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The Current Transcript for April 5, 2023

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SINEAD BOVELL: What does it look like to go into a physician's office, sequence your genome and have AI design a medication based on your unique illness?

MATT GALLOWAY: Artificial intelligence is having a moment, one that extends well beyond using chat GPT to help write your resume or your term paper. The latest in computer science has been cast as a way to help solve some of our biggest problems from health to climate change. And it's developing fast enough that some of the biggest names in tech wrote an open letter calling for a pause. In an hour, separating the promise from the hype in AI. Also this morning, it's the opposite of pumping the brakes. Coming up, why researchers are moving forward quickly on new guidelines for treating pediatric pain. Plus.

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MALE SPEAKER: Five metres to go. Let’s see her put her head down to the finish. MacIntosh, a new world record. Another world record. Summer MacIntosh.

[crowd cheering]

MG: Summer MacIntosh Can't stop breaking world records. In an hour, how the 16-year-old is the latest product of a Canadian swimming program designed to spot future winners. We begin, though, with the arrest of a former president. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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DONALD TRUMP

Guests: Azi Paybarah, Jay Krehbiel

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ALVIN BRAGG: Under New York state law, it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and an intent to conceal another crime. That is exactly what this case is about. 34 false statements made to cover up other crimes. These are felony crimes in New York State no matter who you are. We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct.

MG: That was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaking yesterday after former U.S. President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts. It is the first time a former American president has been criminally charged. Azi Paybarah covered the arraignment. He's a breaking politics reporter for The Washington Post. Azi, good morning.

AZI PAYBARAH: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. I guess just broadly, let's start off with these 34 felonies that Donald Trump has been charged with. Just tell me about them big picture.

AZI PAYBARAH: So big picture is that Donald Trump used his money, sent it to a lawyer who eventually gave money to an adult film actress to prevent her from saying that she had a sexual encounter with the president. The encounter allegedly happened years earlier. The payments were made just as people were voting in the 2016 election.

MG: What is interesting here is that in advance of this, there was a lot of attention paid to that adult film actress Stormy Daniels. But the prosecutors are also citing other hush money payments to a doorman and a Playboy playmate who wanted to sell her story about an affair, apparently. Was that a surprise?

AZI PAYBARAH: There was some initial, it was a little bit of a surprise since the Stormy Daniels payment was known for a little while. The payments to the Playboy Playmate was known, but it was not clear that it would be part of this case. And the payment to the doorman had been. It was known to have happened. Again, it wasn't clear that this was going to be part of the case. So it was a bit of a surprise, but not entirely new details. It was just another layer to this evolving case.

MG: What does the prosecution say would have been the motives for these payments that, as we heard from Alvin Bragg, he said, are part of a larger story here?

AZI PAYBARAH: So it's a little bit hard to appreciate this. But apparently, the president did not want a particular unflattering story to appear about him. Now, it's hard to understand because one of Trump's brands or ways he presents himself is a person who is boastful, no shame, always leaning forward. But allegations or stories that he had sexual encounters with a Playboy playmate and also with an adult film actress, apparently, that was something he did not want to appear. And I think it was because the timing of those encounters overlapped with when he was married, which could have caused him if not trouble with voters and supporters, then maybe in his own house.

MG: And again, it's not just burying potentially embarrassing information. The prosecution has said in some ways, this is falsifying business records.

AZI PAYBARAH: Right. Because the money apparently came from the Trump company which he runs. And he runs it almost as a personal bank account even though it's not. And then because it was impacting a presidential election, it needed to be accounted, according to prosecutors, in FEC filings, the way that campaigns normally account for spending on things like ads and staff. So the district attorney is arguing that it was a campaign expense paid through a business and neither one of those columns was accurately reflected in the records.

MG: The sense would be that if you're trying to pay to bury these bad stories, this could be part of a broader scheme to influence that election.

AZI PAYBARAH: Exactly. Which would have to be paid for the way you would pay for an ad or a mailing or a radio spot.

MG: How serious are these charges? I mean, there's a salacious element to this because of the character involved and the characters involved. But how serious are these charges?

AZI PAYBARAH: I am not entirely clear of the exact penalties, but the fact that they are bringing out these details is resurfacing the underlying accusations, which again may cause problems if not with the electorate, then personally with Trump, and it is rattling his ability to control his environment. But legally, this could be incredibly problematic, although it would not prevent him from continuing his campaign for the presidency. You could run for president while being incarcerated if need be, which has happened once before in American history.

MG: So what was the scene like at the courthouse yesterday? A lot of talk in the lead up to this about what might or might not unfold. What did you see?

AZI PAYBARAH: My colleagues who were down at the courthouse described it as an unprecedented scene in terms of supporters and counter protesters outside a locked down courthouse building, which is usually pretty open, which hasn't been done even in a place that is used to dealing with high profile people coming in, celebrities. We've had sitting mayors who had to show up for jury duty and, you know, any number of celebrities going in and out. This was beyond that. We've never had a defendant under the protection of the Secret Service be arrested and submit themselves to the custody of the courts. So the hallways were locked down. People couldn't move as easily. It was unclear when exactly things were going to be happening. There was a very tight control of movement when Trump was coming in and out of the building.

MG: But no violence.

AZI PAYBARAH: No. I mean, there are videos outside the courthouse of people shoving and pushing. I mean, whenever you get a large number of people, you know, especially on a topic like this, there's going to be some encounters. I spent part of my day outside of Trump Tower. There was a lot of people sort of gawking, looking, crowded sidewalks more than usual, even a little bit of shouting, which turned out to be two Trump supporters agreeing with each other, but no violence. And New York is a place that, again, is very used to having a lot of bold-faced names come in and out and people just move along their way.

MG: Aside from posting on his social media network, which he has been doing this morning, what is your understanding as to what Donald Trump's lawyers have said about how they will look at defending their client, what they're going to do in the face of these sorts of charges?

AZI PAYBARAH: So they have tried to dismiss the case outright. They suggested in public comments, or at least Trump has, about possibly requesting to move the case to a different part of New York City that's more amenable to him in terms of how people voted in the last presidential elections. But what his lawyers have basically said is that to bring this case forward the way the Manhattan district attorney did, the DA is arguing that there was an underlying crime that these falsified documents were covering up, that it wasn't just the payment. The payment was happening while another crime was being committed essentially. The Manhattan district attorney has not publicly stated what that underlying crime is. And without that, it appears that the only thing Trump is facing a penalty for is falsifying these documents. And in the courtroom and the court of public opinion, that may not be as strong without that underlying detail which has not been presented. So Trump's lawyers are arguing that this is a minor bookkeeping error as some of his supporters have said. And they're going to try to play it like that, that it's red tape bookkeeping. You know, Lord knows how many people have filed taxes, you know, checking the wrong box and whatnot. And they're trying to cast it as something like that and not a bigger conspiracy about a sexual encounter.

MG: Just finally, before I let you go, I mean, one of the things that came up is the judge raising concerns about some of the posts that the former president has made targeting the district attorney and the judge himself. He said, please discuss this with your client. Trump then went on and spoke last night in a public event at his estate in Florida, calling the prosecutor a criminal. He called the federal special counsel a lunatic bomb thrower. What do you make of the back and forth between Trump and the judge who's presiding over this?

AZI PAYBARAH: I mean, Trump is presenting this as a campaign. And throughout his entire life, he has made every attempt to regulate him through law or customs or regulations. He has made that and he's tried to cast that in terms of politics as oppositional forces rather than acknowledging the legitimacy of a court or any power outside of his own. So when someone tells him to not speak like this, he views it as the same as if Joe Biden, the president of United States, would have said it to him. So his lawyers seem unable to control or deter him from saying anything on social media or in his speeches. And it's not clear what ramifications it will have in a courtroom where at times, people's ability to best represent their own cases can be called into question. You know, this is a setting that he cannot control. And if the judge asks his lawyers to deter him from speaking like this and he's not able to, there could be consequences for that.

MG: We'll be watching. Azi, thank you very much.

AZI PAYBARAH: Thank you.

MG: Azi Paybarah is a breaking politics reporter with The Washington Post. While Donald Trump is the first American president to be charged with a crime, far from the first head of state around the world to face charges. Jay Krehbiel is an associate professor of political science at West Virginia University. Jay, good morning to you.

JAY KREHBIEL: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

MG: This is a big story when you take a look at what's happening in the United States. But as I said in the introduction, perhaps not unusual around the world. Tell me more about how this has played out elsewhere.

JAY KREHBIEL: Yes. So we've seen perhaps not similar in this specific fact pattern, but similar in the sense of the office or position where heads of state or heads of government, as you said, have been tried for a number of things. Most often, corruption tends to be the most common charge. But we've seen this, and I think it's worth noting, in a number of well-established democracies. Whether that's in France where multiple presidents, including in continuing cases with Nicolas Sarkozy, the prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, which some of those cases which stem back nearly 12 years had just now been resolved or ongoing in a country like Israel, which perhaps is a useful analogy in some respects to the ongoing case in the United States where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was charged with corruption. And then that case slowly proceeded. And he was then out of office while the case proceeded and now is back in office, which perhaps lends some interesting potential lessons for this country as the campaign continues with this indictment and charge sort of ongoing.

MG: How often is it that those former leaders who would be charged are actually convicted in those cases?

JAY KREHBIEL: It's a kind of hit and miss. So and you'll see almost all the time they will appeal. So sometimes those appeals, for example, in the case of Brazil with the now President Lula, he had been convicted in the big corruption scandal in that country, but then that was thrown out for political bias, as it turned out, with the initial judge and his conviction was vacated. In other instances, we've seen that the charges, the initial charges seem more likely to stick. And then it's those appeals that oftentimes sort of allow them to get off the hook as it were. And Some of that's still yet to be seen in the case of France, Nicolas Sarkozy's case is under appeal as it currently stands. And I think that's perhaps also noteworthy that it often comes to that stage because prosecutors generally do not want to bring a case against someone as high profile as a president or prime minister unless they really feel like they have a strong case. If you're going to go after someone of that high profile, you want to make sure that you've got it as close to correct as you can.

MG: I don't know if you can disentangle this story from the personalities at the heart of it. But what are the differences aside from those personalities, maybe you can't, between Donald Trump's case and the cases from the other parts of the world? Is there any material difference that you see?

JAY KREHBIEL: I think there's a couple of things worth noting. And you're right that the personalities certainly play an outsized role in many respects, but there's a couple aspects worth noting. One is in the United States, District attorney. So in this case, this is the district attorney in Manhattan. These are local prosecutors who are generally in most states elected. And they're elected with a partisan label to them, which is different than effectively most of the rest of the world. So when the president or his allies talk about this as a Democrat witch hunt or something like that, they're pointing to the fact that the district attorney was in fact elected as a Democrat. Now, that doesn't mean that he's politically biased in how he carries out his job, but it makes it much easier for politicians to use that label against them to say this is a Democrat in the office of district attorney bringing the case against me. Whereas in most of the world, the prosecutorial roles are more housed either in say a justice ministry or a more insulated and independent, if you will, non-partisan edifice. And that can help to insulate at least to a better degree than I think what we're seeing here where you have, as you were reeling to earlier with your previous guest, like the former president attacking all of these different actors in the process and going after the judge and looking at whether the judge's daughter was perhaps involved with the political campaign and therefore, that's bias. They will use all of these opportunities available to them to try and make it appear political.

MG: Well, and they're already using them. I mean, yesterday, have a listen. This is one of Donald Trump's attorneys, Jim Trusty, speaking about that DA Calvin Bragg.

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JIM TRUSTY: You know, when you have a guy that runs for office saying I will get Donald Trump, it shouldn't be a surprise that he will string together a flimsy case because he feels like, hey, this is how I got here. I've got to do it. And it turns upside down how prosecutors are supposed to act in this country.

MG: Donald Trump posting this morning on his social network, Truth Social, “The Democrats have weaponized law enforcement in our country”. Not to give a statement like that undue weight, but if there is a political partisan element to this, how does that shape the debate around this process? Does it create in the minds of people who already have questions about this, does it give them further ammunition in some ways?

JAY KREHBIEL: It certainly gives ammunition to people who want the public to think that way. And as the statement you just played shows, that they're not going to hesitate to use this. It's not as though this partisan component of local prosecutorial offices is new. It's been there for quite some time, but it's being used in a new way. This is perhaps an example of just another norm of being broken by the former president and how they are in a sense weaponizing this particular aspect of our system to try and use to their own defence.

MG: What's the threat that that poses to the rule of law?

JAY KREHBIEL: I don't think it's a trivial one. I mean, in past research, my colleagues and I have generally found that Americans are still quite committed to the rule of law. But what is concerning is that how one defines the rule of law can change if you are following partisan cues. And if we can no longer agree on what it means to have a strong rule of law system and that it means opposite things to some people, this indictment is a perfect example of the rule of law. But to other people, it's the total opposite that it's a complete travesty when it comes to the rule of law. And if we can't at least allow the process to play out and as I mentioned earlier, a lot of times with these high profile cases, it comes to appeals and there's a long ways yet to go. And if we can't agree to at least allow the process to play out, then I think that's a significant concern.

MG: Just in the last couple of minutes that we have, what is the impact of something like this on U.S. democracy? Is it a test of U.S. democracy? And part of this is the fact that Donald Trump is running again for president. He said he's going to run for president and he's involved in a campaign for the primary right now.

JAY KREHBIEL: There's no doubt it's a test. And I think it's worth noting in all of those other countries where former presidents or prime ministers have been tried, that's also been a test there. You know, to say it's happened elsewhere is not to trivialize the significance of it. It certainly puts a lot of pressure on the system and on the people within the country, in this case, on Americans to have continued faith in our justice system, to allow that process to play out. And if people aren't willing to do so or if politicians are going to use it for their own personal political benefit and whatever the consequences to our democracy may be, then that's a bit much more concerning.

MG: Does it worry you personally? I mean, at a time and in a country where polarization, you know, a word that a lot of people use for a lot of different reasons, but it feels like the country is deeply, deeply divided.

JAY KREHBIEL: It's worrisome in the sense that this is sort of like here we go again. It’s kind of some of the feeling of, you know, again, the norm breaking out of calling into question something that I don't think most Americans really were that concerned about in the sense of I think generally, people's confidence in the fundamental, you know, functioning of our legal system was there. There's been some cracks to that with, for example, the Supreme Court and public confidence in that institution wavering to some extent. And this just feels like it's another sort of chip chipping away at some of the sort of core, both norms of our democracy and institutions. But that said, I'm still optimistic that the democracy here is resilient, that most Americans can see that. There are those that are on the edges that are of course going to think differently, but I think the majority of people are still with democracy.

MG: Jay, really glad to talk to you this morning. Thank you very much.

JAY KREHBIEL: Great. Thank you for having me.

MG: Jay Krehbiel is an associate professor of political science at West Virginia University. He was in Morgantown, West Virginia. Your CBC News is on its way. And then

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KATIE BIRNIE: We have to remember, we have to embrace that pain is complicated. We need to tailor what's needed to each child and each family. One size is not going to fit all.

MG: We're going to talk in six minutes about managing chronic pain for children, different ways that we're understanding how children perceive pain and how we could address that. There's new science that's leading the way. We'll tell you about it coming up. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

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CHILDREN’S PAIN

Guest: Katie Birnie

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

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MG: Still to come, Summer MacIntosh. Remember that name? Canada has a lot to boast about when it comes to talent in the pool. In 15 minutes, why Swim Canada says we are in the golden age for that sport, especially for women. But first, how kids cope with pain.

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MG: Pain can be one of the most difficult medical problems to diagnose, especially when it comes to kids. One in five children in Canada will deal with chronic pain before they reach the age of 18. Some experts, though, say that pediatric pain is still often overlooked. And so this week, Canadian researchers published the first ever national health standard for managing pain in children and adolescents. The guidelines were developed by the non-profit groups Health Standards Organization and Solutions for Kids in Pain. Dr. Katie Birnie is a clinical psychologist, associate scientific director of Solutions for Kids in Pain. She chaired the working group that developed the standard. Katie, good morning.

KATIE BIRNIE: Hi. Good morning.

MG: What is wrong now when it comes to how we diagnose kids in pain?

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah, it's an important question. And I think as we're starting to talk, I also want to be talking about not just these chronic pains that last months to years, but also these short term pains, these procedural pains, these medical procedures that are happening. And the real problem is that we know we have science backed solutions for managing this pain in children, but children aren't actually getting access. Their care they get every day to day is not based on the best available science that we know works.

MG: Why is that? I mean, there are historical reasons that would lead to people thinking differently about how kids experience pain, right?

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah, absolutely. So as recently as the 1980s, current standard of care we thought based on best available knowledge was actually that children didn't experience pain the same way adults do. We thought that the infant brain in particular was too immature to experience pain. And babies in the 1980s used to undergo open heart surgeries with no anesthetic, just paralytic so that they wouldn't move.

MG: This was in the 1980s.

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah, in the early 1980s. Yeah. That was standard of care. That's what we knew at the time.

MG: Wow! And so coming out, I mean, we're not in the 1980s and that's not happening, thankfully, anymore. But when you take a look at this, and you talked about not just chronic pain, but individual kind of procedural pain, what are some of the examples where we're getting this wrong, where we're misreading the pain that kids might be in?

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah. I mean, there's a number of examples, I think. Even in terms of these medical procedures I talk about, there are many really simple, effective solutions, things like numbing creams that can go on the skin and in addition to medications, using psychosocial strategies like distraction or physical strategies like comfort positioning for those. You can see as I'm talking about them, they're very simple. But we know from science done here in Canada that many children, especially children in hospital, don't have access to all of those really simple techniques.

MG: And so tell me about the national standard. Why do we need a standard to understand how better to approach this?

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah. So as you mentioned in the intro, this is the first national health standard for pain management in kids in the world, actually, and there isn't one in adults. So we're really leading the way by setting a national standard for what kids and their families can expect. And the standard applies to all children seen in any hospital in Canada starting from birth up to the age of 18, for any type of pain that they may experience. So I mentioned those medical procedures, but also think about pain from surgeries or chronic pain that you mentioned as well. And so one of the reasons we need national health standards is we need to set the bar for what all children and families can expect, a consistent care no matter where you are in Canada. And this also responds to a 2021 action plan for pain in Canada put forward by the Canadian Pain Task Force and Health Canada. So it's something we need to do and we should have already been doing.

MG: A consistent approach is important no matter where you are, but also no matter who you are. Tell me what we know about how treatment for and I guess diagnosis of pain has broken down in kids along racial lines.

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah. And this is a commitment we've really made in the standard as well because we recognize that issues such as racism, oppression and ableism are also an issue in how we treat pain in children. And so we really wanted to make sure that that was captured. And we engaged with some additional experts beyond the phenomenal working group that we had to make sure that we did this in the right way. And you're right, Indigenous children, particularly First Nations youth, we know, are disproportionately impacted by pain but struggle to access care or less likely to see a specialist than white children. Black children, unfortunately, there's still the belief out there, the falsity and inaccuracies that they don't experience pain as much as white children do, which we know is not at all the case. And also children who are non-verbal, children who can't communicate their pain experience using words to others are also at risk for challenges in assessing their pain. And therefore, all of these children don't receive the same quality pain management as others. So this national health standard really set out to change that.

MG: This question I ask as somebody who's curious about it, but also as a parent who has gone through this. How do you know? How do you go about figuring out how much pain a child is actually in? Because it can be really difficult to determine that, right?

KATIE BIRNIE: It can be. You're right. And especially with younger kids, and I mentioned kids who can't communicate verbally or in babies. And in those instances, we actually look to behaviours. We look to see markers that we know can be there when pain is experienced, like crying or crying out, the way the body moves is tense, grimace on the face and so on. But of course, that's only a proxy, right? The best we can do is asking children themselves. And children are actually pretty good at letting us know, using words like hurt, as they get older, using words like pain. And there's some great research that's come from here in Canada that's really identified that children are incredibly bad at faking pain, but they're very, very good at suppressing it. So oftentimes, if we don't see those other behaviours, sometimes we assume that there is no pain. But actually, we know that parents and health professionals are likely to underestimate pain that children experience. And if we're seeing those other signs that they might be in pain, we need to take it seriously.

MG: So you can have a standard and that's one thing. But what would you want to see change? You mentioned the procedural thing and you specifically reference something like, you know, numbing creams. We've gone through a pandemic, a lot of kids getting vaccines. Perhaps kids have anxiety around vaccines. Maybe they worry that it's going to hurt. Talk about how that could change with procedures that are put in place in light of these standards and that were meant to meet these standards.

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah. I mean, a national health standard is great because these 34 criteria in it provide a roadmap for organizational leaders. So those managers, those hospital leaders, but also direction to health professionals about what they need to do to make sure that all children are getting quality and equitable pain management. And it's doing so in a comprehensive way in one place with the best science and expert knowledge that we have today. So it lays out things like, you know, what do we need to have systemically within an organization to make sure that tools, resources are accessible to health professionals to properly assess and manage a child's pain? It's making sure that health professionals know what's part of comprehensive pain assessment. When should I be doing it? When do I need to be checking back in? You mentioned distress as part of some of those procedures, and the standard also identifies what we call multi-modal approaches to pain management as the best practice, as the target. This means that medications are important or can be important, but it also means that we need to address those psychosocial strategies like distraction and otherwise. And in some cases, especially for indigenous folks, maybe also the inclusion of traditional medicines, but then also these physical strategies I mentioned as well. So everything needs to be there for proper pain management. And then of course, it sets out quality improvements. How do we make sure that we're doing this on a consistent basis? One of the criteria we include treats or identifies untreated or poorly managed pain as a patient safety incident. So that builds into some of the quality improvement processes along the way. And then of course, key to all of this is that we're partnering with children and their families. So the standard itself also really emphasizes that children and their families need to be equal members of the health team to make sure that the care is individualized to the child's values, priorities, medical history and so on.

MG: It's been a long history of well, if you're in pain, you just take something. And now the conversation obviously is very different. Adults very concerned about pain medication, the addictive nature perhaps of some of that medication. Do you worry that that could influence what doctors but also parents do when it comes to pain in children?

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah. I think what's really, really important that the standard lays out and is that we need to be doing this well from the beginning because if we don't manage pain properly, the short and long term consequences for children are huge. We know from research that it can impact poorly managed pain, especially in babies, can impact how their brains develop, and it can also impact chronic pain you mentioned. Kids who have chronic pain can become adults who have chronic pain, and it puts them at risk for mental health issues and socioeconomic disparities and substance use, which I think is also what you're touching on. And, you know, we know that medications such as opioids can be used safely and effectively and equitably. And the standard lays out some specific criteria in order to do so to make sure that it's part of this multi-modal pain approach, but also that we're not dismissing children's pain and we're not under treating it because of some of the stigma and serious fears that people have.

MG: Just before I let you go, what would your advice be to parents who are listening? You said something really interesting about how kids are not good at faking pain, but they're very good at masking pain. And so briefly, for parents who might be listening, what's the advice that you would give them?

KATIE BIRNIE: Yeah. I think one of the things we hope to see with this standard is that children and families can expect more when they go into hospital or expect the highest quality care. So I would encourage parents to be asking, you know, what's happening in terms of managing my children's pain? And even though our standard focuses on hospital, do the same thing for vaccines, thinking about school based clinics, thinking about, you know, in the physician's office or public health, you can ask and make sure that you're receiving information about how to manage your child's pain, either for yourself and strategies you can use at home or also in a medical setting. And I just would encourage them, ask your child and believe your child. We can do some of these really simple things with no risk and no harm to the child, but incredible benefit if they are experiencing some pain.

MG: Dr. Birnie, thank you very much.

KATIE BIRNIE: Thanks so much for having me.

MG: Dr. Katie Birnie is a clinical psychologist and associate scientific director of Solutions for Kids in Pain.

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CANADIAN SWIMMING

Guest: Byron MacDonald

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. My name is Matt Galloway.

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FEMALE SPEAKER: And here comes the crowd. This is Summer as deep digging as deep as possible. So many hours of training go into this moment. Can she do it?

MALE SPEAKER: Here she comes. Five metres to go. Let's see her put her head down to the finish. MacIntosh, a new world record. Another world record. Summer MacIntosh, 4:25:87. Her second world record of the weekend. What an incredible and dominant performance.

[crowd cheering]

MG: Canada's 16-year-old swimming star Summer MacIntosh was indeed dominant during the national swimming trials in Toronto last weekend. She is not only the Canadian swimmer who's been breaking medals and breaking records lately. She is part of a pack of Canadian swimmers who are doing great things. There would appear to be growing momentum for Canada's swim team as it gets ready for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Is there, as they say, something in the water? Byron MacDonald is a former Canadian swimmer, represented Canada at the 1972 Olympic Games. Also head coach of the University of Toronto's Varsity Blues swimming program, a role he has held since 1978. He is with me in studio. Good morning.

BYRON MACDONALD: Great to be here, Matt. Love talking swimming.

MG: Great to have you here. I want to put your longtime analyst for CBC Sports hat on. Summer MacIntosh, Tell me why she is so great. Penny Oleksiak said she does not die. She is all gas, no brakes. What makes Summer MacIntosh so good?

BYRON MACDONALD: I love that quote by Penny, actually. And it's so true. There just seems to be nothing to hold this woman back. Well, I think what makes her good, there's two or three things that go into the mix. Number one is there's no question she's got talent. And the talent, one could say, well, it's a bit genetic. Her mum swam in the Olympic Games in 1984, so there is that. But it's also just a very athletic family. Her sister, as many people might know, is on the national Figure Skating team. So, you know, there's an athletic ability there, so there's talent. And then at the same time, she's got a phenomenal drive. And I mean, she's motivated, she works incredibly hard, she trains hard and she doesn't panic when she races. You could put all those things together and then get behind the blocks and people get the heebie-jeebies and they panic and they can't, they just don't have the focus to be able to stay with it or they lose their confidence. She doesn't have any of that. As Penny said, she's all gas. She just goes, goes, goes.

MG: And she's part of a bigger story. How good is Canada right now in the pool?

BYRON MACDONALD: Canada's very, very good. This is a golden moment for Canadian swimming. Back in the 70s and 80s, Canada was winning 10 medals at a time at Olympic Games sometimes, and we're one of the top four or five countries in the world. And then there was seven Olympiads we went, Matt, where it was one or two medals and that was it. So kind of the lower points, I guess you'd say, of Canadian swimming program. Now all of a sudden, Canada's usually ranked third or fourth in the world in medal counts, be it the gold medals or the total medals. So it's certainly a golden moment now for Canadian swimming, dominating and having the confidence that you can get up there and win a medal.

MG: And it's not happening by accident. I mean, the confidence and the performances and the results come because of something changing. Tell me what has changed in the program that would produce, identify, but also produce someone like Summer MacIntosh.

BYRON MACDONALD: Well, talent id is very important, of course, But in swimming, unlike team sports like basketball or hockey or whatever, you're in your own lane. You don't have to worry about, you know, somebody put in a full court press on you and screwing up your shot or whatever. So it's pretty easy to identify because it doesn't matter if you're in St. John's or Winnipeg or Vancouver, everybody swims in the same pool, the same length, the same rules. So I could give you a list, Matt, of the best 12-year-olds, and you’d be able to look and say, well, Summer MacIntosh is 15 seconds faster than everybody, I think she's going to be pretty good. And so the talent id is the first step and then the second step is obviously nurturing that. And there has been an influx of funds to Swim Canada over the last 10 years, 15 years. And I think that's helped because now there's a development coach named Ken McKinnon, and he ids these teenagers, young teenagers, and then tries to foster their growth over the next four, five, six, seven years. And I think that's been a big step forward. They get a lot of experience, they bring them away in training camps, they sort of hothouse them a little bit and try to bring their coaches as well because without coaching, you're really not going to take those athletes to the next level.

MG: I’ll ask you about the coaching in a moment, but the id thing is interesting because this is about seeing somebody in the moment but also identifying potential, right? This is where this person is going to be in a couple of years or where they could be a couple of years.

BYRON MACDONALD: And there is a big, huge statistical analysis program, you know, a bunch of algorithms that they're using now based on the past 10 or 15, 20 years. And if you're going this fast at age 16, then you've got a chance to be a star at 18. I mean, obviously, Summer’s thrown a bit of this out of whack because she's so good so young. But we can talk about that in a second, why it happens for women and not men. But you can then decide, well, we're going to put the funding behind these athletes because it looks like on the chart, they've got a big future as opposed to maybe somebody that is not as fast or maybe they're a bit older and maybe they've flatlined.

MG: Is that controversial? You're kind of picking winners in some ways. Not everybody is going to get that money. You're saying this person is going to get it because we see the potential.

BYRON MACDONALD: Yeah. I mean, it's a bit controversial, Matt, but again, swimming is a very cut and dry sport. It's time oriented and everybody knows if you're going a minute, you're better than the person going 1:01.

MG: Because you're racing the clock.

BYRON MACDONALD: That's right. You're racing the clock. And it doesn't matter if you look pretty or you don't look pretty. It doesn't matter if your stroke is, you know, wonderful or if it's kind of all over the map. The point is you're fast and so you're going to get rewarded for that. The controversy comes in because… it’s sort of hard to describe… in the sense of a woman can achieve success at a younger age. And so you'll be able to fund those athletes because it looks like they're on track to be able to do these performances. It takes a lot longer in the men. And so therefore, sometimes, the men might not get as much funding, and particularly when they get older, they fall off the map a little bit quicker and you don't have a critical mass of men. I think the only complaint I would have is that we're losing our senior men. And the best men are still fine, but they like to train with other guys. They like sort of a pack mentality. And whereas the women are pretty good. They don't necessarily need big groups to train. They're very good sort of solitary if they need to be. So we're losing some of the men for that camaraderie. But other than that, it seems to be working on the women's side as well.

MG: How big is an issue of coaching? And I ask you this because you’re a coach. You coached Kylie Masse working at U of T. How big is coaching in terms of a variable to get the best out of that athlete?

BYRON MACDONALD: Coaching is the answer. As somebody once said, you know, a person who coaches himself has a fool for a coach. So in other words, you've got to… But the coaching, Matt, isn't just at this level. It's very, very critical, obviously, at the Olympic level. But it's also critical when you're 11 years old or 10 years old because if you're given a bad technique at that point, really hard to change it once you hit your mid to late teens. So it's really important. Summer MacIntosh started at Lakeshore Aquatic Club, which is in the west end of Toronto. They had some good coaches. They do a good job with the youngsters. Then she moved to the Etobicoke swim club. And they have a great history of international athletes. Unfortunately, her coach died during COVID. So then she moved to the National Centre and the National Centre’s Ben Titley totally did a phenomenal job. I would argue he single handedly brought Canada into the top echelons that they are in now. And then now, she's down in training in Florida.

MG: Does it matter that these athletes follow their coaches, that many of them don't end up staying here because the coaches go somewhere else?

BYRON MACDONALD: No, as long as you can coordinate it. I mean, obviously, we'd love to have most of the athletes here training in Canada. And that did happen over the last decade to a large extent. Again, it was the initiation of the National Centre in Toronto that was sort of initiated by Pierre LaFontaine when he was the CEO of Swim Canada and bringing in Ben Titley over from England as he was their Olympic coach, really kind of was the catalyst that moved Canada into world level. He's the one that was responsible for bringing Penny Oleksiak along. And obviously, we all know how well Penny did. And then Summer had to move over to the National Centre during COVID as well. And I think all the medalists in the last Olympics basically were under Ben's charge at one point or another.

MG: The National Centre, this is the centre that was built for the Pan-Am games.

BYRON MACDONALD: Yes.

MG: And people will often say, well, we're going to build this thing for this circus. The dog and pony show comes to town, we're going to build this thing and there will be a legacy of this thing. And people will say, well, what's the legacy of that? You see what we're talking about now in many ways, the direct result of that building that was created for the Pan-Am games.

BYRON MACDONALD: 100%. I mean, it is a gigantic addition to the swimming program in the country. And even going back to the Commonwealth Games back in Victoria in 1994, they built a great facility out there. And lo and behold, about 10 years later, Ryan Cochrane became one of the best distance swimmers in the world.

MG: And people have seen it in other sports when it comes to speedskating, the bobsled.

BYRON MACDONALD: And what it helps to do, it doesn't just give you a facility that you can wow at and look at, it motivates governments, provincial, national and even cities to get behind it and help fund it and get behind it and push things and make things happen like bringing in elite coaches, centring all your resources, bringing in sports psychologist. All those things can now be centralized and other coaches can learn from those coaches as well. So it is really a huge step forward.

MG: How much is that, the Kylie masse factor, the Oleksiak factor a part of this? People see those swimmers on television during the Olympics. That's when people generally watch. They should be watching swimming all the time, but that's when they watch. And if they're a kid, they think I want to be her. Do you know what I mean? Does that matter at all? Do you see that in the pool?

BYRON MACDONALD: Absolutely. I know the United States channel, and we had some facts as well after Pan-Asia registrations jumped in Canada. I know that jumped in the United States by 30% after Michael Phelps won his eighth Olympic gold medal. So and the larger your base of talent, you can find talent anywhere. You can find talent in Halifax, you can find talent in Timmins, Ontario or wherever. But those athletes have to join the pool first. They got to join a swimming team. And when they see Penny Oleksiak or Michael Phelps, then they’ll join. And that's the first step. And then we hope you have coaches that can identify them and move them forward. So, you know, Kylie Masse is interesting because when she came to swim for me at the University of Toronto, she was only ranked 200th in the world in her stroke. And I mean, you know, there's 20 events. I mean, she was not really in the top 100 overall if you want to look at it like that. So she was a late bloomer. So I just don't want people to think that well, if you're not a world beater by 16, you're really not going to be a success in the sport of swimming. You can be and even in women's swimming. In men's swimming, it definitely takes into their 20s. But in women's swimming, you can do it later in life like Kylie Masse proved because she's obviously now been, I think it's seven years now she's won a medal every big meat she's ever gone to.

MG: Her coach might have had something to do with it.

BYRON MACDONALD: Oh, I hope so.

MG: What is the ceiling for Summer MacIntosh? How good? She's 16. How good can she be?

BYRON MACDONALD: I don't know. The question is interesting because how good she can be. Well, she's already a world record holder, so she can't get much better than that. So.

MG: But people look towards Olympics. They think she’s going to come home with her neck full of medals.

BYRON MACDONALD: Oh, they absolutely do. This will be interesting because the world championships are coming up. And she's gone now from the hunter to the hunted and now everybody's after her as opposed to her being sort of in the background, really. So it'll be interesting how she responds to the pressure. I have no doubt she'll respond brilliantly. She's actually a great racer. I think she actually could have gone even faster this past weekend if anybody would have been close to her. So she's got two or three more Olympics in her. So this is a once in a generation talent. I hope everybody pays attention, watches this, appreciates how amazing this young woman is in many aspects, not just in the pool. She's a wonderful young woman as well. And I was with a pro swimming team that was sort of a three-year experiment for a while, and she was on our team. We drafted her and so I got to see her every day for a while. And just the poise is amazing. She's a happy young child and she's doing really, really well.

MG: It's exciting to hear about her, but also the program that is in this country that helped create her in many ways. Byron, thank you very much.

BYRON MACDONALD: Thank you very much. I love talking swimming.

MG: Byron MacDonald, head coach of the University of Toronto’s swim team, the Varsity Blues. And yeah, remember that name, Summer MacIntosh. Coming up after your regional update, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and why some experts are saying we need to slow down technology so humanity can catch up. I'm Matt Galloway. The Current is back in 90 seconds. Stick around.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Guests: Nick Frosst, Sinead Bovell, Neil Sahota

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. Artificial intelligence is top of mind these days from the Light-hearted stories. Things like the AI generated image of Pope Francis wearing this high fashion puffer coat to things that are much more concerning, like reports of a man who died by suicide after allegedly interacting with an AI chat bot. The rapid development of artificial intelligence has prompted thousands of people, including some big tech minds, to sign an open letter calling for a six month pause on AI development to let humanity catch up. Nick Frosst is the co-founder of the AI company Cohere. Sinead Bovell is a futurist, also the founder of the tech education company WAYE. She sits on the United Nations ITU generation Connect Visionaries Board. And Neil Sahota is an IBM master inventor and the U.N. Artificial Intelligence Advisor. Good morning, everybody.

SINEAD BOVELL: Thanks for having me.

NICK FROSST: Great to be here.

MG: Thank you all for being here. There's a lot to talk about. I want to talk about the positives and what excites you about the potential for artificial intelligence. Nick Frosst, we'll start with you. What to you is most exciting right now about artificial intelligence?

NICK FROSST: Yeah. To me, it's a very exciting time for artificial intelligence. At Cohere, we're building artificial intelligence in line with large language models explicitly to solve business problems and to be useful for people. So I'm really excited about over the next few years this technology just kind of solving problems and becoming boring to you. Like right now, there's a lot of talk about what this all means, how it's going to change the landscape. But I think over the next few years, you'll feel similar to this technology as you do to the graphic user interface or the touch screen or even personal computers. Like it will just be a mundane part of your life that allows you to do things. And that's what I'm really excited about this technology to become.

MG: What in that mundane part of life are the problems that it could help solve?

NICK FROSST: Yeah. I mean, I think this technology really represents like a new way that computers can use language and subsequently a new way that people can use computers. So I think fairly soon, you'll be able to go on to a website and just describe what you want have done and then have that website do that for you, or you'll be able to load up a whole bunch of different documents and ask complicated questions about the information presented in all of them at once. So I think it will be like just a new interface for you to use computers.

MG: I'll come back to that in a moment. Neil Sahota, you have said that in some ways, we have a very powerful ally in artificial intelligence. What do you see as the promise here?

NEIL SAHOTA: I think we're moving towards having that ultimate assistant. So much like Nick was talking about, if you remember from the Iron Man movies where Tony Stark is talking with Jarvis, it's almost like you get this kind of rough first draft of things. Then it's the partnership between the human and the machine that really refines that and unlocks that new potential. So I know we talk a lot about artificial intelligence, and at least my mom says I’ve broken off of natural intelligence. But I think we're seeing a leap forward on the true future of hybrid intelligence now leveraging our human abilities and augmenting that with machine capabilities.

MG: You've talked about some specific things that I mean, big problems that this could help us solve. I mean, people talk about this as a portal to help address issues of global hunger, for example.

NEIL SAHOTA: Yeah. It's actually a great example where we've actually worked with farmers in impoverished areas like Bangladesh and Malawi and again, taken all their knowledge, you know, generations of farming and augmenting it with some AI tools around predicting climates, examining the topsoil, looking at different types of seeds and things. We've been able to marry the two together and actually help these farmers increase crop yields by about 30% while actually using less water or using less topsoil resources. So we're actually able to grow more food using less resources, meaning we do have the potential to feed everybody in the world.

MG: One of the other things that you pointed to and people are very familiar with still making their way through the pandemic is vaccines and emerging diseases. How could artificial intelligence or working with artificial intelligence help us get ahead of some of those diseases?

NEIL SAHOTA: This just goes to this whole concept of generative design that, you know, teaching AI about some of these things about disease, about viruses, genomics, that has the ability to go out and well, what's called forecast millions upon millions of possible virus mutations or even transmission from animals or plants and see what's the probability of something like this actually becoming reality. One good thing we should leverage about machines is that a lot of things that we think are black swan events statistically are not so much or more probable than we realize. And so getting ahead of that, now we would know a potential virus like COVID could emerge. We already know essentially the genomics of the virus and actually start working on something that we think could be an epidemic or a pandemic and actually start manufacturing, you know, a vaccine before it actually occurs. So we could actually jump ahead of the situation.

MG: Sinead Bovell, your job in some ways as a futurist is to look around that corner and see what's coming. When you do that, what to you is the promise of artificial intelligence that you see right now?

SINEAD BOVELL: What excites me a lot is the idea of being able to stream artificial intelligence the way we stream the internet, being able to point AI at a problem and being able to capitalize on its form of intelligence. And what that could look like, if you examine what happened when we all got computers in our pockets, it transformed and created industries that were hard to imagine at all even in just the 90s. Whether that's GPS or Uber or social media, all of these new avenues and lanes became possible. And so what does it look like when the next computing platform is artificial intelligence and accessible AI at that through it being conversational? And then I think where we'll see also a lot of gains and an area that really excites me is biology. We have so much data in biology, tons and tons of data. So being able to point AI at it and potentially disrupting health care from the perspective of what does it look like to go into a physician's office, sequence your genome and have AI design a medication based on your unique illness? And a lot of times with disease, it is personal. It's based on your own cells. So where AI can help us design for that person as opposed to this kind of one size fits all approach to medicine that we have today.

MG: That's fascinating. But can you go back just for a second to what you talked about in terms of comparing it to the computer that we have in our pocket, the thing that's sitting in front of me right now that has extraordinary computing power? What would that interface look like? What would that relationship look like in future as it develops, when it becomes that next operating platform?

SINEAD BOVELL: Yeah. I think it will just be the backbone or the foundation of every interaction that we have. So you'll sign into whatever word processor you use and you’ll have a system that's going to help you create or write whatever it is that you want to write. You’ll have sensors in your home, for example, that are powered by these AI systems and able to give you feedback or predictive insights, so to speak. And then, of course, there are all the lanes and the industries that are just hard to imagine right now when it comes to artificial intelligence at scale in the hands and in the pockets of everyone. 15 years ago, the role of social media manager didn't exist, and now a company probably wouldn't survive if they didn't have one. So what could be possible when we have this streamlined artificial intelligence going forward? And again, I think the personal assistant was mentioned and that will be what's coming. So an AI system that’s maybe localized on your phone that helps you sort through your emails and responds on your behalf, or it knows your calendar, your contacts, your health concerns, and you're able to interact with it in a conversational way.

MG: Neil Sahota, there are big claims and you've hinted at some of this, but there are big claims that are being made with the power of this technology. Bill Gates wrote a newsletter in which he talked about how artificial intelligence he believed could help, you know, eradicate inequalities in education and could help us tackle the climate crisis. How do you get people to buy into the benefits of something that a lot of people still can't really wrap their head around, that it still seems like something out of science fiction?

NEIL SAHOTA: Well, ironically, it's actually about starting with small wins. I think that’s actually the big challenge. We can do big things. We can tackle big problems. But some of these things seem so unreal to most people that it's hard to grasp. AI, we call it the third generation of computing with good reason. It's got whole new capabilities. It's like we're adding new tools to our toolbox. We're not really familiar with the tools or how to leverage them. You know, back in my IBM Watson days, after we did the Jeopardy challenge, we decided to actually go into health care. We were talking about where do we start, Right? There were lots of challenges out there. And one of the things that I feel people are advocating is like, well, let's start off with some simple tools so people understand what's possible. Let's use AI to collect some patient data. So the symptoms they’re feeling, you know, free up a little bit of the admin time from doctors so they could spend it with the patient. But the feedback was that's not sexy enough, you know, that's not going to grab the headlines. Let's go out there and cure cancer. That became the mantra. And well, it's a great, noble goal. And, you know, AI can help us on that. That's not a quick turnaround. And well, we live in a very fast moving society where people expect very quick results. That's not really going to pan out. So I think to really drive adoption, we have to look at small steps, quick wins to build on the momentum to start realizing that yeah, we can do some of these big things. That's why we're seeing like chat GPT actually, you know, suddenly kind of star burst onto the scene because it can do lots of different small things for people. And suddenly AIs become very real for them, right? It's like someone's using it to help look for a job, is using it to generate like the resumé and cover letter for a specific job description. It's a very tangible tactical thing they could do with it. That's really the best way to get started and start actually promoting that adoption.

MG: Nick, how do you distinguish between what is actually possible, the real claims that can be made versus, I suppose, you know, the PR by companies that are looking for investment in AI during a moment when a lot of people are talking about AI? How do you distinguish between the two?

NICK FROSST: Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's definitely a lot of excitement now and there's a lot of hype and there has been about this stuff for a while. I mean, I remember when IBM Watson first came out and it beat Jeopardy. And there were similar conversations like this on the radio at the time saying this is going to cure cancer, this is going to do everything. And it did not do any of those things. Now, the difference here is the tech we're talking about today. Large language models based on transformers and neural nets is a completely new type of technology. It's very different than IBM Watson and older school versions of artificial intelligence. And subsequently, you can do lots of different things. Similarly to back then, there's more promises being made than will be delivered. This technology is amazing at sequence modelling, at reading some text and then predicting what text should come next. That's fundamentally what it does. It turns out that modelling sequences of words and predicting what word is likely to come next can be very useful. And it can do all kinds of things like read a document and write a summary or answer questions or even write code or be your interface into a dataset. But it isn't a digital God. It isn't the artificial intelligence of sci fi. It is just a really powerful new computational tool that's particularly well-suited to some things and not well-suited to others. So it's quite difficult to disentangle that. And I think one way of figuring out what is real and what is just hoped is to try to understand and remember what the technology actually is, and that is a model of the probabilistic sequence of words. At its core, that's all it's doing. It just turns out that doing that is very, very powerful.

MG: There are a lot of people who worry that it is on the way to being that digital God, that it becomes artificial general intelligence. And so there was this letter that was signed by a huge number of very powerful and influential people, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, the list goes on and on and on, asking for a six month pause for AI experiments working on things that are more powerful than chat GPT four. It has more than 4700 signatures. Sinead Bovell, you signed the letter. Why do you think AI needs a pause right now?

SINEAD BOVELL: Mm hmm. And I want to make sure I'm clear and differentiating. The letter does speak in some ways to the hype and fantastical kind of Hollywoodesque claims with artificial intelligence. And I think that that can actually be more damaging than good because we're focusing on the wrong problems. But why I signed the letter is because it has sparked an important public conversation around what we want the boundaries of this technology to be. I don't think it's realistic that companies will end up pausing for six months. That's not enforceable, but it's already sparked some important conversations across the board and not just in tech firms. Everybody deserves to be in conversations about their own futures, especially if we claim AI is going to have such a transformative impact. And it has gotten the attention of regulators. Are we building the right systems and pivoting and moulding our institutions to prepare them for the AI age? That's why I signed it, specifically to continue to spark the important conversations we all need to have about AI.

MG: What are you most concerned about when it comes to, again, people have compared it to an arms race in some ways. You have companies that are trying to one up each other with the technology at a furious pace. What are you most concerned about?

SINEAD BOVELL: That we don't have systems in place or infrastructure or frameworks in place to evaluate that what the private sector claims AI can do can be done and can be done safely. Because at the end of the day, our institutions were designed to move slow and that's what we want them to do. But we do need to figure out a way to have the checks and balances of these types of systems because we're clearly struggling to catch up. And the fact that even education has been thrown off this year with these large language models, there were ways to see that that was coming. We have seen research papers on large language models in the works for at least four or five years. But we don't have foresight built into our institutions because they're not necessarily hardened for the modern age. So that is what concerns me the most.

MG: Nick Frosst, this letter talks about projects that, in its words, could have profound risks to society and humanity. These are projects that you're working on. What do you say to the concerns that are raised in the letter, too fast, too soon?

NICK FROSST: Yeah. I mean, I think it's always good to be critical of technology and think about whether or not people are working on technology that will be good for the people. I think that it's great to have those conversations. I think this letter starts with a premise I disagree with and is written and signed by a lot of people who are intentionally propagating that premise.

MG: What do you mean?

NICK FROSST: Well, a few weeks ago, Elon Musk announced that he was going to create his own large language modelling company. And now this week, he's signing a letter asking for people to pause on that development. And I think, you know, one reason for doing that is it propagates the idea that this technology is one step away from the AI of science fiction. And although I think this technology is powerful and has a place for solving business applications and being useful in people's daily lives, I don't think it means we're one step away from an artificial general intelligence. And I question some of the motivations on the creation of the letter, seeing that a lot of people signing it are financially invested in the populous, thinking that, wow, this stuff is imminent and we're one step away from this thing that we've seen in movies.

MG: And yet there are some people, I mean, Sam Altman who's the head of Open AI has been saying, you know, we're right to be a bit scared by what he is creating, by what he is unleashing. What does that tell you?

NICK FROSST: I mean, first of all, I think he operates in good faith. I think he says the things he believes. But I also think that it is useful for him to propagate the idea that this technology is going to be world shaping and he's creating a company that is creating just that. So I think it's a useful idea to try to get out into the world.

MG: Sinead, how do we untangle individual interests versus legitimate concerns about this technology?

SINEAD BOVELL: Yeah. I think for one thing, we need to have independent bodies that are evaluating these technologies, that are researching them and getting a pulse for where we are in this moment and where we could go and assigning the appropriate risk. I do agree that there's a lot of conflicts of interest when the people claiming the biggest risks that the technology present are also the people selling and deploying them. It becomes very hard to differentiate what's fact and what is literally science fiction. So I do think we need to establish some independent parties. I will say even just as an individual, our tendency to anthropomorphize technology too plays a lot into this in terms of where do the bigger risks actually lie that tie in some ways to these bigger claims but have some validity, the idea of alignment and robustness and trustworthy systems. So how are we building systems that will continue to align to human values? And I'm not talking about systems that are coming in 100, 200 years. Even in today's systems, do we know that they align properly, robustly and that they're trustworthy in how people choose to use them? And I don't think we can even really answer those questions because these systems are largely just in the control of a few people. And that makes it really challenging to put up frameworks and guardrails when you don't have access.

MG: Neil Sahota, one of the things that the letter calls for is kind of a shared set of safety protocols for the development of AI that would be overseen by outside experts. How realistic do you think that is?

NEIL SAHOTA: It's the right idea. I think it's incredibly difficult to do. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a difficult conversation for most people. If you really think about it in the day, what are the right uses? That's the baseline question. That really means that we have to have some common ethical framework, common concerns around safety that I'm not sure we can quite get to. If you look at China, the police use Google Glass. Obviously, it's got some visual recognition on there. So if they see somebody, they know your name, where you live, where you work, where you were in the last two hours. But in China, they look at that and say, this is a great way to catch criminals faster or find lost children faster. You migrate that technology into the EU or into North America and we think that's invasion of privacy, a little too Big Brother ish. And that's the big concern that we actually have. A few years ago, I was asked to give a speech at GSR, which is the big global regulators conference. And the big question is not just AI, but all emerging technology. How do we regulate them? How do we understand not just the intended use but other uses and misuses and how do we put up those guardrails for society? So she threw out the hand grenade, the thing that everyone's thinking about but nobody wants to put voice to, that means having a common set of morals. And that's a very subjective thing. We each one of us as individuals kind of have our own moral, ethical code. How do you come up with a baseline? And I've seen a very visceral response from people when I bring this up. And I will tell you that day when I made that speech, when I was done, nobody clapped. But I was surprised that the next year they invited me back. But I saw people kind of having those hallway conversations, you know, small conversations. But to get the ball rolling, much like Sinead was talking with the letter, we do have to start somewhere. And really, the ultimate challenge is the advancement of technology isn’t going to stop. The rate or pace of change is accelerating. We're not going to have this opportunity to kind of just hit the pause button, unfortunately, because not everyone's going to stop to do that to try to figure out how this is going to work. And the only way we're going to jump ahead of this is to get good at working together, figuring out that baseline or framework of guidelines and ethics and acknowledge that there are things we could be doing that are not going to drive our way, but we can build some quote unquote administrative overhead things into things like AI, like the ability to explain its logics so we understand how it's working. So there are already some small steps we could take right now to address some of those.

MG: Well, I'll end by asking all three of you this question, which is what is at stake if we get this wrong? This technology is moving, it feels from the outside, at a very aggressive pace. And whether the promises are real or not, the promises are being made and people are latching on them. So Neal, if we don't get this right in terms of thinking about what this technology is going to mean for us, what's at stake, do you think?

NEIL SAHOTA: Honestly, I mean, humans are the only species wired for self-destruction. We could not just wreck our society, but we could trigger an extinction of it. I know that's the extreme, but that is possible and that's on the table.

MG: Nick, from your perspective, I mean, why do we need to get this right? And what do we need to be thinking about in terms of, again, trying to evaluate what those guardrails might look like for this technology?

NICK FROSST: Yeah. I think there's ways that this technology can go wrong, but I don't think they're like an extinction event. I think they're much more low level and in some ways more insidious. I think we can look back on the past 10 years and realize that, you know, the rollout of social media has had a lot of unintended consequences and that technology, you could say, has gone wrong. I think if this goes wrong, it's much more likely to be like that. A more perhaps probable outcome if this goes wrong is that this goes the way of Google Glass or IBM Watson, which is just to say that it's a technology that had a lot of promise and ultimately didn't deliver. Like we're in North America not walking around with screens on our faces mostly because that's not a thing people want. It could turn out that people don't want to talk to their computers either. And I think that's a very likely outcome of this going wrong as well.

MG: Sinead, as somebody who signed that letter, for you, what's at stake here?

SINEAD BOVELL: Yeah. I think the ability to destabilize core industries and not being able to realize that until five, 10 years down the road. So the micro ways it can impact who gets hired, who gets sentenced, whose resume is getting seen, if we aren't careful in understanding how these systems work or even employment, right? If we go straight forward with this technology works, let's deploy it, let's augment or automate jobs really quickly and we're not careful in doing this safely, there are ways I think it could radically destabilize our key institutions and key industries. So this is going to be an ongoing conversation and managing of this technology.

MG: These are big questions that people are grappling with and it's happening right now kind of in real time. So I'm really glad to have the chance to talk to you all about it. Thank you very much.

SINEAD BOVELL: Thanks for having me.

NICK FROSST: Thank you.

NEIL SAHOTA: Thank you.

MG: Nick Frosst is the co-founder of the AI company Cohere. Sinead Bovell is the founder of the tech education company WAYE. She sits on the UN's ITU generation Connect Visionaries board. And Neil Sahota is an IBM master inventor and the U.N. Artificial Intelligence Advisor. That is The Current for this Wednesday. Q is up next on CBC Radio One, followed by Commotion. Next week, Commotion will delve into artificial intelligence and how it's changing our relationship with art. People are writing things on AI. People are using AI to generate visual art and more. And there are a lot of concerns about what that will mean for us consumers, but also art creators. You'll hear all about that next week on Commotion. We're going to leave you with an AI experiment. The input here, hundreds of Eurovision songs. The result is this, Sweaty Machines and a song, song, he says in quotation marks, called Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

[Song: “Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears” by Sweaty Machines]

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Wednesday April 5, 2023 Episode Transcript

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