A conversation at the intersection of technology and humanity.
A conversation about making technology behave.
A conversation about future-proofing nothing less than civil society itself.
And a conversation that is once again under way.
True North 2019, the global-in-scale, two-day follow-on to last year’s conference about “tech for good,” kicked off Wednesday at the Lot42 Global Flex Campus in Kitchener with a full slate of inspiring and engaging speakers and an audience of more than 2,500 who were keen to take in every word.
The conference, coupled with a region-wide, after-hours festival featuring dance and music, art and food, is a determined response to the stories and behaviour by tech companies and their masters that in recent years have left much to be desired. The conference aims not only to call out data privacy issues, and gender issues, and diversity issues, but also to highlight paths to better outcomes.
“We can and must make a difference,” said Communitech CEO and President Iain Klugman in the days leading up to the event.
Perhaps no one throughout the opening day was more captivating in that regard than the speaker who delivered the conference’s opening address on Stage A – Thomas Friedman, the award-winning foreign affairs columnist with the New York Times and author of the bestseller Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations.
Friedman, to a standing ovation, laid out the extraordinary dilemma faced around the world due to the shocking advancement of technology since 2007, and offered what appears as a most rational antidote – slowing down, building communities, emphasizing values, expressing our humanity.
“We are standing at a moral intersection, he said. “One person [now has the power] to kill all of us.
“Everyone needs to be in the embrace of sustainable values.”
Friedman described the growing gap in the pace of change and our capacity as a species to adapt. At the U.S. communications giant AT&T, he said, employees are required to constantly retrain and upgrade – paid for by the company but on their own time. Failure to do so can result in termination. The realization of just how hard it is to keep up, he said, “has a lot of people understandably freaked out.”
But then Friedman described the synergistic benefit of people who are moored in stable, diverse, welcoming communities, people who are supported and included. Those people, he said, are least likely to trumpet Brexit or a populist outlook.
In an interview with Communitech News after his talk, Friedman acknowledged the apparent tension – of needing to go faster because of technology and slower at the same time.
“One is about skills and the other is about values,” Friedman said.
“In terms of skills you want to be moving as fast as you can to always be expanding and updating them. In terms of values, you want to be moving as slow as possible and remain anchored in them.
“One of the things that’s happened is there is so much change going so fast that people got unmoored, unanchored. That’s why community is so important. That’s the anchor in the hurricane.”
Friedman’s discussion was just the beginning.
In the afternoon, Robert Mazur, who spent 27 years as a U.S. federal agent, left the audience gobsmacked as he described a working life spent undercover in order to bring drug barons and money launderers to justice. Mazur, whose life is the basis for a feature film starring Bryan Cranston called The Infiltrator, described how technology aids and abets crime and steps that can stop it.
Later, David Stein, Managing Partner of the Leaders Fund, unveiled the problem statement for The Leaders Prize at True North, a $1-million national competition that challenges Canadians to solve a major societal problem using artificial intelligence.
The problem to be solved? Fake news.
“Social networks have been used to manipulate elections,” said Stein. “When we don’t know what to believe or what to trust it causes a lot of turmoil in our civilization.”
Appropriately, tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has made a career out of challenging the status quo in Silicon Valley with coverage that is the polar opposite of fake, followed Stein on Stage A with an outline of tech’s ills, but also acknowledged the powerful contributions technology has made across layers of society.
“Innovations can help us with critical problems,” Swisher said. “[But] there is a price, a cost. [Tech leaders have] got to man up, woman up really, and figure this out.
“Karma is a bitch, but it’s coming for all of them.”
In the morning, 100 attendees, partners and speakers joined the Tech for Good Ethos Studio, a workshop designed to investigate how tech for good and ethics can be integrated into workplaces.
Key to the workshop was a deck of Tarot Cards of Tech at each table, which posed such questions as “What could cause people to lose trust in your product?” or “How would a community of your most passionate users behave?” or “What would using your product too much look like?”
(To obtain your own deck of Tarot Cards of Tech to encourage these discussions at your workplace, go to www.artefactgroup.com/case-studies/the-tarot-cards-of-tech/)
Also appearing on Stage A throughout the day:
- Roy Gori, the CEO of Manulife, spoke about the challenge of transforming the culture and processes of a 130-year-old company with 34,000 employees into that of a nimble technology company.
- Lisa de Wilde, the CEO of TVO, talked about the reinvention of the public television broadcaster into one that provides Ontarians with a menu of digital services, including one called Mathify, which connects students with certified math teachers through an online portal for tutoring.
- Ann Cavoukian, the former Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, delivered a passionate address about digital privacy called Privacy by Design, highlighting the need to bake privacy into platforms and policy alike.
- Antonio Zappulla, the CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Thomson Reuters, discussed how his organization has helped enlist banks and financial institutions to use the data footprints left by human traffickers in order to arrest the exploitation of vulnerable women and children.
- Kelsey Leonard, a PhD candidate and Philomathia Water Policy Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Hamilton’s McMaster University and a citizen of the Shinnecock Indian Nation of Long Island, N.Y., discussed data and tech sovereignty as it applies to Indigenous peoples. “How are we decolonizing tech?” she asked, emphasizing that Indigenous nations have the lowest levels of connectivity across North America. “Digital colonialism” continues, she said, and is an ongoing form of repression that must be addressed. Reconciliation, she added, must include tech and data.
Klugman opened the conference by saying that “the world needs more Canada than ever,” referring to this country’s diversity, inclusiveness and honest-broker reputation.
On cue, Friedman described the healthy, diverse, welcoming societies he has witnessed emerging in his home state of Minnesota – communities, he said afterward, that share much in common with what he sees in Canada.
“[Minnesota is] the closest thing to Canada there is. You’re definitely onto something; if Canada were a stock, I’d buy it. I really mean that.
“I think Canada is a great example of people who are learning to manage diversity. You have your problems, you have your issues. It’s never easy. It’s never a straight line. All journeys are [like that]. But I think the journey you are on is the right one now. You can see how Canada is thriving.”
Not to be outdone by Stage A, Stage B highlights included:
- Patrick Myles, CEO of Huron Digital Pathology, a medical device company based in St. Jacobs, Ont. Myles talked about democratizing pathology by sharing digital slides and knowledge among pathologists and doctors around the world. “We spend a lot of time thinking about how AI will leave people behind ... but we have to spend an equal amount of time thinking about how we can use this technology to bring a greater number of people into a healthier future,” said Myles.
- Montreal-based international speaker and tech marketer Duane Brown’s talk on being digitally exhausted picked up on a theme raised in Friedman’s keynote address. While Friedman described a world that was moving too fast, Brown talked about developing healthy habits to untether from that fast-moving technology. “It’s great that we have all these applications but it doesn’t necessarily help us to live our best life possible.”
- Mohamed Musbah, director of product at Microsoft Research’s Montreal lab, talked about building literate responsible machines. While most of the world’s information is written down in books, on the web or in the cloud, machines can’t yet read and write. “I work on trying to teach machines to be literate and learn to read and write like humans.” Literacy is what separates us from animals, he says.
- Trust is key to any company’s success, said Interac’s Debbie Gamble. When it became public that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the public accounts of millions of Facebook users and used their personal data without consent for political purposes, it was a watershed moment for trust as some U.S. political candidates called for the breakup of big tech, said Gamble. Trust is not just an expression of a company’s brand, but also a huge competitive advantage, she said. “If data is the new oil, then indeed trust is a currency.”
This year’s conference features three key themes: ‘Living digital,’ ‘Bridges Not Walls’ and the ‘Age of Relearning.’ An afternoon workshop titled Future of Work and Learning supported the third, with 120 attendees.
The workshop was the culmination of a series of breakfast meetings earlier this year, involving Communitech and such partners as Manulife and Deloitte, that examined the challenges and opportunities facing various demographics in today’s workforce.
Simon Chan, Vice-President of Talent, Academy and Future of Work at Communitech, told the crowd that, as Friedman’s escort for the day, he had the opportunity to discuss how Waterloo Region is creating a complex adaptive coalition to address the realities of future work. “When I told him what we were doing, he said this is exactly what communities should be doing, this working together across academia, government and industry to move these solutions forward.”
Chan said the results of today’s workshop will inform a future-work playbook that will be developed later this year in Waterloo Region, and, “I’m an aspirational guy. I’d like to see this a playbook that we can send to other communities. That’s what True North is all about: big ideas.”
Rounding out the Day One speakers on Stage B:
- University of Waterloo science professor and Canada Research Chair Roger Melko said Waterloo Region is well poised for the second quantum revolution that’s under way, with ultra-secure communication and superconductors that will change our energy grid. Thanks to the second revolution, technology that began in academic labs is being transferred to industry in record time, he said.
- Shak Lakhani, CEO of Avro Life Science, which develops skin patches for generic drug delivery, told his audience that AI can help speed the delivery of new drugs.
- Monika Jaroszonek of Ratio.city said her company is helping change how cities are built by developing interactive tools that will aid planners. “At Ratio.city we want to be the Google Docs of city building,” said Jaroszonek.
- MedStack CEO Balaji Gopalan said that technology is making healthcare more accessible via telemedicine and robotic surgery and has made healthcare smarter and faster.
- A panel discussion with alumni from Waterloo-based SHAD, an enrichment program for promising high school students, explored the rise of social entrepreneurship. Alum Jen Wang, now with online consignment store ThredUP, said more people want to know that the company they’re supporting is having a social impact. “So they’re moving with their feet.”
- Mandulis Energy, which is developing a power station that’ll bring electricity to a town in Uganda, is working with French NGO Acted and 24,000 area farmers to provide them with training and access to processing services to increase their income. Mandulis then uses waste, such as corn husks, to produce energy. More than 630 million Africans are without electricity, said Mandulis co-founder Peter Benhur Nyeko. “Energy is the thread that connects everything, whether you’re looking at ending hunger or improving health.”
- Branka Marijan, senior researcher at Project Ploughshares, a Waterloo-based research institute that focuses on disarmament and tracks worldwide arms sales, and AI activist Liz O’Sullivan, discussed concerns about the potential threat of weaponizing AI and the efforts under way at the United Nations to regulate weapons, such as drones. “We’re talking about a pre-emptive ban because once a weapon is out there it’s really hard to regulate it,” said Marijan. Those types of weapons could decide whom to target, but there’s no way to know how the model is making decisions. “It’s a black box,” said O’Sullivan, who stopped working for a tech company involved in Project Maven, the Pentagon’s bid to use AI in warfare.
- Lyndsey Butcher, Executive Director of SHORE Centre — formerly Planned Parenthood — and Zeitspace’s Mark Connolly wrapped up Stage B with a prime example of True North’s tech for good mantra. Waterloo-based Zeitspace, a software consulting company, donated its time and expertise to help SHORE develop a web-based abortion referral app, called Choice Connect. The app was rolled out in Waterloo Region in November, but Butcher announced it was being launched across Canada at True North Wednesday. Butcher graduated from Communitech’s Fierce Founders program, which helps female entrepreneurs frame a tech-based problem so that the tech community can help them solve it.
The True North conference continues Thursday.
– with files from Bill Bean and Kelly Pedro
