Alberta workforce concerned about impacts of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into our everyday lives, from the phones we use to prediction text when replying to an email. As helpful as AI can be, not everyone is on board.

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Adam White, a director of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute,told CTV News Edmonton on Wednesday it's easy for the public to worry about what AI is capable of.

"With any new technology, there can be concerns that it's used poorly … there's this idea that there could be this exponential takeoff where you build an AI and it's a little bit smarter than us, and then it helps you build the next AI which is a little bit smarter than it, and then all of a sudden it just explodes," White said.

With his 20 years of experience working with AI, White said that those outcomes are "mostly science fiction."

For better or worse, Alberta is not immune to the presence of AI. White explained how his work with the technology has never been a means to replace workers, but rather use the tool to give them extra support.

"Water treatment operators are often overworked, or in some remote communities they just don't even exist. So in that situation, AI can come in and support the operators or run the plant in between the times when the operator can visit," White said.

"The opportunity for AI to make oil and gas more efficient and less polluting – to make our food supply more secure and more local … those are the success stories we should focus on, rather than getting worried about the doom and gloom. But of course, we have to be careful of how we roll these things out," he added.

As for the negative side, White believes that AI used to create documents could reinforce the public's worries about being replaced.

"Making legal documents, transactions for selling houses – it seems pretty clear that these large language models can generate text in that way very effectively. We might not have nearly as many people producing contracts and things like that," he said.

Ironically, White warns programmers are also at risk, as large tech companies are training language model AIs to write the same code as their programmers.

White said the deployment of AI in the real world is painting a rosy picture for Alberta.

He believes AI will not replace workers, but help them by boosting efficiency and creating support for workers in the long run.

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Nav Sangha.