Canada's AI Task Force Could Use Some Ethics Expertise
Commenting on Canadians’ need to use more AI, the Honourable Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, stated on CBC‘s Power and Politics recently, “Technology moves at the speed of innovation, but adoption moves at the speed of trust.”
Commenting on Canadians’ need to use more AI, the Honourable Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, stated on CBC‘s Power and Politics recently, “Technology moves at the speed of innovation, but adoption moves at the speed of trust.”
Speaking as someone who has spent the better part of the past 20 years researching AI ethics, I’ll add the following proviso, rooted in ethical inquiry: AI adoption ought to move at the speed of trustworthiness.
Indeed, I wrote about this very issue in 2018 as lead author on a G7 paper titled “Accountability in AI: Promoting Greater Social Trust”—it was Canada’s contribution to the first G7 discussion on Responsible AI.
As we wrote in our 2018 submission, chasing “trust” in AI without properly considering its “trustworthiness” puts us all at risk of over (or under) trusting the technology. It treats the trustworthiness of the technology as a foregone conclusion. A quick scan of the daily news tells us that’s not a great assumption—we have many good reasons to question the trustworthiness of the many AI-powered applications in our lives today. However, we are regularly told to trust applications that we should not, underscoring the need for greater focus on calibrating our trust.