44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 20, 2023
- 11:39:03 a.m.
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Madam Zarrillo, you have six minutes.
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- 11:39:11 a.m.
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Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. This is very interesting testimony today.
I'm going to ask my initial questions to Mr. Lockhart. If I have time, I would like to ask some questions to Monsieur Carrière as well.
I want to talk a bit about the points you made around the increased prosperity and how that's potentially not going to be distributed equitably among workers. My questions relate to protections of workers. You mentioned a responsible framework. I wonder if you could expand on what you think those responsible frameworks could look like on a federal level.
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- 11:39:43 a.m.
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I think that's probably a very challenging question to answer in a short time.
What we certainly view as part of a responsible framework is making sure that when artificial intelligence is implemented, it's not being done in a way that's harmful to the workers who are using it explicitly. There are always risks of increased workplace surveillance and facial recognition being used in the workplace, and we definitely want to avoid any kind of negative impacts from that.
Beyond that, there's a huge risk from AI that businesses will be able to implement AI and reduce labour, and that the increased productivity and benefits from that could be concentrated among just the ownership of the business. That runs the risk, obviously, of increasing wealth inequality in Canada. At the Dais we strongly believe that prosperity and GDP growth are beneficial for Canadians, but only when they are distributed among all groups.
I don't think I have an answer for how to make sure the benefits that come from increased productivity for workers are distributed among all of the workers and the people in the firm, but I do know that's going to be an important part of keeping up with AI adoption.
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- 11:40:56 a.m.
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Thank you for that.
Do you think, perhaps, that the federal government could lead an advisory council or a round table? If so, who do you think should be on there? What groups should be represented?
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- 11:41:07 a.m.
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I think that is definitely a path that needs to be investigated. I think that when you do that, you need to make sure all groups are represented. Obviously, you need to make sure industry's represented. Having unions there is important.
I think the trickiest part is making sure you have non-unionized workers represented there in some capacity, because a large portion of Canada's workforce is not unionized. If those voices aren't present at the table, then you really run the risk of a two-tiered system of unionized versus non-unionized workers.
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- 11:41:38 a.m.
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Thank you so much.
Monsieur Carrière, I also have a question around the protection of workers. You talked about it.
I'm worried about populating the tools with workers' ideas, skills and experiences, and then those workers never receiving any of the benefits of that. All of their intellectual and cognitive property and even their copyright rights are potentially at risk. I'm wondering if you could expand on how we protect workers' ideas, skills and experiences?
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- 11:42:16 a.m.
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As a union, we see that a number of tools exist to make the employee’s job easier. As I mentioned, there are negative impacts. Workers are being stripped of their autonomy and capacity for judgment. We’re turning individuals into automatons following a recipe previously determined by an algorithm.
I’ll use Bell’s Blueprint as a case in point. Communication systems installation technicians are required to enter their objective and all the steps involved in their task into the program. This is a basic step. It’s not a complex process, but workers have to explain what they want to do, and the program tells them how to do it. Workers become mere implementers.
In the job categories we represent, no one holds intellectual property on their ideas, because they’re already performing a job as an implementer. Workers are reduced to their simplest expression. They are stripped of their ability to judge, their expertise and the effect of having a great deal of experience in the sector, under the pretext that an algorithm can take anyone and have them do the same job. The impact is negative for workers. Work is becoming boring and so easy that there’s no challenge. As a result, people are leaving the company to work elsewhere. Artificial intelligence is being used as a partial solution to a labour shortage, but by making the work uninteresting, it’s causing turnover. It’s driving attrition.
It’s not so much a question of protecting workers’ ideas, but of ensuring that human beings are contributing their skills, values and knowledge to their business. Currently, we’re seeing that tools aren’t having that effect.
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- 11:44:17 a.m.
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Thank you so much.
I'm going to use my last less than a minute to ask Mr. Bessen this: We recently experienced the writers' and actors' strikes down in the United States. It had an affect up here in Canada. I'm from B.C. It put a lot of people out of work for over six months. I wonder what was learned around AI with regard to the recent strikes in the acting and writing fields?
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- 11:44:42 a.m.
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I'm not sure we've learned much about AI specifically.
There have been a number of studies done on using AI to assist writers. There's some evidence that it helps less-skilled writers do a better job. I don't think that AI's anywhere near the point where it can really replace writers. I think that was being talked about, but I don't see any evidence that it's about to happen or can happen. My own experience—and the experiences of a whole number of other people who have tried to do writing with ChatGPT or whatever—is that there are some huge limitations on using this technology at this point.
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- 11:45:36 a.m.
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Thank you, Madam Zarrillo.
Mr. Aitchison, you have five minutes, please.
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- 11:45:42 a.m.
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Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Bessen, I'm going to start with you.
I'm actually just going ask a question about housing, frankly. That's my portfolio. I know that there's a huge challenge with housing in the United States, as well as here in Canada. A big part of the problem is the lack of supply and the pace at which things get approved—with plans and all of that kind of stuff.
I'm wondering if you could speak a little to the application of tools like AI to speed up the approvals process, for example, in municipal zoning and that kind of thing. When you made your comments, I kept thinking about how this is a tool to be used, not to be afraid of. It presents opportunities. I'm hopeful that maybe it presents some opportunities in the housing sector.
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- 11:46:40 a.m.
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That's certainly an interesting idea and one I hadn't thought about before. I immediately see that it runs into a problem, which is that all of the regulations and requirements that go into approvals are not something an AI system can just ignore.
AI may be helpful. You would like to be able to see ways in which perhaps the various regulators would be able to use AI to analyze the various reports and speed up that process, but they'd have to be willing to do so. You might see ways in which AI could help compile all the various approvals.
There are possibilities for it to work, but I think it's a difficult problem, because there's a big interaction between regulations and laws and the technology. You can very easily see a situation in which AI would be used and then there would be a lawsuit because somebody didn't like the outcome.
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- 11:47:51 a.m.
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For an industry that is incredibly over-regulated—I would suggest that housing is generally over-regulated—you made a comment there that made me think that maybe AI is a tool that could be used, as you said, to compile all of the existing rules and regulations. Maybe it could be a tool that could analyze the layers of regulation, the layers of bureaucracy involved, trim the process and eliminate a lot of overlap. Is that a potential perhaps?
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- 11:48:23 a.m.
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Yes. AI can make recommendations about what to trim, but it can't trim it itself. Obviously it requires legal and regulatory approval to trim the process. It's a good idea.
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- 11:48:35 a.m.
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Thank you.
Mr. Lockhart, I will ask you to just provide some comment here on the same question, if you wouldn't mind.
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- 11:48:44 a.m.
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I would say two things. The first is that when we switch from talking about AI use in private workplaces to AI use by government, there are a lot of different questions that raises and a lot of different issues that come about. In the private sector a lot of the time we get to just focus on productivity, but in the public sector there's a lot more to consider than productivity. You can't just talk about making the process faster, because I think there's an important equity concern here even when it comes to housing applications. Handing over to an AI tool any kind of judgment on that makes for a real challenge.
The second is more on the topic of using AI to cut down on regulations. I think you're going to really run into a challenge there, because there are real social considerations, as opposed to just productivity or efficiency considerations, that go into that kind of regulation system. It seems to me that it's probably better done and left to humans and human decision-making for now.
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- 11:49:47 a.m.
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I will throw it to you, Mr. Carrière, as well, if you're interested in commenting on that, sir.
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- 11:49:56 a.m.
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I will refrain from answering that particular question about the use of artificial intelligence and housing issues. I don’t think I have anything new to add.
However, I will reiterate that we need to learn more about these tools. The way to better understand them is to talk about them, to provide a framework that forces employers to explain to their employees what they want to do, the goal they’re trying to achieve, the changes that will be made to their workplace and the repercussions on people’s autonomy.
In a context where augmented work will occur, that’s terrific. In a context where we’re only getting diminished work results, it’s problematic. It all begins with knowledge. We need to know what we’re dealing with. We don’t even know whether we’re dealing with algorithmic tools for automated decisions or semi-automated decisions or whether they’re symbolic algorithms or machine learning algorithms. Those are things we simply don’t know. Workers don’t know if the algorithmic tool is capable of thinking for itself or if it’s just following a decision tree.
We’re a long way from understanding. We need to develop mechanisms to learn more. Once we do…
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- 11:51:17 a.m.
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Thank you, Mr. Carrière.
Mr. Kusmierczyk, go ahead for five minutes, please.
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- 11:51:29 a.m.
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Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. I have a question for Mr. Carrière.
You know, Liberals believe in the power of the bargaining table. That's why we introduced Bill C-58, which will ban the use of replacement workers. That's what differentiates us from the Conservative Party: We believe in the power of the bargaining table and we're putting forward the ban on replacement workers.
Are you able to comment? Have you already seen the spectre of AI being part of discussions at the bargaining table? Are you currently seeing negotiations with employers? Are you seeing AI being raised in those bargaining discussions? I'm not sure how much time you've spent at those bargaining tables, but can you tell us a little about whether it's part and parcel of those discussions already?
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