Thank you.
Mr. Bengio, my riding is bigger than Great Britain, and I live in my car. My car is very helpful. It tells me when I'm tired, and it tells me when I need to take a break, but it's based on roads that don't look like roads in northern Ontario. I'm always moving into the centre lane to get around potholes, to get around animals and to get away from 18-wheelers. I start watching this monitor, and sometimes I'm five minutes from the house and it's saying I've already exceeded my safety capacity.
I thought, well, it's just bothering me and bugging me. I'll break the glass. Then I read Shoshana Zuboff's book on surveillance capitalism and how all this will be added to my file at some point. This will be what I'm judged on.
To me, it raises the question of the right of the citizen. The right of the citizen has personal autonomy and the right to make decisions. If I, as a citizen, get stopped by the police because I made a mistake, he or she judges me on that and I can still take it to some level of challenge in court if I'm that insistent. That is fair. That's the right of the citizen. Under the systems that are being set up, I have no rights based on what an algorithm designed by someone in California thinks a good roadway is.
The question is, how do we reframe this discussion to talk about the rights of citizens to actually have accountability, so their personal autonomy can be protected and so decisions that are made are not arbitrary? When we are dealing with algorithms, we have yet to find a way to actually have the adjudication of our rights heard.
Is that the role you see legislators taking on? Is it a regulatory body? How would we insist that, in the age of smart cities and surveillance capitalism, the citizen still has the ability to challenge and to be protected?