Will Artificial Intelligence advance science and solve urgent issues at dazzling speeds? Or cause mass unemployment and become a tool for manipulation in the hands of authoritarians?
The third annual Conversations: sponsored by Charles Bronfman delved into these questions. Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter, co-hosted by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC) and the CBC, drew a full-capacity crowd of 700 to the Mont-Royal Centre on April 10.
The Conversations series examines timely topics with broad, long-term implications, says Daniel Béland, James McGill Professor of Political Science and the director of MISC. “The series is going extremely well. The first two Conversations [on reimagining borders and civility and democracy] generated strong insights and very positive feedback from audience members.”
Academics are polarized over AI, says Béland, and foretell either doomsday or utopia. “Social scientists are very bad at predicting the future,” he adds. “Sometimes novelists or journalists are better.”
The panel included representatives from all three fields. Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute founder and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, BEng’86, MSc’88, PhD’91, DSc’25, is the most cited living scientist in the world, as well as being considered a godfather of AI.
Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, activist-organizer and author of, most notably, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss it When it’s Gone. She delivered the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures. Journalist, science fiction novelist, and former editor of the blog Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, rounded out the trio. His books include Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
Nahlah Ayed, host of CBC Radio One’s Ideas, chaired, asking pointed questions about the potential pitfalls of AI.
A thread throughout the evening was concern over who wields power over, and with, AI.
“Intelligence is power,” said Bengio, who worries about that power being turned against us, and if we can keep it in check. “We are opening a Pandora’s box,” he said. Even in the 1950s, computer scientists warned that increasingly powerful computers could lead to “the creation of entities that we don’t control.”
From left, front row: Charles Bronfman and his wife Rita beside McGill President Deep Saini
Doctorow, however, thinks worrying about that kind of leap in capacity for AI is overblown. “If we keep breeding our horses to run faster and faster, none of them will give birth to a locomotive,” he quipped. For him, the problem lies in how, “we have committed all of that money to an industry, to a product, that has lost more money than any product in the history of the human race.”
The bubble will burst, Doctorow is sure, and once the wreckage is cleared, AI will be just a useful technological tool. But his worry is, “we have a habitual response to economic collapse which is austerity, and whenever we do austerity, we drive people into the arms of fascists.”
Taylor positioned herself between Doctorow and Bengio over the worries about AI’s capabilities and consequences. Her concern focuses on how the labour force could be replaced by AI. “Bosses want this threat, and there has been a long dream of labour-saving devices, or robots doing our dirty work for us. But the question is always, well, who owns the robots? We should be defending human workers, we should be strengthening unions, we should be reining in corporate power.”
Bengio, when talking about which countries will profit, urged Canada to partner with other like-minded democracies that embrace human rights. Companies needn’t choose between profits and ethics, he said, we’ve managed before to enforce regulations and build safe products, “and we can do it again.”
Doctorow wants us to imagine a future in which tools work for us, not the other way around. “Labour-led automation tends to enhance quality, whereas capital-driven automation tends to increase quantity,” he said. “If you’re investing capital, you want to maximize the return, whereas if you’re doing anything that matters to you, you want to do it as well as possible.”
“If we fire half of [a workforce’s] colleagues and tell them their job is to pick up the slack, well, we're going to get a very terrible world where AI just means we couldn't be bothered to do this [work] well, which is, I think, the world that we're headed for today.”
Taylor said she sees “incredible skepticism” in the United States about AI, and a strong resistance to putting profits before people. There is a robust bipartisan social movement against willy-nilly building of data centres, she added, with objections raised to the massive tax rebates and environmental hazards. “This movement, to me, is the hope in the Pandora’s Box.”
All the panelists were concerned over how AI is worming its way into our personal lives, from monitoring our online activities, gathering data on us, and replacing human relationships.
Taylor quoted philosopher Hannah Arendt. “Totalitarianism is organized loneliness – I think that is a powerful phrase. These companies are in competition with our real friendships.”
To great applause, Taylor said, “to pull people back from that loneliness, which serves a very dangerous political purpose, we have to give people the resources, offer them the opportunity to re-engage with social reality and become grounded in the real world. The most effective policy to mitigate the risk of artificial intelligence is investing in social services, investing in real jobs for human beings that serve human needs.”
Also, can we trust the technology itself? Bengio cited experiments that show AI systems “will be willing to lie, to cheat, in order to preserve themselves or other AIs.” So, we should carefully build systems to “be as honest as can be given the information that they have” to use “as guardrails to prevent other AI systems that maybe we don’t trust.” Bengio started the non-profit organization Law Zero to work towards that.
“There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to develop these solutions in time, but I feel like we should do everything we can on many fronts. And one of them is on the technical side. Half of my life right now is trying to develop and build those technical solutions, build AI that will be ethical. The other half is coming here and talking to you all, to raise awareness, understanding, and participate in a global democratic discussion,” Bengio said.
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disrupter will be broadcast on CBC Radio One’s Ideas and is available on YouTube.