Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?

We launch our second season with a deep dive into the new world of artificial intelligence with some of Canada’s top thinkers in the field. 7 p.m. Oct 3, Stuart McNish will moderate a panel including:

• Edoardo De Martin – CEO Industrio AI & Chief Development Officer, Digital Innovation Cluster
• Mark Low – KPMG Ignition
• Terri Griffith – Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Simon Fraser University Beedie School of Business
• Dr. Sylvain Moreno – Founder of the Circle Innovation model
• David Seymour – Vice President and General Manager in Office Media Group, Microsoft Vancouver,
• Calvin Gerus – Borealis AI 

Early AI actually started playing an important role in our lives in the 1980s (even earlier in science fiction) - a computer science used for simple but detailed tasks such as inspecting circuit boards in manufacturing. Early AI proved good at picking patterns out of huge quantities of data and noting details a human eye may miss. It’s critical in the algorithms driving online search engines like Google, and in detecting credit card fraud. 

With the launch of ChatGPT, however, the technology has been thrust into public discourse in a new way. Overnight, the new platform was writing blogs, conducting online research, and helping students cheat on papers. Its limitations have quickly become apparent, as have some of the new challenges the technology creates. 

Perhaps more importantly, but quietly, new AI applications are being developed across hundreds of fields. AI’s already starting to play a key role in healthcare, education, and manufacturing. It’s creating new fields of work not conceived of until recently but already employing thousands. 

It’s also fostering fears of increasing automation costing jobs – playing a key role in the recent port strike and ongoing Hollywood actors and writers strike. There is concern people will stop learning underlying processes AI can replicate and we’ll lose expertise in creating art by hand, writing, and research. 

If AI does free humans from tedious and dangerous work but creates new jobs managing that work, is it a net positive? Will it finally be the technology that frees up our time for other things?

Can AI help us overcome looming challenges of capacity in fields such as healthcare and education? 

AI is already starting to play a role in healthcare, helping doctors diagnose ailments from an array of scans, patient history, genetics, test results, and devices such as a fitness band or heart monitors. It has the same potential to radically change our financial systems, education, militaries, transportation networks, and media. 

We hope you can join us as we strive to answer some of these questions on Oct 3. 

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