Interview With the Authors: Part 2
What were some of the big issues in Computers and Society when the book came out?
Gotlieb:
Well, there were at least three issues that stand out in my mind. One of them was computers and privacy. I had already been involved and written a report on that.
Borodin:
People still talk about the issue of privacy. When we wrote about it in the book, we were, I think, referring back to the responsibility for privacy. The sort of responsibility we were thinking of was like the conscience of people who worked during World War II, the nuclear physicists who developed atomic weaponry and things like that. There was a movement post-war about the responsibility of scientists for the things they do.
Gotlieb:
Another issue was computers and work. A that time, and when computers first came out, there was an enormous debate going on as to whether computers would cause job losses. I had given an invited speech on this topic on computers in work in Tokyo and Melbourne, and the largest audience I ever had was in Melbourne, about 4,000 people, and it was picked up in Computer World and spoken about all over. Computers had already had an effect through the introduction of postal codes, for example: a lot of people in the Post Office lost jobs because they had manually sorted mail. Before the postal code, they would look at the addresses and look up what part of the country it was. The question was: what is going to happen to the Post Office? We did not have email yet, and the Post Office did not go away. But the Post Office is still shrinking today because of email.
We invited the Head of the Postal Union to come and speak to our class. At the time, the postal union was under tremendous public censure for holding a strike, and he was grateful for the invitation. He said nobody had thought to invite him to present his case, especially for a university audience. I maintained contact with him for a long time after. This question as to whether automation or advances in technology caused lost jobs had long been considered by economists and in particular by Schumpeter, who essentially said technology creates and destroys. He used this example: when motor cars came in, the buggy industry was shot, but there were far more jobs in producing cars than there ever were in producing buggies. I generally had the feeling that the same thing would hold for computers, but at the time I did not have the evidence. There were a certain number of jobs designing computers and building them, and then programming them, but nobody ever thought that, let us say, computer games would be a big industry, as we have now.
Automation replacing workers was the threat.
Borodin:
You know, it is interesting, I went back and looked at our summary for computers in employment. I think it was very guarded. At the time it was true that we said things and presented evidence for the case that computing has not had the unsettling effect on employment forecast by many. I think we presented a lot of evidence and that is what was different about the book; we tried to kind of be balanced about it. We presented what the various people were saying.
Gotlieb:
There was a third topic that was quite hot at the time. At MIT, there was a whole group who had put together research on the limits to growth. They had predictions about how we were using up resources, not just oil, but metals and so on, and they made predictions as to how long the world’s supply would last, at which time population growth will have to stop. So the question was how accurate were these predictions, could you trust them? They were computerized predictions, so here again was an area of where computers were making predictions that were affecting policy quite seriously.
Borodin:
Well, it was mainly simulations that they were doing, rather than, say, statistical analysis of a precise model.
Gotlieb:
They were simulations, right. They had a whole lot of simulations about particular resources.
Borodin:
Another topic that I think was always very popular: to what extent can machines think? We considered some classical computer uses at that time, but the issue of “Artificial Intelligence” and the ultimate limits of computation has continued to be a relevant subject.
What are some of the issues today? Are there any other issues that you think have emerged since you wrote the book that you would consider hot topics?
Gotlieb:
Some of the problems are still there and there are new ones. And they continue. By and large, the effect of computers on society continued to multiply, so there are now more important issues and different issues. I continue to follow things quite carefully.
For example, right now let us take the question of drones and the ethics and morality of drones. Now, Asimov had the three laws of robotics which said what a robot might be allowed to do. But drones are getting more powerful. They fly over Pakistan and then we think we have found the head of or an important person in Al Qaeda. They get permission from a person before they send a bomb to attack a car that they think holds a terrorist leader. The ethical and moral questions about robots continue. For example, in Japan you have all kinds of robots that act as caregivers. So they are looking after older people. Presumably if they see an old person about to put their hand on the stove, they do not have to ask questions, they can act on that. But there are other times when before the robot interferes with the person, you have to ask: is it right to intervene, or should the person be allowed to do their thing?
Another question about the ethics and morality of robots, is automated car driving. Let us say we are about to have cars that drive themselves. The senses that computers can have, and their reaction times, are better than us, better than humans. So if there is a decision to be made about driving a fast car, decisions which are normally under the control of a computer, should these always be under the control of the computer, or are there times when decisions about what you do with that fast car ought to be made by humans rather than machines? Or again, consider a medical decision. Computers get better and better at diagnosis, but if they want to give treatment, should a human be involved in the decision about that? So the ethical and moral questions about robots as they become more and more intertwined with human life continue, and as computers become more powerful, then they become more important.
Borodin:
It is not just robots: it is any automated decision making.
Gotlieb:
Exactly, any automated decision, so the ethics and morality of automated decisions is a continuing, ongoing issue. For example, consider automated driving. In the case of drivers’ licences, there are times in which you get a suspended licence, but the period of suspension depends upon the seriousness of the infraction. Driving under the influence becomes a lot more important if you happen to kill somebody while you were drunk, rather than just being stopped because your car was weaving. You may lose your licence for a week or a month in one case and for much longer in another case. So we need good judgment: we have legal judgments and we need that. But when the sins are made by autonomous devices like robots and drones, then the ethical and moral problems do not go away. The ethics and morality on autonomous systems has become more urgent because there are more autonomous systems, and they are smarter.
Gotlieb:
Another issue that I think is very important is security. If you want to do the most damage, you can probably bring down the electrical grid. Or if you mess up all the aircraft weather predictions so that the aircraft fly into a storm that they cannot manage. We know there are people who are prepared to do those things, obviously, so the question of computer security when it comes to data privacy, safety issues and so on, is important today, because we have systems that are so dependent on computers and networks. The problem of making them secure is more important, more urgent than ever, and I think unsolved. At least it is far from being solved. You see lots of people who say it is important, and fortunately they are addressing it, but nobody that I know claims that we have a good handle on it yet. And by the same token, computer security has become more urgent because we have, you know, power grids and networks of weather systems and so on that all depend on them. So I would say that what certainly has happened is that some of the old problems which we saw have become more serious and maybe still demanding solutions that we do not have.
Many years ago there was a conference at Queens when privacy was a big issue and I was invited to give the keynote talk. Essentially, people were worried about too much data-gathering by companies and government and so on. The title of my talk was Privacy, A Concept Whose Time has Come and Gone. That was completely counter to what the people who invited me expected. If I give a talk, I would say security trumps privacy every time So it is a changing concept.
Borodin:
Well, you do anything on Facebook and it could be there forever. That is a good social issue, who really owns the data after a while and how long are they allowed to keep data on people? That becomes a very big question.
Apropos your comment about security trumps privacy, I probably agree with that. When I listen in the morning to CBC News, I hear a theme come up, an underlying kind of theme that we have had for who knows how many years: “Big Brother”, 1984, the whole idea that we can be controlled centrally, everything about our lives are known, and things like that. It is a theme that we have had in literature, in our popular thinking, in our consciousness for many, many years. I do not think that has gone away. I think it is still there.
Gotlieb:
One guy was caught going through an airport with explosives in his shoes, so in airports all over the world forever, you take your shoes off. Now in the United States if you are over 70 they changed the rule on that.
Borodin:
No, it is more than 70. I was stopped, they asked me how old I was. I am 71, and he said, no, you are not old enough, you have to take your shoes off.
Gotlieb:
Yes, so they are making some tiny changes to it. But I think they have only caught one guy who ever tried explosives in his shoes. There has been one-off cases which have led to extreme, exaggerated, I would say, conditions in airports all over the world. Three-year-olds have to take their shoes off, you know.
Borodin:
We were in the Buffalo airport a couple of years ago and there was a 99-year-old woman in a wheelchair and she just happened to be the random number that came up that you have to search, and they were searching her.
Gotlieb:
I remember, I was in Israel, and I went to Eilat. It is in the south. I was coming back to Tel Aviv and I was the only non-Israeli in the group. So the security person went through and said to me, “I have got somebody who I am teaching how to do a search. Do you mind if we practise on you?” What was I going to say? “Yes, I mind?” No. So I got special treatment.
Borodin:
This brings up a related issue, and I think the Israelis are very good at this: they have a lot of data on people. So when you show up at the airport, they pretty much know quickly who you are. And they do profile you. To the extent the government, or whoever is running security at the airport, has a lot of information about you, it may alleviate how much physical invasion of your privacy you are going to go through. So you have lost a lot of privacy in terms of all the stuff they are going to know about you, but on the other hand it may save you much more intrusive physical types of embarrassment.
Gotlieb:
If you are a frequent traveller to the United States you can get something to let you go through a lot faster: Global Entry and there is also the Nexus pass.
Borodin:
You give up a certain amount of privacy for those. For the privacy issue, even though in the end we usually will trump privacy in favour of security, it is still on people’s minds. They still feel sensitive to it; there is this underlying issue that we still have that we do not want to be controlled centrally, we do not want “Big Brother”, 1984 is still in our minds.
C.C. (Kelly) Gotlieb is the founder of the Department of Computer Science (DCS) at the University of Toronto (UofT), and has been called the “Father of Computing in Canada”. Gotlieb has been a consultant to the United Nations on Computer Technology and Development, and to the Privacy and Computers Task Force of the Canadian Federal Department of Communications and Justice. During the Second World War, he helped design highly-classified proximity fuse shells for the British Navy. He was a founding member of the Canadian Information Processing Society, and served as Canada’s representative at the founding meeting of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Encyclopaedia Britannica and of the Annals of the History of Computing. Gotlieb has served for the last twenty years as the co-chair of the awards committee for the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and in 2012 received the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award. He is a member of the Order of Canada, and awardee of the Isaac L. Auerbach Medal of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies. Gotlieb is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Association of Computing Machinery, the British Computer Society, and the Canadian Information Processing Society, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, the Technical University of Nova Scotia and the University of Victoria. Allan Borodin is a University Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto, and a past Chair of the Department. Borodin served as Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee for the Mathematics of Computation for many years, and is a former managing editor of the SIAM Journal of Computing. He has made significant research contributions in many areas, including algebraic computation, resource tradeoffs, routing in interconnection networks, parallel algorithms, online algorithms, information retrieval, social and economic networks, and adversarial queuing theory. Borodin’s awards include the CRM-Fields PIMS Prize; he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.