt? First of all, there is the investigation of cases outside of our country. Second of all, there's the capacity of civilian police forces. Third of all, there is a need to ensure that provinces and territories and the civilian police forces are going to accept these cases and have the systems in place to do so. So there is a process. It will take time. And that's why we need to ensure that the interim recommendation remains in place while we make sure that the full-fledged permanent recommendation can also occur.

MG: But just so I understand, will you look at amending the National Defence Act so that the military will not be able to prosecute sexual offences, as it is not able to prosecute other offences?

ANITA ANAND: Yes, of course I will. That was the gist of my response to Parliament yesterday on recommendation number five. Of course, we've already implemented the Victims Bill of Rights. There are a number of other areas that I will look at in terms of amending the National Defence Act. That's what leadership on this file demands, and that's what I will deliver.

MG: One of the other issues is and this was talked about yesterday. The matter of military colleges, just as our board described them as having discriminatory, discriminatory cultures and outdated leadership model, she said in her report. Almost every female cadet has experienced an incident or more of sexual misconduct or worse. The report says that DND is committed to the value of military colleges. In that context, what is the value of a military college where, as she said, almost every female cadet has experienced sexual misconduct or worse?

ANITA ANAND: Matt I was a professor for over 20 years in a university and I know the value of educational institutions, and that's the value of the military colleges right there, the education that cadets are entitled to and that they receive. At the same time, we know that there are definite systemic changes that need to occur in the military colleges. For example, we've already started to implement some changes, for example, in the exit interviews of cadets making sure that we are hearing directly from the students themselves. Second of all, making sure that diversity and inclusion training is included in the courses and curriculum that the military college is offering. So once again, this is complex, but it must be addressed and the time to address it has long passed. That's why we accepted and will implement all 48 of Madame Arbour's recommendations. That was the gist of my report to Parliament yesterday.

MG: But of course we're not talking about the value of educational institutions. We're talking about the value of military colleges in this context. One of the things that she'd said in the report is it might be better to shut these colleges down. Is that something that you would consider?

ANITA ANAND: I am the chancellor of both military colleges and I have visited them both. I have made sure that we will undertake a detailed review of the Canadian military colleges by setting up a review board. The culture in these institutions does have to change significantly, and as we dropped those terms of reference, I will make sure that the governance structure is in place to ensure a full fledged review of the college. I'm not going to presuppose the results of that review. Whose terms of membership and reference have yet to be announced? They are important institutions are our country. They need to change significantly and we are developing the roadmap forward with regards to those educational institutions.

MG: Perhaps Louise Arbour's more pointed, pointed criticism yesterday of your Government's progress is around those reviews. She said that most of the reviews are internal and that misses the central point of her recommendations, that outside eyes are needed to take a look at this culture not from the inside, but from the outside. Why is that recommendation being dismissed?

ANITA ANAND: Actually, Matt, on recommendation number 29. Madame Ah Baugh herself suggested a review and study of the military colleges and for numbers--

MG: I don't mean to interrupt, but that's not what I'm talking about. And that's not what she was talking about yesterday. She's talking about broadly the reviews that you have been speaking about yesterday in in the announcement that you would move forward on the 48 recommendations, that many of the reviews, the majority of the reviews are internal, that they're not external reviews.

ANITA ANAND: We need to make sure that we are getting the work done. And the internal groups that she's mentioning consist of military personnel and I am ensuring that they are implementing these recommendations. It's very important to shed some light on this institution. That's why I appointed an external monitor to oversee the implementation of the recommendations. Just went talking, for example, was appointed by me in October for this very purpose, to open up the process to ensure that we are coming back to Canadians with updates. Quarterly updates will continue to occur as they have through the past year, so that the media, so that stakeholders, so that Canadians can hold us to account as we expect that they will. These are committees to implement the recommended options that Madame Arbour has put forward in her report.

MG: You became emotional yesterday in talking about the need for institutional reform in the military. Why? Why, why did why did that choke you up in speaking about that?

ANITA ANAND: I've lived my whole life as a racialized minority woman, striving to do my best in a variety of institutions and myself. I know what it's like to face barriers and to try to overcome them. And now I have a chance as Minister of National Defence, to do something about such barriers that others face in an incredibly important institution in our country, an institution that Canadians depend upon every single day in forest fires and floods and COVID 19. And I want to deliver on this promise for Canadians and for the Canadian Armed Forces.

MG: And yet, just last week, we saw two military officers disciplined for failing to enforce orders on preventing sexual misconduct within the armed forces. So who's going to be accountable now if the culture doesn't change significantly over next months and years? We've had these reports, we've had the concerns from the former justice from the Supreme Court saying that her reports could end up in the graveyard of recommendations. So who is going to be accountable if these allegations of misconduct within the military continue?

ANITA ANAND: We are all, Matt, government, the Canadian Armed Forces, DND, and we will keep ourselves accountable. Bill with the external monitor, with the quarterly updates, with making sure that we are transparent on our path to reform. And the incidents that you're mentioning, Matt, they're reprehensible. They should not occur, but they exemplify the very reason that we are so adamant and I am so determined to ensure that cultural change in the Canadian Armed Forces continues to occur at a rapid pace.

MG: We will talk again as this continues. And in the meantime, Anita Anand, I'm glad to have you on the programme. Thank you very much.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you so much, Matt. Take good care.

MG: Thank you. Anita Anand is the Minister of National Defence. Listening in is Stefanie von Hlatky. She is Canada Research Chair on Gender Security and Armed Forces, also an associate professor at Queen's University. Good morning to you.

STEFANIE VON HLATKY: Good morning.

MG: Matt. The minister says this time will be different. Will it?

STEFANIE VON HLATKY: Right. We've been here before and it was mentioned at the outset that it's been seven years to such external reports. So I think I, I definitely understand where the scepticism is coming from. At the same time, I have no doubt that the Minister's words from yesterday are genuine, but there are a certain number of points that deserve to be raised in this context. And I must say I must echo the words of Madame Boo when she talks about more reviews, more working groups, more panels being set up, which means that the timelines for implementation are really uncertain. And that's difficult on the members of the armed forces and also for an external observer such as myself. It's really difficult to talk about an optimistic outlook when it means when we're talking about quick implementation of these very comprehensive recommendations.

MG: Let me just ask you quickly about two things that Madame Arbour mentioned yesterday. One is and we raised this with the minister. The sense of of of resistance that she expected. She talked about that on our programme. She expected when she released the report and expected to see it as the recommendations came out. How big of an obstacle is that to true culture change resistance from coming from within the military itself?

STEFANIE VON HLATKY: So I think there is a kind of resistance that is not necessarily nefarious and that comes from just a very large bureaucracy trying to make some very comprehensive reforms. So that's one point, and I'm the first one to acknowledge it. But then I think there's a kind of resistance that's also a bit more pernicious and that is, you know, stalling change and also doing a lot of that that work around change internally. And this is something Arbour mentioned as well is the overarching principles behind her recommendations are greater transparency, more external oversight, more civilian input into these processes. We're not quite there yet. And another thing that struck me when reading the report and here I'm specifically referencing the report that was tabled to Parliament by the Minister, which outlines the progress to date is that not all recommendations are accepted as they are. So the language here is really important, says all recommendations or I reject. None of the 48 recommendations is how the Minister puts it. And indeed, when we look at the response to the recommendation, we see that there is an attempt to be respectful of the intent behind the recommendations. But there's also the Canadian Forces own interpretation of what change look like, which is not completely in line with what our board recommends. So there is a bit of slippage there in terms of the very implementation focussed recommendations that Albo made and how they are now being interpreted and put into place for implementation in the next year or so.

MG: The Minister also spoke about Canada's military colleges and as we heard, the colleges will be subject to a review. In the meantime, there is the suggestion again, it came in coming out of Louise Arbour's report that you might need to close those colleges down. Should the colleges the very least be closed until they've demonstrated that they've changed and that the culture has changed within those colleges?

STEFANIE VON HLATKY: Yeah, this is one of the recommendation where I find the response in yesterday's report unsatisfactory because it seems to walk back the level of ambition that is underlying in this recommendation. And so to me, everything should be on the line in this review. And by contrast, in the report table to Parliament, you know, we're just at the stage of draughting terms of reference to pick members of a panel to conduct a review. So it's still very difficult to get a sense of where we're going with this. But I think that the gist of it should be, you know, everything is on the table. The situation is grave enough to do a fulsome review of of those recommendations by this expert panel. But what we're seeing in the report now is me maybe walking that back, acknowledging that military college had value. And, you know, to use the language from the the the report reflect the best of Canadian society. So I think there's an attempt here to change the narrative on the scope of this review, which we should be watching very carefully as this unfolds.

MG: I guess in the last minute or so that we have when you take a look at this moment that we are in right now, why is now the time for real change in this culture? There is scepticism, but there is also momentum, clearly, and we just heard that from the minister herself. So why is now the time for change?

STEFANIE VON HLATKY: Now is the time for change not only because it's long overdue, but because there there is a bit of a crisis in the Canadian Forces right now, not only on culture, but in terms of recruitment and retention. And I think it's when the organisation is facing a crisis like this one, that real ambitious change can happen and comprehensive change focussed on how the Canadian Forces recruit, train, educate, retain their personnel is when I see this comprehensive focus that I'm optimistic. And because the organisation is about 10,000 personnel short, it's imperative that it make meaningful change and meaningful change quickly or else it will take a really long time to recover. So because there's momentum going in the direction of culture change and reconstitution, I think it's possible to implement these these recommendations in a way that will have a lasting impact on the organisation.

MG: It's kind of like an existential crisis in some ways.

STEFANIE VON HLATKY: Yes, those words have been used.

MG: I'm glad to talk to you again. Thank you very much for being back on our programme, Stefanie.

STEFANIE VON HLATKY: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Stephanie von Hlatky is Canada Research Chair on Gender Security and the Armed Forces, also an associate professor at Queen's University in Kingston. Your CBC News is up next. And then.

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This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero carbon fusion energy powering our society.

MG: No shortage of hype in an announcement yesterday, nuclear fusion, a scientific breakthrough that could revolutionise the way we turn on the lights or heat our homes. Is it really getting closer? We will discuss that coming up in six minutes. My name is Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio. Stay with us.

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Scientists hail ‘breakthrough’ in harnessing fusion energy

Guests: Robbie Scott, Greg Twinney

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

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MG: Still to come, how A.I. artificial intelligence is changing the way we communicate from telling stories to finishing your homework. Some two million people have signed up to use a tool called ChatGPT. We'll give it a whirl in just under 30 minutes. But first, a scientific discovery. Replicating the power of the sun.

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VOICE 1: Honey, you've got to come back with me.

VOICE 2: Where?

VOICE 1: Back to the future. I need fuel. Go ahead. Quick. Get the car.

MG: Doc Brown just needed to add a can of beer to his fusion powered time travelling DeLorean in the 1985 classic Back to the Future. Flash forward to 2022, and fusion energy is more than just a plot twist. Yesterday, officials announced that the same energy that powers the sun has for the very first time achieved a net energy gain in a laboratory. That means it's producing more energy than it takes to create. This is a big deal. Don't just take my word for it. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm cast the scientific breakthrough as one for the history books.

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VOICE 2: We're here to talk about fusion, combining two particles into one. Last week, scientists achieved fusion ignition, and that is creating more energy from fusion reactions than the energy used to start the process. Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.

MG: Goodness. The announcement follows decades and billions of dollars worth of research into nuclear fusion. And the hope is this could one day supply the world with clean, cheap energy. Robbie Scott contributed to the breakthrough research. He's a senior plasma physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at the UK's Central Laser Facility. Robbie, hello.

ROBBIE SCOTT: Hello. Thanks for having me today.

MG: Thanks for being here. Just I mean, for all of us non physicists, give us the primer. The primer, as you might say, on fusion energy. What is it?

ROBBIE SCOTT: So I mean, fusion the process of fusion is the you know, that's what powers the stars and Sun. And so as a consequence, you know, that's what has provided basically all of the energy on Earth. So from fossil fuels to solar to wind. And the reason it's so attractive is that, you know, if we can really harness this energy, it can be a safe supply of energy because there's no possibility of a meltdown. It's a secure supply of energy because the fuel comes from seawater. It's reliable because it's a baseload, baseload energy capacity. So it's not subject to, you know, fluctuations like renewables. And then finally, it's clean because there's no carbon dioxide released. So that's that's the attraction. And that's why it could be the ultimate source if we can make it, you know, economically viable.

MG: If the people have called this the holy grail of fusion research.

ROBBIE SCOTT: Yeah. I mean, so achieving, you know, ever since the fusion research is started, well, the laser fusion research has been going on since 1972. I think the concept was invented three days after the laser was invented. And ever since then, with old fusion research, that really is the option that the Holy Grail has been to, which is this, you know, more energy than what we put in. I suppose now we need to find a new Holy Grail, which is probably putting power on the grid, but it certainly this really is the the holy grail of fusion research, the fantastic result.

MG: As it sounds like you have a smile on your face as you talk about it. And so you can have, you know, the energy secretary say that this is one of the great feats of the 21st century. But for you, as somebody who was involved in this, what was it like to to see this work finally?

ROBBIE SCOTT: Yeah. I mean, I, I was extremely I was ecstatic as it was in a way, because, I mean, it's been a good couple of years for laser fusion research because, you know, for a fact, I was at Lawrence Livermore back from 2011 to 2012 and it was originally hoped that we would get, you know, energy gain back then and it didn't happen. And that was, you know, everyone was quite down in the dumps at that point. And then, you know, slowly, slowly over the years, the people that Livermore, you know, with international collaborators have managed to, you know, tweak and improve the whole process. And slowly over time, it's been increasing, but it's really been quite a slow process. But then in the last year, the fusion yields have really started to ramp up and it's actually increased by more than the factor of 2000 over the last decade. So, you know, it's a it's a massive achievement. I'm very happy.

MG: What has happened over the last little bit because as you say, there have been a series of breakthroughs after, a lot of consternation and, you know, hoping but not real results. So what's happened recently?

ROBBIE SCOTT: So the thing about the way that with laser fusion, when you have this process called ignition, which is, you know, it's essentially like, you know, sparking a match which ignites the process. Once it starts to happen, the the the burning of the fuel actually feeds back upon itself. And as the fuel starts to burn, it releases these things called alpha particles, which heat the fuel more, and then that releases more alpha particles which heat a few more. And so you had this runaway process. And and so what's happened over the last few years is we started to get into this case of what we call the regime, where this release and the process amplifies itself. And so that's what we've been sort of transitioning to over the last couple of years. That's why such rapid progress has been made.

MG: And so what is the promise of this? I mean, again, when we talk about clean, limitless energy, in the best case scenario, what would this provide us with?

ROBBIE SCOTT: Yeah. I mean, so all of these things, you know, the fuel supply would be at least thousands of years and radioactivity produced. It's essentially it's very, very low level. So it's it's not. So with fusion, you have radioactive waste, which has to be stored for about 100,000 years, whereas with fusion, the only radioactivity you get is in the chamber that you do the reactions, the neutrons that are produced by the fusion reaction, they will bury the coal. This caused the change of chamber to be very slightly radioactive, but it's very easy to handle. And in fact with fusion you can even get rid of the radioactive waste created by fission. And so yeah, for all these reasons it's a very promising fuel source. And like I say, it's, it's carbon free. So that's fantastic.

MG: And so what needs to happen now to get it from this chamber to powering, you know, my home, if I had one of those?

ROBBIE SCOTT: Yeah. So a lot of, a lot of work still needs to be done. The good news is that researchers all around the globe have been, you know, thinking they have just been concentrating on the goal of ignition and energy. And they've actually been thinking about, well, what do we need to do for the next stage. So, for example, at my laboratory central laser facility, we've been working on more efficient lasers, which can fire at the repetition rate required for electricity generation, because actually the electricity generation by laser fusion, it's a pulsed process. So it's like if you think of like a car engine, which, you know, the piston explosion happens in the test and then that pushes the piston. So there's a fusion as it is a pulse process as well. And so we need to make more efficient lasers. We have, you know, technology which can do that. We need to get more fusion energy out. We think we know we have to do that. We need to improve the targets which we use and make them more a lot cheaper than we can at the moment. But again, we have concepts for all of these different areas. So what we really need to do now is get going. And then the path for all these different areas of technology development and you know, as rapidly as possible.

MG: Long before yesterday, people were saying the way to do that as rapidly as possible is to bring the private sector into this. And so you already have billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos who are investing in fusion companies. Are you comfortable with private sector billionaires influencing the future of this energy source?

ROBBIE SCOTT: Yeah. I mean, I'm quite for the idea of having these, you know, public private partnerships to date. All of the funding essentially has gone, has come from governments and for laser fusion and particularly the US government. But you know, there comes a point when you think about if you want to do this rapidly and if you want to, you know, well, yeah, rapidly and efficiently, then I think there is a role for the private sector there.

MG: What is the public sector need to retain in that area?

ROBBIE SCOTT: Well, I think what the public sector can do is, you know, they can provide a lot of personnel who have a lot of expertise. They can also, you know, they can help in terms of, you know, potentially providing facilities, have access to existing facilities and things like this. So, you know, I think the combination of the two could be quite a powerful way of doing it. You know, if you look at the sort of space X type, what has done for space travel, it's I think it's reduced the cost of flights into space. But that factor of [unintelligible], if you if you combine the of these two aspects, it could be very game changing, I think.

MG: Do you worry that the focus on this takes away at all from the more known entities when it comes to clean energy, things like solar and wind? And people have been looking at, you know, tidal power, for example, that if you invest billions of dollars in this thing, which people have been thinking about for a long time, that that takes some of those billions away from those other forms of energy.

ROBBIE SCOTT: So, I mean, my perspective is that we really, really want to have both. You know, you want to have things like wind and solar because they're so cheap and relatively abundant. But in the moment, it's not at all clear that you can fulfil our energy demands with, you know, the common renewables alone unless you have, you know, vast, vast amounts of storage. And so for me, this is the appropriate role of fusion would be to provide the baseload capacity. But then you also have like things like wind and solar as you are, you know, when, when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing.

MG: So the joke with Fusion and there are many is that we're just 30 years away from it being 30 years away, or you could say 20 years away from it being 20. People have said this for longer than 30 years. Is it closer now? I mean, are we in that window where something like this is not just an idea but but is possible?

ROBBIE SCOTT: Yeah. I mean, I really think we are, because I think the key thing about this result is that, you know, it's created a bit of a paradigm shift in the you know, it's suddenly into the consciousness of everyone. And if if that can then catalyse funding to go into a field because things have been the reason it stayed so far away is basically because it's been chronic. A research field has been chronically underfunded ever since it was conceived. And so if this, you know, momentous occasion can really catalyse the level of investment that we need to make rapid progress, I think we really can accelerate and minimise that the time to actually getting electricity on the grid.

MG: Robbie, thank you very much for this.

ROBBIE SCOTT: Pleasure.

MG: Robbie Scott, senior plasma physicist with the UK's Central Laser Facility at the Science and Technology Facilities Council. We were talking about the role of the private sector in furthering this technology. Some private companies are already experimenting with how to take this technology and turn it into a viable energy source. Greg Twinney is CEO of General Fusion. It's a fusion company based in Vancouver. Greg, good morning to you.

GREG TWINNEY: Morning, Matt.

MG: When you heard about this fusion breakthrough, what went through your mind?

GREG TWINNEY: I was excited but not not surprised. The industry and labs have been trending in this direction for years, so it's an important milestone for fusion and the culmination of years of incremental progress. It does demonstrate that the work to the world of fusion isn't science fiction.

MG: How important of a milestone is it? Rabie called it a paradigm shift just now.

GREG TWINNEY: Yeah, absolutely. It is an important scientific milestone. And for companies like us who are have been in this pursuit of fusion and commercialising it for 20 years. It's a it's a major milestone. But now, really, as Robbie talked about, it's up to companies like us to take a practical design for creating fusion and turn that into commercialising the technology in a way that it can be used in the grid and to power your Tesla.

MG: You've said the science is important, but if it doesn't end up on a path towards a commercial power plant, it becomes a lot less interesting in some ways.

GREG TWINNEY: That's right. Yeah. The ultimate goal has to be to put power on the grid using fusion. I mean, that is the that's the Holy Grail, in my opinion. And this scientific breakthrough that happened is in a very, very important milestone on the path towards that.

MG: Tell us what you are doing to get there with your pilot power plant. That I mean, in some ways it uses fusion that works differently than what we saw in California. But you're trying to get to that to that end goal, that same end goal.

GREG TWINNEY: Yeah, exactly. You know, all all fusion approaches are doing the same thing and sort of combining two light atoms to create a heavy atom and and releasing huge amounts of energy. It's how you do it. The difference differs amongst the different approaches. And, you know, you're talking about the ingredients of the right fuel, which is hydrogen for most of us, small amounts. But then you need time, density and temperature to create the conditions to to fuse the hydrogen together, the different approaches. There's lasers, there's these large tokamaks, these big doughnuts that you see when you Google Fusion. We take a hybrid approach that uses steam driven pistons actually in existing materials to create fusion conditions and a design that will ultimately translate to a power plant that has been in mind since the beginning. So we you know, we're not founded out of an academic lab or a national lab. We're actually founded by our entrepreneur 20 years ago with an end in mind to commercialise. So all of our designs are focussed on, on putting energy on the grid and we've spent the last 20 years at large, large scale prototypes here in Vancouver with 200 or 200 person team proving out that our approach is one that will land fusion on the grid, and we're building a fusion demonstration power plant, a relevant demonstration, I should say, in the UK, and that will be operational 2026, 2027 timeframe.

MG: And what would that power do you think?

GREG TWINNEY: So that that machine will demonstrate the the science of our approach, which is in a power plant scale, and a power plant is relevant to design. And so it's kind of taking what what the announcement just the other day was doing and putting it into a power plant, relevant environment using, using our approach. And so so you can kind of easily translate and go from our demonstration in 2026 to 2027 to the first commercial power plant in the early 2030.

MG: That would be the ultimate goal is to have a commercial power plant that would help. As you say, you know, charge electric cars, chart, turn the lights on, what have you.

GREG TWINNEY: Absolutely. The goal is to commercialise the technology in early 2013, which would lead to the deployment of fusion power plants across the global energy markets.

MG: What is the role of the private sector, do you think, in getting to that finish line?

GREG TWINNEY: My belief is that we need to work in partnership with, as Dr. Robbie Scott talked about, we need to work in partnership with the national labs and academia and science community. And we do that huge way. We stand on top of all of the decades of research that has been done. And we're just taking it the next the next the next phase. You know, obviously, the holy grail of energy is something that that translates to a massive global addressable market in terms of dollars and entrepreneurs like myself, like our founder, like the types of investors that invest and recognise that there's an opportunity to reap large financial rewards while doing something that is incredibly impactful.

MG: You're also looking, though, at creating what could be a public utility of clean energy, something that that everybody needs and something that would benefit all of us. And so for those who immediately might get their hackles up, saying, how is it that, you know, how how is it feasible? How is it right that a private company would be deeply involved in that public utility? What would you say back to them?

GREG TWINNEY: No. I'd say that globally there's a lot of, a lot of power is provided to the grid through through private companies. And and there are regulatory bodies that oversee the activities of these private companies to ensure that reliability, economics and all the things that that are in place to keep the public safe are followed.

MG: How much money is it going to take, do you think, to get to the finish line?

GREG TWINNEY: There's been, I think, something like $5 billion put into the or maybe more over the last few years into the private industry. And I think that is kind of just getting us started where we're going to need at least that much over the next handful of years to get us and other private companies to a large scale demonstration. So but we're talking about a multitrillion dollar a year market. So the return on that is is incredible.

MG: And do you worry at this is the same question that I asked Robbie. I mean, this is what you are, you know, shooting towards. But more broadly, should society as a whole be worried that those moneys are not going to be going to the renewable technologies that are already in place right now, that are already helping to clean our energy grid?

GREG TWINNEY: Yeah. Well, I mean this as I talked about the global addressable market, you know, there will be truly, you know, multiple trillion dollars per year of investment in global carbon free electricity. And so a fraction of that will go towards fusion and there still will be huge investment in other forms of electricity, some that are more near term, perhaps as we discuss renewables, wind and solar being a nice complement. But you need baseload power in the long term that is clean and safe and economical, and that's where fusion comes in.

MG: For a lot of people, this still sounds like science fiction. It's hard, I think, for some people to wrap their heads around the fact that something like this, that replicating the power of the sun is possible.

GREG TWINNEY: Yeah, absolutely. I didn't believe it either. A number of years ago before I joined the company. But it wasn't until I'd spent the last few years with our team and understanding how much progress the the community has made. And and really, I would say as as Dr. Robbie Scott talked about, there's been a lot of work over the decades, but it's been a lot of the complementary technologies that have enabled fusion to come to the forefront now and be achievable. You know, things like 3D printing mad and things like new materials, science, high speed digital. So these are things that just, just several years ago were not available to the fusion community to utilise in order to create these conditions here on Earth.

MG: Greg, good to talk to you about this. Thank you very much.

GREG TWINNEY: It's been my pleasure. Thanks for the interest.

MG: Greg Twinney CEO of General Fusion, based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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MG: Lazer sounds and 80s electropop that is OMD orchestral manoeuvres in the dark and Electricity. Coming up after your regional update how an AI programme could change the way we communicate from writing school assignments to the speech at your brother's wedding. That's coming up in about 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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The new AI tool that can mimic humans

Guests: Ethan Mollick, Michael Wooldridge, Karin Marley

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. All right. How does this sound?

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[Sound: Dramatic throat clearing]

MG: Welcome to our radio programme about ChatGPT a large language model trained by open A.I. Chat. GPT is a state of the art A.I. that is able to generate human like text in response to user input. Today, we'll discuss the capabilities and limitations of chat. All right. So in case you were wondering, we had the A.I. programme chat actually. That introduction, it's a little stiff, you got to say. So we asked it to do it again, but make it a bit more conversational. Here we go. Round two. Hey there. We welcome to our programme. We are excited to talk to you about ChatGBT a super cool I trained by open A.I. ChatGPT is a large language model that can generate human like text in response to what you say. It's like having a conversation with a robot, but one that's actually smart and can hold a decent conversation. So grab a cup of coffee and settle in because this is going to be an interesting ride, a bad conversational kind of corny as well, but it's a robot. What do you expect? Since its launch a few weeks ago, the ChatGPT, an AI tool has been sparking debate and a lot of attention. Some two million plus people have used this so far. Ethan Mollick is one of them. He's a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of The Unicorn Shadow Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Start-Ups Founders and Investors. Ethan, good morning.

ETHAN MOLLICK: Good morning.

MG: So we just heard a little bit of how chat works in that introduction, which the A.I. wrote itself just briefly and simply. Can you walk us through how this thing works? What's going on?

ETHAN MOLLICK: Yes, of course. So it is a what's called a large language model like you've heard and The Age, basically trying to predict what you would want to see in response to your response and writing that out to you. So it's, you know, talk about artificial intelligence. There's no artificially smart person behind it, but it feels like it. So this is one of several of these models you may have been seeing them happen over the last couple of years, over the last week or two. What happened is that these chat bots were released over a chat and that is, you know, feels much more realistic and has really crossed a line where the kind of work it's doing actually feels human as opposed to talking to a machine.

MG: So when you log into it, you essentially type a phrase, you know what you a question that you wanted to answer or something that you wanted to do, and then what happens?

ETHAN MOLLICK: Then what happens is, a, the air is going to respond to you, right. It's predicting based on all the information it's been trained on, which seems like it's most of the Internet. What the right answer would be that you want to get to, what phrase would make you happy? And it's giving that back to you. And what's great about it is because it's interactive, because you can ask you to do things like, I heard you doing the introduction, we can ask you to change its approach or write the same thing back as a poem. It actually can adapt to what you need or want.

MG: So I did this yesterday, the writing the thing back as a poem. I asked it for a paragraph on how dogs are better than cats, and it gave me a paragraph on how dogs are better than cats. Then I said, Can you reverse it and talk about the different perspective on that? And so I talked about how cats are better than dogs, that I asked it to write it in the form of a poem. And then I asked her to write it in a form of a poem that would be written by Chaucer. And it came out like old English. I, I don't entirely understand what was happening on the screen in front of me, but it was quite something. What are you doing with it? How have you been using it?

ETHAN MOLLICK: Well, I think I've gone through the same process as you, which is I started using I've been using these for a while and they kind of were toys. And then I started playing into the way you did where, you know, I'm having a kind of Jerry, all this kind of fun language and, you know, rap battles and fake news transcripts. And then you start to realise the other things that's useful for us. I'm at the centre of entrepreneurship, so taking the perspective of somebody who might want to start a business, I asked it to give me 20 business ideas for a doctor who no longer wanted to practise medicine, and it gave me 20 business ideas that I asked to take. The test idea looked really great and I asked you to describe it more, to describe it more. And one of the suggestions it did was it had was to write a letter to a hospital about a plan that it had developed for me. I asked you to create the letter and it wrote the entire letter, and I've asked it to create lectures and syllabi. Now, I'm not giving those to my classes yet. It creates assignments of great assignments I've pasted in my book and asked for a summary of it. So once you start to play with it, you start to realise it can do a lot of different things and I think we're still trying to understand what all that means for jobs and education and work.

MG: We're going to talk about that in a moment. But there are a couple of things just broadly that people have said about how groundbreaking this is. One is so somebody said yesterday, in some ways this is an iPhone moment for artificial intelligence, that it changes how we think about what the technology could be. Is that fair to say?

ETHAN MOLLICK: I think so. An inflexion point in Iceland moment. I think this is there is a pretty large fundamental change. The technology hasn't changed radically from four weeks ago. The older versions of GPT three, but this newer version with the Chat 5 plus GPT 3.5, the thing we're interacting with now seems to be qualitatively different, seems to be feel different when we're working with it. And I think that is a huge change and I think you could see it by the rapid adoption.

MG: The other thing that somebody said is that in some ways this could replace Google because you're asking it's something and it comes back not just with, you know, one piece of information, but with context as well.

ETHAN MOLLICK: I think it could replace Google. Right now, it has a tendency to lie with extreme competence or elucidate and make up facts. And so if you use like Google, be disappointed. It's also not connected to the Internet. So it's not going to be able to give you the answers to your to your questions the way you might have wanted to. But it's not just Google, right? The question is also if it can create lectures and syllabi and writing for you, what else does that do besides that doesn't Google doesn't already do right now.

MG: Ethan, stay on the line with us. I want to bring one of the guests into our conversation to talk more about some of the concerns that people have around this technology in addition to the benefits. Michael Wooldridge is with the Department of Computer Sciences at Oxford University, the author of A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. Michael, hello to you.

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: Hi. Nice to talk to you.

MG: Good to have you on the programme. What do you make of Chad? I mean, is it an inflexion point? Is it a game changer when it comes to how we think of artificial intelligence and the way that we use artificial intelligence?

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: I think it's a landmark event. There've been a lot of events, a really interesting an artificial intelligence over the last 15 years which have been which have been really great science, but which I haven't personally been overly excited about, like chess programmes that could beat me have been around for 45 years, so I'm not excited about an even bet, a chess programme. But this does feel like something different. I mean, this does feel like a bunch of technologies which people have been working on over the years of now reach the point where where they can go mass market. And so, yeah, I think this is a very exciting moment.

MG: What to you is most intriguing about what this technology's dangling in front of us?

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: So I think it's a couple of things. I mean, I'm sure many of your listeners will have heard the Turing test, the test by Alan Turing, that basically Turing was thinking about whether we could say when a machine was intelligent. And he said, well, if you can't distinguish what that machine is doing from what a human being is doing, then stop arguing about it and accept that it's intelligent. And I think we've we've we've now passed that test. I mean, that test has been passed at some point in the last two years, for all intents and purposes. Now, what that might actually mean is the Turing test wasn't the most important test for intelligence. But nevertheless, it's a it's an important moment. These tools can produce language, which is, you know, certainly at the level of, you know, of an undergraduate student or a typical, you know, a typical office worker. And that feels like a really important moment.

MG: And an alarming moment. I mean, one of the things immediately that people have said is that, yes, those undergraduate students could use this to write assignments and schools wouldn't be able to tell whether the student wrote it or whether the A I wrote the assignment first. Is the technology that good? Is it is it from your usage and from your understanding, good enough to be able to blur that line?

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: I think with a little, you'd still need to put in a little bit of effort. But yeah, I mean, I think you would be able to to produce school assignments, for example, maybe not university assignments at this time, but school assignments, certainly essays with a little bit of work because they can be it can be too good and the text can be a little bit unnatural in places in the sense that it doesn't sound like you, but with a little bit of work is certainly at that level. So that's going to prompt rethinking by educators. But I mean, my standard point that I make when this comes up is I can remember the moral panic when pocket calculators arrived in the 1970s and people said, you know, this is the end of mathematics because nobody's going to like this. Nobody's going to bother learning mathematics. I mean, what pocket calculators do is they make you better mathematicians. They relieve you from a tedious and error prone task. And for the most part, that's exactly what this technology's going to do. And it's going to be embedded in word processes, and it's just going to help you write better. Text is going to be embedded in your in your email programme and it's going to help you write better written emails. You know, you can give it a rough draught of something. I mean, this is one of the really cool demos that you can try that anybody can go and try out right now. Just give it a rough draught of something and say it this, improve this, and it'll do, it'll do a pretty creditable job. So I think that yeah we are at the it does raise challenges and educators are going to have to rethink how they evaluate students. I think viva voce exams are going to come back in fashion. We're going to have to talk to the students rather than just to trust them to write their essays at home. But for the most part, this is just going to be a tool that people use, and it's just going to relieve them of a lot of tedium and make them better workers and better students.

MG: Ethan, you mentioned that you're a professor and you've been kind of thinking about how this could play out in the classroom. Are you worried that your students could be handing in assignments written by AI?

ETHAN MOLLICK: I basically guarantee it's only happening. You know, I think it's, you know, undergraduates and MBAs. I introduced this, you know, this programme to the class last Tuesday. By last Thursday, two days later, I asked how many of them use the technology and only two or three more tried it before I introduced it by the time I had to. The second class is a couple of days later, about 70% of hands went up that people had been using it for some other use in between. And that obviously is not cheating, right? Or at least that was what we're talking about. But people were asking it to find the error in their computer assignment, polishing up draughts, explaining a concept to them like they were five years old. So I think we're going to see this everywhere. And I think it does create a pretty big change to how we think about how people are interacting with information and what we teach them versus what the computer is teaching them. It's a really interesting time.

MG: Let me ask you more about that, because you wrote, I think there are three points to this. One is and you've hinted at this already, it's a toy. The second is it's a great way to create lots of written work. But the third is this changes so many things. So how does this tool change so many things?

ETHAN MOLLICK: Well, I hate to be vague about that, but those are my sort of levels of revelation of working with chatbots. Right? First, you have to create a poem about cats and dogs. Then you think, Oh, I can use this, you know, cheat on homework, or someone will maybe not me. And then I think the third level is okay. So it writes computer code for you, right? So I have written small running Java programming language. I don't know what I, but I should backslash this. But when one of the students was distracted to answer a bunch of questions, but by the end of class had built a working demo of their entrepreneurial idea by just telling the AI to do that and making some minor corrections. There is something about multiplying the amount of work that we can do that is both very liberating. But I think also scary because I don't think we know quite, you know, what the expectations would be about what's done by human, what's the other machine and what kinds of jobs it should replace. I think that, you know, it's, it's a very open question.

MG: Michael, let me ask you about the scary part of this, because essays or maybe an application letter to a job are one thing. One of the concerns that people have raised is the issue of fake news that you could use this thing just to generate. Nonsense, but nonsense that would perhaps seem almost true if you squinted at it or more, and then it could end up being published, it could end up being disseminated and people could believe it. How big of a concern is that?

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: Yeah, I think that's a very real concern. And we need social media companies in particular to really start taking this issue seriously. You know, where social media is a difficult time at the moment. We've seen we've seen the turmoil at Twitter and so on. And this is an issue that they absolutely need to get to grips with. It's not an easy issue. I mean, one of the challenges is, you know, if you want to start planting fake news stories, you can create the skeleton of a fake news story, ask it to produce 100 different variations on that, and then just use 100 different fake Twitter, Twitter IDs or Facebook IDs to start spreading that. And it's easy to automate the very plausible production of of fake news. And that absolutely is a concern.

MG: So what do you do about that, then?

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: Well, we need we need social media companies to work harder at detecting it. And and, you know, for example, the issue of verified IDs on Twitter, I thought when it was a really big one, I mean, the blue tick that you used to get on Twitter meant that you could have some confidence that you were looking at a real person. And it's not clear that that's true anymore. So they they need this is a big this is a big research challenge and need to get to grips with. One really interesting idea I've heard and this is a long way from being reality, but the idea one idea is that what you can do is you can in these these programmes produce text that you can insert a hidden digital signature into the text, which just signifies that that's produced by a computer so you can easily detect it. If that could be made to work, that would be a very, very neat solution. But that's some way off. And I think where we're facing more immediate concerns in the short term, what.

MG: About the idea of it cannibalising people's jobs within journalism, you could imagine again, it could generate stories that wouldn't be fake news, but that could end up being published in a newspaper. You don't need somebody to write that story for you. You just have the I do it. You could have artists, you could have and we saw this with the I image app lens, creating a lot of concern around artists, seeing their livelihoods being taken away by this. How concerned should we be about that, that people's jobs that they have now? Again, this is some sort of dystopian belief that people have worried about for a long time, but that that actually could be happening right now because of this technology.

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: So yeah, I think there's a whole bunch of things to say about that. I mean, the automation of labour is far from new. Right? I mean, the, you know, the first time the first time somebody hooked up an ox to a to a plough that was relieving a human being of a job. But it didn't eliminate the need for farmers. It just made them better farmers. And I think, in fact, for white collar workers who spend an awful lot of that time and huge numbers of stews is a huge part of my job. Just sifting through information, collating information from different sources, summarising information, so on. And that's a huge number of jobs. This is not probably not going to replace them. It's just going to be a tool that they start to use in their jobs. Human beings do an awful lot more than just those those things. So I'm not I'm not losing sleep over that for that. But for the moment, I mean, I think it's going for the vast majority of people. It's just going to be another tool that they use and it's going to make them more productive. And it's going to take the strain of a tedious and difficult task and make them better at that.

MG: Ethan, do you worry about you talked about, you know, writing code in a computer language that you can't speak, that the people who are paid to write that code then would still be out of a job because you could just ask the chat bot to do it for you?

ETHAN MOLLICK: I agree. In general, when a technological change like this happens, right, people find other jobs or increase their performance. And I think that's most likely what's going to happen. But I think what's really interesting about this is that it's affecting so many broad based careers. Do I think most programmers will be out of a job now, but do I think that some set of programmers might be able to be replaced by AI in a better way? Possibly. Are there other job categories that might change? You know, if you can have the draught material written for you, for all of the programmes that you're going to read, and you have to you have to modify it just a little bit. Do we need as many programmers doing the same kind of work? I don't know the answers to these questions. I think we could be hopeful based on how technology has affected work in the past. But there have been times also where we switched from those old school telephone exchanges to having automated telephones that that, you know, was a beeping button that it would directly without an operator. A lot of operators lost jobs, too. So I don't think it's 100% clear that it's going to have the same effect on every industry and every job. And I think the fact that it will affect so many at once is what makes this a little bit unusual.

MG: Michael, we're just about out of time. So very briefly, knowing what you know about this and what you said already, do you think the net benefits of this outweigh the concerns that you have?

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: I think yeah. I think that for now, certainly the benefits outweigh the wider concerns, but it doesn't mean that we should be aware of the concerns. I mean, we haven't had a chance to talk about the production of toxic content, and it's very easy at the moment to get these programmes, for example, to produce racist or misogynistic or transphobic text. And they try the design is to try to prevent that, but you don't have to work too hard to do that. So there's there's a whole bunch of concerns that we should be aware of. But yeah, on balance, I think this this is going to be interesting times.

MG: Interesting times, indeed. It's good to talk to you both about this. Thank you very much.

ETHAN MOLLICK: Thank you.

MG: Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Michael Wooldridge is a professor with the Department of Computer Sciences at Oxford University and the author of A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. Love to hear from you. What you should do is try this thing out just in your favourite search engine. Look for ChatGBT. You can sign up, it's free and then you can use it. And then having used it. Are you alarmed? Are you excited by this? You can email us or ask the chat. Good machine to do it for you. thecurrent@cbc.ca.

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MG: This is The Current. My name is Matt Galloway. On Monday's programme we spoke about losing your sense of smell and I talked with Kerri Wall about what it was like to have anosmia and how that diagnosis has changed her life.

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I felt so, so disconnected from myself. I could no longer smell any of my own body smells like I no longer kind of felt like a mammal in that way. And I think that's something people can't get used to. You think, Oh, I didn't smell myself, whatever. It's it's a very alien feeling. And I felt really like not human.

MG: Kerri lost her sense of smell four years ago. Researchers are working to find out what causes Anosmia and what can be done to restore someone's ability to smell, including creating perhaps an electronic nose that you would wear. Many of you could benefit from something like that. The Current senior producer Karin Marley is here with some of your mail. Karin, good morning.

KARIN MARLEY: Hey, Matt, many people wrote to us, as you said, about losing their own sense of smell. So this is from Ibrahim Bayaa. I am 41 years old and I've been having issues with smells since I was about 20. It started with strong allergies and congestion and I had a minor operation. Ever since, I've mostly lost my sense of smell. Oddly, there are random times when I will get my sense back for maybe an hour or a day or two. I've learnt to live with it and out of all the senses it's maybe the easiest one to live without. That being said, when I do get my sense of smell back, I hurry and try everything I love like grinding coffee, drinking coffee, having certain foods.

MG: It would appear that coffee is something that quite a few listeners prioritise when it comes to taste and smell. This is from Martha Dolan. I had COVID in May of 2022, noticed after I stopped feeling totally dreadful that my morning coffee just tasted like brown hot water. There was none of that lovely morning anticipation of starting my day with a cup of coffee. Then I started noticing that my sense of taste was off for other things I could sense. Salty, sweet, spicy, but not really taste as I remembered it. My family doctor says it could take a year for things to get back to normal, but I don't think anyone really knows. Now I can smell certain things like rum and I still enjoy chocolate, but do I really taste it? I am constantly questioning if what I am sensing is really a taste or a memory.

KARIN MARLEY: That's interesting. John Simpson is 72 years old and says it's been about 50 years since he had a working sense of smell or taste. He writes, though I have long ago adopted, I do agree with the notion that it places you in a kind of enclosure or bubble that prevents you from experiencing some things that many other people experience. There are misses in my life. I miss the smell of freshly cut grass, the smell of bread baking in the oven. I miss being able to savour the aroma of a lovely meal before eating. And of course, with the loss of my sense of taste, I miss the flavours of that lovely meal. There are many more misses, but I suppose I've also experienced some benefits. When my children were infants, I was never deterred from changing diapers. At times I was probably the go to guy because smell was not an issue for me. Similarly, I was stoic when passing a dead skunk in the car while everyone else held their noses.

MG: Ankaret Dean wrote us with a similar story. During the 1990s, I was invited to teach a workshop away from home. I had a terrible cough and was prescribed an antibiotic. After the first day, I woke up with no sense of smell or taste. It was a mystery. I phoned the drugstore and was told it was a taste perversion and to stop taking the drug and it would all be better in a few days. Well, it's never got better. And I have had to learn to live with a very poor sense of smell and taste. My class took me out for a dinner at the end of the week in a very exclusive restaurant, and I could not taste a thing. Now, after all these years I have adapted. The difficulty is cooking and tasting. I usually ask people to add salt to the soup, sugar to the dessert. I do whatever the recipe tells me and hope for the best.

KARIN MARLEY: Joshua Molinsky in Toronto writes I lost my sense of smell approximately two weeks after getting a mostly mild case of COVID. It returned a couple of weeks later, accompanied by a phantom, soapy taste that would show up randomly. A couple of weeks after that, the soap taste disappeared and seems replaced by the smell of cigarettes, which follows me for about 80% of the day. It's not just a whiff of cigarettes either. I feel like I'm sitting in a bingo hall in 1982 and my nostrils actually feel the burning from the cigarette smoke. It sucks, it's mentally draining, but I'm aware it's not the worst of stories and I'm trying to stay upbeat. But it does stink, like cigarettes.

MG: You get a mental image of the bingo hall in 1982. Debbie Spindler lost her sense of smell, but only for a few days following a sinus infection. Debbie writes, I was so grateful for the return of my senses after that, that I ran around the house smelling everything and anything just to reassure myself. Smells and tastes are so associated with our memories and everyday life. The smell of the beach, the forest, the rain, sugar beets in the fall, asphalt on a hot summer day. The taste of a particular raspberry jam all take me back to memories of vacations, my childhood and just walking to school. It left such an impression on me that when at a later date, my doctor. Prescribed a medication that had a possible side effect of loss of smell and taste. I could not bring myself to take it. So I empathise greatly with all those who have lost this immense source of joy.

KARIN MARLEY: And finally, Judy Dryden in Victoria, B.C., and emphasises with our guest, Gary Carey. Well, she writes Carey said it perfectly when she said she could no longer smell her son. As a parent, I remember that being such an important way of getting to know my daughters when they were born. I regret that I've never had the pleasure with my grandson. I'm grateful that I have my other senses. But anyone who says they willingly give up their sense of smell and taste has never been in that position. Those senses are part of the richness of life.

MG: Karin, thank you very much.

KARIN MARLEY: Welcome.

MG: Karin Marley, senior producer on the programme. Thanks to everybody who wrote in, you can get in touch about anything you hear in the programme. Just email us at thecurrent@cbc.ca. that is the current for this Wednesday cuz. Up next on CBC Radio one later this week, more of our coverage of the UN Conference on Biodiversity in Montreal. We're actually going to be broadcasting live from Montreal on Friday. I'll be speaking with political leaders and we'll also have an Indigenous LED conversation about conservation and how Indigenous communities are leading conservation efforts across this country. Leave you this morning with an introduction to one of our guests, Valerie Courtois, director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. Here she is talking about land guardians, indigenous people designated to care for their lands. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening.

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And the movement of guardians has really exploded in the last five years. We've gone from having about 30 programmes across what is now known as Canada to now over 120 in First Nations alone. That means that there are thousand guardians every day whose job it is to make sure that incidents and and data collection and also they can be ambassadors on behalf of their nations. Too many Canadians have never met an indigenous person, and having guardians out in the landscape increases the chance of people who are going to their cottages and who are using the land even for work as foresters and other industries to meet guardians and to meet indigenous peoples and get to know them.

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