Tragedy - and More

The news came last night. The submersible vessel in the news suffered a catastrophic implosion that killed all its occupants. We learned this new word that means the opposite of an explosion - which a violent event of pressure spreading outward. This one had a violent pressure spreading inward. It dominated all news media for four days until we knew its outcome and we will now stop thinking about it - but we shouldn’t. It tells us something about who we are. The source of this information is an article in the morning edition of the Washington Post.

What we now know is that the hull of this vessel was composed of a lighter carbon fibre than earlier ones of its type. Those who regulate the field of submersibles were concerned about the safety of this model. The owner did not have it inspected because such an inspection was not required by law. In fact there had been previous lawsuits related to the safety of such material.

In a global world, the company was not accountable to any country’s law. It was American made and launching in our waters and did not have to report to either. Submersibles, unlike ships are treated like cargo carried aboard a bigger vessel. It was in ours waters - but we didn’t regulate its activities or pay attention until there was a problem.

The company’s CEO - who perished in the event and was driving it - thought that innovation means trying new things that disrupt previous ones. Some of us can agree with that as a theory - but might have questions about its implications for its effect on others - both human and non-human. What didn’t happen this time was that it was a vessel diving deep in US waters or carrying its flag. Inspection in that case to ensure safety standards was mandatory. The CEO thought that law was well intended but “it put passenger safety over commercial innovation”. It’s worth pausing and reflecting on his statement. Innovation was important. But so was commerce - which is making money for profit. Making money for profit was more important to this company than protecting the life of its own leader - who said that was what he thought. It cost him his life and that of four other persons. It cost millions of dollars in the search for the vessel.

The company published an article in 2019 stating that marine accidents are caused more frequently by errors of the operator - the corporate firm - it thought it avoided this issue via its own efforts and corporate culture - not mechanical failure, which is usually seen as the error that regulations and inspections are designed to protect.. A former director of the company had disagreed with that statement and was terminated. There were other concerns and lawsuits going back several years.

While there is much in the press about this story, what is not named is the amount of hubris we all share - that we are right on our own, that we don’t need to listen to the concerns of others. It’s an important learning for all of us even if may never want to see the Titanic at the bottom the sea - a previous example of the same sort of hubris as this one.

Dining with Senators

Not everyone gets to do this too often - if ever. But I had some interesting experience this weekend that is, in some ways, a truly Canadian story.

By a fortunate accident of fate, I acquired a nephew via marriage on my late husband’s side of the family. Though our lives have changed, we keep in touch for family events and these recent events were pleasant ones - watching his daughter conduct a master class with the Toronto Symphony and later conduct a world premiere of a new opera with triple affiliations to Tapestry, Soundstreams, and Luminato - all long part of the Toronto contemporary music scene. We were able to have dinner together in advance of the second event. The nephew is a Canadian senator - and he had invited one of his retired colleagues and his wife to join us for dinner. We met still another recently senator and his wife at the performance.

There was a bond shared by all three. They were all appointed in 2016 as independent senators and I was privileged then to also have an invitation to their initial seating, though I knew only one of them at the time. Working together through the years has created bonds of friendship for the three men that extends well beyond their official duties. But it is their individual histories that make their stories even more interesting.

One has served in all three branches of parliamentary democracy - executive, judicial and legislative. He also worked as a senior public servant in both the Ontario provincial and federal governments and as a federal court judge. His family fled Poland and came to Canada after spending time in Uzbekistan and relocated to a displaced person’s camp in Germany where he was born. They were eventually able to settle in Sydney, Nova Scotia when he was two years old.

Another earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Calcutta, a Masters in economics from University of Delhi and MBA (Finance) from UCLA Los Angeles. He has had a distinguished career in banking and prior to his senate appointment was Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Office of Scotiabank. He has made a contribution to the cultural life of Canada serving on the boards of major hospitals and arts organizations as well as being a founding member of the Sikh Foundation of Canada.

The third has worked on public policy issues related to Canada’s relations with Asian countries for more than 30 years. He is a former President and CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and currently a joint chair of the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations and a member of the following Senate Standing Committees: Foreign Affairs and International Trade; Banking, Trade and Commerce; and Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament. On June 23 he will be present for the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the Chinese Exclusion Act. something most of us know nothing about and could learn more here.

He was born in Malaysia and his family moved to Singapore shortly afterwards. After early education in and Anglo-Chinese school, he attended the Canadian United World College, Lester B. Pearson, in Victoria, which provided the Canadian connection before further studies at Cambridge and the University of London and later settlement in Newfoundland.

Three interesting Canadians - serving the country and enjoying personal friendships beyond their careers from such diverse starting positions. How grateful we all need to be for our own country and all those who settle here and work hard - both to heal our past and contribute to our future.

News - Bad and Good

The morning paper contains news of a tragic accident in Manitoba killing several seniors and wounding others. Their small community is grieving and we must join them. Hidden behind the main outline, though is another tragedy. The seniors were travelling two hundred kilometers to visit a casino - ‘for fun’.

As a senior myself, I would never suggest that seniors don’t deserve travel or pleasure. My guess is that the casino in question probably pays for the cost of the bus as they do in Ontario to lure seniors to casinos here. Sitting around a group some years ago, all of us confessed we had never been to a Casino and decided as a group to go one summer afternoon. We had agreed that our spending limit was $30 each. Among the six of us, we paid $180. One of us lucked out by winning $75. She noted that this gave a rush of pleasure, which made her feel guilty - but it didn’t occur to her to share the proceeds with the rest of us. Most of us were losers. We could, in fact, afford to lose the money on one afternoon of experiment. But what we learned was what a joyless place it was - subdued lighting, no sense of time or place, and too many vacant senior faces with no sense of joy or fun whatsoever - and less money than they came with, which most of them, unlike us, could ill afford. They had been brought in by a bus that probably cost the Casino about $300. Significantly the date was one day after old age pension cheques arrrived. To question it takes less than an ounce of moral courage to question this as a system on my part - but I do and more today than usual.

Better news came in a story about seven-year-olds learning about climate change in a school in New Jersey. The teacher had told the kids about penguins in Antarctica ; the warming of their environment meant that the penguins had to charge accordingly. What might they do?

Seven-year-olds are nothing if not inventive. Solutions ranged from penguins migrating to the US in winter to their building igloos. One thought she could keep a few in her fridge. It is the wife of the state governor who encouraged the school system to have children start to think seriously about the climate emergency, because they are the ones who will have to deal with it. Unlike others, who want to protect children from realities, this program encourages them to enter it now - not to scare them, but to become aware and to consider local solutions. While there were naturally dissenters, 70% voter in favour and the subject penetrates several curricular areas.

They are learning close to home:

“Outside, in a corner of the playground, there’s a fenced-in butterfly garden, a compost bin, and a soil bed where kids have tested which type of fertilizer, a chemical commercial variety or a natural blend, best helped plants (the natural one came out ahead).”

They are starting local and exploring a much larger framework. Would that we all did the same.

Thinking About Data

Recently a friend noted that he wanted to talk soon about his use of Chat GPT for better writing and I’ll be interested to see the results = without being tempted to try it out for reasons that follow..  My first encounter with artificial intelligence was through Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable, Understanding the 12 technological Forces that will Shape our Future,  which I read soon after its publication in 2016. AI came in as number two in a chapter called Cognifying – after a chapter called Becoming – dealing with the inevitablity of always having to upgrade our devices.

I’ve just read a bit of the book again.  I enjoy telling young persons advising me on the latest technology that I first turned on a desktop in 1983, was on CompuServe by 1989,  added the web the next year, and had my own website in 1995 – a one pager with no images. Kelly was a couple of decades ahead of me, but I relate well to his sense of excitement of where we have been – and take seriously his notions of where we might be going.  Like Brian Arthur, he notes that technology frames us after we adapt it for our own purposes and it creates the cultural era.  I look forward to re-reading the whole book again.

Kelly points out that AI technology was already here as a force when he wrote the book – because of the networks of information already in existence. He said, “It will be hard to tell where its thoughts begin and ours end.” He also pointed out how its utter ubiquity hid it from us even then. AI is the ultimate disrupter and suddenly the ability to deal with quantities of data is in our hands. I can remember when a mainframe was the size of a dining room and now I have instant data available on my phone. As Kelly points out, it was the magic of combining computer/phone/internet that has happened during less than half my lifetime.

When the latest New Yorker came through the door, I tried not to add it to the pile of others immediately and turned to the article by Jill Lepore, their excellent staff writer who tackles many current topics. Lepore received her Ph.D. in American studies from Yale in 1995 and is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University.  The article’s title is Data Driven and it resonates particularly as I serve as a volunteer secretary for an institution which is reviewing its immediate past and deciding where it wants to go. Online Zooms and surveys have become part the scene and its steering group has been given quantities of data to sort through.  I don’t have to read it, but like the other volunteers, I browse through. From workers recovering from the pandemic, there are many responses of “poor me”. There is also dissatisfaction with reduced revenue and attendance, a typical desire for more from the young and a general sense of foreboding.  It’s hard to find the desired glimmers of hope – and one solution has been to turn the data over to a  bot to sort it out.

Not precisely a bot – it has been turned over to an outside consultant with a bot that attempts to put single words in larger contexts. “Day” is a simple word. “Good day” and “Bad day” mean something different. I was pleased to see the observation that the coding of the data into larger sets was something that she had done totally subjectively. Putting the data through this process was helpful even when the sample of the total population she was drawing from was very small – about 2.4%. But we are encouraged to listen to the data to predict the future. even as we really know we can’t.

Lepore starts her article with an entertaining fantasy of a millionaire trying to develop a new plan for universal knowledge. He recruits 500 college grads to read three hundred books a year for five years. Instead of being paid for their efforts, when they turn up to be paid, their brains are removed and wired up to a radio and a typewriter. Lapore then turns to the latest gismo for universal knowledge, Chat GPT and asks it to write an essay on toadstools. It comes out right away. She liked what she saw, but also imagined a missing shadow side of the instruction to eat them – some toadstools are poisonous.

She  goes on to imagine an old fashioned small steel case, like the one in my closet still holding dcoument-filled file folders and also serving as the base for an all-in-one printer that is used less and less. Her cabinet has four drawers labelled “Mysteries”, “Facts” “Numbers” and “Data”. The labels might suggest the contents are similar but each follows a different logic. She describes them:

• Mysteries are things that only God knows – top drawer because it is closest to heaven. The point of collecting them is the search for salvation and the discipline to study them is theology.

• One collects Facts to find the truth through discernment and in contrast to the previous drawer. they are associated with secularization and liberalism; the disciplines are law, the humanities, and the natural sciences.

• Numbers are associated with the gathering of statistics by measurement, These are associated with administration; their disciplines are the social sciences.

• Feeding Data into computers leads to the discovery of patterns to make predictions. Data is associated with late capitalism, authoritarianism, techno- utopianism – and the discipline known as data science.

All of these, LePore points out, are good ways of knowing – and the best thing to do in any situation is to open all four drawers. But we are now in an era where we tend to want to open only the bottom one. In citing a recent book, How Data Happened, A History from Reason to the Age of Algorithms, by Chris Wiggins and Natthew L. Jones, she notes how statistics, numbers and data have been used to support previous biases in fields like intelligence, race, crime and eugenics. Some of us are old enough to remember sets of Books of Knowledge and Encyclopedia – often bought by parents on the installment plan in the hopes that their offspring would thrive.  Now the alleged cryptologist Sam Bankman-Fried is quoted as having famously said, “I would never read a book”.

Technocrats – chiefly engineers – promised a new world following the depression, though it fell out of favour in the 40’s. As data storage became more available and information became digitized,  data science has started to be perceived as the only tool in the storage case.

But should it be? Tatum Hunter notes three things that everyone is getting wrong in an article yesterday in the Washington Post. One thousand people have asked AI experiments like these large language models to slow down – though Kevin Kelly would probably wish them good luck. There may be other necessary ways to deal with them.

First and most important, we should not project human qualities on AI.  When my Iphone really basic AI prompts me to change a word as a write, I’m tempted to say, “Don’t be stupid, that isn’t what I mean” – as though I am talking to another human being.  Instead I should be saying, “This platform’s algorithm is not sound in the information it has searched for.” I’m not ever likely to look to AI for emotional support. Sadly the most vulnerable are those that receive their information from questionable real people and they are the ones likely to put their faith in words drawn from equally questionable sources by a machine.

Second, what is coming down the pipe is not one technology but a whole sequence of them with different building blocks. Who the builder is and what the purpose is will vary.  Different AI platforms will have different values, rules and priorities. Some specialized ones may indeed have their positive uses. Some will start well with high values and become commercially greedy.  Hello Facebook, Hello Google.  We are not very good right now at holding the creators of algorithms to account for all those advertisements on the social media platforms we use every day. That might not be a bad place to start educating ourselves.

Third – and following from this – always be skeptical.  As I learn today of the indictment of a former US president. I can only imagine what a chatbot might come up with as an answer to a question about it. The danger that I see immediately in an amalgamation of information, neatly returned in good English and paragraphs is to trust its accuracy when it looks so professional. I use Google all the time to research a topic, but at least I can see the source it is drawing from, and I can make judgments about the source. I won’t say that I am without bias, but at least I know what the source is. Tatum Hunter at the end of her article rather optimistically states these sources as reliable ones – newspapers, government and university websites, academic journals. Sometimes, yes. What she might add in all these cases is to look for a diversity of views within the sources themselves and clear attribution.  As I write, you can at least see mine.

Combining

As I have already said, I’ve been pondering a planning exercise with a logo, slogan, and title that comes from a story in the Bible.  It’s certainly not an unusual way to go for strategic planning in church land.  It’s designed to suggest a new direction coming out of a pandemic.  I wonder though, if it is missing something when asking about where we are and where we are going. This was the time that our institution, along with our schools, our workplaces and our law courts became digital. You can’t start from there and get to here.

People complain now that their buildings are burdens.  They were doing so before the pandemic hit because of the cost of utilities, mortgages and aging infrastructure – but at least the churches were open then. Many places of worship have been locked and mostly dark for months on end. One that I know did put a small altar inside at the entrance – and some people walked up to the closed doors to see it and said their prayers.  The only other time I have observed similar behaviour was when I visited the Czech Republic during its last year under communist rule. Church vestibules were open but further entry was blocked by glass barriers. I frequently saw parents taking small children inside and whispering to explain what the spaces were about. Sometimes there were elderly ladies on their knees saying their beads inside; they must have entered defiantly through side doors but were assumed to be harmless to the regime.

For about 24 months, we couldn’t sing.  Part of my working life has been administering an organization that supports choirs and I have been a lifelong chorister myself. For many, singing in any choir is a lifeline to connecting with other people; we sit physically close to one another; we listen to the nearest voice and try our best to make a blended sound. The pandemic cut the lifeline. To compensate, some singers recorded a few lines on their phones singing at home alone –  heard how that single voice croaked and sounded terrible without the others – and sent a small tape to someone technically sophisticated enough to compile several files into one after dozens of hours – to be sent back out into the world as a one minute recording.

We couldn’t worship together. Clergy read lessons, preached in an empty space, conducted services with one person present and sent recordings one after another into the world. Alternatively a gathered grid of familiar faces appeared on screen. When they spoke at the same time it was a small cacophony of voices. Zoom changed from an active verb to a passive noun. You became joined to Tube – the latter used to refer to a TV screen – but no more. Or nothing happened at all.

Now we say we are coming back to normal.  But what is normal about still singing or preaching through a mask? What is normal about preferring to wear pajamas while watching church online, drinking coffee and checking email at the same time? We are grateful for technology as we advertise our online services. But are we pausing to ask – who are we now?  What is our work now? Where are we going? How are we using technology for our purpose?  How is technology using us?