Robot Ethics and “The Importance of Being on Twitter”
Welcome to the 19th issue of the Digital Policy Salon weekly briefing.
This week we’re highlighting developments in artificial intelligence and economics. Our policy update showcases new investments in the Canadian cleantech sector, while our first interview piece discusses one company’s experience of European FDI in the Canadian tech market. Jumping to current issues in technology in Canada and around the world, our second interview is with a McGill University robotics engineer and ethicist who speaks to the most pressing questions facing developers and robots alike.
For timely takes on natural language processing and the impact of COVID-19 on macroeconomic theory, check out our research and policy colleagues’ work in “what we’re reading.” We close as always with a featured infographic and tweet: the former provides a telling global comparison of mobile data costs, while our featured tweet throws in the funnier side of NLP.
Thanks for joining us in this week’s Digital Policy Salon, we hope you enjoy this issue and look forward to bringing you more technology and policy updates next week.
- Faun & Khiran
COVID-19 and Tech Policy Updates 🇨🇦
Cleantech sees $23 million worth of investments in Ontario and Québec in 24 hours
FedDev Ontario and CED announced almost $18 million in public funding, alongside $5.2 million in private sector investments for clean technology projects in Ontario and Québec last Thursday. The funding will support 30 new cleantech projects across Québec, by Québec entrepreneurs, and establish the Trent Enterprise Centre, a new accelerator for cleantech companies.
New Zealand establishes new Algorithm Charter for government agencies
Twenty-three government agencies signed off on the newly established Algorithm Charter for Aotearoa New Zealand on Tuesday. The Charter will govern the use of algorithms by government, while establishing a commitment by government agencies to strike the right balance between privacy and transparency, prevent unintended bias, and reflect the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.
CAN Health Network celebrates one-year anniversary as integrated markets are considered for other sectors
The CAN Health Network, an integrated market established to connect Canadian health-tech companies with Canadian healthcare providers celebrated its one-year anniversary — and 10 commercialization projects underway — last week. In an associated interview with BetaKit, Minister of Small Businesses, Export Promotion, and International Trade Mary Ng discussed using the model elsewhere, in industries such as Cleantech or Agtech.
Beta testing begins for Canada’s government sponsored tracing app
Beta testing began in Ontario for Canada’s government-sanctioned contact tracing app last week. Ongoing feedback from beta users will help identify bugs and other issues and will inform future iterations of the app for its eventual public release.
CRA facing pressure to update its work-space-in-the-home expenses program
The federal government is facing increased pressure to make changes to its work-space-in-the-home expenses program to more easily accommodate workers and companies impacted by the pandemic. The program requires eligible workers to work from home more than 50% of the time, or use their home workspace exclusively for work purposes, but also requires employers to file T2200 forms for each individual employee. Despite dropping slightly in recent months, just over 3.3 million Canadians worked from home in April, suggesting significant bureaucratic weight next spring. - Mairead Matthews | email
Interviews in the Field
Canada as an Attractive Destination for European Tech: A conversation with Nicole Streuli-Fürst, Executive Vice President Operations and Research at RepRisk
By Maryna Ivus | email
Canada is one of Europe’s closest trading partners, and the rapid pace of Canadian development in artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and IoT overlap with European priority areas and digital strengths. This makes Canada an attractive destination for tech-based foreign direct investment (FDI) from Europe. Recently, ICTC’s Manager of Labour Market Research, Maryna Ivus, met with Nicole Streuli-Fürst, Executive Vice President Operations and Research at RepRisk, to learn about RepRisk’s experiences as a European ICT company entering the Canadian market.
Maryna:
When did you begin operations in Canada? And what prompted this decision?
Nicole:
We started our operations in Toronto in 2017. We were looking for a place to expand and that had a lot of foreign language capacity. Our biggest operations are in Manila, which is where we conduct English language research. We wanted a hub where we could get basically any language at a well-educated level. When we did our research, Canada stood out, and especially Toronto. We have also been looking at expanding into the US. We felt that opening in Canada was a bit easier than the US, at least at the start.
Maryna:
What have the results been of your company’s expansion into the Canadian market?
Nicole:
We have been pleased with how things have gone. We are extremely happy with the talent we have found, especially in research and IT. For Research, we do find the multi-language analysts we are looking for. We did not anticipate that our IT team in Canada would grow as much as it did; IT was not our primary focus when we decided to expand to Canada, but now our second biggest IT team is in Canada. It was easy to get started here. There were not too many hurdles. We got some help through Toronto Global and we were in touch with Trade Commissioners who eased those first few steps for us, providing context, etc. In general, the legal side and the paperwork was structured and went well. We had lawyers helping us, but we followed the process, and everything went rather smoothly.
On a more personal note, I moved to Canada with my family. Both as a business professional and as a resident, I felt extremely welcomed. Canada is very open and supporting to new people. There is a culture of helping people to get on their feet.
Read the full interview here 🎙
Robots & Robot Ethics: A Conversation with Dr. AJung Moon
Recently, ICTC spoke with Dr. AJung Moon, an experimental roboticist. Dr. Moon is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at McGill University, where she investigates how robots and AI systems influence the way people move, behave, and make decisions in order to inform how we can design and deploy such autonomous intelligent systems more responsibly. She also has a background in start-ups and advising organizations such as the UN. In this conversation, as part of ICTC’s Technology and Human Rights Series, Kiera and Dr. Moon discuss robot ethics, AI ethics, and lessons from the international arena.
Kiera:
Could you briefly explain what ‘robots’ are in your work, and what these robots are used for?
Dr. Moon:
Of course. So, I don’t work with terminators or robots that are purposefully built to kill. By robots, I’m talking about embodied, physical objects that are able to sense something about our physical environment, process, and compute something about the signal that it has sensed, and then do something about it within a physical environment to change that environment. Some people say that bots on web browsers — the algorithmic things that automate specific functions — are robots as well, but I am specifically focused on the physical domain when I talk about robots.
Kiera:
One topic you research is human-robot interaction, such as human-robot collaboration, nonverbal communication, and human-robot negotiation using motions/gestures. Could you talk a bit about how robots and humans interact? What are some major questions that you are working on?
Dr. Moon:
If anyone has visited an automotive factory within the past few decades, they’re likely familiar with those huge robotic arms that perform those repetitive functions and can be “on” 24/7. In a way, I work with those types of robotic arms but on a much smaller scale and in much more physically safe interactions. The idea is to work with industrial robots that are designed to be able to safely interact physically with people so that you don’t need the safety curtains that manufacturing facilities typically have. Essentially, it means that you can envision a person assembling a particular part with a robot, both holding onto the same object at the same time. I also look at robots that are a little more human-like: it might have two arms or head-like things, with cameras, and/or it can move across the floor.
In human-robot interaction, we look at questions about designing robots to better interact with us, such as, How do you get a robot to pick up a water bottle and hand it over to a person in a safe and clear manner? When a robot hands you something, it should be very clear when you are supposed to take it from the robot. Between humans, this seems trivial because we pick up on each other’s gaze cues, ways we move our hands, etc., to figure out these details of everyday tasks. But for robots, we have to program every single feature.
Read the full interview here 🎙
What We’re Reading
OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good — and completely mindless
(MIT Technology Review)
“Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days to OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI. OpenAI first described GPT-3 in a research paper published in May. But last week it began drip-feeding the software to selected people who requested access to a private beta.
GPT-3 is the most powerful language model ever. Its predecessor, GPT-2, released last year, was already able to spit out convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence. But GPT-3 is a big leap forward. The model has 175 billion parameters (the values that a neural network tries to optimize during training), compared with GPT-2’s already vast 1.5 billion. And with language models, size really does matter.
Sabeti linked to a blog post where he showed off short stories, songs, press releases, technical manuals, and more that he had used the AI to generate. GPT-3 can also produce pastiches of particular writers. Mario Klingemann, an artist who works with machine learning, shared a short story called “The importance of being on Twitter,” written in the style of Jerome K. Jerome, which starts: “It is a curious fact that the last remaining form of social life in which the people of London are still interested is Twitter. I was struck with this curious fact when I went on one of my periodical holidays to the sea-side, and found the whole place twittering like a starling-cage.”
Talking Points:
GPT-3 (“Generative Pretrained Transformer,” a language algorithm that uses machine learning) is definitely a great achievement and a huge improvement from previous models. However, it is nowhere near genuine intelligence, or “strong AI,” yet. In this article from MIT Technology Review, Will Douglas Heaven comments that as “the result of excellent engineering,” GPT-3 is a better model which speaks less robotically than previous versions, but the formula is still familiar. By studying word/phrase presentations and combinations from old text, the model generates new words with the highest probabilities learned from its training materials. As per the article’s concerns about racist and sexist language, GPT-3 is just a tool that tries to mimic human patterns. Biased sentences are generated not because GPT-3 is intuitively racist or sexist, but because these sentiments are visible in existing human texts today. We should watch our own behaviors rather than blaming the tool. - Olivia Lin | email
Starting over again: The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing a rethink in macroeconomics
(The Economist)
In the form it is known today, macroeconomics began in 1936 with the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”. Its subsequent history can be divided into three eras. The era of policy which was guided by Keynes’s ideas began in the 1940s. By the 1970s it had encountered problems that it could not solve and so, in the 1980s, the monetarist era, most commonly associated with the work of Milton Friedman, began. In the 1990s and 2000s economists combined insights from both approaches. But now, in the wreckage left behind by the coronavirus pandemic, a new era is beginning. What does it hold?
Talking Points:
The economic crisis wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic is leading to a reassessment of both the objectives of macroeconomic policy and the tools at policymakers’ disposal. Coming, as it has, after a decade of near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing, it is testing the limits of monetary policy. While the current level of inflation suggests that there is room for further monetary easing, fiscal policy represents a better opportunity for targeted stimulus. At a time when secular stagnation, income inequality, and climate change are very much part of the political zeitgeist, this crisis presents a vital opportunity to enact policies for resilient, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable growth.
ICTC’s latest white paper with proposals for Canada’s post-COVID economic future is available here. - Akshay Kotak | email
Research Visualized
One GB of data will allow you to listen to about 250 tracks on Spotify, or spend 20 hours browsing the internet. How much it costs to do so, however, depends greatly on the country you live in.
Mobile data prices are influenced by a number of factors: mobile and fixed broadband infrastructure, government regulation, geography, perceived value of data, and the structure of the market (that’s to say who the consumers are, and what they earn). Whatever the cause, data prices vary substantially country-to-country: the world’s most expensive data, at $27.41 in Malawi, is more than 300 times as expensive as the cheapest data, which is 9 cents per GB, in India. As many Canadians would guess, Canada’s place on this spectrum is decidedly towards the pricey end. At $12.55 per GB, data in Canada is 57% more expensive than in the United States. - Khiran O’Neill | email
Our Research
Transformative Technologies for Smart Canadian Cities
From the (not-so-ancient) archives: This ICTC brief from September 2019 remains pertinent today. Nearly a year after the brief’s release, it’s worth considering how COVID-19 has, and hasn’t, altered the development of smart cities.
Canadian municipalities of all sizes are facing unique challenges to do with population, distance, and public services. Large and growing urban centers need improved ways to deal with congestion, mobility, and sustainability, while smaller and more remote communities face barriers to accessing high-quality infrastructure and social support. One way to solve this is to help our cities and regions become more informed, efficient, and “smart.”
The brief analyzes how cities are using technologies such as:
- The Internet of Things (IoT) and Connective Technologies
- Artificial Intelligence
- Autonomous Electric Vehicles
- Geolocation, Information, and Positioning System Technologies
- Smart Lighting
Twitter Highlights
A sample of the GPT-3 language generator’s writing. AI-generated text has come a long way in the last five years.
Talk to Us 💬
Send your comments, questions, and tech policy insights to:
- Tyler Farmer 🚀 t.farmer@ictc-ctic.ca
- Faun Rice 🦌 f.rice@ictc-ctic.ca
