(Illustration by Pete Ryan)

Valérie Pisano is the president and CEO of Mila, a non-profit artificial intelligence research institute based in Montreal.

It used to be fairly easy to tell when a machine had a hand in creating something. Picture borders were visibly pixelated, the voice was slightly choppy or the whole thing just seemed robotic. OpenAI’s rollout of ChatGPT last fall pushed us past a point of no return: artificially intelligent tools had mastered human language. Within weeks, the chatbot amassed 100 million users and spawned competitors like Google’s Bard. All of a sudden, these applications are co-writing our emails, mimicking our speech and helping users create fake (but funny) photos. Soon, they will help Canadian workers in almost every sector summarize, organize and brainstorm. This tech doesn’t just allow people to communicate with each other, either. It communicates with us and, sometimes, better than us. Just as criminals counterfeit money, it’s now possible for generative AI tools to counterfeit people.

Mila, where I work, is a research institute that regularly convenes AI experts and specialists from different disciplines, particularly on the topic of governance. Even we didn’t expect this innovation to reach our everyday lives this quickly. At the moment, most countries don’t have any AI-focused regulations in place—no best practices for use and no clear penalties to prevent bad actors from using these tools to do harm. Lawmakers all over the world are scrambling. Earlier this year, ChatGPT was temporarily banned in Italy over privacy concerns. And China recently drafted regulations to mandate security assessments for any AI tool that generates text, images or code.

Here at home, scientists and corporate stakeholders have called for the federal government to expedite the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, or AIDA, which was tabled by the Liberals in June of 2022. The Act, which is part of Bill C-27—a consumer privacy and data-protection law—includes guidelines for rollout of AI tools and fines for misuse. There’s just one problem: AIDA may not be in force until 2025. Legislation usually doesn’t move as fast as innovation. In this case, it needs to catch up quickly.

MORE: Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez & Nick Frosst are creating a smarter, friendlier chatbot

The European Union has taken the lead with its AI Act, the first AI-specific rules in the Western world, which it began drafting two years ago. Canada should consider adopting one of the EU’s key measures as soon as possible: that developers and companies must disclose when they use or promote content made by AI. Any photos produced using the text-to-image generator DALL-E 2 could come with watermarks, while audio files could come with a disclaimer from a chatbot—whatever makes it immediately clear to anyone seeing, hearing or otherwise engaging with the content that it was made with an assist from machines. As an example, a professor we work with at Mila lets his students use ChatGPT to compile literature reviews at the start of their papers—provided they make note of which parts are bot-generated. They’re also responsible for fact-checking the AI to make sure it didn’t cite any non-existent (or completely wacko) sources.

The EU’s AI Act includes a similar clause. Any company deploying generative AI tools like ChatGPT, in any capacity, will have to publish a summary of the copyrighted data used to train it. Say you’re using a bank’s financial planning service: in a properly labelled world, its bot would say, “I’ve looked at these specific sources. Based on that information, my program suggests three courses of action…” In the creative sector, artists have already filed copyright lawsuits alleging that their images have been lifted by bots. With mandatory labelling, it would be easier to run a check on what “inspired” those creations.

One of the main dangers of ChatGPT specifically is that it says incorrect things in such an authoritative way that it confuses us into thinking it’s smarter than it is. (A tweet from Sam Altman, OpenAI’s own CEO: “fun creative inspiration; great! reliance for factual queries; not such a good idea.”) The tool was trained on a massive body of information including books, articles and Wikipedia, and recent upgrades have allowed it to access the internet. That gives it the impression of having a kind of super-intelligence. And though the program generates its responses almost instantly, it blurts them out one sentence at a time, with a human-like cadence. Even people with highly developed intuition could be fooled; ChatGPT is designed to make us trust it.

What it’s not designed to do is find correct answers. ChatGPT isn’t a search engine, whose algorithms prioritize more credible websites. It’s common to ask generative AI questions and have it spit out errors or “hallucinations”—the tech term for the AI’s confidently delivered mistakes. On a recent 60 Minutes episode, James Manyika, a senior executive at Google, asked Bard to recommend books about inflation. Not one of its suggestions exists. If you type in “Valérie Pisano, AI, Montreal,” ChatGPT won’t offer a summary of my real bio, but an invented one. It’s already so easy to create fake news. Generative AI tools will be able to supply infinite amounts of disinformation.

RELATED: My students are using ChatGPT to write papers and answer exam questions—and I support it

In the absence of any meaningful guardrails, we’re having to rely on the judgment and good faith of regular internet users and businesses. This isn’t enough. Canada can’t leave oversight of this technology exclusively to the companies that are building it, which is essentially what happened with social media platforms like Facebook. (I’m no historian, but I recall that having some negative impacts on fair elections.) At some point, governments will either need to make it legal or illegal to pass off AI-generated content as human-created—at both the national and international levels.

We’ll also need to agree on penalties. Not every misapplication of generative AI carries the same level of risk. Using the art generator Midjourney to make a fake picture of Pope Francis in a puffy winter coat isn’t really a threat to anyone. That could easily be managed by a simple in-platform “report” button on Instagram. In areas like journalism and politics, however, using AI to mislead could be disastrous.

Labels also force a certain amount of AI literacy on the average person. We’re past the point of being able to say, “But I’m not a tech-y person!” Going forward, all internet users are going to be encountering AI on a daily basis, not just reading articles about it. It will inevitably change how everyone creates, competes, works, learns, governs, cheats and chats. Seeing (or hearing) a “machine-made” disclaimer presents us with the opportunity to choose how we allow its output to permeate our personal lives.

Of all the new tools, chatbots seem to have impressed the scientific community the most—specifically, because of how human they feel. (I actually find it difficult not to say “please” and “thank you” when I’m interacting with them, even though I know a bot won’t judge my manners.) So it’s easy to imagine using generative AI for tasks that are more emotional. But while I might ask Google Chrome’s new Compose AI extension to “write email requesting refund” to my airline, I probably wouldn’t use it to pen notes to my close friends. I can also see the upsides of Snapchat’s new My AI bot, which now greets millions of teens with a friendly “Hi, what’s up?” while understanding that a machine will never replace the deeper kind of support we need to grieve a difficult loss. Some things might be better left to humans. I guess we’ll see.

The post How can we tell whether content is made by AI or a human? Label it. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Aaron Grinhaus’s Toronto firm was the first in Canada to open an office in the metaverse (photograph by iStock, illustration by Maclean’s)

In January of 2022, Toronto-based Grinhaus became the first law firm in Canada to open an office in the virtual reality landscape known as the metaverse. The building, made of pixels instead of concrete, is a place to meet clients and a way to keep up with new technology. “It wasn’t okay if you didn’t have a fax machine in 1985,” says Aaron Grinhaus, the firm’s founder and co-chair of Osgoode Law School’s Web3, blockchain and metaverse law program. Here, he explains what it was like to set up (virtual) shop, what the crypto crash means for virtual real estate and why this modern workplace requires park benches and elevators, but not bathrooms.

Grinhaus Law was among the first Canadian companies to launch an office in the metaverse. What inspired you to go virtual?

I’ve always been interested in cutting-edge technology. In 2018, I wrote the first ever textbook on blockchain technology and the law. Later that year I became the co-director of Osgoode Hall’s program in Web3, blockchain and metaverse law. This kind of innovation requires regulation. If you’re a law firm, or any kind of business that wants to set up a presence in the metaverse, there are a lot of legal questions that go along with that. I kept getting questions from colleagues and clients: How does this work? How do I implement this technology into my practice? I couldn’t give advice before testing it out myself, and that was the push we needed to create our own virtual office.

How does one go shopping for real estate in the metaverse?

First, you have to decide where you want to buy real estate. There are several platforms in the metaverse, the more popular ones being Facebook’s Meta, and Roblox, which is a global gaming platform. I chose to buy in Decentraland because—as the name suggests—it’s decentralized, meaning the platform is co-owned and operated by its users. There are a few dozen different districts within Decentraland, where people congregate based on their interests: there’s a fashion district, Chinese district, dance district, yoga district, etc. We wanted to keep things professional and academic, so we bought a parcel in the university district for five figures. “Land” comes in the form of NFTs or non-fungible tokens, so you have the exclusive ownership right to that land and can build whatever you want on it.

READ: The makers of the metaverse want you to give up on reality

When you say build—are you hiring a virtual architect? Or is it more like buying a house in Monopoly?

There are prefab home options, but we built our office from scratch. (I was lucky to have employees who had some experience with this.) It’s like a Lego set: you have different options for windows, walls, stairs and banisters that you can use to build your space. Some of the basic options are free and you can pay for upgrades. Our building is a two-storey square divided into four rooms, and the front of the building is transparent so you can see inside. We have a fountain out front with benches and trees where we hold meetings with clients. It’s always sunny in the metaverse.

Welcoming our partners in (helping people avoid) crime @OutlierCanada (https://t.co/tx6ljLlRux) & https://t.co/CCbIO0T7Cb to our #Decentraland #Metaverse office!#Blockchain #cryptoregulation
Come visit us to discuss latest Web3 legal/regulatory trends AND SEE OUR COOL FOUNTAIN! pic.twitter.com/CYKhMjvSV1

— Aaron Grinhaus (@A_Grinhaus) February 18, 2022

Did you buy furniture? Do you decorate?

We have chairs and tables for meetings, but nothing fancy. We’ve recently added some NFT artwork—virtual paintings that I purchased as investments—on the walls. Compared to some of the buildings that have gone up recently, our place is pretty modest. We’re doing some renovations to accommodate our new tenant Outlier Solutions, an anti-money-laundering company, and because we just launched MetBA, a metaverse bar association. Anyone can open a law office in the metaverse, but how do prospective clients know that the person offering legal advice is actually qualified? Our association will recognize lawyers and offer professional development workshops and conferences.

Aaron Grinhaus (photograph courtesy of Grinhaus Law Firm)

How do you access your virtual workplace? Do you need an app? A fancy VR headset?

The Oculus headsets create the most immersive VR experience—it feels like you’re actually in the metaverse, shaking hands with clients or sitting around a desk. But you can also access it via the Decentraland website on your laptop or phone, moving your character around like you would in a video game. In either case, your presence is represented by a customizable avatar. We’re not in the metaverse 24/7: it’s only used to meet prospective and current clients.

This all sounds cool and futuristic, but I’m wondering what the point is. What problem is a Metaverse office solving that hasn’t been already solved by Zoom?

Why use Zoom when you can use a telephone? Or why bother inventing the telephone when we already have the telegraph? New technology will drive us forward, create efficiency and allow for seamless communication, which is essential to our work. Of course, there is some hesitancy. For the longest time, lawyers resisted email and now we can’t do our job without it. We wanted to lead the way in this space and so far, we have no regrets.

But practically speaking, how often are clients asking to meet you in the metaverse? And why?

We host meetings there on a weekly basis. A small but growing number of clients working in the blockchain space approach us through the metaverse or because they’ve heard about our office there. These include clients running NFT platforms; cross-border clients looking to make transfers more seamless with Web3 technology, and any other business that wants to increase its reach by marketing in the metaverse. These clients want to make sure we know what we’re doing and that’s why we often meet in the metaverse. At this point, we’re waiting to see where it goes, but it’s already proven to be a good investment.

Even with the massive crypto crash earlier this year?

We’re not a bank or investment firm, so we weren’t really impacted. We bought real estate at the height of the NFT market when land was going for 10 times what it is now, but the office isn’t a real estate investment for me. I’m not making money off the firm’s physical office at Yonge and Eglinton either, but it’s an effective way of meeting and retaining clients. The same has been true of the metaverse.

More: The Power List: Top 10 AI Trailblazers

Some bosses have insisted that working from home is bad for innovation: less brainstorming around the watercooler, etc. Could a metaverse office be a middle ground?

Even when they’re in the office, my employees tend to communicate mostly via messenger. Office culture evolves with technology. Watercoolers were a big thing at one point, but now we have different channels for interacting, so people choose what works for them.

Is there much after-work socializing in the metaverse? Like, would you ever take a client to a bar for a “drink”?

There are bars in Decentraland, and if a client wants to grab a drink after work, we’re more than happy to (though you’re just chatting, not actually drinking). There are also places to play ping pong or go bowling. We just threw a party to celebrate the new bar association. There were no drinks, but we handed out virtual T-shirts with our logo that people put on their avatars.

I notice your office doesn’t have any bathrooms. I guess there’s no need?

As far as I’m aware, there are no bathrooms in the metaverse. We’re trying to replicate the best parts of the real world. Our updated office will have an elevator, which is a bit weird. How tired are you going to get climbing virtual stairs?

The post This is the first law firm in Canada to open an office in the metaverse appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Pierre-Yves Fouillen is the North American business-development lead for Flying Whales, a cargo-airship company based in France and Quebec.

When most people think of airships, the first thing that comes to mind is the Hindenburg, which burst into flames in 1937. I’ll admit that wasn’t the most amazing example of what this technology can do. For years, these vessels clocked impressive transatlantic flights, hosted delightful leisure cruises and were used by the world’s militaries. Their disappearance was brought about by technological advancement. Aircraft like the Boeing 747, which rolled out in the ’70s, were simply faster and more cost-efficient than the lighter-than-air dirigibles. But lately, airships have been making a comeback for a few reasons: low emissions output, attractive price tags and the serious need for freight solutions in a troubled global supply chain. This time around, they’re in hybrid form.

Theoretically, airships could be used to carry anything—building materials, food supplies, even people. The startup I work for, Flying Whales, began with wood. In 2012, when the French Ministry of Agriculture and Food needed a high-capacity machine to transport difficult-to-extract wood from forests high in the Alps, our future CEO thought: airships. Helicopters have agility on their side, but airships produce 80 per cent less pollution and cost 20 to 50 times less. For seaports crammed in times of crisis or landlocked communities with limited airport facilities, our fleet—which is currently in development—could drop off payloads of freight via winches and slings, all without landing on solid ground. Airship projects are now popping up all over the world. Many are targeting the U.K. and the U.S., but the most interesting market, to us, is Canada.

In 2019, the Quebec government invested $30 million to develop and build Flying Whales airships in the province. Our current model is the LCA60T, which has an oblong superstructure and a cargo bay that’s 96 metres long, eight metres wide and seven metres high. The lift is powered by helium—not hydrogen, which is flammable and played a not-insignificant role in the Hindenburg debacle. Right now, the airships run on a hybrid propulsion system, but we plan to have them fully electric by 2030. 

Inside, we can store 60 tons of goods. That’s three times the capacity of Hercules planes, which the Canadian government has used to service northern fly-in communities. Best of all, our machines don’t require any extra infrastructure during takeoffs and landings. When completed, the Flying Whales will be the largest aircraft in the world—which is good, because there are plenty of loads to carry.

The pandemic highlighted the many cracks in Canada’s supply chain. Shipping ports were congested for months on end, and planes delivering important freight were grounded en masse. In October, the National Supply Chain Task Force released a report that said the country’s cargo transportation strategy was in desperate need of an overhaul, thanks to ongoing issues with international trade. (Just ask anyone who has recently tried to buy Tylenol for their kids.) 

An airship, which travels at about 100 kilometres per hour, can’t replace trucks, which are faster and cheaper over short distances. They also won’t replace cranes, but they can certainly help out from high above. In a pinch, a hybrid airship could potentially hover alongside freight ships and retrieve critical, time-sensitive cargo. 

Airships are particularly useful in Canada’s challenging (and increasingly volatile) climate. For one thing, hybrid technology means fewer emissions. Canada’s winter transportation routes are also less accessible these days. In the past two decades, remote road access has dwindled from 60 to 40 days a year. Last fall, flooding interrupted all road and rail travel between the city of Vancouver and the B.C. Interior. Road cargo, meanwhile, is expensive to deliver, and trees and mountain passes sometimes need to be cut or widened to allow for wide loads—like heavy-duty construction equipment—to pass through. An airship could float right on by. 

Many airship producers are for-profit, but we don’t want to focus on helping corporate clients make more money. We’ve already received plenty of interest from Canada’s mining sector, for example; in the coming years, many of the country’s buried minerals, like cobalt, will be in high demand for the electric-vehicle industry. But airships should be used in service of the greater good. One of the applications we’re looking at is disaster relief. Indonesia, which has more than 17,000 islands, is regularly exposed to tsunamis and earthquakes. Our airships could carry emergency equipment from warehouses on the main islands to any disaster site in the country within 24 hours.

We’re especially interested in the vast Canadian North: for most of the year, 292 northern communities are only accessible by air. Their remote locations complicate regular access to health care, affordable food and other basic resources for the people who live there. On the energy side, we’re looking into flying in wind turbines that could replace communities’ reliance on diesel generators. On the health-care side, we’re developing a program we call Flying Care, which would deliver modular hospitals. We could transport medical equipment—say, for dentists, optometrists and surgeons—that is tailored to a population’s needs. For some people up north, doctors and specialists might be a four-day drive away, and treatment is often too expensive or too late. More frequent visits from fully equipped medical professionals would flip that care from reactive to proactive.

We’re also exploring the possibility of airships transporting intact houses from one place to another. This could be useful in places like Kashechewan First Nation, which sits on the western coast of James Bay in Northern Ontario. The village regularly floods when the Albany River rises—and it’s only getting worse as the world gets warmer. Each year, millions of dollars are spent on evacuations. The federal government has a plan to move the entire village 30 kilometres upriver, which could take years. Lifting the houses—or flying prefab housing directly to the new site—could be a game changer. It would mean that the people of Kashechewan are no longer prisoners of their geography.

The first Flying Whales assembly line will start production in France in 2024, with the Quebec line—and certification from Transport Canada—to follow. We’re aiming to produce 50 Canadian airships in the first decade, with operating hangars and refuelling points in each province. (You won’t see us at airports; we don’t want to exacerbate existing traffic issues.) One day, our Quebec factory will house and provide airships for cargo transport all over North America.

There’s something about airships that makes people dream. The way they float—it’s quite beautiful. In the innovation space, there’s always a rush to disrupt with something new. But it’s also possible to improve on a creation that already exists. The second age of the airship builds on the best of the past: the cockpit, once full of analog indexes, is now fully digital. The exterior, once made from aluminum and chemical-soaked materials, is now a robust composite. The right idea was there; it just got outpaced by aviation. The goal now isn’t to replace other modes of transportation, but to make the entire industry more efficient. Sometimes, paradoxically, that means slowing down.

The post The Big Idea: Airships are back, and they’re better than ever appeared first on Macleans.ca.

As a graphics designer on the move, looking for the right gear to handle my workload is no easy task. And while it’s impractical to carry your desktop everywhere around with you to match the specs to your needs, there’s a powerful solution available at your fingertips: MSI’s Creator Z16P, a laptop made for creatives, by the creatives.

Whether it’s video editing, illustrations or graphic design, the Creator Z16P handles everything that I need it to do with power, portability, and style. Upon unboxing, the first thing I noticed is how light the Creator Z16P is for a performance laptop. Laptops of this nature usually weigh anywhere between five to eight pounds, but the Z16P weighs in at the low end of the spectrum at just over five pounds.

Much like Clark Kent and his second identity as Superman, the Creator Z16P blends in with the crowd yet stands out from other performance laptops in its design: sleek and unassuming, yet masking strength and powers within. The Creator Z16P merges a gorgeous minimalistic design with cutting-edge technology in all departments, accomplishing peaks in both aesthetics and technology.

With my daily work routine, I had next to no issues making graphics. The specs are a marvel to behold: the Creator Z16P packs a 12^th gen Intel i9 Processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series graphics and up to 64GB of the latest DDR5 RAM. When I had to make designs in Photoshop with multiple layers, the Creator Z16P was able to handle the load without a hiccup. And with moments where I had large vector files in Illustrator that I needed to transfer to Photoshop—paired with a myriad of browser tabs and the Spotify app running—the Z16P was able to keep up with everything I threw at it and more. It’s an impressive feat that the laptop stays cool and quiet with everything running—a testament to the innovative vapor chamber cooler that changes how cooling is distributed throughout, and the Ambient Silent AI that helped maintain performance while keeping fan noise down.

What stood out for me as a graphic designer were the visuals; the 16-inch display monitor gave me plenty of space to view my work with perfect visual acuity. Combined with the QHD+ True Pixel display, colours looked richer and more vibrant. With the sports designs that I often create, getting a team’s colours right is priority number one. Even watching movies and television provided me a pristine viewing experience as if I was sitting a theatre, thanks not only to its crisp display, but the built-in high-res DTS speakers that brought life to every room.

From a tactile perspective, the Creator Z16P gives you a fluid experience, which was important in keeping my workflow as seamless as possible. The built-in fingerprint sensor helped to unlock the computer so I could get to work right away, which came in handy when I had to rush to make and edit graphics for breaking news stories. There is also an option for facial recognition, making use of the infrared FHD webcam. The monitor is also a touchscreen, which, in combination with the MSI Pen, improved my productivity over using my mouse, the trackpad, or even my tablet at times. With a pen pressure level of 4096, a 266Hz poll rate and replaceable pen tips for adapting to the different styles that I worked with, the MSI Pen was my trusty companion in maximizing efficiency in my workflow.

Compared to other performance laptops, the trackpad on the Creator Z16P is about 50 per cent larger than average, with support for different multi-gestures like pinch zooming to maximize your productivity and tab between programs with ease. The RGB-backlit keyboard also allows for custom colour profiles, providing an extra layer of personalization for users to make this laptop feel like home.

If you’re a content creator and you’re constantly on the go, the MSI Creator Z16P is the trusty steed that will handle your workload. This unassuming slab of metal may not look like much, but it packs enough processing power to transform any coffee house table into a mobile workspace.

The new Creator Z16P is now available at Memory Express and Canada Computers.

The post How MSI’s newest laptop for creatives upgraded my day-to-day appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Seventeen years after the Molson Indy Vancouver left Western Canada, a new circuit race is coming to the Indy’s former racing grounds—and it’s literally all electric. Formula E is slated to take place in False Creek, Vancouver, over the 2022 Canada Day weekend.

During the first Vancouver E-Prix, Formula E vehicles will speed along the 2.21-kilometre, 15-turn circuit in a 45-minute race. In contrast to Formula 1, where the race is set over a number of laps, Formula E races are timed to minimize the risk of the cars running out of power. And while F1 vehicles reach speeds of 360 km/h and go from zero to 100 km/h in 2.6 seconds, electric engines still pack power, reaching speeds of up to 280 km/h and going from zero to 100 km/h in 2.8 seconds.

RELATED: Is the electric car right for you? Everything you should know before switching gears

ABB FIA Formula E Championship – New York City E-Prix Round 10, on July 10, 2021 (Jaguar Racing/Getty Images)

Racecar fans might miss the ear-splitting noise they’re used to, though: the E-cars only reach 80 dB, the equivalent of highway traffic noise.

“Attack mode” is another unique part of E-racing. Drivers make a pit stop in an off-circuit charge zone to get a 30-kilowatt boost (around 143 kilometres if you were to charge a Tesla) that the driver has five minutes to use.

The Vancouver electric race follows Formula E’s disastrous start in Montreal back in 2017, when Montrealers complained that the event caused construction and traffic—not to mention costing taxpayers $35 million. Four years later, Vancouver’s city council approved the event on the condition that no city dollars would be spent on the race, and in the hope it would boost tourism.

This article appears in print in the January 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “An all-electric race.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Formula E—the all-electric circuit race—is back and quiet as ever appeared first on Macleans.ca.

DST comes to an end in much of the country on Nov. 7, when clocks go back an hour and small children from coast to coast lose their minds and take their parents with them. Originally established in Canada in 1908 when our lives were more governed by the rhythms of available daylight, DST has become increasingly unpopular and many jurisdictions have toyed with getting rid of it.

(Illustration by Sol Cotti)

Pros

Peer pressure

Most of the U.S. and Europe use DST, so trade and social ties could be thrown into disarray if we opt out. Indeed, when Ontario voted to abolish the time change in 2020, it was only on condition that Quebec and New York state do the same.

READ: These are the Canadians whose clocks don’t spring forward or fall back 

Let there be light

In March, when snowbank tendrils still cling to our streets and psyches, that extra hour of evening daylight arrives right when we need it most to prevail through false spring into the real, balmy thing.

Siri, make it easy

As we acquire more mini-robot clocks that automatically update, the time change gets easier to navigate. Like your ancestors before you, just ignore that blinking DVD display for the rest of your natural life.

(Illustration by Sol Cotti)

Cons

It’s confusing

Parts of B.C., Ontario and Quebec don’t use DST. With the exception of a few municipalities, most of Saskatchewan skips it. As of March 2020, The Yukon ditched it entirely. Good luck sorting all this out if you have to book a trans-provincial conference call.

MORE: The great pumpkin spice debate 

It’s dangerous

Some studies show an uptick in car accidents after clocks go ahead in the spring, likely because people are sleep-deprived or because their morning commute is darker. The autumn “fall back” does not appear to have the same effect.

No, but for real

Kids = loco. Young children are a total mess for a week after the clocks magically skip a beat. You could campaign on this single issue as a candidate and sweep the parent vote.

The post Debating the pros and cons of Daylight Saving Time appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Created by Mediaplanet

This article was made possible with support from ModernaTx

The fall season is upon us and with it brings a lot of unknowns about the ever-changing COVID-19 variants.

In this climate of uncertainty, vaccination will be key to staying healthy and fighting our way out of the pandemic. “Generally, when the public is well vaccinated, whether for flu, meningitis, pneumonia or shingles, we see less disease, and less burden on the healthcare system,” says Dr. Vivien Brown, a family physician in private practice in Toronto.

Dr. Vivien Brown, Family Physician, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.

“With COVID-19 specifically, the vaccines have had a significant impact on driving down the number of hospitalizations, and deaths, and in helping to create a cocooning effect to protect people who can’t be vaccinated,” she says.

Ongoing efficacy, adolescent approval, booster shots

Moderna’s efforts are critical in the global fight against COVID-19. To date almost 146¹ million doses of the Moderna’s COVID vaccine have been administered in the US and over 7.2 million in Canada.² As the pandemic evolves, Moderna is staying ahead of the science with mRNA technology.

Though the variants, waning immunity, and breakthrough infections are concerning, new data published in Science³ reported that the majority of individuals vaccinated with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, maintained antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 variants for six months after the second dose.

Dr. Beverly Francis, PhD, Director of Scientific Leadership — North America at Moderna.

On August 27, 2021, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was authorized by Health Canada for use in adolescent populations aged 12 and above. “We see that as a major win in the fight against COVID-19, says Dr. Beverly Francis, PhD, Director, Scientific Leadership – North America at Moderna. “Vaccinating as many eligible Canadians as possible limits the human pool that serves as a viral reservoir, limits the spread of this virus, and greatly limits the virus’ ability to evolve and mutate into more transmissible or infective strains,” says Dr. Francis.

Anticipating the combination of the force of the current Delta variant, waning immunity, and pandemic fatigue will require further defensive action. Moderna is already preparing by advancing its mRNA-1273 vaccine as a booster candidate⁴. “Initial research has found it to be effective in boosting responses broadly against both the ancestral and major variant strains of the virus, and the safety profile of the booster was similar to that observed previously for dose 2 of the vaccine,” says Dr. Francis.

Finally, to ensure a steady supply, Moderna has been working closely with the Government of Canada to secure supply for up to 105 million doses of the COVID vaccine and its booster candidates, when authorized, for delivery through to 2024.⁵

mRNA technology as the future of medicine

The Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is the first mRNA vaccine that the company has brought to market. mRNA technology is built on the foundation that our bodies can create their own defense mechanism. mRNA-based vaccines are designed to deliver the instructions to our cells to create proteins that help activate the immune response against the virus. “It’s like giving the cell a recipe to follow, in this case a recipe to produce a spike protein, which then stimulates the antibodies,” says Dr. Brown.

Moderna’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccines build on more than a decade of basic and applied mRNA science, delivery technology, and manufacturing. The precision, speed, and flexibility of the platform enabled Moderna to respond quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing an effective vaccine in just under a year. “It’s such an elegant and precise platform,” says Dr. Brown. “It’s just so fortuitous that it was ready at a time when we urgently needed it,” says Dr. Brown.

Moderna’s mRNA platform and approach will enable the company to research, develop, and manufacture medicines in new and potentially ground-breaking ways that can help single patients with individualized therapy, or millions of patients with infectious diseases. “We’re essentially industrializing mRNA technology and scaling the scope of therapeutic targets to address diseases, viruses, and pathogens in ways that were previously considered unimaginable,” says Dr. Francis.

Robust R&D investments lead the way to new ways to treat diseases

In 2020, Moderna invested $1.37 billion on R&D⁶ – and $2.3 billion over the past three years. Moderna’s mRNA pipeline includes 23 projects in development, and 15 clinical study programs currently underway.⁷

Within the infectious disease modality Moderna currently has nine vaccines in development for major unmet needs, including next-generation COVID-19 vaccines, influenza, cytomegalovirus (CMV), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human metapneumovirus (hMPV), parainfluenza (PIV3), and Zika. It has an additional 12 medicines in development across four therapeutic areas – immune-oncology, rare diseases like propionic acidemia, cardiovascular, and autoimmune diseases.⁸

“The breadth of the mRNA platform and its capabilities is really energizing,” says Dr. Francis. “If you understand what mRNA is at its core and figure out how to deliver it, as we have done, you can see we’re just at the beginning,” she says.

Clinical trials are underway to assess two of Moderna’s new respiratory vaccine candidates – one is a quadrivalent mRNA seasonal flu vaccine candidate, and the other aims to protect against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)⁹. “Our vision is to develop a combination respiratory vaccine for adult and older adult populations, combining seasonal flu, RSV, and COVID-19 booster all in one shot,” says Dr. Francis. “Doing many things in parallel to protect against three serious respiratory viruses at once is typical of the spirit and boldness of Moderna,” says Dr. Francis.

To explore how mRNA science is being used in vaccines, visit Moderna Canada.

Important Safety Information

SPIKEVAX (elasomeran mRNA vaccine) is a vaccine used to prevent the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It can be given to individuals aged 12 years and older. As with any vaccine, SPIKEVAX may not fully protect all those who receive it. Even after you have had both doses of the vaccine, continue to follow the recommendations of local public health officials to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Individuals may not be optimally protected until after receiving the second dose of the vaccine.

The most common or very common side effects of SPIKEVAX are pain at the injection site, tiredness, headache, muscle ache and stiffness, chills, fever, swelling or redness at the injection site, nausea and/or vomiting and enlarged lymph nodes. Allergic reactions may also occur.

Vaccination may not be suitable for everyone, so ask your healthcare professional if SPIKEVAX is right for you. Full product information can be found on https://www.modernacovid19global.com/ca/. To report an adverse event, please call 1-866-MODERNA (1-866-663-3762).

© 2021 Moderna, Inc.

ISI-0006 09/2021

Sources

¹ Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States. U.S Department of Health & Human Services: September 2, 2021.

² Public Health Agency of Canada. Canadian COVID-19 vaccination coverage report. Ottawa: Public Health Agency of Canada; August 21, 2021.

³ Moderna press release, August 12, 2021.

⁴ Moderna press release, September 1, 2021.

^{5, 7} Moderna press release, August 16, 2021.

⁶ Moderna press release, February 25, 2021.

⁸ 2Q2021 Moderna Earnings Call Business Update presentation, August 5, 2021. (slide 9).

⁹ 2Q2021 Moderna Earnings Call Business Update presentation, August 5, 2021. (slide 34).

The post How Moderna’s mRNA technology is revolutionizing health care appeared first on Macleans.ca.

No one would ever accuse the U.S. Navy of being unmodern. Its aircraft carriers, planes and ships are packed with the world’s most sophisticated technology. And yet it recently announced a move that seems downright antique—it’s getting rid of touchscreens.

In 2017, the USS John S. McCain collided with a chemical tanker in the Singapore Strait, killing 10 sailors. An investigation pointed to a confusing touchscreen-based steering and propulsion system as one of several causes. “We really made the helm control system … overly complex with the touchscreens,” Rear Admiral Bill Galinis told the U.S. Naval Institute News earlier this year in explaining why the Navy is removing the widely used technology from the bridges of its destroyer fleet in favour of tried-and-true physical throttles. “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” Galinis added. It’s good advice with application far beyond the ocean.

READ MORE: Canada falls behind in health care technology

Maclean’s annual Year Ahead issue highlights amazing technological advances set to arrive in the near future. And the 2020 edition is no exception—with stories on exciting developments in quantum machines and smart grocery carts. But sometimes in our rush to adopt new technology, we inadvertently make things worse. And touchscreens—a technology that has become synonymous with sleek, modern design—might be considered a touchstone in this regard.

More than warships are turning their backs on the technology. Over the summer, Mazda announced it is removing touchscreens from its popular Mazda3 cars as well. New models will rely on buttons and knobs to control a screen set too far away to reach. The goal is to cut down on driver distraction, as research shows drivers often push the steering wheel as they lean over to press a touchscreen, causing the car to veer out of its lane. By rejecting this technology, Mazda is choosing a path quite different from many of its competitors, most notably Tesla, which boasts of its “expansive 17-inch touchscreen” taking up most of the dashboard on some models.

It remains an open question which touchscreen route the car industry will choose; the pursuit of modernity may well outweigh the safety shortcomings. “People seem to expect touchscreens in all their new technology; it’s become a symbol of the future,” says Will Odom, co-director of the Everyday Design Studio at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. “But cars are a really specific example of a situation where tangible, tactile controls like a button actually work better than a touchscreen.”

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In other contexts, such as smartphones, touchscreen technology is stunningly convenient and endlessly reconfigurable. It’s also intuitive; two-thirds of children under five know how to navigate a touchscreen unassisted, according to a recent U.K. study. But Odom’s point, backed by the recent U.S. Navy and Mazda decisions, is that technology shouldn’t exist for its own benefit. “The bigger message here is that we need to take a human-centric approach to design,” says Odom. “We need to ask ourselves: ‘What are the longer-term consequences of adopting this technology?’ ”

Odom also has misgivings about the current proliferation of app-based controls for many basic home functions, such as heating, cooling and security. “Everything is centralized and controllable, but not by a person who is actually in the building,” he points out. “So what happens when something goes wrong?” It’s no coincidence, Odom adds, that safety-critical situations such as nuclear power plants “are the absolutely last places to adopt new technology.”

As Canadians enter 2020, the appearance of miraculous new technologies will continue apace. And as this high-tech future unfurls before us, we must remember to temper our wonderment with a commitment to defend and respect the human factor at all times. New technology is always exciting—but it’s not always better.

This editorial appears in print in the January 2020 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The human touch.” Order a copy of the Year Ahead special issue here. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

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The post Touchscreens make life easy. Until they put it in peril. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In partnership with Surex

Photo: iStock

Why would we want self-driving cars?

Two big reasons: safety and economics.

Traffic fatalities claim more than a million lives a year around the world; that’s 36,000 deaths a year in the United States, and 2,000 a year in Canada. This public-safety crisis—that is mainly caused by driver error—has largely been overlooked, considered a necessary trade-off in our commuting economy. But with the development of advanced sensor technologies (e.g., cameras, radar, and laser-driven lidar), and perception systems guided by big data, artificial intelligence and increasing processing power, we are fast approaching the day when self-driving vehicles can do a better job than human drivers.

Economically, consumers and businesses alike can expect to save money with autonomous transportation. Currently, paying the driver accounts for about half the cost of taking a cab (or Uber). And trucking companies today are already struggling to find enough drivers—a shortage that’s only expected to get worse in years to come.

What does the future of autonomous vehicles look like?

Nobody is entirely sure how this landscape will develop. As the new technologies prove out, some cities may pivot to driverless vehicles exclusively, while others may designate separate lanes for manually driven cars. It remains unclear whether that future will mainly involve privately owned vehicles, public systems providing a mix of individual vehicles and bigger, pooled “pods,” or a broader mix of options and providers.

Future vehicle fleets will be electrically powered, which could result in cleaner cities. But if private ownership prevails, there could be more cars on the road than ever. (City planners have nightmares about drivers setting their autonomous vehicles to cruise the streets empty rather than pay for parking.) On the other hand, if driverless vehicles become part of an integrated transit system that includes bicycle paths, motor scooters, and improved public transit, we could see a renewed greening of cities where less space is required for roads and parking.

Who’s leading the charge in developing autonomous vehicles?

Automating the world’s motor vehicle fleets will be one of the century’s biggest business opportunities, so it’s no surprise that the leaders are commercial giants investing billions: carmakers such as Ford, Daimler, Toyota and General Motors/Honda, new mobility companies such as Uber and China’s Didi Chuxing, and technology leaders such as Google, Intel, and LG. Their work is further enhanced by hundreds of start-ups and academics. Researchers at the University of Waterloo last year debuted Canada’s first driverless vehicle, the Autonomoose, featuring leading edge detection and reaction systems that were immediately adopted by commercial competitors.

Where are we now with current self-driving car technology?

The transition has already begun. Automakers are racing to offer advanced driver-assistance systems; these safety features and warning systems represent a major leap into semi-automated cars. Such offerings include adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance, and lane-departure warning systems. Spinoffs from this research will also benefit other industries, including robotics and aviation – and yes, that includes flying cars.

Can I insure an autonomous vehicle?

Insurance costs are likely to fall as new driver-assistance technologies reduce the number of accidents, although overall savings may be offset by the higher cost of repairing cars with automated systems. In the long term, automobile insurance will transform as responsibility for accidents shifts from drivers to the manufacturers and service providers that supply automated fleets. The insurance industry is just beginning to explore how liability will be shared in semi-automated vehicles, and how operating data from autonomous vehicles—vital to understand how accidents happen—will be collected.

Should we trust autonomous vehicles?

One recent survey found 46% of consumers don’t trust self-driving vehicles—and that’s understandable. It will take time for these new technologies to earn public trust. The experts also recommend that consumers and governments keep a close eye on the industry giants pushing this forward, to ensure they focus on issues such as safety, privacy and data-sharing.

But at the very least, you may not need to worry about whether self-driving vehicles can handle extreme weather conditions. University of Waterloo researchers are already collecting data on winter driving conditions in Canada and developing protocols for autonomous cars. With their advanced sensors, one robotics expert claims that these vehicles are better at detecting black ice than the human eye.

When will self-driving cars be available? What if I still want to drive?

Relax. It’s unlikely that any adults driving today will ever be forced to take their foot off the pedal. While self-driving cars (usually monitored by “safety drivers”) are already sharing city streets as part of testing programs, the experts predict it will be 40 or 50 years before autonomous vehicles fully displace manual ones. Even then, there will likely still be roles for manual vehicles, particularly in rural areas, or in specific industries like construction or agriculture.

University of Waterloo academics Michal Antkiewicz and Krzysztof Czarnecki, and Steven Waslander of the University of Toronto, were consulted for this story.

The post Everything you need to know about the future of self-driving cars appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Should Facebook, Google and other giant tech firms be broken up? If this seems an unrealistic response, even to the problems they’ve been accused of bringing about—from the hobbling of competition to the destabilization of democracy—Tim Wu would like to give you a history lesson. In his latest book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, the Toronto-raised, New York-based lawyer, who coined the term “net neutrality” and has worked with the Federal Trade Commission and at the Obama White House, looks to illuminate the present through the lens of the late 19th century.

The original antitrust movement in the United States sought to entrench competition as an American value, in the face of the monopolies created by tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Antitrust legislation helped stimulate the American economy, but the last breakup was AT&T in 1982. Since then, Wu argues, the American judiciary has been convinced—by economists from the Chicago school—that big companies should be dismantled only when doing so would deliver better value to consumers. But how can this even be determined in our tech-focused age, when so many services are offered for free and it’s difficult to predict or even define value?

Wu contends that ever-expanding companies eventually become inefficient, their ubiquity worsens inequality by making it harder for people to find decent work in their field, and their lobbying muscle gives them unwarranted power. He compares the way many tech start-ups now simply hope to be bought out by the likes of Google (itself a part of Alphabet) to the days when robber barons aggressively acquired their competition—the situation may be more convivial now, but it’s still no good for innovation. Wu spoke with Maclean’s from Columbia University, where he teaches law, about the long arms of big tech in the U.S. and Canada, and whether breaking up is always hard to do.

Q: The “tech trusts” you write about, such as Facebook and Google, are multinational. If antitrust legislation were brought against them, could they simply decide to move their headquarters?

A: Those are the empty threats that government has listened to for far too long. The richest country, with the largest economy in the world, is still the United States. I take this idea of capital flight as at best a form of propaganda, at worst an unseemly threat. A smaller country might have more of a challenge, but when you start accepting those kinds of arguments, it’s an erosion of the idea of democracy or popular sovereignty. It says, “Well, we can only do so much; we have to be very careful that we constantly cater to these enormous corporations, or else they’ll leave us.” Who’s really in charge then? The major economic powers should be co-ordinated in their enforcement of the antitrust laws when they think companies are too big. The companies can go to the Canary Islands if they want, but last time I checked, the Canary Islands don’t have that many people to sell to.

Q: Several countries, including Canada, did work together to hold the fake news inquiry in November that Mark Zuckerberg skipped. The Canadian representative, MP Charlie Angus, suggested that Facebook be broken up, and the company’s vice-president of policy solutions, Richard Allan, replied, “Unless you’re going to turn off the internet, I’m not sure people would be better off in doing without Facebook offering the services it’s spent 15 years perfecting how to offer.” What do you make of this?

A: That was a striking exchange. [Angus] took an important angle that sometimes Europeans don’t get their heads around. Europeans are more regulation-focused, and companies like Facebook don’t really fear it. It’s paperwork they have to go through, but it’s not a threat to their way of doing business. Charlie is talking about something structural that Facebook really does fear: being broken into three pieces [Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp]. Allan’s implication that Facebook is somehow essential is frankly ridiculous. There was an Internet before Facebook; I had friends before Facebook, and it’s not like they’re running the phone networks. Actually, we broke up the phone company in the United States [AT&T, in 1982] and should have broken it up in Canada. [Facebook’s] effort to portray themselves as too big to fail should be ignored.

Q: Consumers are used to the convenience of one-stop searching, shopping and social media—might Allan’s argument about “perfecting” services hold water with them?

A: If Facebook is what perfection looks like, I’d like to live in a different universe. Does perfection mean being open to Russian hacking so that the American elections become questioned by everybody? Loading your feed with so many ads, you can’t tell what’s an ad and what’s not? Allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica to raid your personal information and give it to Republican operatives? Facebook is the poster child of the curse of bigness. There are some companies out there—I think Amazon is the strongest—who can say, “Listen, if you break us up, that isn’t necessarily going to be great for American commerce and the consumer.” I don’t [think] Facebook has anything close to a claim like that. They haven’t invented anything particularly Earth-shaking; the only reason they’re still around is they own their competitors. That company is ripe for a breakup, and it’s not clear that the consequences would be particularly inconvenient for anybody. In fact, it would open the field to better choices. Imagine Wikipedia launches something and says, “This is social networking with no ads, and we don’t let Russians hack our site, and you can still see your friends and family.” Social networks are not rocket science.

Q: And that lock on the market can have impacts in many other spheres—for instance, on the media.

A: They’ve also done a good job of impoverishing the media. Some unconscionable number of people get their news through Facebook, and most thinking people think an independent and strong media is pretty important. So Facebook has very weak arguments on its side.

Q: What do you make of the CBC’s refusal to publish the Nov. 19 interview from Metro Morning with columnist Jesse Hirsh, where Hirsh called Facebook “a threat to democracy” and questioned the CBC’s relationship with the company?

A: I have my suspicions. For 10 years now, Facebook have become expert at throwing their weight around. They rarely do it publicly, but they’re very good behind the scenes at putting pressure on people. It seems pretty clear that Facebook said they were wrongly treated and put pressure on the CBC. I have a lot of friends who have felt similar pressures, and [Facebook have] been very good at getting people to change their tunes. The opinion that Facebook is a threat to democracy, I think, is respectable. It seems to me, knowing what they do, that they said, “That’s an outrageous thing to say,” but journalists are supposed to be allowed to have their opinions. It’s shocking that the CBC backed down. It sort of proves the point about excessive corporate size being a threat to democracy, because if the media is afraid to publish criticisms of powerful private firms, just what kind of place are we living in? It’s not much different than declining to publish criticisms of political figures.

Q: Notably, the CBC is a crown corporation.

A: Crown corporations are supposed to be unconcerned with these kinds of things. It’s notable that the New York Times is not a crown corporation, but they’ve had the backbone to publish numerous scathing exposés. The idea that Facebook is a threat to democracy is legitimate. Whether it’s right or not can be debated, but it’s not like it’s beyond the bounds of journalistic opinion.

Q: You worked with the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. from 2011 to 2012. How did the time you spent there inform the book?

A: Very profoundly. [That and] my time in the White House [in 2016] are the origins of this book, in different ways. There were some very smart people in that White House, among them the economists, and they were ringing alarm bells on this idea that the American economy had just become overly concentrated. They weren’t antitrust people; they were like scientists who were pointing to a hole in the ozone layer, and that motivated me. In the FTC, we did our best, but I became convinced that the mental framework we were operating under at the agency was incredibly constrictive and had enfeebled law enforcement and made us incapable of doing our statutory duties. The burden of proof we’d created for ourselves was excessive, and there was a tendency towards inaction that ultimately, I think, was unwarranted. At the time, I understood the reasoning for it, but when you look back with a little more perspective, basically we blew it, particularly when it came to mergers. I didn’t work on that many, so I can spread the blame a bit—all of antitrust allowed way too many mergers. Among them, we allowed Facebook and Google to buy too many of their competitors, and the beer industry became consolidated, the fertilizer industry, the airlines…the list goes on and on of industries that got away with too much. One of the reasons I wrote this book, actually, was to give enforcers a little more background and inform them they have a glorious history, which involves some pretty epic challenges. We need to be doing our job. I think in America, and Canada as well, enforcement of laws is important to the preservation of what the countries stand for.

Q: Do you think people have forgotten that part of American history, about the gilded age and the rise of antitrust laws?

A: A glorious history of popular response to the rise of the trusts was the breakup era, and I think it’s forgotten. In some ways, in popular discourse, it’s become radicalized. It was once a mainstream, normal thing to break up companies, and there’s been a 40-year campaign to try to make it sound like some kind of Canadian socialism [laughs]. The way Americans fight political battles is they radicalize things. They declare them out of bounds. That’s why America has a terrible health-care setup—somehow, they radicalize what the rest of the world does. And I’m not saying Canadian health insurance is perfect, but it’s certainly better than what we have in the United States. [Antitrust] should be a mainstream, broadly understood remedy for excessive size—the breakup or preventing many more mergers in the first place. Charlie Angus is on the right path.

Q: To what extent are we dependent on our administrations to be behind this? Could a grassroots movement make a difference?

A: History suggests that when people suffer for long periods of time economically and feel that they have no control over their economic destiny, and there are private powers that seem completely unaccountable, that they become angry and they want something done. That energy can go in some very negative directions; it can become anti-immigrant fever. Sometimes, historically, it led to the rise of dictatorships and fascist governments; it can lead to Communist revolutions if it gets extreme enough. I think a good way to channel it is into an antitrust movement. It’s not like everyone can understand every detail of the antitrust law, but they can understand what something getting too big means and having too many monopolies fees like; they feel the effects in terms of higher prices or a sense that corporations feel no responsibility towards them. So, I think there’s every chance this has become a popular movement that transcends parties. Historically in the United States, it’s been both a Republican and Democratic cause, and often bipartisan. I think it’s something that people are hungry for.

Q: Right now, there’s an antitrust case before the Supreme Court about the Apple Store.

A: I think it’s a symptom of something that’s going on. People are waking up and saying, “Wait, this Internet, which used to be all about competition—something new every day—is basically about three or four firms, and that’s a lot different than the original vision.” There’s a lot less room for hope for entrepreneurs—sort of like, “Well, what’s your next step here?” Retail doesn’t seem too promising, or manufacturing. It’s important that we have channels where people can start small businesses and have some prospect of reaching their customers and not just being copied or cloned or making money for somebody else.

The post Should we break up the tech giants? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The day of the theft, Brian Schreiber started his morning in a bustling Vancouver Starbucks at Homer and Robson to perk up with a coffee and write a card to a friend. With him was his laptop in an expensive leather bag, and five USB sticks containing personal information. He set the bag on the table beside him and went to the counter to buy a coffee. He ran into a friend in the lineup, and the two chatted for a bit. It might have been at that moment the thief struck, nabbing his bag and laptop. Schreiber isn’t sure. “I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I did leave without the bag.” When he realized it was missing and called the shop, staff were sympathetic but told him no one had turned it in. He reported the theft to police, who so far have not found his bag. “It was a real bad mistake,” says Schreiber, a self-employed lawyer who used the laptop for work.

Schreiber is not alone in his misfortune. He’s one of a rash of victims targeted by thieves this summer in coffee-crazy Vancouver’s cafés. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of coffee shops in downtown Vancouver where people go with their expensive laptops and phones to grab a latte and surf the net or work, using free WiFi and chargers. Their clientele has come to reflect Vancouver’s disparate socio-economic profile. On any given day, an aspiring novelist could be seated beside a moneyed stock trader. And beside them both could very well be a thief. At some point, someone gets up to use the washroom—it’s a coffee shop, after all—and doesn’t bother to pack up their belongings for the quick trip. Waiting to strike are opportunistic petty thieves, many of whom are addicted to drugs and steal to pay for their next fix.

READ:  Canada’s Most Dangerous Places 2019

Electronic devices are small, portable and easy to steal. With some phone prices now topping $1,000, and laptops more expensive still, they are an attractive target, joining the black-market ranks of carbon-fibre bikes and some older model cars and trucks. This fall, police harnessed the power of technology and mounted a bait e-device sting that resulted in the arrests of 14 people. They don’t like to give away details, but judging by past bait schemes, they likely planted traceable laptops and phones in cafés where thieves are known to frequent and stayed nearby to catch them when the global positioning systems in the laptops or phones showed the machines on the move. Many of those arrested have pages-long rap sheets for robbery, break and enter, and theft under $5,000. Const. Jason Doucette said most of those swept up in the sting had substance abuse problems and were stealing to fence the goods for money.

The use of GPS and bait devices in B.C. started in a big way in the early 2000s, when vehicle thefts were endemic throughout the Lower Mainland. Police adopted bait car technology pioneered by police in Minneapolis in the early 1990s. By the early 2000s, “Surrey was the auto theft capital of the world for all time,” says B.C. MLA and legislature speaker Darryl Plecas, who was a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley and held the school’s RCMP research chair. In 2003, more than 20,000 vehicles were stolen in the region; to combat the scourge, police positioned bait cars—equipped with GPS monitors, ignition kill switches and surveillance cameras—in high-theft locations. When a bait car is stolen, police dispatchers are alerted and can monitor its path via GPS. Everything that goes on inside the car (often expletive-heavy reactions), is also recorded on camera. Once a police response is under way, the vehicle’s motor is shut down to prevent high-speed chases. The technique works because most thefts are done by the same small group of people, Plecas notes. Every time police catch a thief for one incident, they are catching someone who has probably done 50, he says.

MORE: ‘Dirty money’ is destroying Vancouver’s civic fabric—and causing lasting damage

As immobilizers made cars harder to steal, thieves turned their sights on expensive bicycles. So police started placing GPS chips in bait bikes, too. “We have bait everything, even baby formula,” says Doucette. It’s true: in 2016, police launched a sting to catch a ring of thieves stealing cases of formula that were being shipped overseas. China was reeling from a tainted baby formula scandal, and worried parents in that country were willing to pay two and a half times the retail price for safe Canadian product. The ring was being run by a capable criminal who hired drug addicts to steal. Police video shows the recovered loot: cases of formula stacked in rows as tall as a person in the Vancouver Police Department’s stolen property office.

With enough staff, says Plecas, police can shut down theft rings. But sometimes technology solves the problem for them. Manufacturers now build vehicles with immobilizers that are almost impossible to circumvent. Phones are traceable, too. Plecas figures it won’t be long before expensive bikes are built with locator devices, making them a less attractive theft target as well. Still, more markets for stolen goods are bound to open. And when they do, the thieves will be ready—just as they were for the baby formula.

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The post Vancouver cops are baiting coffee-shop thieves—with traceable laptops appeared first on Macleans.ca.

At the end of a dusty gravel road in Squamish, B.C., a facility is making gasoline from destructive carbon dioxide emissions captured from thin air. Carbon Engineering applies equipment and chemistry common in other industries to remove CO₂ from the air and, through a series of chemical processes, combine it with hydrogen to produce synthetic fuels. It claims that those fuels, which are compatible with vehicles or planes, are on the way to being entirely carbon neutral. While scientific observers quibble over the word “entirely,” they generally agree the process works.

Now, results of a recent study that pegs production costs at a level lower than expected have excited academics who monitor technological solutions to global warming. “It’s a major step forward,” says Philip Jessop, a Queen’s University chemistry professor and technical director of Green Centre Canada, which commercializes green scientific discoveries. “But like every fantastic step forward, you’ve got to have the ‘what’s-next.’ ”

Questions remain over whether the facility can be replicated on a large scale without losing control of costs. The process requires considerable energy to operate, which raises efficiency issues. Steve Oldham, Carbon Engineering’s ebullient CEO, says facilities will be powered by renewable energy sources—the test facility in B.C. runs on hydro. Jessop, however, notes that even clean energy sources like solar and wind are not entirely carbon neutral.

If successful, though, Carbon Engineering offers the utopian-sounding prospect of a climate-change solution that does not involve eliminating our reliance on fuel—a shift, to say the least, from conventional thinking on how to slow global warming. Carbon-neutral fuels would allow everyone to ditch the guilt associated with, say, booking an overseas flight. Battery-powered airplanes don’t exist—at least not yet, Oldham points out: “If you can eliminate your carbon footprint, you don’t have to change your behaviour.” Moreover, if the company’s facilities were built on a massive scale and the carbon captured were buried instead of used to make fuel, the process could do better than break even. That would reduce the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, says Oldham, glancing up at smoky skies caused by dozens of forest fires, which on this day are choking B.C. “The challenge is that the planet is not ready to spend the money to do that,” he says.

Read more: Climate change is making weather more extreme. How can Canada prepare?

Not everyone is giddy about Carbon Engineering’s plans. Carbon-reduction purists, who for years have tried to use moral suasion to convince countries and individuals to reduce their carbon footprints, worry an advancement in fuel production could raise false hopes and cause a backslide. “On a small scale, it’s a technology that could help at the margins,” says Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute in California. “But it’s not a technology that’s scalable—it’s so energy-intensive.” To operate on a large scale, the air-to-fuel process requires vast supplies of clean energy, solar or wind. As society decreases its reliance on fossil fuels, there will be competing demands for every joule. Still, Heinberg says he admires the efforts of company founder David Keith, a former University of Calgary physics professor who is now at Harvard University: “They’re good people and they’re doing good work.”

Keith founded Carbon Engineering in 2009. The company is privately owned, and its major investors are Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Alberta oil financier Murray Edwards and Michael Hutchison, a Whistler-area real estate developer. Oldham came to the company from the aerospace industry. He was poached from MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) by his former boss, Dan Friedmann, who was once CEO of MDA and now chairs Carbon Engineering’s board.

Buzz over the company’s progress heightened this summer with the publication of a recent study in Joule, a new journal from the publishers of the respected life-sciences periodical Cell. It states that Carbon Engineering can remove carbon from the air for about US$100 per metric tonne, far less than past estimates of $600 per tonne made by an earlier American Physical Society study. Considering projected price drops in renewable energy, Carbon Engineering believes it can produce fuel for US$1 per litre, about the same price as renewable diesel, the company states.

Jessop says the economics outlined in the paper are exciting: “It’s not going to be free, but it’s not crazy expensive.” He’s now eagerly awaiting the results of the company’s life-cycle assessment, which measures the environmental damage of a project from construction through its entire operation. Oldham is confident the numbers will tip in Carbon Engineering’s favour; the company is seeking partners to build a commercial facility. He says it’s naive to think that people will end their dependency on fossil fuels overnight. But by creating carbon-neutral fuel, society can forgo pumping more oil and gas out of the ground. “If every car in the world used our fuel, CO₂ emissions would drop by 20 per cent.” Oldham doesn’t claim air-to-fuel technology is a complete global warming fix; he says CO₂ reduction measures, including biofuels and electric vehicles, are key to any solution.

Erle Ellis, a geography and environmental systems professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County who studies the environmental impact of humans on Earth, would love Carbon Engineering to produce a carbon-neutral jet fuel. Although he understands the environmental harm associated with flying, he still boards a plane as many as 15 times a year.

However, Ellis sides with those who believe the ultimate climate-change fix will come not from science but from human behaviour. “We do need to be actively developing new technologies like these, but that’s not going to be the end solution.” Societies must first grow sufficiently aware of the environmental consequences of climate change and then co-operate on mitigation steps, he says. “Physics is easy. Social sciences are much harder.”

MORE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE:

• Nobody should believe Canadian politicians who promise to fight climate change
• On climate change, there aren’t ‘two sides.’ So why do some feel otherwise?
• How climate change is costing you in the vegetable aisle
• Is Hurricane Harvey a harbinger for Houston’s future?

The post Can cars go carbon neutral? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A few weeks ago, Twitter prompted me with a message suggesting that I add my birthday so I’d be able to “celebrate with balloons on your profile on your big day!”

Unlike Facebook, Twitter has never required users to add their dates of birth, and I never added mine when I created my account. Despite the fact that it was optional, I hopped on over to my profile settings and entered my birthday thinking little of what would happen.

Immediately after I hit the “Save Changes” button, Twitter shut me out. In an instant, the account that I’ve had for nine years was gone. “In order to create a Twitter account, you must be at least 13 years old,” the message on the screen read. “Twitter has determined that you don’t meet these age requirements, so your account has been locked and will be removed from Twitter.”

I’m not alone in this. Search #TwitterLockOut or #StopTheBirthdayBans and you’ll find that numerous other users over the age of 13 have reported being suspended.

But the removal of my old account is simply collateral damage from Twitter trying to act in compliance with American and European laws protecting minors online—laws that don’t exist in Canada yet.

RELATED: When it comes to our data privacy, we don’t really have a choice

Under these laws, Twitter legally cannot keep content shared by users when they were under 13. Despite the fact that I’m 21 now, I created my account two months before my thirteenth birthday. Once I put in my date of birth, Twitter became aware that they had gathered data from me while I was under 12. They have no way of differentiating between data collected from me before I was 13 and data collected from me after I turned 13 and were forced to close my account.

The account deletions happened as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which significantly enhances regulations on digital privacy for individuals within the EU, came into effect on May 25. You’ve probably received emails from just about every company that has your email address, telling you that they’ve updated their terms of service or privacy policy.

Chapter 9 of the GDPR sets the age that children can consent to data collection. EU member states can set the age anywhere between 13 to 16, but if no age is set, the age of 16 automatically applies.

Legislation protecting the privacy of minors online is also more comprehensive in the United States. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act prohibits websites from collecting data from children under 13 without a parent or guardian’s consent.

But Canada’s online privacy law—the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)—has no specific provisions on online privacy for minors and does not lay out a minimum age at which children can have their data collected.

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s guidelines say that websites should obtain parental consent to collect data from children under 13, but these guidelines are not written into legislation.

However, change may be on the horizon. Back in February, the House and Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics made 19 recommendations for improving PIPEDA, many inspired by GDPR’s protections. Among these recommendations include “specific rules of consent for minors as well as regulations governing the collection, use and disclosure of minors’ personal information.”

RELATED: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have just confirmed it: online privacy is dead

On Tuesday, the federal government announced a nation-wide consultative process looking into developing a digital strategy and implementing some or all of the 19 recommendations. The consultation will cover a wide-range of digital issues, including artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, and changes in the labour market. The most pressing of those matters—at least for the time being: data privacy.

“There will be a focus, in particular, on how companies can gather, use, and share personal information [to] innovate and compete, while at the same time, protecting privacy, a value that Canadians continue to hold dear,” said Navdeep Bains, the minister of innovation, science and economic development.

The federal government has begun holding roundtables with industry leaders, experts and other stakeholders and has also launched a website for Canadians to share their thoughts.

“Industry and policy research can’t answer these questions being closed doors,” said Bains. “It’s a fundamental question for our society and that’s why we’ll be launching these national consultations on data and digital transformation…with the goal of putting together a set of recommendations and a path forward in the fall.

This all comes, of course, in wake of the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting agency that was revealed in March to have used personally-identifiable data from 87 million Facebook users to sway public opinion in favour of the Donald Trump presidential campaign and the campaign in favour of Brexit.

Digital rights advocates have praised the federal government’s move. “We’re extremely happy that consultations are happening,” said Nasma Ahmed, who is the executive director of the Digital Justice Lab, an advocacy group focusing on digital issues.

Bianca Wylie, is the co-founder of Tech Reset Canada, another advocacy organization focusing on technology issues, called the announcement “really good news,” but noted that the government has a daunting task ahead.

“The scope and the sheer number of people that need to be at this consultation—it’s a lot,” said Wylie, “That leads to the other challenge… which is, you need to do public education before you can actually consult on things.”

That leaves users like myself muddling along, at the mercy of tech companies scrambling to comply with a constellation of new laws and requirements coming their way. Twitter, for one, has issued an apology for the confusion over the removal of my account and is reaching out to affected users.

In the meantime, we’re reaching out to people impacted with options to unlock their account and continue to use Twitter. Instructions from us will come during the coming week. 5/6

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 12, 2018

In the meantime, I’ve made a new account. You can now follow me at @7om_Yun.

CORRECTION: This story has ben updated to correct the spelling of Bianca Wylie’s name.

The post Why the federal consultations on digital strategy matter: Exhibit A appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Throughout history, we have gone to incredible lengths to ensure someone remembers us after we die. Ancient people left handprints on cave walls. Emperors marshalled armies of slaves to build monuments. Medieval merchants commissioned paintings. All their efforts translated into three short words: I was here.

The fear of being forgotten is universal. It is expressed in different ways across cultures, but we all instinctively believe we die twice—first when our heart stops beating, then once more and finally when someone remembers us for the very last time.

It is terrifying to imagine yourself dead and gone, with no trace left behind that you even existed. Ironically, only a tiny fraction of a fraction of us have ever succeeded in being remembered.

Consider all the millions who have been born, lived and died in the Nile River Valley over the millennia. You are probably vaguely aware of only a couple, and we know almost nothing about them. No one remembers what the mighty pharaoh Ramses thought, how he spent his days, what he dreamed and what he feared. His great pyramid can only tell us that he once existed, and that is all.

WATCH: Don’t blame Mark Zuckerberg, you want Facebook to have your data

Even William Shakespeare, the most famous writer in history, left behind almost nothing. There is a church record that tells us he was baptized in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564. There are some references in tax files that tell us he was a managing partner in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an acting troupe. And there is his will. Nothing beside remains. We can guess at the man by reading his plays and sonnets, but there is no trace of how he lived or whom he loved. Our assumptions about Shakespeare as a man say more about us than him.

But now, even the humblest among us is leaving behind massive piles of information, digital pyramids crammed to bursting with records of our days, what we ate, where we went, what we thought and what we did, and even how often we defecated.

In recent weeks, many of us have only just realized the scope and detail of our legacies. Data breaches at Facebook have sparked this sudden conversation about what is contained in our social media accounts. Some have made the effort to download this information and are staggered at the size of it—dozens of gigabytes.

One data expert discovered that his Google account contained the equivalent of three million Word documents. If he were to print those off, the resulting stack would be taller than the Empire State Building. For comparison, Shakespeare’s entire stack, including his works, is not quite as high as a can of soda.

And that is just from one social media platform. We are compiling even more data in the rest of our lives. Our credit cards, our emails, our voice mails are recording everything. It is estimated that we are now taking over three billion photos every single day. That is more than all of the visual records left by all of mankind from the beginning of our species to the 20th century.

A future historian, likely with almost no effort, may be able to track every expenditure you ever made. He could know to within a few dozen feet where you were at any moment, and who you were with. Your most intimate notes and photos will be there to examine. He could even know your heart rate right up until its final beat.

These electronic records have been scattered about like billions of grains of sand; they have been copied and backed up and shared among servers and they will likely exist in one form or another for as long as this civilization lasts, and quite possibly beyond.

READ: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have just confirmed it: online privacy is dead

Our forebears literally tried to move mountains in order to be remembered, and yet failed. We have done nothing but pick up our smartphone out of boredom and inadvertently carve out mountain-sized monuments to our existence.

But now we are all building monuments—billions of monuments made of trillions of records, a vast and endless range that stretches far away, boundless and bare. Our own handprint saying “I was here” will never be seen among so many.

Which brings us to perhaps the great irony of our newfound digital immortality. Our predecessors were forgotten because they left so little; we will be forgotten because we left so much.

The post After you’re dead and gone, will your tweets and Facebook updates even be remembered? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The post How well does Facebook think it knows you? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

I’m not sure about yours, but my Facebook feed has been littered with a lot of sad goodbyes lately.

But the people in my world deleting their Facebook accounts are not just sad — they’re angry. They’re joining scores of others vowing to #deleteFacebook in protest to news Facebook has been used to manipulate voters. According to a new poll, almost 75 percent of Canadians are rethinking their relationship with Facebook.

It all started with an investigation from The New York Times and The Observer of London that explored how voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica used data from 50 million Facebook profiles without their permission to create voter-influencing strategies for its client, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign.

Though Facebook didn’t give the information over directly (they’d shared it with an academic, who in turn provided it to Cambridge, who he says assured him it was all above board), it’s resulted in a public relations nightmare for the platform.

“It’s given us a glimpse behind the curtain at the fundamentals of Facebook’s business model, which is to basically surveil you and track your movements and watch every aspect of your behaviour,” says Mathew Ingram, the Toronto-based chief digital writer at Columbia Journalism Review, who writes about the social media giant and its activities.

So, is it time to delete your account for good, bidding farewell to all those digitally documented photos, memories and interactions with friends? Here’s what you need to know first.

Facebook may know you better than your closest friends do

Facebook knows you well. Like, REALLY well. It knows the basics — how old you are, what you look like, where your home is — but it knows a lot more, too. Using your photos, connections and conversations, it can gauge what kind of work you do, what you’re interested in, how many kids you have, what you care about and even how happy you are. It also knows your political views (and how likely you are to share them), if you’re friends with any expats, what kind of email service you use, and the number and types of devices you own.

If you have your GPS on, it knows where you are at any given moment. Especially spooky, Ingram says, is the way Facebook can see and gather information from a post you’ve drafted but never published — a pretty perfect way to track our fears and anxieties.

The platform can even track people who don’t have a Facebook account if their contact is uploaded to the platform by one of its users.

Ever verbally mused to a friend about buying a certain product and then — without having Googled it — seen an ad in your Facebook feed for just the thing you’d discussed? It’s not because Facebook is listening to your conversations (they swear they aren’t). It’s because they have so much aggregate information about you, they can make super educated guesses at which products you may want to buy.

“If there’s one thing we’re kind of realizing,” says Ingram, “it’s that this world we live in now is not about physical things… it’s about data about you and your behaviour.”

If you’re curious about just what intel Facebook’s gathered about you, you can request it. According to the Associated Press, Facebook will give you a file with every photo and comment you’ve posted, ads you’ve clicked, everything you’ve liked and searched, all your new friends and unfriended contacts over the years.

If I delete my Facebook account, is my info really gone forever?

Nope. Facebook hangs on to the account for 90 days or so after you shut down your account, just in case you change your mind, Ingram says. After that, they keep the information that they’ve aggregated from your profile.

That said, the information and data you publish to Facebook belongs to you. And Facebook is not allowed to share private information about you that you might’ve shared through Facebook Messenger (should you have posted your Social Insurance Number there). “You own it,” says Ingram. “But you agree to give them the right to do things with it.”

Other than not being able to creep my ex, what are the downsides of deleting Facebook?

Before you say goodbye to your Facebook profile, make sure you check which apps (like, say Spotify or Yelp) you log into using your Facebook profile and change your login method. If you delete your Facebook first, you won’t be able to access them.

You may also want to consider ending your relationship with other Facebook-owned platforms like Instagram and free text service WhatsApp. Though they’re independent companies, Big Facebook gathers aggregate data from those sites too, Ingram says.

OK, so maybe I hang in there. Any advice for how to be a savvier Facebook user?

Revisit your settings and remove any apps contained within Facebook that are needlessly sharing information about you. Turn off targeted advertising, so you see generic advertisements only.

Be mindful that, despite your privacy settings, nothing that you post on Facebook is truly private. “Be aware of the bargain you’re making, be aware of what you’re giving up in return for all that free stuff and for the freedom to connect with people and see their baby photos,” says Ingram.

There’s really no such thing as a free lunch.

The post Here’s everything Facebook already knows about you appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Artificial intelligence is already present in millions of homes in the form of “smart assistants” like Google Home and Amazon Echo. (Google)

In January 2018, both Microsoft’s and Alibaba’s deep-learning software did better than humans on reading and comprehension tests, opening the door to artificial intelligence (AI) based customer service, medical inquiries, and many other applications. Research and investments in AI have exploded globally in the past year and this is just one example.

Canada is at the forefront of these developments. Canada pioneered research in neural networks and has the world’s third largest AI talent pool, according to consultancy Element AI.

The pace of AI development is fast. And, the global potential is huge and growing rapidly, estimated at $US2.4 billion in 2017, close to double what it was in 2016. Now is the time for Canada to advance its AI technologies and businesses in global markets.

Canada is a relatively small, open economy with social and economic stability. Canada can build on its foundational AI research to lead the development of AI best practises that advance economic and social interests.

Here are four ways Canada can and is advancing responsible AI development:

1. Develop locally, think globally

The image of Canada as mainly producing commodities and manufactured goods is out of date. Canada is actively attracting and developing cutting edge AI, blockchain, and quantum machine learning technologies and quickly becoming a leading hub for scientific talent. New institutions are supporting them, such as the Vector Institute, the Creative Destruction Lab, and Canada.ai. Canadian-grown startups are tapping into global opportunities in the U.S. and Europe, as well as those in developing markets that are investing hugely in AI—such as China. Canadian AI companies are already gaining from selling into these markets.

READ MORE: AI is the future—but it’s not immune to human bias

2. Address fears head-on

Studies show that AI and new technologies will lead to job losses, though no analysis agrees on how widespread these will be. What is clear is that the phenomenal pace of change will be very disruptive and the benefits of these new technologies will not automatically be shared broadly. Rather than protecting Canadians from technological change, governments, businesses, and educators should actively prepare citizens across all industries to learn how to leverage technology’s benefits rather than fear them. Sweden has adopted one approach putting in place policies that do not protect certain types of jobs, but instead protect and invest in workers to leverage these technologies.

3. Shape the rules for the global AI economy

China has ambitious plans to be the world’s AI leader by 2030 and the U.S. and Russia have also embraced these technologies. Canada can advance leading-edge domestic and international AI policies, leveraging its position as a respected promoter of rules, stability and openness. By being at the global table, Canada has a chance to advance AI policies that improve living standards, promote inclusivity, and advocate for transparent data collection and unbiased algorithms.

4. Welcome people, ideas, capital, and trade

As the U.S. threatens to turn increasingly inwards, Canada is open to entrepreneurs, individuals, technologies, and investments from outside our borders. Canada has a window to attract talent, companies and and foreign investment across a range of AI verticals.

Canada has a unique opportunity to leverage its AI moment globally to shape AI’s future.

Danielle Goldfarb is a Senior Fellow at The Conference Board of Canada. Candice Faktor runs Faktory Ventures, a seed stage microfund investing in exponential technologies like AI and the blockchain.

MORE ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:

• Here’s why we shouldn’t fear artificial intelligence
• How tech firms are racing to perfect conversational artificial intelligence
• Why Google built its first Canadian cloud computing facility in Montreal
• This A.I. can black out sensitive data before making documents public
• Meet Botler, an A.I. chatbot that helps people immigrate to Canada
• This Toronto startup uses A.I. to help lawyers predict trial outcomes
• Canada could be an A.I. powerhouse—if we can halt the field’s brain drain
• Five Canadian tech leaders on what they’re most excited for in 2017

The post Four ways Canada can own the artificial intelligence century appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Shutterstock)

The later it is at night, the more embarrassing the confession. So goes the rule. And on this particular night, as a group of friends and I talked about how we try to stop relentlessly looking at our phones—keeping Twitter and Facebook off one’s device, or silencing all notifications, for example—someone piped up: “I’ve managed to stop taking my phone to the bathroom.” We murmured our approval, impressed at his restraint.

At the point that a trip to the loo without a phone is almost an act of bravery, it seems fair to ask: are we addicted to our phones? It almost seems too obvious to say yes. Our lives are full of stories of people who cannot stop checking Instagram, or texting, or a host of other things—and chances are, we recognize that affection for our phones in our own lives, too. We are also talking about it more, sparked by new phenomena like “phubbing”—ignoring people in face-to-face social situations in favour of checking our phones—as well as by buzzy books like How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life, and various apps that either track or limit how much we use our phones.

But are we really addicted to those little slabs in our pockets? As Canadian technology writer Ramona Pringle likes to argue, we aren’t quite addicted to phones exactly: we are addicted to each other, constantly seeking out connection through our devices. If there is an excess at play, it is an excess of humanity—and that’s to say nothing of the almost incomprehensible wealth of information and art we can access through our little pocket computers.

Criticism of new forms and new technologies, after all, is hardly original. During the rise of the novel in the 18^th century, having one’s nose buried in the then-new technology of a trade paperback was considered idle and wasteful—in no small part because novels were considered to be for women, and therefore supposedly unimportant. But now we see novels for what they are: some of our greatest artistic explorations of meaning and beauty.

Something similar might be said of phones. If we are addicted to our phones, it’s not because of the devices themselves—it’s because there’s something on them worth looking at. Most obviously, the smartphone connects us to others, stitching us into each others’ lives through the connective tissue of social media. We gain an ephemeral, ambient awareness of what our friends and family are up to, regardless of where they are, and at its best, this persistent socializing can envelop us in a blanket of connection.

Too often, critics of technology dismiss what appears on screen as ephemeral and meaningless. Beyond the obvious rejoinder—that one can in theory just as easily read Islamic philosophy or math treatises online as one can do a quiz about what kind of pie best reflects your personality—there is the more basic fact that phones open up spaces of connection, and with minimal effort. Consider the trans teen in the suburbs, or the Muslim mom in Northern Ontario; a phone allows one to connect with other like-minded folk. Critics who blithely dismiss phone usage itself as inherently self-destructive or meaningless miss how they can produce new communities and homes. So it’s no wonder people can’t stop looking at their phones: They have access to the whole world and everyone they hold dear.

But there is a problem with these sorts of defences: they miss the aggregate effect of all this connection. We now know, for example, that persistent use of Facebook can adversely affect your mental health. Constant debate online can leave one drained and distracted, and the phenomenon is particularly acute in the sped-up, hyper-polarized context of today’s politics in North America. And any smartphone user must admit that there are times when they’ve picked up a phone for no particular reason—moments in which one might otherwise reflect, or merely let the machinations of one’s mind play out.

READ MORE: Why we need to clear out our cluttered minds

The problem for both sides of this debate, however, is that the exact same behaviour can have radically different consequences depending on context. For one person on a certain day, spending the day glued to a phone can be rewarding and healthy, as they chat with friends, learn new things, and perform errands. But for another person, the same tasks may be exacerbate mental health troubles, or distract them from important tasks, and leave them worse off.

Just as it makes little sense to criticize books or TV themselves as forms—it instead being far more sensible to critique individual books, shows, or trends—criticizing “phone addiction” can’t account for both the enormous variety of what we use phones for, or how the situation and mental state in which we use them can drastically change the effects of using them. The problem isn’t phones, it’s the context in which they are used—and that context is often deeply personal.

More broadly, the debate also usually undervalues the degree to which the smartphone represents a historical transition from the era of print and TV to the digital era. A decade ago, very few people knew what a status update was. Now, over a quarter of the world’s population—more than the entire global population of the 1920s—is on one company’s social network. There are billion Apple devices in the wild, and about twice that number running Android. Those numbers represent unprecedented, mind-boggling change. It’s the kind of shift that also makes it harder to see the forest for the trees. Our constant poking at our phones is a historically novel phenomenon we are still coming to grips with, and simplistic cries about the corruption of a pure, analog world do little to help.

Making matters worse, however, is that as the scale of the change in our daily lives has dramatically increased, so too has the sheer number of people whose reality is being mediated through the lens of private companies. The trouble is that phones—and more importantly, the services on those devices—are designed to induce compulsion, running on an attention economy that relies on first extracting data, and then catering our desires with it. Our smartphones notify us with beeps and buzzes, always pulling us back in. As Apple always exclaims, they design their devices to cultivate a sense of pleasure. We have eagerly adopted devices that cater to human desire and our lust for novelty, and in doing so, have allowed a few large organizations on America’s West Coast to create a new form of social infrastructure through which we increasingly conduct our personal and professional lives.

That kind of concentration of influence and power should be worrying. Think of it this way: what if books, rather than being an aesthetic presentation of narrative and ideas, were instead designed to be reflective of the interests of a set of private companies, interspersed with ads and structured to induce compulsive use? What if you couldn’t buy them without handing over personal data? It sounds dystopian, but that is exactly the situation we find ourselves in with the smartphone, where perhaps the most significant technological change in a generation has left a society at the whim of groups who, despite their best intentions, often don’t have our best interests at heart.

If our phone addiction is in part a function of both the plethora of connection and information, and the seductive allure of such excess, it is underpinned by a group of companies whose economic model is attention. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and more all function by trying to maximize engagement and keep people using their sites and apps as much as possible. Far more than discussions about the inherent good or bad in phones—of whether a book is in fact superior to a screen—we should talk instead about how internet giants, and their domination of the market, are at the root of smartphones’ most toxic effects. It is they, after all, who have structured a world on attention. It is easy to forget that there was no fundamental reason that the smartphone had to become an engine of distraction, or a machine meant to serve ads and capture our time—it is simply how they’ve been designed.

So are we addicted to our phones? It’s the wrong question—because it’s a meaningless one. What we must ask instead is: What are we addicted to on our phones, and why? Is it merely a screen that is compulsive? Or is it the promise of another like, or another new joke, waiting there as soon as we unlock our device?

Sitting there late at night, perhaps in the glow of a phone while lying in bed, pawing at a screen, what one is seeking is connection—but it is a desire that has been hijacked by the economic drives of enormous companies whose massive wealth has been built on exploiting our desire for the next thing. The brave thing will be not be leaving one’s phone behind; it is too late to put the digital genie back in the box. It will instead be reclaiming our screens from these giants—keeping our most intimate moments free from their prying eyes, and finding ways to devote technology to more human ends.

MORE ABOUT TECHNOLOGY:

• How public libraries are reinventing themselves for the 21st century
• Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ is already in millions of homes. Her name is Alexa.
• Why Facebook is cleaning up the neighbourhood
• Trust in digital technology will be the internet’s next frontier
• 10 jobs of the future you need to know about right now
• 2018 will be the year of cyberwar
• How to keep your job in the semi-automated workforce of the future
• Why would we trust Facebook to safeguard our democracies?

The post We’re asking the wrong questions about phone addiction appeared first on Macleans.ca.

John is an old high school friend I mostly see at weddings, so I wasn’t expecting to see a message from him blinking on my desktop one night in December. He asked if I still had the Bitcoin he’d given me back in 2011.

“I still have it I think,” I replied, dimly recalling the loonie-sized brass coin that he’d given me, around the time someone bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC.

I remembered seeing some recent headlines about Bitcoin making a comeback. “How much is it worth now?” I asked, thinking that for him to be asking, it must be worth a couple of hundred bucks.

“13,000 USD-ish,” he said.

I figured he must be joking. So I googled it—and sure enough, 1 BTC was trading for US$11,850  that day. On the Canadian exchanges, it hit a high of C$15,323.

I tore through old boxes of odds and ends I’d hoarded over the years. I found the coin mixed in with some euro pocket change, with the unmistakable B with vertical slashes embossed on it. The coin itself was worthless of course, but the cryptographic private key printed on the back, underneath a tamperproof holographic sticker, was linked to an anonymous digital wallet holding 1.0 BTC.

How do I sell this thing?

Discovering I hadn’t thrown it out brought a momentary wave of relief, followed by acute anxiety, as I realized the single coin in my hand could buy a new Ford Fiesta, and I had no idea what to do with it. Obviously I couldn’t just sell my coin for cash —I’d have to figure out how to redeem it online, then sell it on an exchange. But what software was I supposed to use? Which of the thousands of totally unregulated businesses out there should I trust to store and process my money? What if in my fumbling illiteracy I deleted my keys or opened myself up to hackers? And what if I took too long figuring it out, and the Bitcoin bubble popped before I could sell?

MORE: 10 things you need to know about Bitcoin

The post My personal Bitcoin nightmare appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press

MONTREAL — His netminding skills may not rival those of the Montreal Canadiens’ Carey Price, but Jacques Gravel has saved many a hockey game.

And at about $40 a game, Gravel comes considerably cheaper than Price, who commands an eight-year, $84-million contract.

Gravel is one of the growing number of goaltenders offering his services on GoalieUp — a website and app that connects local goaltenders with hockey teams looking for a last-minute fill-in ahead of game time.

The 51-year-old says renting himself out as a goalie helped to keep him afloat during a nine-month bout of unemployment a few years ago.

“I was running from one rink to the next, averaging a game or two every single day,” he said.

“During that period it was something that kept me going.”

But while the extra money can come in handy, Gravel says his love of the game and a desire to help other players out are by far the biggest motivator.

“I love to play and I’ve never met a bad bunch of hockey players,” he said.

“When the goalie shows up in the dressing room, they’re thrilled — you’re the star of the team and very much appreciated.”

The app was created by Montreal-area goalie Mark Manning, who got the idea of renting himself out as a substitute goaltender when he was an unemployed student.

What began as a texting service for Montreal goalies seven years ago has now grown into an app that includes about 2,000 netminders across Canada and beyond, including 700 to 800 in the Montreal area.

While many leagues keep lists of available goaltenders, entrepreneurs such as Manning are using technology to create a convenient solution to one of the game’s perpetual problems.

Manning said many leagues face goaltender shortages, largely because of the physical and mental challenges that come with the role.

“It’s not just standing in front of a puck,” he said in a phone interview. “You have to be mobile, to be flexible, there’s a whole bunch of things, including the cost of equipment.”

Teams who use the app are charged $40 for the first hour, which includes a booking fee and a cash payment to the goalie.

Netminders are paid more if the game goes longer, plus an extra $10 for a late-night or last-minute request.

While most of the requests are for beer league games, Manning says he’s provided goalies for a private backyard tournament and even an event at Montreal’s swanky Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where two goalies were asked to take shots from businessmen at a corporate event.

Niki Sawni, who runs another goalie rental app out of Toronto, says the demand for goalies stretches all across Canada.

Puck App, which he founded in 2015, books goalies for between 200 and 250 games a month across Canada, with Ottawa the biggest market.

Both GoalieUp and Puck App take requests from teams and send notifications to appropriately skilled goalies in the area, who respond to say whether they’re interested.

While Manning prefers to assign the goalies himself to ensure a fair rotation, Puck App gives goalies who have received positive user feedback the first chance to play, and then automatically assigns them on a first-come basis.

Puck App also has slightly different pricing for different cities, which reflects the higher price of parking and ice time rental in some cities, according to its founder.

Sawni believes the goaltender shortage is unique to Canada’s national sport, largely because of the specialized skills required of those who stand between the pipes and face down speeding rubber pucks.

“It doesn’t really work in other sports, in other sports anyone can play any position,” he said.

“It’s definitely a unique Canadian problem.”

The post ‘A unique Canadian problem:’ Apps connect teams with netminders appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Shutterstock)

Paul Boothe is Managing Director of the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing and a Fellow of the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity.

Since the 18th century the world has undergone massive change through a series of industrial revolutions, from the advent of water and steam power to electric power to the rise of electronics and computers. As the fourth industrial revolution, otherwise known as Industry 4.0 or I4.0, builds momentum around artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning, one of the biggest concerns expressed is whether human workers will be replaced by robots.

While it is true that a lot of existing jobs will probably disappear as a result of I4.0, the disappearance of obsolete jobs isn’t exactly new. More importantly, it doesn’t need to be a catastrophe if, as a society, we take steps to manage the transition.

What is I4.0? It is the combination of four advances in technology working together to revolutionize the way we manufacture things. The first advance is the ability to use computers to virtually design both products and manufacturing processes. This joint design capability reduces the cost and time to market of new products. The second advance is in robotics. Increasingly, robots can perform repetitive, physically-demanding or dangerous manufacturing tasks at high speed and with great precision.

READ: When robots steal your job

The third advance comes from new capabilities to collect and analyze data—sometimes called ‘big data’. Sensors embedded in the production process collect enormous amounts of data on both the quality of products and the performance of manufacturing equipment. Analysis of this data leads to fewer product defects and less unscheduled maintenance (breakdowns) of machines, again reducing costs. Finally, with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in parts, software can be used to manage supply chains. Parts can be ordered and tracked by computers so that they arrive just when needed and the source of any defects can be identified quickly.

All this sounds pretty scary if you are currently doing a job a robot or computer software can do. Indeed, some recent research has highlighted which jobs are most vulnerable. But robots are just machines, and machines have been displacing workers for hundreds of years. What robots also do, like many other machines, is extend the capabilities of workers to do more things safely and efficiently.

MORE: This chart shows which jobs are most at risk of being replaced by robots

It’s much harder for researchers to identify the new jobs that will be created and who will get them as a result of I4.0. In addition, if everyone has to adopt this new technology to be competitive, emerging economies have the ability to catch up to the industrial economies much faster. What they give up is the cost advantage that comes with lower wages for human workers.

The lessons from past industrial revolutions can help us prepare for I4.0. While past revolutions have been disruptive for some workers and firms, they have not resulted in permanent, mass unemployment. New products and services are invented. For example, the first iPhone was launched only 10 years ago. New products need to be manufactured by workers and companies. Workers develop new skills to use the latest technology and wages and salaries rise with skills, giving workers the purchasing power they need to buy the new products.

If only the transitions were so easy and so smooth.

What can we do as a society to smooth the transition to I4.0? Governments already do a lot to support firms that want to adopt new technologies. Canadian firms can write off new equipment quickly and access a number of grant programs. What if firms were encouraged to use the same grant programs for training workers to learn the skills needed to contribute to I4.0?

Developing new skills is not just the responsibility of firms. Workers need to take charge of their own careers. What if Employment Insurance was treated as an account that could be managed by workers themselves? Workers could invest funds in the account to gain the skills they need, perhaps in collaboration with their employer (who also contributes to the account).

As I4.0 happens around us, perhaps we are asking the wrong questions. Rather than asking whether a robot will take my job, we should be asking what could my next job be and what skills do I need to get it? There is a lot to gain from I4.0 if we manage the transition well. Workers, firms and governments all have a role to play to make sure we do.

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• The 91 most important economic charts to watch in 2018
• More older Canadians choose to keep working, census finds
• Justin Trudeau is getting cocky about the economy. Watch out.
• ‘F*ck it, I quit.’: Five epic ways to ditch your job
• Ontario bill seeks ban on mandatory high heels as part of uniforms
• Number of Canadians who identify as poor or working class rising, poll finds
• Canada’s job market is firing on all cylinders

The post What the fourth industrial revolution means for your job appeared first on Macleans.ca.

TORONTO – Ride-hailing company Lyft is bringing its service to Canada.

The company announced Monday that it is coming to Toronto in what will be its first expansion outside of the United States.

“Our passports are packed and we’re crossing the border,” the company said in a post on its corporate blog.

“We’ve been looking forward to taking our brand of ridesharing international for some time, and we’re super pumped to share this with our close friends up north.”

The company did not say exactly when the service would be available in the city, but says it will be “around to help ring in the holidays.”

The move follows the controversial launch of rival Uber in Toronto a few years ago, which saw protests by taxi drivers.

Toronto city council introduced rules to allow the service to operate legally last year.

Uber also has been embroiled in a fight in Quebec over the province’s rules for ride-hailing services.

In September, the province announced it would renew a pilot project agreement for one more year, but added new provisions that included 35 hours of mandatory training, police background checks and a vehicle inspection every year.

Uber has argued the 35-hour provision hurts the firm’s model of employing part-time and casual workers, who couldn’t even try the service without the training.

The post Lyft’s first stop outside the U.S.: Toronto appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In late October, Reddit user yooston, a sports fan, complained on the site’s Instagram forum that their feed was “showing posts from 4-7 days ago.”

“I’m going f–king crazy cause my feed is filled with crap from last week,” yooston complained. “I follow a bunch of sports accounts, and there is nothing more annoying than seeing a post of highlights from a game from last week in your feed. I miss the chronological feed so much.”

Fellow Reddit users sympathized. “Welcome to Instagram,” one replied. Welcome, in fact, to being online.

A cursory glance around the internet—either in comment forums or even via Google search—reveals a virtually endless array of complaints about the way information, particularly social media posts, is presented to users.

RELATED: Is Facebook a ‘con’ or not?

People are increasingly becoming aware of the ghosts in their social media streams; that what they see when they search Google, or scroll through Facebook and Twitter—the news stories, updates, tweets, cooking videos, photos etc.—has been filtered and reordered for them. In other words, they’re not seeing the Internet, but a curated facsimile of it.

In an innocuously titled 2013 blog on its news page (“News Feed FYI: A Window Into News Feed”) Facebook announced a major change to the screen its billions of users see the moment they log in to the site or access its mobile app. “Now organic stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top of News Feed if the stories are still getting lots of likes and comments,” Lars Backstrom, a Facebook engineer, wrote. The move was necessary, Backstrom wrote, because “with so many stories, there is a good chance people would miss something they wanted to see if we displayed a continuous, unranked system of information.”

Backstrom also noted that, “the number of stories people read and the likes and comments they make decrease,” when Facebook showed unranked news feeds rather than those where posts were curated by the platform. It was to be an important discovery.

Fast-forward four years, and the same idea has been applied to Facebook-owned Instagram, and similarly to Twitter. Meanwhile, in 2016, Google updated its mobile app to present users with a more personalized search screen, showing not only upcoming calendar events, but curated news and information for each user. The platforms via which we see the world don’t just show us more of the same kind of content we saw before, but predict what amongst it all we are interested in seeing most.

RELATED: What will happen when we fall out of love with tech?

It is all the work of algorithms, computer programs that are designed to operate on Boolean logic—“if this, then that”—and scan vast datasets that are either compiled by or purchased by companies and include information about what each of us has done online: what we’ve liked or disliked, commented on, purchased, or asked Google.

In an immediate sense, that means there are plenty of things we don’t see, such as updates from friends or news items that, for one reason or another an algorithm has determined interests us less than other content. But the Facebook posts or Google searches we don’t see are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what’s become invisible to us online. As consumers, we also know little about how the algorithms actually work.

“For the average person who doesn’t know a lot about technology, there’s no way for them to make informed choices about the systems that they’re using and the kinds of behaviours that they’re doing on those systems, because there’s no visibility about what’s being collected and what’s not,” says Emilee Rader, an associate professor at Michigan State University whose research focuses on sociotechnical systems (those in which people, information, and technology interact).

That’s because the algorithms are proprietary. While we have some idea of how social media ranking systems function, the details are locked away safely deep inside each company’s vaults.

The sign outside the main entrance to Facebook HQ. Image via Facebook.

It might not seem like a big deal that posts from particular people are shown to us more than others, or that ads for items on your Amazon wish list follow you around the internet as you browse, but there have already been unexpected consequences of increasingly allowing our interactions with technology, and each other, to be dictated by invisible algorithms.

For one, algorithms have helped make the big tech companies incredibly powerful.

Our information is valuable, and algorithms help monetize it. The simple reason Facebook was concerned that people spent less time engaging with posts in a chronological feed than one ranked and edited to match inferred preferences is because the better the company can show it knows its users, the more valuable it becomes to advertisers. So far, what Facebook knows about us has made the company a lot of money. The overwhelming majority of internet ad dollars flow through Google and Facebook, and ad revenues make up the lion’s share of revenue for both companies: 87 per cent of Google’s $90 billion in sales and 98 per cent of Facebook’s $27 billion.

Online platforms like Facebook feel like a “nice happy social place where you’re talking to your friends,” says Rader. “But that’s not what it exists for. It exists to make Facebook money. Google search exists to make Google money.”

RELATED: Russia’s Facebook memes have been revealed, and politics will never be the same

In short, our data, given willingly for free, has effectively helped create a duopoly in the global advertising business, and elevated Google and Facebook, along with other tech giants like Amazon and Apple, to a place of such dominance in the economy that trust-busting is being seriously debated.

What we also don’t know much about are the intricate patterns algorithms draw between datasets, as the information that’s collected about us all online is increasingly being merged with data collected offline from other companies and organizations.

Again, the implications may go well beyond simply being shown an ad that you can ignore. In fact, ignoring ads is no longer the problem, Zeynep Tufekci, a leading techno-sociologist, said recently.

In a September talk, Tufekci offered the example of ads promoting tickets to Las Vegas. We might assume they were targeted based on demographic data – young men or people with high credit card limits – but algorithms might make a different kind of connection, Tufekci speculated. “What if the system that we do not understand was picking up that it’s easier to sell Vegas tickets to people who are bipolar and are about to enter the manic phase?” she asked. “Such people tend to become over-spenders, compulsive gamblers,” she said. The algorithms could make such a connection “and you’d have no clue that’s what they were picking up on.”

RELATED: Why Twitter needs Donald Trump

The point is this: The algorithms that decide what you see on your social media stream and in search results are not limited to that space. What we do on Facebook or Twitter or Google can inform how we experience the internet as a whole—an increasingly crucial contact point we have with the world.

The internet in whatever form (platform, app, etc.) is not benign. It is not a passive medium, but one that is incredibly, if invisibly, active. The frustration we feel when we scan our social media feeds and realize we’re not seeing everything is all the more visceral because of how personal the content feels (why shouldn’t we be allowed to see what our friends are trying to show us?). But there is a reason: it’s just hidden, and the algorithm’s decision to hide that content was informed by you.

“Everything that you do communicates something to the system. Every action you take is used to make guesses about what you want to see in the future,” Rader says. “Thinking about whether you want to like that page or not, thinking about whether you want to like that cute dog, Halloween photo or not – those things, you’re training the system about what you like.”

The post What the Facebook, Google and Twitter algorithms hide from you appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Redux)

Briefly, on Thursday night, Donald Trump disappeared from Twitter. His account, reportedly shut down by a Twitter employee on the last day on the job at the company, was reinstated after only 11 minutes offline. Yet, for that brief period, there existed the possibility that Twitter—or someone else—had made calls for Trump’s exile from the platform a reality.

Back in February, during an earnings call, Twitter’s CFO, Anthony Noto hinted at how valuable Donald Trump is to Twitter. “The president’s use of Twitter has broadened the awareness of how the platform can be used,” he said, according to reports. “It shows the power of Twitter.”

RELATED: What will happen when we fall out of love with tech?

Few might have guessed at that time that one of the ways Twitter could be used was to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war, but of course Trump appeared to do just that in August. It was among the reasons that Valerie Plame Wilson sought later that month to raise $1 billion via a GoFundMe campaign in order to purchase a majority stake in Twitter, just to evict Trump from the platform. (The effort has raised just over $89,000 so far.)

The cost of getting Trump off Twitter might be far less than $1 billion, but still pricey, depending on what valuations you trust. Various websites exist that attempt to guess the value of a Twitter account. One called Webfluential suggests Trump’s account is worth anywhere from US$44,805 to US$54,765 per tweet (Here’s the math on that: Trump has tweeted 2,033 times since his inauguration, equal to roughly $100 million).  Something called Free Valuator puts his account’s overall value at US$17,628,720—and 39 cents. But, again, the accuracy of these estimates is questionable. A few years ago, Time magazine created a tool for users to calculate their account’s worth, but it was disabled in June 2014, after Twitter started requiring account authentication for sites to load tweet history and follower information.

But the money isn’t really what’s important when trying to guess at Trump value to Twitter’s bottom line. What matters more, probably, is data.

RELATED: Russia’s Facebook memes have been revealed, and politics will never be the same

Donald Trump is, in short, a great data trawler. Twitter, like any other social media app, wants your attention. It requires engagement, not merely for relevance in a strictly newsmaking sense, but because the more time its users spend on its site or app, and the more they interact with other accounts, the more Twitter knows about them. Every time Trump tweets something—be it an insult, attack, boast or covfefe—thousands of people retweet or respond to him. They often share it, and their posts are commented on and shared again and again. And all the while, Twitter gets a better idea of who its users are, who they are connected to, and where they might sit on the political or ideological spectrum. Based on that information, Twitter can then target users with tailored ads.

RELATED: Is Facebook a ‘con’ or not?

Nodo’s comment that Trump shows the “power” of Twitter was right at home on an earnings call—a forum for a company to pitch its value to investors. And because Twitter is above all else a business, it’s through that prism Trump’s presence on Twitter must be seen. It doesn’t actually matter to Twitter what Trump is saying, so long as he says something, and so long as people engage with it somehow.

Trump may be a billionaire in the world of plain old money, but the planet now runs on a different currency. And when it comes to data, the asset that matters most these days, Trump may be just about the richest person on earth. He will have to do a lot of harm before Twitter allows him to disappear, especially for more than 11 minutes.

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• Canada’s coolest PM. (It’s not Justin Trudeau.)
• Why we should pay attention to Donald Trump’s Facebook page
• Stop blaming Twitter for your bad opinions
• How Donald Trump distracts from his radical agenda one tweet at a time

The post Why Twitter needs Donald Trump appeared first on Macleans.ca.

And so we meet the memes again, on the other side of the election they were apparently designed to influence, and via members of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, who released a handful of them to the public this week.

Some of the memes and images were purely political: one of Bernie Sanders portrayed as a buff bodybuilder, for instance; another describing a young black man allegedly trying to prove that Bill Clinton was his real father; and yet another that encouraged people to agree that Hillary Clinton ought to be disqualified from running for president.

Earlier this fall, we learned that some of the 3,000 ads purchased by a Russian troll farm on Facebook weren’t necessarily aimed at supporters for a specific candidate; some were merely designed to inflame divisions that already existed within American society. And sure enough, the committee members released some of those as well.

Two groups—one broadly aimed at conservatives, the other at liberals—are of note. The first is called Heart of Texas, which mostly promoted Texan secession. The second is something called United Muslims of America. One of the images released this week showed a post by that group portraying a woman in a hijab standing next to Hillary Clinton, and the text: “Support Hillary. Save American Muslims.”

Rather than simply sit back and create Facebook groups and shareable content, the Russians also reportedly promoted and encouraged Facebook users to attend rallies supported by these sham groups. At least 60 events across the U.S. are reported to have been created in this manner, and perhaps as many as 100 activists were also reportedly offered money to organize and attend.

This is how it came to be that Facebook followers of both Heart of Texas and of United Muslims of America met on Travis Street in Houston on May 21, 2016—”a scene,” the Texas Tribune reported Thursday, “that appeared on its face to be a protest and a counterprotest.” As the Houston Chronicle described at the time, Heart of Texas had encouraged its followers to bring firearms. One man named Andrew Gomez turned up with an AR-15 assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

That the pro-Muslim crowd eventually dwarfed the Heart of Texas crowd on the other side doesn’t really matter in the end—or perhaps at least not as much as it seemed to at the time. What matters is what was ultimately achieved: psychological chaos.

Perhaps it is time to entertain the idea that, far from being worried about the Americans uncovering what they’ve been up to, Russia feels exactly the opposite about the probe into its alleged meddling in the foundations of U.S. democracy—right down to its simplest expression, a protest. The goal of Russia’s interference was systemic disruption. Awareness that Russians—or whoever else—can create genuine tension on American streets from afar, with nothing more than a social media app is not only profoundly, if subversively, disruptive to the target audience, it also deepens the general air of mistrust that has been already created by viral misinformation.

Far from strengthening people’s resolve in defending legitimate democratic action, realizing how easy manipulation can occur will instead undermine the system even further. Imagine being someone who attended one of those duelling rallies. Would you still feel the same way about your initial motivations for being there? Would you still feel good about the ideas you defended? Or would you feel like you were used – that you were an actor in someone else’s play you had no idea was being crafted?

This is what people will think about in the future.

How will anyone know what protests are real and what protests are manufactured? How will anyone know whether the people attending the rallies are genuine actors or paid by a foreign entity? How will anyone know, even, whether they themselves have not been manipulated into being there?

The very idea of agency, key to the concept of democracy, is suddenly upended, as everyone wonders: what are we really doing here?

Forget about fake news. Fake news is over. Psychologically, we are entering much more frightening territory. This is how the fourth wall of politics and society is broken, and how an alternate cultural reality is created. Things may never be the same.

The post Russia’s Facebook memes have been revealed, and politics will never be the same appeared first on Macleans.ca.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Eric Risberg

MONTREAL – Published reports say ride-hailing company Uber could be about to cease operations in Quebec.

Reports in Montreal La Presse and the Journal de Montreal say the company could make an announcement as early as Tuesday because of new rules governing the service announced last week by the provincial government.

Uber’s Quebec general manager, Jean-Nicolas Guillemette, will speak to journalists in Montreal about the impact of those changes.

RELATED: Uber loses operating license in London

Transport Minister Laurent Lessard said last Friday he would allow Uber to continue to operate under a pilot project for another year under expanded rules that include subjecting Uber drivers to background checks performed by police and no longer by private companies.

Additionally, Lessard said all Uber drivers will be required to undergo the same number of training hours as traditional taxi drivers, which is 35 hours, instead of 20 hours.

Uber vehicles would also require an inspection every 12 months.

Last week, the ride-hailing company called the new rules “challenging,” and said they threatened the company’s ability to continue offering its services to Quebecers.

RELATED: Uber wants in to public transit. Cities should proceed with caution.

But the province has countered that the rules set “basic conditions to ensure safety.”

The pilot project allowing Uber to legally operate in Quebec went into effect in October 2016 and included the option of a one-year renewal.

Part of the pilot project includes a provision allowing the government to collect a small sum from each Uber fare, which is dedicated to helping the traditional taxi industry modernize.

Lessard said the money collected from the program totalled about $7.2 million over the course of the pilot project’s first year.

The post Uber set to cease operations in Quebec, reports say appeared first on Macleans.ca.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Eric Risberg

LONDON – Uber’s license to operate in London won’t be renewed because its practices endanger public safety and security, the local regulator said Friday, in a blow to a company already facing big questions over its corporate culture.

Transport for London says the company, whose app is used by 3.5 million passengers and 40,000 drivers in London, isn’t “fit and proper” to hold a license to operate a private-hire vehicle service.

“TfL considers that Uber’s approach and conduct demonstrate a lack of corporate responsibility in relation to a number of issues which have potential public safety and security implications,” the regulator said in a statement.

Uber was first licensed to operate in the city in 2012 and will see its current license expire on Sept. 30. The company said it plans to appeal the regulator’s decision, and can continue to operate until the appeals process is exhausted.

MORE: Uber wants in to public transit. Cities should proceed with caution.

For its part, Uber accused the city of caving in to special interests “who want to restrict consumer choice.”

“Uber operates in more than 600 cities around the world, including more than 40 towns and cities here in the U.K.,” the company said. “This ban would show the world that, far from being open, London is closed to innovative companies who bring choice to consumers.”

Uber, founded in 2010 in San Francisco, has often faced opposition as it expanded. Taxi drivers complain that Uber drivers don’t have to comply with the same licensing standards, giving the ride-hailing service an unfair advantage and placing the public at risk.

The company, which provides a smartphone application that connects passengers with drivers who work as independent contractors, argues it isn’t a traditional transportation company.

In its decision, Transport for London singled out Uber’s approach to reporting serious criminal offences and how it conducts background checks on drivers. TfL also took issue with Uber’s explanation of software that could be used to block regulators from gaining full access to the app and “prevent officials from undertaking regulatory or law enforcement duties.”

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said he supported the decision, saying any operator of taxi services in the city “needs to play by the rules.”

“Providing an innovative service must not be at the expense of customer safety and security,” he said. “I fully support TfL’s decision – it would be wrong if TfL continued to license Uber if there is any way that this could pose a threat to Londoners’ safety and security.”

MORE: Why Uber’s manipulation of drivers is so wrong

Police in London accused Uber last month of not reporting a sexual assault by a driver on a passenger, allowing the driver to strike again. Metropolitan Police Inspector Neil Billany suggested in a letter that the company was putting concerns for its reputation over public safety.

At the time, Uber said it was surprised by the letter and that it had a good working relationship with the police.

But the company has been dogged by questions on its workplace culture. In July, former CEO Travis Kalanick resigned following criticism of his management style. Some 20 people, including some managers, were fired in June amid allegations of sexual harassment and bullying.

Its aggressive corporate culture has resulted in litigation around the world. John Colley, a strategy professor at Warwick Business School, said poor values ultimately bring companies down. Uber is now effectively banned from France, Spain and Belgium, and it is facing litigation and investigations around the world, he said.

“There is a very long list of businesses who have suffered for failing to uphold the level of values necessary,” Colley said. “Until Uber gets this message then it will suffer lost trade as a result of its deteriorating reputation.”

The post Uber loses operating license in London appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The sign outside the main entrance to Facebook HQ. Image via Facebook.

NEW YORK – Facebook is slowly acknowledging the outsized – if unintended – role it played in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Bowing to pressure from lawmakers and the public, the company said it will provide the contents of 3,000 ads bought by a Russian agency to congressional investigators, while also pledging to make political advertising on its platform more “transparent.”

“I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook video and wrote in an accompanying post . “That’s not what we stand for.”

MORE: Russian troll farm bought ads during 2016 campaign, says Facebook

The moves Thursday come amid growing pressure on the social network from members of Congress, who pushed Facebook to release the ads after the company disclosed their existence in early September. Facebook has already handed over the ads to the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Facebook’s reluctance to be more forthcoming with information that could shed light on possible election interference has prompted the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee to call for the company to testify in its election-meddling probe.

A more transparent Facebook

In one of the first steps Facebook has ever taken to open up its secretive advertising system to observation, the company will now require political ads to disclose both who is paying for them and all ad campaigns those individuals or groups are running on Facebook.

That’s a key step that will allow outsiders to see how many different variants of a given ad are being targeted to various groups of individuals, a tactic designed to improve their effectiveness. At the moment, there’s no way for anyone but Facebook to track these political ads, or for recipients to tell who is sponsoring such messages.

MORE: Should Facebook tell you more about political ads?

Since average users “don’t know if you’re seeing the same messages as everyone else,” Zuckerberg said, Facebook will “make it so you can visit an advertiser’s page and see the ads they’re currently running to any audience on Facebook.”

The company will hire 250 more people in the next year to work on “election integrity,” Zuckerberg said.

The top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel would go farther. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner is writing a bill that would require social media companies to disclose who funded political ads, similar to rules on television broadcasters. In an interview with The Associated Press, Warner said he hoped to work with social-media companies on the bill.

And yet still secretive

Zuckerberg suggested that the company may not provide much information publicly, saying that the ongoing federal investigation will limit what he can reveal.

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee have sought to bring Facebook executives before their committee for the past couple of weeks. But critics say Facebook should go further. They say the company should tell its users how they might have been influenced by outside meddlers.

The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, for instance, stressed again on Thursday that the company should make the ads public, “so that everyone can see the nature and extent of the use of Facebook accounts by Russia.”

RELATED: Why we should pay attention to Donald Trump’s Facebook page

Zuckerberg also warned that Facebook can’t catch all undesirable material before it hits its social network.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you we’re going to catch all bad content in our system. We don’t check what people say before they say it, and frankly, I don’t think our society should want us to,” Zuckerberg said. But those who break the law or Facebook’s policies, he added, “are going to face consequences afterwards.”

Facebook won’t catch everyone immediately, he added, but it can “make it harder to try to interfere.”

Facebook has company in the hot seat

Zuckerberg’s move came a day after Twitter confirmed that it will meet next week with staff of the Senate intelligence committee, which has been scrutinizing the spread of false news stories and propaganda on social media during the election.

Warner said the committee wanted to hear from Twitter to learn more about the use of fake accounts and bot networks to spread misinformation.

“Twitter deeply respects the integrity of the election process, a cornerstone of all democracies, and will continue to strengthen our platform against bots and other forms of manipulation that violate our Terms of Service,” the company said in a statement.

LoBianco reported from Washington. Associated Press Writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Chad Day contributed to this story from Washington.

The post Facebook pledges more transparency for political ads appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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(Maskot/Getty)

Uber is enjoying a string of good news stories in Ontario.

Back in March, the company was announced as one of the “platinum” backers of the new Vector artificial intelligence institute launching in Toronto, which is part of a larger plan to make the province a global hub for A.I. research and development.

On May 8, Uber announced it plans to open a self-driving car research group in Toronto, headed by University of Toronto assistant professor Raquel Urtasun. The work she’s been doing “focuses on developing the software that allows self-driving cars to ‘see’: recognizing objects so they can navigate the world smoothly and safely,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick wrote.

And then on Monday the small town of Innisfil, Ont. became the first in Canada to subsidize Uber rides as part of a plan to provide transportation services along specific routes to people who might otherwise outside the reach of public transit. Along those routes, residents will pay a base fair – $3 to $5 – and the city covers the rest, if necessary. The city also offers to cover $5 of non-routed trips residents might want to take within the city’s boundaries. Innisfil concluded that expanding bus service to some areas might cost as much as $1 million; subsidizing Uber, on the other hand, might cost as little as $175,000 over the course of the six-month pilot project.

MORE: Ontario town launches Uber public transit service

Of course, the first two news items are directly related to the third: Some day, the ride-share cars that make up for gaps in public transit won’t be driven by locals – either those looking to make some extra cash, or those for whom it’s a full-time job. Instead, those connecting routes might be staffed by autonomous vehicles.

But why does Uber, a disruptive tech company, want to attach itself to something as archaic as public transit?

Uber knows that when it comes to driverless vehicles, it will have a lot of competition. This February, Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous car unit, filed a lawsuit alleging that one of its former employees stole trade secrets and took them to Uber. (Some of its claims were later dropped.) In the (near) future, both the frequency of these kinds of patent dust-ups and the accusations involved are likely to intensify. But the thing to remember is that Uber is not a company that makes things. Unlike Alphabet (Google’s parent company) or Tesla or Ford or General Motors or even Apple, Uber’s product is just an app. While Uber is currently testing driverless cars, what it’s really testing is the driving software.

This is cutting edge stuff at the moment, but it could still leave Uber in a precarious position.

“If these tech and car outlets all create cars that can drive by themselves, what role does Uber or Lyft [Uber’s main competitor in the rideshare universe] play in that transaction?” Nick Bilton asked in Vanity Fair last year.

That is to say, were it to remain just a platform to connect people with drivers, Uber would lose market share, eventually, to companies like Google or Apple, who could conceivably make that experience much easier given their combined mobile platform dominance. You might not need a separate rideshare app—your phone, knowing your schedule, could arrange for an Apple or Waymo car to come pick you up automatically.

RELATED: Why Uber’s manipulation of drivers is so wrong

That would leave Uber hoping that it remains popular, or that other companies integrate it with their car networks rather than build their own consumer-facing products. Still, even if Uber “could offer to connect cars to passengers… in doing so, they will likely want a cut of the revenues that the carmaker gets from each transaction. It doesn’t take an insider at Apple to know that Tim Cook probably wouldn’t want to give Uber 20 per cent of Cupertino’s car profits,” Bilton wrote.

Is this why Uber is latching on now to public transit? Early adoption could, conceivably, make it indispensable to governments all over the world. It may be that, when autonomous vehicles are finally the norm and the competition over riders heats up, Uber wants to have arrangements like the one in Innisfil already in place. In that scenario, Uber will survive despite not making cars—all it has to do is make the software for cars that cities want to buy.

Partnerships like the one Uber has with Innisfil also potentially create a new customer base: people who would normally not take an Uber due to its price, but now, thanks to the partnership, can afford it.

Eventually, if Uber’s partnerships with city transit continue and expand, it will create a second tier of “public” transportation: one that sticks to designated routes, but is a step up from the bus or subway and a step below a more traditional Uber ride.

This scenario creates all kinds of issues that cities like Innisfil, or Toronto, or anywhere else, must consider before entering into these agreements. For example, will the private companies they’re partnering with address the range of accessibility issues that public transit is obligated to? In an indication that Uber is ill-equipped to accommodate those who need mobility aids in cars, Innisfil offers a similar subsidy for people who use the local, regular taxi service.

More pressing, however, is what would become of the lowest tier: traditional public transit. Who will pay for it? More specifically, who will want to pay for it? Currently, many citizens are willing to have their taxes go to buses and subways because even if they’re relatively financially comfortable, they still use those services – to get to work or to concerts or sporting events.

RELATED: Enough with the Uber bashing already

But if there were a more comfortable, private, perhaps cleaner alternative that not only filled in transit gaps but offered better routes, all for a bit more money, would people still feel the same? Would the argument for a truly public transit system still hold? Fewer riders for the old-style public transit system would mean lower revenues, leading to degrading infrastructure. Rather than pay for the upkeep on buses and trains as well as for salaries for their many employees, cities might look to cut their losses and either expand the cheaper subsidy option, leaving publicly-funded transit covering only a fraction of the grid it once did, or get out of the transit game entirely, leaving it to private companies to handle. As services are cut, the poorest tier of transit users would either have to use a decaying, even more underfunded system, or may not have a transit option at all.

Most worryingly, cities might not have the chance to ponder the question of where this all leads—once the partnership begins, the market may decide things for them.

It’s not hard to see the collapse of public transit as a nightmare scenario. But classes of public transit? Uber currently operates a carpool service. In 2015, Uber tested UberHop, a $5 fixed-route service in downtown Toronto. Stratification of public transit is not some faraway dystopian future—it’s already happening.

MORE ABOUT UBER:

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• The four most important lessons about technology for 2016
• After-work drinks are great for productivity—but only if you do them right

The post Uber wants in to public transit. Cities should proceed with caution. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Matt Rourke/AP)

Facebook thinks you should be better at reading the news. In an effort to help, starting Friday, you’ll notice a post appear at the top of your Facebook news feed prompting you to click through to see tips on how to spot “false news.”

“Our purpose here is just to raise awareness about how to think about information critically online,” says Kevin Chan, head of public policy at Facebook Canada. “This is a first step in our efforts to deal with this challenge—it is on the news literacy side.”

To that end, specifically, Facebook has partnered with MediaSmarts, a Canadian media literacy not-for-profit that has developed a new list (available via the Facebook tips page) of the well-known journalistic “Five Ws.” MediaSmart’s Five Ws suggest readers of online news ask questions like why a certain post is being spread around, who posted it—and whether they have an agenda—or where else they might be able to verify information they’ve seen.

RELATED: Is the world falling out of love with Facebook?

“Of course, there’s no way that we can authenticate everything that comes to us through social media, so the first question is when we should authenticate. When do we double-check?” says Matthew Johnson, director of education at MediaSmarts. One time we should double-check, he says, is “when something seems too good to be true.”

Facebook seems very aware of the position it currently occupies in the greater cultural discussion about news—and, to some extent, facts. It’s not a flattering one.

When the immediate fallout from the U.S. election in November was examined, the most radioactive particles were broadly determined to be so-called ‘fake news’ stories—those shocking headlines so dripping with maximum partisan outrage that well-meaning people on all sides of the ideological spectrum apparently couldn’t help believing and sharing them with their social media networks again and again.

Whether ‘fake news’ really did swing the election toward Donald Trump—or simply away from Hillary Clinton—has yet to be conclusively determined. But, in the weeks following the election, Facebook took seriously the criticism it garnered from having been the primary distribution tool for these posts replete with misinformation or quasi-information.

In an open letter posted in February, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that, in its quest to weed out misinformation, Facebook noted that “in general, if you become less likely to share a story after reading it, that’s a good sign the headline was sensational,” but that “if you’re more likely to share a story after reading it, that’s often a sign of good in-depth content.”

RELATED: The dark irony behind Facebook’s fake news problem

This very well might be true. We don’t know for sure, as Facebook didn’t release any data publicly to support Zuckerberg’s observation. (When asked for it, Facebook pointed to this blog.) But really all that matters is that Facebook has determined it to be true. Chan repeated the same thing, nearly verbatim. And he added that “over time what we’ll want to do as we understand this stuff, is to make sure that where there is something that’s going viral and people are sharing it without having engaged with the content, then those things get severely down-ranked on News Feed.”

On the surface, this seems antithetical to both Facebook’s raison d’etre—as a place to share things with people—and its bottom line. But Chan refutes the idea that Facebook’s ultimate goal is to create a lot of activity around a post, without ever worrying whether people click through to see the story.

“I think that would be the opposite of what we want. What we want is for people to have good content, reliable authentic content that they can engage with on News Feed,” Chan says. “We very much value good engagement and good content on Facebook, so definitely one of our priorities is to make sure that where there is false information, misinformation on our platform, that we understand how it behaves and that we are able to take appropriate enforcement action.”

Missing from this conversation about how to either eradicate misleading or false information posing as news from Facebook, or reduce sensationalist, clickbait-y headlines from reputable news outlets is, of course, the fact that much of the reason all of it exists in the first place is because of Facebook. It’s longstanding ability to make something go “viral” incentivized the very thing it now hopes to squash.

Not that long ago, it thought the full-on democratization of ideas was pretty good.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Menlo Park, California September 27, 2015. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File Photo

Back in 2012, as Facebook prepared to go public, Zuckerberg wrote another letter—this one to potential investors. He highlighted what kind of world we were living in at that time: one in which a majority of people, via the internet or their mobile phones, had “the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want.”

Back then, Facebook wanted to help people form connections in the hopes that it could “rewire the way people spread and consume information.” The world’s information infrastructure, Zuckerberg wrote, “should resemble the social graph—a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.”

By giving people “the power to share,” he wrote, “we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a number of different scale[s] from what has historically been possible.” Those voices, Zuckerberg predicted, would only increase in number and volume: “They cannot be ignored.” Over time, he continued, “we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.”

RELATED: Is Facebook a media company?

It is possible that Zuckerberg’s vision has been realized. A massive, global sharing of ideas has indeed happened. But, being a sharing of ideas between humans, it was naturally going to be privy to human conversational failings: hearsay, conjecture, specious arguments, baseless proclamations, just to name a few. In other words, not good or reliable content.

Is it any wonder that we are where we are? It was essentially all part of the plan, in that the plan encouraged people to speak their minds. It just turns out that a lot of the time, people don’t know what they’re talking about.

So what now?

This latest effort by Facebook to change direction—in effect to reverse the tide—is interesting. But there are two things to note.

First, Facebook’s plan does nothing to change the importance given internally to quality content. “Good reporting,” as a report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism put it in March, is still “not currently algorithmically privileged.”

That leads to the second point, which is that this particular move puts the onus on users to figure things out. Facebook might have made a mess of things, it might have—in its design and in what posts it has naturally promoted for years—rewired information consumption, but it’s left up to us to set things right again. Whatever that might mean.

RELATED: Why Canadians should care about Facebook’s fake news problem

Yet, perhaps that’s the way it should be, for other moves Facebook is making to combat “fake news” could lead us to even weirder territory than we’re in now.

Recently in both the U.S. and Germany, Facebook began testing a flagging system that alerts users to content that might be misinformation. As The Verge reported in December, if at least two fact-checking organizations take issue with a story, users will see a banner reading “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact Checkers,” along with links below it to debunking articles.

Which could mean, with this fact- and news-checking feature in place, and thanks to its incredible size and clout, that Facebook could become the opposite of what Zuckerberg once said it was. We might see things swing entirely the other way. Rather than the disrupter of top-down information, Facebook would become the enforcer of it; the de facto portal through which people feel they must consume the news. For, where else might they be told what information should be read and what should be ignored? Where else in this world will news reading be safe?

When, and if, that tool comes to Canada, it may be trumpeted by Facebook as a thing that will rewire information dissemination again. As a thing that will save us. As a thing, maybe, that seems too good to be true.

But in that case, at least Facebook’s media literacy push will have taught us to double-check it.

An earlier version of this piece contained the suggestion that Facebook is promoting its media literacy effort as a cure-all for ‘fake news’. This piece has been amended to clarify that Facebook is not promoting its current media literacy program as such.

The post The problem with Facebook’s plan to teach you how to read news appeared first on Macleans.ca.

REUTERS/Mark Blinch – RTX1HRYW

BlackBerry’s latest gambit to save its struggling business is to stop making BlackBerrys altogether—a move that sounds like a death rattle, but may well prove to be the one-time mobile giant’s last chance to return to profitability.

Waterloo, Ont.-based BlackBerry said Wednesday it would no longer design or manufacture physical devices as part of an ongoing strategy to refocus the company on higher margin software and services. “The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners,” CEO John Chen said in a statement that accompanied the firm’s latest quarterly earnings, which showed a loss during the three-month period of US$372 million.

The decision marks the end of an era. Under the leadership of former co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the company formerly known as Research In Motion kicked off the smartphone craze in the early-to-mid 2000s with popular devices like the Pearl, Curve and Bold. The term “Crackberry,” a reference to the addictive nature of BlackBerry’s push email, entered the global lexicon. But, as everyone now knows, BlackBerry’s meteoric rise—it was once the most valuable company in Canada—began to sputter shortly after Apple entered the market in 2007 with its now-iconic iPhone. In just a few short years, BlackBerry went from being the largest seller of smartphones in the world to controlling less than one per cent of the market.

Yet, while BlackBerry diehards will no doubt consider Sept. 28, 2016, a dark day, it shouldn’t have taken them by surprise. When Chen took over three years ago, he promised to refocus BlackBerry on more profitable software and business services, building on BlackBerry’s reputation for security. A few months later BlackBerry signed a strategic agreement with Taiwanese device-maker Foxconn to build some of its phones. Chen had reportedly given BlackBerry until September to make the remainder of its hardware division profitable. When that didn’t happen, he pulled the plug. “If part of your business is not profitable, and you don’t see a way to make it profitable, I think it makes sense to get out of it,” says Glenn Rowe, an associate professor at Western University’s Richard Ivey School of Business.

Shareholders seem to agree. BlackBerry’s beleaguered stock was trading up five per cent yesterday at US$8.30 on the Nasdaq stock exchange. That’s the highest it’s been in six months.

What might BlackBerry’s phone-less future look like? The company on Wednesday announced a licensing deal with a telecom joint venture in Indonesia that, for the first time, will see another company design and build phones with BlackBerry’s name stamped on them. The devices, destined for the Indonesian market, will also run BlackBerry’s more secure version of Google’s Android operating system and applications. Explained Chen in a statement: “BlackBerry is no longer just about the smartphone, but the smart in the phone.”

It’s a far cry from being known as “Crackberry.” But, as slogans go, it’s surely better than nothing.

The post In a bid to save itself, BlackBerry to stop making BlackBerrys appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This Friday, Oct. 18, 2013, file photo, shows a Twitter app on an iPhone screen, in New York. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

What is the true nature of humanity? In the absence of society and its restrictions, do we exist in a state of perfect freedom, or absolute chaos? Lengthy philosophical treatises from the likes of Plato, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau have mulled and debated these questions for millennia. While human nature hasn’t changed much, this eternal issue can now be contemplated in 140 characters or less: why do so many people act like complete jerks online?

Earlier this month, Maclean’s came face-to-face with an issue we’ve reported on many times: social media’s apparently endless capacity to fill itself with hatred and venom. Ottawa Associate Editor Shannon Proudfoot, an enthusiastic Twitter user, recently posted about the curious gender sorting of children’s toys. “Boys can be pirates, construction workers, firefighters. Girls can be seven varieties of princess,” she tweeted. It’s an entirely reasonable topic for a journalist to raise. Yet during the next week Proudfoot found herself the recipient of an endless flood of uninvited, often dangerous, invective. Space and good manners preclude us from offering more than a small sample: “You are scum,” “please kill yourself,” “stop abusing your children.” Most of this appeared to come from American anti-feminist groups at the behest of perpetually unhappy right-wing commentators such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. Before the deluge subsided, Proudfoot was forced to temporarily block or mute tens of thousands of hostile Twitter users. Following a death threat, police were involved.

Proudfoot’s experience is certainly not unique. Dog-piling—marshalling an army of angry online warriors against individuals who express views at odds with the mob—and other forms of online attacks have become depressingly common occurrences. Black actress Leslie Jones, star of this summer’s Ghostbusters movie, was mercilessly hounded by sexist and racist tweets from “movie fans” upset over her role in the all-female reboot of the 1980s comedy. When the Guardian newspaper in Britain took a close look at 70 million reader comments posted to its website dating back to 2006, it found eight of the top 10 targets for abusive or derogatory messages were female writers. The remaining two were black men. In similar fashion, online feminist mobs have targeted former Republican presidential candidates Rick Perry and Rick Santorum. The underlying issue isn’t the politics of Twitter users, but why online discussions can so quickly become cesspools of hate-filled rhetoric.

Freed from social conventions that govern face-to-face interaction, far too many Twitter users gleefully adopt an overheated mob sensibility on a range of politically charged subjects. Anonymity breeds contempt. As a result, responsible users can find their social media accounts overwhelmed by an interminable stream of hate, making meaningful conversation far too difficult.

The simplest solution is to ask everyone—politely, of course—to ensure their online behaviour aligns with how they act in the real world. Would you shout at a passerby because you disagree with a slogan on their T-shirt? Probably not. So why is it okay to accost complete strangers over Twitter under similar circumstances? Failing widespread adoption of the Golden Rule, users also have the ability to leave Twitter whenever they like. But retreating in the face of bullying leaves the bullies in charge. The same goes for efforts to muster mob attacks in revenge of dog-piles; adding more poison to the well is unlikely to improve water quality. “I like Twitter,” says Proudfoot. “I don’t want to be chased away, but it seems the jerks have all the power.” (She’s stayed on Twitter, and unblocked all the accounts she blocked.)

Twitter and the rest of the privately owned social media universe are free to set their rules however they wish. But if long-term survival is a goal, the overall experience for users must remain positive. More must be done to stem rage-filled attacks while maintaining Twitter’s laudable commitment to free speech and serendipitous communal interaction. A circuit breaker that allows users to pause incoming tidal waves of opprobrium might make sense. Stock markets use similar mechanisms to cool off panicked investors without compromising the integrity of the market. And credit card companies are sophisticated enough to know when your card is being used in ways that are at odds with past patterns. It is in Twitter’s best interests to find new ways to ensure users aren’t deluged by hateful messages from complete strangers. The status quo isn’t working.

Social media has become a big part of many people’s lives. As journalists, we appreciate the ability to communicate with our readers in diverse ways. It is therefore deplorable that bullies and hate-mongers have come to dominate so much of the conversation on Twitter. If social media has become uncivilized, perhaps it’s time for civilization to take it back.

The post The social media status quo isn’t working appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In this July 9, 2016 file photo, Leslie Jones arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of “Ghostbusters.” In a series of posts Monday, July 19, Jones said she had been pummeled with racist tweets. She said the messages were deeply hurtful and brought her to tears. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

LOS ANGELES – Department of Homeland Security investigators said Thursday they are investigating the hack of Leslie Jones’ website that revealed several private details of the actress-comedian’s life.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of Homeland Security Investigations, said Thursday that its New York office is investigating the hack that exposed the driver’s license, passport and intimate photos of the “Saturday Night Live” star, along with hateful and racist images.

ICE Public Affairs Officer Rachael Yong Yow said the agency does not release information related to active investigations. Jones’ website was taken offline after the hack was exposed Wednesday.

The “Ghostbusters” actress was also targeted on Twitter last month with a barrage of racial slurs and obscene photos. She called on the social networking service to do more to curb harassment, and Twitter banned several users as a result.

In recent years, Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Christina Aguilera and Kate Upton have been among Hollywood actresses who’ve had stolen nude images of themselves posted online.

No charges have been filed against those who hacked and posted images of Lawrence, Upton and numerous other celebrities in a massive dump of intimate images of celebrities in August 2014.

Two men were recently convicted after federal prosecutors charged them with hacking into the accounts of several celebrities and stealing images and other personal information. However, neither of the men, Andrew Helton of Astoria, Oregon, or Ryan Collins of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, are suspected of posting the stolen images online.

Helton was sentenced to six months in federal prison in July, half of the sentence prosecutors had sought. Helton pleaded guilty to stealing 161 nude or explicit photos from 13 people, including unidentified celebrities, and said his arrest forced him to confront his mental health issues. He is due to report to prison in October.

Collins’ sentencing date has not been set.

Johansson, Kunis and Aguilera were hacked by a Florida man, Christopher Chaney, who used publicly available information to obtain access to the email accounts of more than 50 people in the entertainment industry. Chaney was sentenced to 10 years and remains in a low-security federal prison in Mississippi.

“I have been truly humiliated and embarrassed,” Johansson said in a tearful videotaped statement played in court before Chaney was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in December 2012.

Private information and images of celebrities are frequent targets for hackers. In 2012 a site posted credit reports, Social Security numbers and other financial info on celebrities, including Jay Z and his wife Beyonce, Mel Gibson, Ashton Kutcher and many others.

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MONTREAL – Automakers are hoping to overcome the biggest roadblock to electric vehicles sales — range anxiety among consumers — with a little help from government.

A spokesman for Ford Canada said Monday that government efforts to extend the network of recharging stations along highways and elsewhere is a big psychological boost in helping consumers overcome range anxiety, even though the typical Canadian urban commute is far shorter than the travelling range of many of today’s plug-in vehicles.

“(With) both the federal government and provincial governments working together to develop the infrastructure you’ll see range anxiety eventually disappear,” Marc Vejgman, Ford’s product marketing manager, said in an interview at a global electric vehicle conference in Montreal.

Meanwhile, new products from the automakers themselves are starting to bring more consumers around.

Nissan says sales of its popular Leaf plug-in surged 50 per cent when it introduced a more powerful battery last November that boosted the car’s range by 27 per cent to 172 kilometres.

Ford is planning to introduce a new battery this fall that will increase the range of its all-electric Focus by 31 per cent to 160 km.

Nissan said it believes new technology can double the Leaf’s range in three years and add hundreds of kilometres over time.

But Kazuo Yajima, alliance global director of the company’s electric vehicle engineering division, said efforts to add more range needs to be tempered with reducing vehicle costs.

“We cannot rely on the (government) subsidies or incentives forever,” he said.

MORE: The rise of the electric car—and the death of the gas station

Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said Quebec’s $8,000 subsidy for the purchase of electric vehicles will only be phased out when sales hit a critical mass and prices fall.

B.C. offers a $5,000 subsidy and Ontario provides up to $14,000 in incentives as it aims for electric cars to make up five per cent of new vehicle sales by 2020.

“It’s hard for me to tell you at what moment we will be able to decrease the incentives,” Couillard told reporters, adding that the sale of electric and hybrid cars generates returns for the provincial economy.

“When you fill up you car with gasoline you basically encourage oil exporters — also of course Canadian oil producers — but if you charge your electric car you send money directly through Hydro-Quebec and recycle it in Quebec’s economy,” he said

Electric cars are a niche market with less than one per cent of global auto sales. More than 21,000 plug-in electric vehicles have been sold in Canada since 2011. The plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt leads, followed by the all-electric Tesla Model S and Nissan Leaf. Together they account for almost 70 per cent of sales.

Meanwhile, Quebec announced Monday that it will greatly increase the number of fast-charge stations for electric vehicles along one of the province’s busiest highways. Quick-charging stations will be added in two phases in six communities along the 580-kilometre stretch of Highway 20 between Montreal and Mont-Joli.

Couillard said the announcement demonstrates the province’s drive to encourage the use of such vehicles and reduce greenhouse gases. The province aims to increase the number of electric and hybrid vehicles on Quebec roads tenfold to 100,000 by 2020.

Couillard said interest in electric cars is growing exponentially, but infrastructure needs to be deployed at a speed that accommodates growing demand.

The post Carmakers, Canadian governments tackling electric car range anxiety appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This just in: You’re not real.

Turns out that maybe none of us is real. According to Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor behind Tesla cars and the SpaceX project, it’s highly likely we are merely characters inside a computer simulation created by an advanced civilization. The downside: Everything we have ever felt, touched or experienced is a synthetic hoax that never really existed. The upside: so is Bono.

Musk’s belief is rooted in the pace of progress. In less than 50 years, video games have gone from Pong to realistic virtual reality. Imagine what will be possible within a century, or two, or 10. Ultimately, there will be one reality—but billions of devices capable of simulating reality. Musk’s conclusion? There’s only a “one in billions” chance that we’re not living inside some future kid’s xBox 3000. Fingers crossed he doesn’t get called to dinner.

This theory is unsettling on a number of levels. For instance, there are millions upon millions of potential simulations—and somehow we ended up in the same one as Ezra Levant. But Musk’s thesis does make some sense. Given the capability, it would be logical for future humans to recreate the past to witness, say, the hardships of life in the 12th century—or how many thousands of times it would take Zack Snyder to make a version of Batman v. Superman that doesn’t suck.

There have been hints all along that humanity has been living in a video game. The gratuitous violence, for instance. Or the fact that Donald Trump’s temperament is eerily similar to that of Donkey Kong.

Let’s explore some of the questions raised by Musk’s theory:

Is this just a way for Elon to meet girls? Probably not. Although . . . “It’s 2 a.m., this bar is closing and our known reality is the algorithmic plaything of futuristic beings. Might as well make out in an Uber.”

How closely is our simulated world monitored? Are we ignored? Are we used for entertainment? Are the children of the year 3016 forced to write reports explaining why we keep rebooting Spider-Man? It’s kind of embarrassing to think that super-intelligent members of an advanced civilization recently watched me not notice my underwear was on backwards all morning.

How are we doing as a fake society? As Musk points out, no advanced civilization would stop at creating just one simulation—there are probably billions. What if we live in one of the worst?

Think about it: We’re so proud of having invented the rocket ship, the super computer, the Swiffer. But what if we’re the laughingstock of the robot hive mind that programmed us? Check it out: these idiots still can’t play Candy Crush with their thoughts!

In other simulations, people have likely evolved beyond the base urges to acquire territory, wealth and power. Meanwhile, we still devote 80 per cent of our mental energy to inventing new hamburgers. It’ll be so humiliating if the other fake humans find out.

Do those who create simulations get to walk among us, like in virtual reality? Perhaps Musk himself is the one who built our simulation. And now he’s in here messing with our fake minds and trying to prank us into paying $100,000 for a car that needs to be plugged in every five minutes.

Can we “overcome” the rules of the simulation, like Neo in The Matrix? Let’s see:

Wife: It’s your turn to drive the kids to soccer.

Me: [Bends back impossibly and in slow motion.]

Wife: It’s still your turn, numbnuts.

What does this mean for the afterlife? What happens when we “die?” Is our consciousness recycled? Or is there a simulated heaven? If so, can we maybe tweak it so there aren’t so many harps?

How far can this theory go? Once we open our minds, the possibilities are staggering. Are we a simulation created by an advanced species—or do we exist in a simulation created within another simulation? More importantly: How many simulations deep do we need to be before I can stop paying my Visa bill?

Is there an upside to not existing? If everything we’ve ever known is a lie and everyone we’ve ever loved is nothing but ones and zeroes, there’s really no point in me accepting your LinkedIn request, Jerry.

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(Photo illustration by Sarah MacKinnon and Richard Redditt)

On March 10, 1987, at 9:40 p.m., the body of Welsh private investigator Daniel Morgan was discovered in the parking lot of a seedy London pub. The 37-year-old was struck three times with an axe in the back of the head and once more in the face, where the axe remained. His Rolex watch was gone, but £1,100 cash sat in his pocket. If none of this seems familiar, it’s because what is widely considered the most investigated murder in British history rarely lands in the mainstream press. U.K. journalist Peter Jukes stumbled on the Morgan case four years ago while investigating the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. “Intrusions, bribery, bugging apartments, tapping phones and hacking voicemail—we call them the dark arts, and they began with the Daniel Morgan murder,” says Jukes.

At the time of his death, Morgan and his business partner, Jonathan Rees, were drinking together, despite their ever more acrimonious relationship: £18,000 had recently disappeared from the firm in a supposed robbery that Morgan suspected was a set-up. Morgan was having an extramarital affair with a woman who now lives with Rees. Det. Sid Fillery, assigned to investigate the crime, later went into business with Rees, trading illegally acquired information with the press. At the time of his murder, Morgan had allegedly approached News of the World with a massive story—which Morgan estimated to be worth £250,000—revealing a web of corrupt police officers operating a cocaine smuggling ring.

“This is a story about media corruption, so the media won’t touch it, and why?” asks Jukes. “Because many of them have been involved.” In almost three decades, five murder inquiries and one collapsed trial have brought no answers or solace for Morgan’s family. “We’ve been lobbying for years for public scrutiny of the case,” says Daniel’s brother, Alastair, now 67. “The last government was totally unsympathetic to us, which infuriated me because I thought, ‘Can’t you see how serious this is?’ ” They didn’t, or wouldn’t, and so the murder went unsolved.

But the media landscape has since shifted. The massive success of the podcast Serial and Netflix’s Making a Murderer provided renewed interest in true crime stories, a new medium to better tell Morgan’s complicated and intertwining story, and a full bypass of the traditional media channels that had previously blocked them. And the advent of crowd-funding could help fund the project without depending on government or media.

Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder podcast appeared on the U.K.-based crowd-funding site Byline, the “new platform for truly independent journalism,” last December; $19,000 from more than 200 donors even included some familiar famous faces. Hugh Grant, a victim of the phone-hacking scandal, supported the first episode.

Jukes is the host, merging old facts with new evidence as it appears. “We’ve recently conducted a five-hour interview with a former police officer who went undercover at Morgan’s rogue detective firm—taken over by Rees and Sid Fillery within a year of Daniel’s murder,” he says. Even when the lead investigator retires and immediately goes into business with the main suspect, Jukes remains an unbiased reporter. “There’s a burden on me to step up and be the objective narrator,” he says. As with Serial, listeners can visit the website to see photographs, newspaper clippings and evidence.

Alastair hopes the podcast will garner global interest, but, he says, “I’m just grateful, after all these years of being told to go away, that someone was interested.” His unabashed interviews carry the 10-episode series and confirm the swirling rumours about Daniel’s plan to expose the police. “‘All police are bastards,’ ” Alastair recalls his brother saying. But even he has questions. “I’d be lying if I said I knew who did what, but I have no doubt who was involved. The question now is how did they get away with it?”

Untold probably won’t solve this mystery. Still, “there is a kind of justice in transparency, even if there are no convictions,” says Jukes. “They might get away with murder, but not without infamy.”

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Drone being flown (Shutterstock)

LONDON — A collision between a British Airways passenger jet and a drone over London has left the plane undamaged but the aviation industry deeply shaken.

British police and air accident authorities were investigating Sunday’s incident, in which an Airbus A320 carrying 137 people struck an object believed to be a drone at a height of about 1,700 feet (518 metres) while it was approaching Heathrow Airport.

The plane landed safely and was cleared to fly again after an inspection by engineers. But the incident has focused attention on the growing number of unregulated drones in the sky and the potential for disaster if they hit a plane — either accidentally or on purpose.

London’s Metropolitan Police said Monday the incident occurred over Richmond Park, a large open expanse a few miles from the airport. Chief Superintendent Martin Hendry said the incident “highlights the very real dangers of reckless, negligent and sometimes malicious use of drones.”

“The potential is there for a major incident,” he said.

HOW MANY DRONES ARE OUT THERE?

The authorities don’t know exactly, since small drones bought for private use often don’t have to be registered, but the market is growing fast as drones become cheaper and easier to operate.

In Britain alone, electronics stores sold thousands during the 2015 Christmas season. Phil Finnegan, director of corporate analysis at aerospace research company Teal Group, estimates there are “several million” drones in the United States.

Tony Tyler, director-general of the International Air Transport Association, told an aviation conference in Denmark on Monday that drones “are here to stay.”

“But we must not allow them to become a drag on the efficiency of the airways or a safety threat to commercial aviation,” he said.

Tyler called for “a sensible approach to regulation and a pragmatic method of firm enforcement for those who disregard rules and regulations and put others in danger.”

WHAT ARE THE RULES?

Many countries distinguish between commercial drone operators, which must be licensed, and those used recreationally.

In Britain, operators don’t need a license to use a small drone weighing less than 20 kilograms (44 pounds) for recreational purposes.

Drones must not be flown above 400 feet (120 metres), must remain within sight of the operator and must and kept away from planes, helicopters, airports and airfields. Violators can receive six months in prison and a fine — though prosecutions have been rare — but endangering the safety of an aircraft carries a maximum life sentence.

HOW MANY NEAR MISSES BETWEEN DRONES AND AIRCRAFT?

While actual collisions are rare, Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority says there were 40 near misses between drones and aircraft in 2015, compared to nine in 2014. Before that, such incidents were too uncommon to merit annual statistics.

In the United States, the FAA recorded almost 600 incidents of drones getting too close to aircraft between August 22, 2015 and Jan 31, 2016.

WHAT COULD A DRONE DO TO A PLANE?

The biggest worries are a drone damaging the windshield or fuselage of a plane — with the additional danger that lithium batteries on the drone could ignite — or getting sucked into an engine.

Aviation systems expert Philip Butterworth-Hayes says there has been relatively little research on the impact of such a collision.

“We don’t know what happens when a drone gets inside an engine,” he said. “The only thing you can do (to find out) is fly it into an engine, which is horrendously expensive. It’s not a test you want to do all the time.”

While the most obvious threat is from accidental collisions, experts have also warned that terrorists could seek to bring down a plane with an explosives-laden drone.

Butterworth-Hayes said drones, lasers that can be shone in pilots’ eyes and cyberattacks are among evolving threats to aviation.

“There’s a whole new series of risks out there which we’re just at the start of assessing and we don’t know how big they are,” he said.

WHAT CAN BE DONE TO CUT THE RISKS?

The British government is considering introducing a drone-registration scheme so the aerial vehicles can be traced back to their owners.

In the U.S, the FAA introduced a registration plan in December, with owners facing a fine if they don’t comply. More than 400,000 people had registered by the end of March.

While new rules and better education are part of the solution, technology will also be a key factor. Drones can be fitted with “geo-fencing” software that prevents them from entering restricted areas. But geo-fencing technology is not a legal requirement for many drones, and criminals or those bent on terror could potentially disable the software.

Finnegan says developing new ways to stop rogue drones by disabling or destroying them is a high priority for defence and technology companies.

“There’s a whole new drive among aerospace and defence company to develop counter-drone measures _ ways you can protect against either someone who doesn’t know what they are doing or someone who does know what they are doing and is trying to do something bad,” he said.

Associated Press reporter Danica Kirka contributed to this report.

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Louis Anslow who tweets @PessimistsArc (Photograph by Kayla Chobotiuk)

Feeling glum? Could it be because America’s best days are behind it, China’s economy is headed for a hard landing and the oil price crash is a harbinger of another global recession? Robots are stealing all our jobs, Uber is endangering lives, and technology is sabotaging the male identity. Self-driving cars will never become popular because people like the feel of driving too much, but if they do succeed they’ll unleash mammoth insurance battles and spark road rage from other drivers. And if that’s not enough, smartphones are wrecking romance, Facebook is destroying marriage, GMOs are wreaking havoc on the environment, and artificial intelligence will one day rise up and kill us all. Oh, and high-tech brooms are ruining curling.

You could say pessimism is booming. But then, pessimism has always been a growth industry. Since the dawn of humankind, we’ve been inclined to believe everything is always getting worse.

Enter Louis Anslow. Last fall the 24-year-old British web designer, currently living in Toronto, started the Twitter account Pessimists Archive where he scours newspaper and media archives for wrongheaded doom and gloom prophecies about technology and human progress, and then mocks them. The account has become popular among tech watchers—Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the Netscape Navigator web browser in the early 1990s and now a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, is a fan—while also being targeted by critics.

Here are 10 examples of undue pessimism dug up by Anslow, followed by a Q&A.

Gallery

The Pessimists

1 / 11

Q: What led you to start the Pessimists Archive account?

A: I’ve always found it very frustrating that pessimism is so prevalent in popular culture: microwaves are going to give us cancer; everyone’s addicted to TV or the Internet or their phones. You’re missing the bigger picture. I wanted to point this out. People tend to take pessimism so seriously in the present, but it’s so ridiculous when you look back. One thing that really pushed me to set up [the Twitter account] was that tech pessimism was getting really powerful. It felt like there wasn’t much pushback and it was really frustrating. It was getting to a point where I thought: “This is my protest.”

Such as your recent tweet of an article about horse-drawn cab drivers protesting the dawn of motorized taxis.

The first motorized taxis in NYC were met with violence from horse drawn cab drivers https://t.co/r0YyjJ5S8s pic.twitter.com/rdhNMV1GLE

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) February 5, 2016

It’s really funny because the same thing is happening now [with Uber].

I’ve read stuff about when two-way radios became affordable and popular. Taxis were obviously using them to find fares—like a dispatch—and it was the cause of this controversy.

Why?

People were just hailing and then suddenly you can communicate across the city instantly? It was causing problems. The New York Taxi Commission banned [two-way radios]. It was competing private services that were using them first and [the Taxi Commission] got really annoyed with it. Even back in the ’60s, they were putting their foot down on improving the service in any way, which is really interesting.

'Cabbies Fight Computer' (1979) https://t.co/7JdfKIMJc7 pic.twitter.com/40RIrXEUDR

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) November 18, 2015

Do you ever feel threatened when new technology comes along?

No. I feel more threatened by the pessimism. You have GMOs, for example, which have this incredible amount of hysteria around them. It’s concerning. There’s genetically engineered rice that [produces pro-vitamin A], which people in Third World countries have trouble getting access to. It’s going to stop people from going blind—and there’s all these protests to stop this rice.

A lot of the examples of pessimism you’ve found seem to be predictions that a business model will fail. Like former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talking about the iPhone.

The iPhone was unveiled 9 years ago today pic.twitter.com/yTsO2oThxL

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) January 9, 2016

With the iPhone, people really weren’t sure if that was going to take off.

I found an article about Google in the New York Times, saying “Google’s toughest search is for a business model.” The tables have turned. The New York Times is looking for a business model and now Google—or Alphabet—is the biggest company in the world.

On the flip side, is there a problem with being too optimistic?

If people overestimate something, it’s usually harmless. Like in in 1950s, they said we’d have flying cars by the year 2000. It didn’t happen, but there aren’t consequences. I think that pessimism can really hold back the development of civilization.

I think the term optimist and pessimist probably aren’t nuanced enough. I like the term “solutionist”—people who focus on solving problems.’ There’s another word and it’s “problemist.” All problemists do is focus on problems.

For instance, cigarettes are killing lot of people. E-cigarettes come along—you can get your nicotine and no tobacco—and most of the anti-smoking groups are against e-cigarettes, even though they’re a viable solution to getting people to stop inhaling tobacco. They don’t seem to care that there’s a solution; they only want to contain problems. They’ve sunk so much time into demonizing cigarettes, it’s almost like a solution puts them out of business.

There was a recent article in Motley Fool which noted that “Optimism sounds like a sales pitch, while pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.”

It’s true. The problem with tech journalism is the companies building some great technology obviously want to communicate those things, so they do so in a press release or adverts. It’s hard for journalists to repeat all that without feeling like they’re doing PR. There’s that dynamic: if you want to feel like you’re doing journalism in tech—because the stories write themselves in many ways—you have to take that [pessimistic] angle. If you say, “This is going to change everything,” you’re just hawking for this company.

Why do you think the media is drawn to doom and gloom?

When you don’t have a good story, the easiest way to trick your readers into thinking you’re doing good journalism is probably taking a pessimistic angle. I think a lot of journalists are guilty of that.

There’s an article about how kids aren’t spending time outside anymore because they’re listening to the radio all the time.

Kids used to play outside before those damn radios came along and ruined childhood! (1939) https://t.co/7Z3cIXkqNu pic.twitter.com/kxFB9IrFHt

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) January 21, 2016

They said the same thing about comics. I’m getting depressed about how predictable society is. (laughs)

[With new technology], usually people say it’s not going to work out. And if it works out, they say it’s a fad.

'Boom has passed for video-game makers' (1983) https://t.co/xF7ecdyTyh pic.twitter.com/D1DxYAcg1t

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) November 26, 2015

And if it’s not a fad, it’s going to kill everyone or give them cancer, you know?

Gameboy is "addictive, no less so than heroin" (2002) https://t.co/nkG15jvTGI pic.twitter.com/fNAT1YfRyn

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) January 19, 2016

Some people have attacked you on Twitter over the things you’ve posted. You seem to embrace the criticism.

I retweet them all. There are a bunch of journalists, from the New York Times to Gawker, who hate Pessimists Archive. They’ve made that very clear. Mike Isaac [of the New York Times] was saying it’s the worst thing ever.

the thin-skinned arc of justice comes for all, and retweeting "journalists got it wrong" paragraphs from 1990 will not save you or your LPs

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) November 18, 2015

Sam Biddle [from Gawker] told me to shut the f–k up. I loved it. It’s very revealing that they get so worked up about this. There’s the argument: “You’re cherry-picking history.” That’s valid criticism, but that’s the point of it. I’m not claiming to give a well-rounded view of history. I am only choosing predictions about things that ended up becoming huge. It’s not a peer-reviewed historical site about pessimism and optimism. It’s just an amusing little view into history.

What do you think is behind the growing popularity of the Pessimists Archive? (The account has added roughly 10,000 followers over the past three months.)

I don’t think the account would have got to this stage had Marc Andreessen not followed it. He retweets so many of them. He’s seen this whole process play out over and over again with the Internet, Web 2.0, and Facebook, and seeing all the pattern of pessimism. He must be really bored with it.

It’s very annoying. There are some legitimate questions that need to be asked [about new innovations], but it’s really hard to know which is hysterical pessimism and which is grounded.

What do think of Elon Musk, who’s an optimist about space travel and human transport, but called artificial intelligence “our biggest existential threat“?

He’s interesting because he thinks artificial intelligence could destroy the world. It’s weird because it’s kind of optimistic to think that AI could get to a stage where it could destroy humanity.

Do you have advice for people who are naturally pessimistic?

Don’t stop questioning everything, but don’t let primal fear take over. Wait until you’ve read into it first.

‘E.C.A.C. Members Would Ban Football Telecasts’ (1948) https://t.co/miYVDNbNhR pic.twitter.com/JA0Z1x4muG

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) February 7, 2016

I don’t want to come across as too much of a zealot. I do understand that new things should be questioned, but my strong belief is that we question the wrong things and we’re gripped by hysterical primal fear.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post Why so glum, chum? One man’s crusade against pessimism. appeared first on Macleans.ca.