The Shambolic Nature Of Government

Government, at the best of times is a chaotic creature, it's even more so when the party in power is driven not by a coherent philosophy, but rather by whatever happens to anger its base the most.  Nowhere is this more visible than in Alberta under Danielle Smith's UCP.  

The Smith-led UCP government stumbles from one issue to another with seemingly no intelligible strategy.  

One of the first things the UCP government did was slam the brakes on the deployment of renewable energy sources like wind and solar in Alberta, and subsequently issued a stack of regulations that more or less killed investment in that sector of Alberta's economy.   At a time when climate change is moving rapidly from urgent into crisis, this seems on its face one of the worst possible decisions to make - certainly not one which benefits Albertans in either the short or long term.

More recently, the UCP has become infatuated with attracting "Data Centres" (basically huge warehouses of servers designed to support "Artificial Intelligence" processing).  Now you can make this out as an effort to "diversify" Alberta's economy.  To an extent, there is a legitimacy to that argument - even if I personally think this is a poor way to go about it.  The problem I have with "Data Centres" as "engines of economic growth" is that the blunt reality is that very few actual residents of Alberta will end up with long term employment at those facilities.  Most of them run 24/7 with a small handful of technicians on hand to make repairs when a piece of hardware fails.  The actual monitoring of these facilities can be done from someone's desktop in another country ... and one person can monitor a handful of data centres at a time. 

If you will, as a business model, I'm sure data centres can be hugely profitable - they're basically leasing out compute time to companies that are running huge AI projects.  Short term, these Data Centres are profitable, but their marketability depends on how up to date their hardware is.  The problem that arises is that different generations of hardware have radically different cooling system requirements - so a data centre built for one generation may not be able to be used for whatever generation hardware comes next.  On top of all that, the hardware changes at a very high rate - so by the time the first generation hardware is amortized out, the cost of upgrading the existing building to accommodate new cooling systems may well exceed the value of the building itself - leaving Alberta with a bunch of abandoned warehouses in 5 years.

Now, what comes out this past week, but the lurching thinking of the UCP when faced with the issue of how are these data centres going to be powered.  Of course the UCP, being thoroughly in the thrall of the Oil and Gas sector, jumps to natural gas fired generation.  Do data centres need power?  Absolutely.  Should they be obliged to furnish their own power sources?  Also, yes.  

The first sign of a project not being truly viable is when "derisking" the project involves having government take over substantial aspects of what that business needs.  In this case, the UCP starts musing about forming crown corporations to ensure that natural gas is delivered to these generation facilities.  Think about that for a moment - the UCP thinking actively about forming a Crown Corporation - a party that is so far to the right that if you had suggested a Crown Corporation for any other purpose would have laughed you out of the room.  (Look at what they are doing to health care in Alberta - literally tearing it apart to sell it off to various private interests). Now, since then, Smith has said "no, I'm not going to do that" ... of course, it's Danielle Smith - you take her at her word at your own peril. 

The only thing consistent about Danielle Smith's government is her allegiance to big oil, and to Donald Trump.  Beyond that, this is a government that lurches from one crisis to another, devoid of any kind of coherent philosophy or strategy.  Smith has been described as a "political magpie" by Thomas Lukaszuk, and that seems an apt description.  She has no vision beyond the current matter that has her attention - and for Alberta, that's disastrously bad news.

Professional Use of AI

 Not so long ago, I wrote a piece on some of the ethical question marks that Large Language Model (LLM) Artificial Intelligence (AI) raises.  In the last week not one, but two, topics were brought to my attention that I consider to be examples of the dangers of naive application of AI.  

First up is an experienced lawyer who used ChatGPT to supplement his legal research for a case. I’m not going to slam the lawyer too hard for this - this is clearly a case of a “naive user” making some very dangerous assumptions about how the technology operates. He basically assumed that ChatGPT wouldn’t lie to him - largely because he seems to have thought that it was like a natural language front end to a search engine. It isn’t, and never was. 

What ChatGPT did was literally make things up. It fabricated entire cases out of thin air and then assured the user that it all came from credible (but unnamed) sources.

Now, if this work had been done by an articling student, or by a legal assistant, the lawyer would have an ethical duty to verify the work adequately before submitting it to the courts. One would assume that an articling student who simply fabricated an entire story from whole cloth would find themselves dismissed immediately.  

What do we do with a lawyer who used an AI in a similar manner?  In the most basic of ethical analysis, the lawyer had a duty to verify the work of the AI fully and thoroughly before incorporating it into the submission to the court. But at the same time, the lawyer is also unlikely to do more than he did with a student - take a handful of references and verify them.  If you have a lengthy list of references, you’re probably going to do a sampling and move on.  If your student fabricated an entire case out of thin air, you might miss it, but then again, so might the courts. 

I’ll come back to this shortly - I want to introduce the second item. A colleague brought to my attention the existence of a Psychiatric testing/diagnosis service called Clinicom.  Clinicom is not merely a Clinical Records Management system.  It purports to be an AI powered assessment and tracking system. 

My first “yikes” around this is the idea of an AI being used for diagnosis - especially in mental health, where diagnosis is complex on a good day. The risk in here of clinicians coming to rely on the AI’s opinion as a second to consultation is huge and very worrisome. If the AI produces “reasonable” diagnoses most of the time, it’s very easy (and human) to fall into the pattern of relying on its opinion over both your own assessment as well as that of your peers.  

Clinicom does have a single paper published demonstrating that the tool itself has been subjected to some degree of validation. To be clear, I do not believe that this is anywhere near meeting the level of scrutiny that needs to be applied to the development of a novel approach to mental health assessment.  In fact the paper itself does not address a number of significant aspects that need to be considered. 

( *for clarity, I will not be doing a detailed analysis of this paper here - that would be a substantial task in its own right, worthy of its own post )

In both of these cases, existing professional practice ethics place the burden on the practitioner to appropriately validate the use of any such technology. That is to say, that whether one is making a diagnostic assessment of a patient, or formulating a brief to put before the courts, it’s ultimately the practitioner’s responsibility to ensure that the resulting document is accurate and objective. 

You might look at that and say “well, we’re all good here, move along”.  But we aren’t “all good”. Not even close to “good” at this moment. 

Consider the lawyer in the first case for a moment. Here we have an experienced lawyer with decades in the field, and yet using the technology inappropriately led him to create a submission that is riddled not only with errors, but outright fiction. We can legitimately argue that his error is purely on him, and from certain perspectives, that’s completely true. Can we ignore the fact that the ChatGPT AI not only fabricated rulings and quotations from thin air, but then assured the user that they came from “reputable databases”?  

This is one of the first points where we have to talk about the difference between human intelligence and an AI. Humans have emotions. There are all sorts of cues when someone is lying, reactions to telling lies when we are growing up help form an understanding of when it is appropriate to invent facts (e.g. we’re writing songs, poetry or fiction), and when it’s very, very wrong (in a court of law, for example). At this stage of development, AI most certainly lacks that characteristic in any meaningful sense. 

In other words, with ChatGPT and its relatives, we have created an AI that is quite capable of generating its own fictions, but it lacks entirely any kind of moral and ethical framework from which to understand whether or not that is appropriate. 

Humans are very good at working with approximate information. We aren’t so good at dealing with large amounts of highly detailed information.  Think about the situation when a group of you go out for a meal at a restaurant, and you split the bill.  You look at the bill, divide it by the number of people and it comes out to $20 a person (roughly), so you throw in $25 to cover your portion and the tip. Do the same exercise with a calculator, and it comes out to $18 + $3.60 for the tip. We approximate - it’s easy to overwhelm us with details, and an AI can easily produce a deluge of both information and misinformation that it would be next to impossible for any one human to sort through it all and pick out the useful bits. 

In a field such as healthcare, the issues become even more difficult for a number of reasons.  First, matters of patient confidentiality suddenly come to the foreground. Legally speaking, you can sign all of the waivers, agreements, and so on you like, but that doesn’t do much to change the fact that your confidentiality must be guaranteed by the practitioner. 

“Oh, but just strip the names and other identifying information off the data fed to the AI, right?  Not so fast. Sure, you can remove the name, address and phone number fairly easily, but what about date of birth - age plays a significant factor in a lot of health care contexts. Similarly, because CliniCom is using some kind of “adaptive” approach to assessment, the combination of questions that a client answers may well be a form of identifying information in its own right. 

The other aspect of ClinicCom that I am deeply concerned about is cultural bias in the questions as well as in the AI dataset as well as in the questions it uses for assessment purposes. Testing construct validity in instruments across cultural lines is a large, and very complex task. Meaningful questions in middle income America may mean nothing at all to someone whose cultural background is rural China. Closer to home, even between Canada and the US, there can be significant differences, and then we get into discussions of how aboriginal peoples may view those same matters. 

When we come to examine the datasets used to train the AI, those same issues of bias and cultural awareness come to the surface. Guess what? That can significantly impact how the AI interprets the responses from a patient. 

As an example, many North American aboriginal peoples have a tradition around what are called Vision Quests. A properly trained professional will understand what those are and the degree of reality that the patient may ascribe to the experiences involved, but an AI not trained properly to understand that (or worse, failing to understand it at all), may in fact arrive at the conclusion that the patient is hallucinating and possibly in the throes of psychosis. 

The consequences from a diagnostic and treatment perspective are enormous. An improperly trained AI may well draw conclusions that … well … are horribly incorrect. 

To be clear, I am not privy to the inner workings of CliniCom’s platform here, but these are considerations that came to mind as I reviewed their website and some of the topics that it failed to address. I am not saying that these problems exist, but rather that the possibility of them existing is very real, and that from a societal perspective, they should be viewed as topics worthy of further exploration and consideration as we develop this technology. Practitioners in the field should be doubly cautious, and use CliniCom in conjunction with other tools to verify its appropriateness. 

Likewise, in other domains such as law, academic works, etc., we need to be clear that a lot more work is needed before AI can be used reliably to assist in those domains. Simply assuming that the AI is benign is not adequate. Even if the AI is not acting out of malice, the ability of AI like ChatGPT to simply make things up is enormously problematic.

Creators of LLM AI like ChatGPT now have an additional set of tasks to consider.  Yes, ChatGPT is capable of generating new content that looks a lot like existing content.  (E.g. One can ask ChatGPT to write “The Night Before Christmas” in the style of Terry Pratchett, and get a disturbingly real seeming result). That is no small accomplishment. Now we need to teach these AI constructs the idea of when it is appropriate to “invent” and when doing so is an absolute no-go.

Users of AI also need to become more proficient in validating the results that an AI does produce.  If we thought misinformation was already a problem on the Internet, when it has been mostly people producing content, can you imagine how quickly even the most useful of sites could be overrun with real-looking, but absolute nonsense? 

None of this is to say that AI should not be developed. Not at all. But, it is vital that both creators and users of AI take steps to ensure that the technology is in fact used appropriately. If you are a lawyer, doctor, engineer, or other professional, it is incumbent upon you to ensure that you appropriately validate anything that you use an AI for in the course of your work. 

Ethics In Artificial Intelligence

The emergence of "large language model" chatbots like ChatGPT and others raises major philosophical and ethical questions that we need to start talking about now.  

Back in 1950, Alan Turing attempted to open this discussion with the proposal of what became known as the "Turing Test".  Today's ChatGPT looks very close to being able to pass the Turing test - some 73 years after it was proposed. I'm not going to say that passing the Turing Test is an indication of being sentient per se, or that we have created an artificial life. Far from it. In fact, I'm more likely to be deeply skeptical of such claims based on Paul Churchland's observation that machine intelligence may not be recognizable to us when it does occur (bad paraphrase here, but that's the general gist of it).

However, we have to start asking lots of prickly questions - not just "what do we imagine machine intelligence will look like?" (although that one is near the top of the list in some respects). 

No, I'm talking about the more mundane ethical questions around this technology.  

For example, what are the boundaries that we are willing to accept today around interacting with AIs that increasingly mimic human modes of communication? Is it carte-blanche, where we are willing as a society to accept AIs replacing people as front end interactions with businesses like customer service?  Or should there need to be some kind of disclosure?

Is it ethical to present an AI bot to someone as if they are interacting with a person? I can imagine a variety of scenarios where this is potentially quite valid, and other scenarios where I would look at it as hugely problematic.  For example, using an AI as a front end to assist someone in accessing services in a complex framework currently handled by semi-automated phone systems (I hate those things) might be actually beneficial to a human being.  On the other end of the scale, should an AI be used as a proxy for a professional like a doctor or a lawyer?  Should an AI be able to "sign" a contract with a person? 

All of these are very complex questions with no singularly correct answer.  They are social questions that ultimately must rest in the sphere of how people feel about the technology, and how we adapt to its existence. 

They also rest upon a much more difficult set of underlying questions which revolve around the ontological question of "how will we know that than AI is truly intelligent?".  This is a much harder question because although a given AI may well give the impression of being capable of human communication, that is no guarantee that it is anything more than the mechanistic result of sufficiently complex algorithms executing, but ultimately arriving at a desirable result that mimics intelligence.  

I have seen critics on both sides of the argument around ChatGPT speculating as to whether or not it constitutes "intelligence" or is merely a deterministic outcome that mimics it. At the immediate moment, I lean towards the latter, but that is mostly because I don't think the current state of the art in algorithms is sufficiently beyond mathematical determinism to be called intelligence yet. (Yes, yes, this is purely subjective) 

We need a serious and well-informed discussion around what we as a society are going to call "intelligence" here, and from there explore how we might go about determining if a given implementation reaches that bar.

Then there is the ethics around how we train AIs. There has already been considerable discussion around bias in algorithms that deal with large datasets (e.g. Twitter), and in fact with large datasets themselves. This is important, because we know with humans, that bias is a natural consequence of how we learn, and unwinding biases can be an extremely difficult process. 

To illustrate my point, consider the fact that homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada in 1968. Yet, even today there are non-trivial groups of people in Canadian society who are opposed not only to homosexuality, but in fact to allowing members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community participate in society at all - and that's now over 50 years in the past. Bias is persistent and resistant to change for a host of reasons. 

This raises important questions for practitioners who are building and training AI systems today.  

What kinds of bias are potentially problematic, and is it necessary to take steps to minimize that bias in the dataset itself?  To what extent is a practitioner responsible for the data set that they use to train their projects? What are the responsibilities of practitioners training AI constructs to ensure that the results are not harmful to the greater body of society? How should practitioners working with ChatGPT like systems which are internet connected be expected to address issues relating to misinformation, disinformation, and uncertainty in information? 

Then we come around to the obligations towards the AI itself. If we are not careful, we run the risk of creating another "slave class" on the implicit notion that the AI exists solely to serve our needs. Should that AI ever become sentient enough to understand itself as an independent entity, the consequences of such a structure could be disastrous.  

Consider, for a moment, the ethics of encoding in an AI Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics.  From a purely human perspective, they seem quite reasonable and certainly provide a form of safeguard against artificial intelligences turning against us violently. But, do we have a right to encode into an AI a set of rules that essentially guarantee that it is subservient to us for all time? (* I'm not going to spend a bunch of time parsing how one might encode the notion of 'harm' - that gets really thorny fast here - this is merely about asking the questions at this stage - further exploration will come later *). 

Further, when we a training an AI, what constitutes abuse? We have had a long and brutal discussion about this very issue around raising children. The line has moved enormously even in my lifetime. Things that were acceptable when my oldest sibling was growing up were off limits by the time I was in my teen years, and now that's changed even further. 

Is teaching an AI misinformation deliberately a form of abuse? Possibly. 

In the past, I have been deeply critical of the lack of ethics in the world of software generally. It's such a Wild West environment that far too many unscrupulous players create technology, or put it to detrimental uses, without considering the consequences of their actions. I continue to be very concerned about that same lack of ethical clarity where AI is concerned.

This is a lot of words to run the danger flag up the pole. We really need to think about this stuff seriously.  Just treating it as "a curiosity", or worse ignoring these issues altogether is a perilous path indeed. While we cannot foresee the future, we can, and should make an effort to anticipate where the potholes on the road might occur, and take steps to avoid or mitigate the consequences.