AI is a gargantuan, new societal component, sucking up water in desert towns, co-opting the world’s innovation dollars, making rare earths rarer and encouraging intellectual sloth. This, while helping cure disease, fast-tracking vaccines, and freeing millions from dreary tasks. Then there's the bewildering matter of ‘interpretability’ — the industry's euphemism for WTF — even its creators can't fully explain how AI systems arrive at their outputs.
As a conversational medium, AI can be as good as, or better than, a trusted human confidant; positioning it to become the world’s greatest influencer. And for some individuals, it already is – as evidenced in suicides and school shootings.
A leviathan of almost unthinkable reach, AI is complex, contradictory and a mystery wrapped in the armour of corporate wealth and influence. The tech industry continually obstructs regulatory efforts to integrate AI into society safely and on human terms. Leaving the matter of safety entirely up to government and citizens. A tricky proposition when only one side has human welfare as a mandate.
BC has enacted legislation holding specific harmful products accountable and making the sharing of intimate images without consent illegal. Broader, more complex matters involving social media and AI were considered better placed with the federal government.
Canada, with BC's conceptual support, is poised to enact online-specific regulations to preserve kids’ safety. With kids spending most of their days in schools, it falls to education to provide on-the-ground methods to regulate students' online activity. At the same time, education is tasked with preparing critical thinkers (with an occasional dose of skepticism) who will excel in their careers with the discernment to leverage AI’s best potential, and negate its worst.
Districts are preparing for this with varying expertise and pace. West Vancouver and Surrey School Districts stand out for innovation in managing AI - via curriculum, guest speakers, First Nations consultation, an AI Student Council and more. (Links to their AI resources above.) Along with their passion for kids and forward-thinking, they hold a common belief - that integrating AI into society on human terms is entirely possible. Here in Cowichan, we're continually developing and drafting resources - keeping kids safe now, and anticipating future regulation.
But it matters that these efforts lack regulatory \"teeth\". How valuable are driving lessons without speed limits? Sure, most people would drive safely. Still, it’s only human to push or ignore boundaries in the absence of law and consequence. It’s the job of education to graduate tech-savvy, ethical citizens. It’s society’s job to define and enforce the standards.
One of the leading thinkers on AI regulation is UBC's Wendy H. Wong. She and US colleague David A. Lake, propose adapting the medical self-regulatory framework for AI. In this model, government grants expert peers the authority to credential, monitor and enforce professional standards. This ensures the best expertise is brought to bear and that regulatory responses keep pace with technological change.
While AI is new, humans are old. Very, very old. Archaeological evidence dating back 300,000 years (yes, hundreds of thousands of years) indicates that humans have used cultural practices to manage and expand knowledge for millennia. The theory of cumulative culture notes that cognition (from the Latin root \"to know\") and culture are co-evolutionary. The partnership powered the move to agriculture and cities, and enabled civilizations to attain ongoing and, at times, explosive advances. Age-old practices grew to manage complex systems, knowledge, institutions and technological creations. It was culture that enabled humans to leverage the benefits of accumulated knowledge and, on balance, improve the human condition. Human societies have always developed intricate frameworks to bring knowledge and technology into the service of humans – distributing wealth, mitigating power and balancing freedom with order. Today, those frameworks are regulation.
Big tech’s repeated claim that social media and artificial intelligence are novel and unlike all of humanity's previous tools and media is wrong. Concluding that these technologies should therefore be unregulated is illogical. Skipping community oversight of knowledge, culture and AI's vast influence is aberrant, and contrary to practices that have balanced freedom with order, enabled the unbounded growth of knowledge and ideas, and provided foundations for civilizations. Big tech's call for an unregulated environment is not forward thinking - it's quite the opposite - rolling back human civilizing dynamics by millennia.
Education is arguably the largest organized environment where society oversees children's engagement with digital technology. (In BC, that's about half a million students, in school 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year.) Teachers, principals, administrators, students, parents and boards manage technology’s real effects every day. With that in mind, it's imperative that the educational community’s voice and wisdom influence the regulations that will build a future where AI’s benefit far exceeds its threat and enhances, rather than diminishes, all that makes us human and whole.