During a town hall event on Monday in Ottawa, CA, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said “diversity” is needed among computer engineers developing AI in order to prevent the development of “evil” algorithms.
Trudeau said:
One of the advantages that we have in Canada around AI, is the world has been looking to us and a few others to lead on the global partnership for AI, and … that is talking about the ethics of AI, talking about … how do you make sure you’re building algorithms that will teach themselves, and move forward to think ethically, and to not do too much evil, and how you frame it in the right way?
But it’s also about making sure that the people designing those algorithms are themselves representative of the widest possible swath of population and experiences.
If you have a handful of non-diverse people designing a machine, no matter what they want to do there are going to be biases and ways of thinking that slip into it, and the more you can ensure a bringing in of multiple perspectives and different experiences, the more likely you’re going to be able to create something that is more suited to the kinds of challenges around the world.
Canada is a place that’s grounded in individual rights and freedoms that recognizes how important diversity and the value of every individual is.
Trudeau said professional groups of people with insufficient “diversity” underperform relative to those with more “diversity.” He praised Canada as a leader on “diversity:”
One of the great things about Canada is we do diversity better than just about any other place in the world, and those of you in the tech sector — but in any sort of innovative or creative sector — know full well that diversity of perspectives, of backgrounds, of stories, of experiences actually contributes in really meaningful ways to sparking new ideas, new solutions, to finding new ways of solving old problems.
As we know from nature, resiliency comes from diversity. When you have a super-diverse ecosystem, it’s going to handle shocks or disruptions a lot better than a monoculture or a place that has been stripped down to just a couple of species.
The same thing with groups of people, if you pull together a group of people who all went to the same school, and grew up with the same background, and practice the same religion, and speak the same language at home, you’re not going to get the kind of range of potential solutions that you could if you’re gathering a whole bunch of people together to solve the same problem.
Across the entire town hall event, Trudeau said the words “diverse” and “diversity” a total of twelve times.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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