The Artificial Intelligence question

It may well be there are teams of expert public servants quietly locked away at ministry engine rooms, and activists associated with political organisations contemplating issues of technological change and its impacts on national development.

For, it is evident that none of it is currently being captured in the public dialogue of our politicians of all persuasions, even when scrupulously guided on public policy by senior civil servants, paid advisors, and otherwise smart people.

Neither is there proof, through action, that basic entry into the digital realities of the modern world is being embraced as an unavoidable step in the development process.

And, why not the platforms accorded local government contestants, to cite one example? What else do political organisations do to display relevance to increasingly challenging global circumstances?

Yes, this is me; yet again lamenting the painful lack of progress on basic digitalisation of public transactions, and even more than that, tracking the most recent developments associated with the emergence of Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a feature of current realities.

So, this is much more than digital ED cards for international travel, or online payment portals, or digitised official documentation and processes for procuring them. There are smaller regional neighbours who have detected positive implications regarding the cost of such transactions.

For expert instruction, there are journalists such as Mark Lyndersay who scan the minutiae of technological possibilities for evidence of public understanding on such matters. He is likely to agree with me that our shortcomings extend as much to private entrepreneurial limitations as they do with respect to undeniable official, public sector resistance to change.

On Monday, I received a report released by the International Labour Organization (ILO) analysing the “potential exposure of occupations and tasks to Generative AI.” I wondered then, what was the likely contribution of the social partners in the sphere of labour rights in T&T to this discussion. What are their views, if any?

Could it be that the PSA or OWTU or TTALPA had provided informed comment arising out of their understanding of the impact of this emerging platform on jobs and employment possibilities? Perhaps they have deployed member financial contributions to closely examine what becomes of occupations and tasks in the public service, the energy sector, and in aviation?

Are there folks at the Ministry of Labour currently engaged in reconciling ILO observations regarding the “exposure” of clerical workers in all sectors to adjustments in job quality and quantity?

How is the Ministry of Digital Transformation interpreting the anticipated calibrations throughout all sectors of the public sector?

Don’t get me wrong, operating in the Caribbean regional space entitles me to record similar observations on a wider scale – among them being the fact that public service resistance and private sector lethargy are strong features of the move to embrace digitalisation in almost all its aspects, and there is virtually nothing happening when it comes to anticipating Generative AI impacts.

It is not that we are all ignoring the signs. The more developed sectors of the regional media industry, for instance, are already (slowly) stepping into the frame.

At the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC), whenever AI enters the discourse, there have been found to be quite enlightened reflections on opportunities and challenges. Not enough, yet though. Legacy media are already among the most affected, if only due to the pervasive impacts of social media.

Back to the ILO study, there is acknowledgment of wide areas of variability, but great value in the way it explores general principles required to head-off net negative effects.

For one, governments and their social partners such as unions, business chambers, and employers’ organisations need to jointly and proactively design “policies that support orderly, fair, and consultative transitions, rather than dealing with change in a reactive manner.”

“Moreover,” the report says, “the likely ramifications on job quality might be of greater consequence than the quantitative impacts, both with respect to the new jobs created because of the technology, but also the potential effects on work intensity and autonomy when the technology is integrated into the workplace.”

Last Monday, the international NGO, Digital Communication Network (DCN) Global, also hosted an online session on Information as a Public Good, and questions about governance and the maintenance of democratic conditions kept coming up as potential subjects and objects of technological change.

How can our policymakers (and people with an expressed interest in our future as a country) not be concerned about these things, even as a function of the way our social institutions, including political parties and sectional representatives, operate? There is sad evidence they are not.

National issue – local solution

While conducting a quick scan of proceedings in my area last Monday, I noted the ease with which tardy electors were on public walkways negotiating what appears to be a growing population of seemingly homeless people in my general space incorporating St Joseph, Curepe, and Tunapuna.

True, on election day, these people appeared as scarce as midday voters and open bars. Maybe it is, as some suspect, that “they living somewhere” and roam as mendicants solely in the dark seeking unsecured bins and familiar philanthropists who won’t throw things at them or chase them away.

But, Monday evening, after they had survived weeks of loudspeakers, canvassing teams, and frenetic politicking, did any of them find time or opportunity to look on quietly in the opportunistic hope that the solemn task would eventually yield rewards?

You couldn’t bet on any animated huddle around a television set or radio – except perhaps those who “live somewhere” and leave with clean shirts at night. I don’t know.

It however would not have been irrational for them to have been absent. For, if they listened to the loudspeakers, they would not have heard much about themselves, if at all; not even as a national challenge requiring localised, community solutions.

Though official focus appears preoccupied with the poor condition of Port of Spain, it’s not absolutely different in numerous other communities throughout the country. Maybe in numbers, but not in essential nature.

In our neck of the woods, in the east, there are now familiar faces (and a growing number of new ones) with numerous heart-breaking real and fictitious stories for which food, drinks, and/or money provide solutions.

The more fortunate meanwhile have the option of crossing the street, walking around, pretending not to hear, or digging deep and hoping they forget you the next time you pass. “Things not easy these days, boy.”

There was one guy I remember from my teenage years. He went to secondary school, played some decent softball cricket, a little football, and smoked weed with the rest of us.

He disappeared for years, then re-emerged about five years ago as a Curepe Junction regular. Conversations often turned quickly to money or food.

Last week, I asked the oysterman and learned that this old friend had died less than a year ago.

I remember back in 1987 with the advent of a new political administration, there was the bold pronouncement by the humanitarian-minded that “vagrancy” would end sooner rather than later. Like the “cleanup” that occurred that January. That it was simply a matter of “political will” to get it done.

At that time, and perhaps not for the very first time, there was a well-publicised effort to address situations such as my late friend’s, as outcomes of underlying social, economic, and medical conditions. I must have written thousands of words of news copy explaining what had been considered 36 years ago. It all seemed to make sense.

However, it appeared to me then, as it does now, that national politicians should concede greater space to community wisdom on such matters, and kindly step aside. Otherwise, what we are left with are resolute soundbites, headlines, and convenient shibboleths.

There is evidence that people who have been employing science and not politics to dissect the growing incidence of homelessness/mendicancy here have a grip not only on the underlying conditions, but some of what is necessary to humanely address the challenge.

Young psychologist, Sule Joseph, broke things down rather competently in a recent newspaper interview. He cited the multifaceted nature of homelessness and the psychological underpinnings of some elements of the phenomenon.

As has been explained before, and impressively restated by Joseph, there are issues that have much to do with the rest of us at stake. This is no mere outcome of “laziness” or wilful protest against the status quo – though there are those, according to Joseph, who decide to opt out of the rat race. Indeed, some have been pushed out.

Back in 1987, it had been explained that while homelessness was sometimes the outcome of financial collapse and/or familial discord, there were more often than not instances where mental illness and (not unrelated) substance abuse had been causative factors.

Amateurs such as the politicians who have proposed solutions including coercive exile to outlying islands, prison, and high-power hoses, typically remain silent on such matters during election campaigns.

Last Monday was no exception. An opportunity was lost to explain how local organisation and action can, indeed, resolve an important matter of national concern. What were the issues that sidelined it?

 

The fading frontline applause

At 10 a.m. on April 9, 2020, many of us stood and applauded in solidarity with “frontline” workers engaged in beating back an advancing COVID-19 threat.

I am using the word “many” and not “most” because I was aware then of several influential factors - ranging from outright denial to the assertion that all of this was needless panic and “overkill” – all serving to temper enthusiasm for the symbolic exercise.

Self-declared virologists, public health experts, and sundry charlatans were aggressively chiming in to challenge the views of most of the world’s top medical scientists including our fine professionals right here.

Later that year, as politics became increasingly aligned with direct challenges to pandemic measures, there was the outrageous suggestion that all of this had been “manufactured fear”.

So, there we were, in April 2020, standing near the fence so that we could hear the sounds of the children next door as we applauded and cheered. We knew and understood that many others were not following suit, so there was a measure of hovering sadness.

Now, let me say from now, that I consider none of the detractors to have behaved as they did because they are outright evil folks with no regard for the lives of others.

But I felt strongly that the people who were out there facing an uncertain, possibly deadly risk – for there was much that remained unknown to everyone – were exhibiting heroic features that needed to be recognised and applauded.

Close to 40 months and over 4,300 lives later, the applause has largely faded. The last recorded COVID-19 deaths occurred in May. The “death with” and “death from” Google and Chat GPT experts, along with the “they would have died anyway” crowds can carry on with their callous nonsense even as families continue to grieve.

Today, not only has the cheering ended, but we have resumed our merry ways with renowned indifference to the state of affairs when it comes to our “heroes” of April 2020.

Against the backdrop of the current agitation of the Registered Nurses Association, today’s attention turns exclusively to these people in our public health system who earned our applause at a rather low point in our national life.

I have listened carefully to Association President, Idi Stuart, and spoke directly with him on Monday in an attempt to get to the bottom of his organisation’s grouses that have generated a largely deficient official response.

For one, I do not know where the impression was given that more money (as important as it is) is at the centre of the points of current contention. It seems to me that the main issues, validated by successive reports on the subject of public health care, revolve around things such as maintenance of key assets (including ambulances and other equipment), and the question of patient-to-staff ratios.

The Seemungal Committee Report, which focused largely on patient care at the height of the pandemic one year ago, and therefore reflected a worst-case scenario, identified some key flashpoints reflected in successive studies and inquiries under non-emergency circumstances.

We can also reference the 1994 Health Sector Reform Report and ensuing decentralisation legislation, and the Gladys Gafoor enquiry of 2010.

There was also the Winston Welch Report of 2017 which focused on the dynamics of private medical practice within the context of a socialised public health system – an inarguably, vastly superior approach to equitable access to the benefits of medical science.

Even in examining this, the 2017 report cited the challenges of resources, including personnel.

Almost all of the concerns between 1994 and 2022 are currently captured in the advocacy of the Nurses Association. Some of these include patient-to-staff ratios at the Regional Health Authorities, chronic issues associated with the reliability of pharmaceutical and other supplies, together with infrastructural shortcomings.

If anybody should be writing to other stakeholders to discuss these matters, it should be the Ministry of Health, acting in concert with the RHAs. It is unfortunate that public advocacy on this should so routinely find people with placards chanting slogans alongside strange friends in the streets.

Again, nobody is questioning anyone’s good intentions here. It is just that there are undeniable needs in a singularly important area of national life that require attention.

It should not be that in a sector as important as this - from the Gaspar Grande Report of 1978 to Gafoor, Welch, Seemungal and the Nurses Association’s placards of 2023, all spanning numerous political administrations and decades – there should be a regurgitation of identical issues.

Why is the frontline applause fading?

Our migrant footnote

‘Tis not the season for too much good sense or rigorous vigilance to prevail. For, elections here tend to be the stuff of comedic farce and the absurd. Such was the counsel of those older and wiser than I following the last column when I urged consideration of the true value of municipal governance in the midst of campaigning for local government elections.

So, when I received the latest release from the Organisation of American States (OAS) regarding a June 23 Declaration for the Protection and Integration of Migrant and Refugee Children in the Americas, I knew I had to pay close attention to it, since few others currently commanding even the smallest share of public space would be inclined to so do.

Bear in mind, and to its credit, our Ministry of Foreign and Caricom Affairs is now among the more prolific producers of timely press dispatches from the government system.

This has not always been the case. As a close observer in this particular area of national concern, I can tell you that there were times when opportunities to remain silent were, as matters of policy and practice, never shunned.

The current period is thus not marked by the kind of opacity that became the norm not very long ago. During those bleak days, this told many of us that an official environment existed in which foreign policy is not deemed as important to maintaining a high level of political preference.

I therefore checked to see whether the June Declaration had at any time occupied space at the public information mill over at foreign affairs. For, the main political combatants and their shadowy surrogates would have been hopeless, futile sources – however intriguing the Declaration under current circumstances.

These were people, you see, who had led the “close de borders” crew and had not winced at the thought of kicking the bows back into dark, rough ocean waters with women and small children on board.

Then belatedly to conclude that these were people, after all, including children who need to be in school. Girls who need to be respected. Little people who need to be meaningfully integrated into society so they can contribute to national life.

Some of this makes me recall the time the late prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, James Mitchell, snapped when I questioned the absence of foreign policy as a manifesto objective during the course of an election (which he lost): “Foreign policy never won anyone an election,” he said.

As a consequence, I suppose, what I consider to have been an interesting intervention by this country at the 53rd Regular Session of the OAS, had eluded even minister Browne’s media engine room.

Read the declaration and you would note three important country provisos to declared hemispheric obligations regarding the rights of migrant children.

The US had technical issues with a provision related to “the right to identity” and the Dominican Republic indicated that it is not a signatory to agreements mentioned in the declaration.

The most significant for us, is T&T’s “footnote” which qualified T&T’s commitment only to the extent that the rights in question are “recognised in international agreements to which we are signatories and in accordance with our national legislation.”

In other words, we plan to comply only if there is a coercive obligation. UWI experts, do I have that right?

Then, just days later on July 4, Justice Frank Seepersad ruled, in summary, that the 1951 Refugee Convention does not apply in our instance due to the absence of relevant domestic legislation.

What does all of this mean in the current context? For one, bipartisan parliamentary action can ensure that July 4 and June 23 do not collide to cause harm to the most vulnerable in our midst – children.

School places alone do not meet the minimum standards set by the June 23 declaration. I have witnessed the unseemly, obscene scramble for credit on this question.

It is time that signatures on international conventions and declarations and handshaking photo-ops give way to more detailed explanations of what these things really mean.

Had this been the case, electorates would have more competently judged our country’s performance as a regional, hemispheric, and global partner.

For instance, had anyone been paying attention, there would have been sharp repudiation of hypocrisy on questions related to the Caribbean Court of Justice, the nature of the Caricom Single Market, and the various options under conditions of open regionalism.

Venezuela and Haiti would not have come as tragic surprises, and the absence of law would not have been an excuse for breaking high-profile, photographed, and press released promises. These things need to begin delivering political damage.

 

Election agendas in T&T

There are few areas of public governance that have been the subject of as many studies, consultations, speeches, and White Papers as the reforming of our system of local government. Yet, local government election campaigns are about the worst possible time to label prospective reform issues as central to their eventual outcomes.

For one, the kind of change needed to regulate better quality representation and service delivery is not the prerogative of councillors and aldermen in a municipal corporation. This is a process suited to enlightened parliamentary decision-making, and faithfully compliant executive action.

Once elected, local government representatives will be responsible for implementing whichever reforms are eventually enacted, but they are not the ones to determine the legislative conditions under which they are to perform.

Secondly, the least of the apostles at local government election time are usually the actual candidates who routinely receive third or fourth or fifth-class billing on the hustings.

It should not inspire anyone that being a local government representative provides a stepping stone to a parliamentary career, when in fact it is a substantially important job that has meaning for people and their communities.

In the process, community needs and ways of managing them, are rarely at the top of the main campaign agendas, and it has become reliant on some kind of “reform” to accord local representatives their appropriate place in the scheme of things.

At this time, even the partisan huddles at cottage and home meetings focus on strategies to win, and not necessarily to work out ways of resolving community challenges.

Instead, the advent of messaging apps has played such a role, during terms of office, and helped stimulate joint deliberation and action on immediate needs, almost in defiance of the formal systems for addressing them.

Virtual “local government”, via WhatsApp in particular, has thus latterly represented an alternative platform (at least at the primary level of discourse) to the research and solution-finding functions of statutory meetings. I am really not sure where village councils stand in this regard.

Another reason why local government reform is such a remote (or even irrelevant) matter for consideration at this time, is that these contests have traditionally been reduced to statistical indicators of the future prospects for political parties at general elections. August 14 is no different.

Current campaign shenanigans are dominant in the public discourse, and who aligns with whom is currently deemed infinitely more important than accumulated water puddles in the drainage system that will soon yield the next dengue outbreak.

I suspect that the more devoted representatives agonise constantly over the manner in which their sponsor political organisations organise these campaigns. Some of the most committed, competent and conscientious politicians I have ever met have been local government representatives – on different sides of the political fence.

Many of them would tell you that when it comes to solution-finding and the allocation of frequently scarce resources, there is a level of mature bipartisanship that kicks in. This is particularly true around times of crisis and emergency.

You can also usually tell the difference between parliamentarians who have served in local government and those who have not – not that this represents any kind of upward mobilisation, for they all serve national interests however communally sub-divided. But there always appears to be greater sensitivity to the micro-issues.

They eventually learn, you see, that the real action resides in the delivery of goods and services at street, block, and community levels. Efficient public health and waste management, community safety and security, spatial planning and development, and community infrastructure and services - all things of value that exceed almost everything else in national governance.

What a reformed system can do is to ensure that these matters are attended to with a higher level of orderliness, transparency, and efficiency, through the wider availability of resources and planning systems to ensure prompt and reliable delivery.

In a sense, that’s all we need. But the outcome of these current elections can change none of that. August 15 will find us in the same legislative space.

But none of this is to dismiss the need for comprehensive reform of the system of local government. There have been numerous iterations that have largely received bipartisan support. It is really hard to distinguish between what Suruj Rambachan and Hazel Manning and Franklin Khan advocated so strongly for. In principle, their proposals were the same.

But that’s not what these elections are all about. Local government reform could not have been more irrelevant at a time of local government elections.

Procurement’s concrete barriers

So, there I was, preparing to engage in big people business this week with a commentary on the procurement law fiasco. Then came one of the more eminently sensible public voices, in the form of Helen Drayton … right here on this very page last Sunday. You can skip me and find her column.

What more can I add, I thought. Ms Drayton argued in favour of sound, rational law-making in order “to foster good governance, accountability, transparency, integrity, value for money, efficiency, fairness, equity, and public confidence.”

That her perspectives are now being only marginally noted signals a sad absence from the independent benches of our parliament, with all due respect to the incumbents. Yet, thankfully, this voice of reason prevails through the devices of a free press. Ditto the more strident efforts of Afra Raymond, aligned to the necessity for greater transparency.

But before I get to some of the more substantial offerings of these two citizens, Ms Drayton in particular, I offer a perspective to consider. If, as I argued three years ago, legislation to govern state procurement is not accompanied by an uncompromising commitment – through legislation, convention, or regulated practice – to a higher level of transparency it would amount to nothing more than inconvenient, fanciful adornments.

Additionally, throughout the various debates and public discussions when the subject became fashionable, I was reminded of a classroom many years ago with Dr Daphne Phillips-Gaskin at the front explaining the true meaning of authoritarian societies, including the adoption of such mindsets and practices by hapless subjects.

This makes it is easy to understand why when traffic needs to be diverted, a concrete culvert instead of a more forgiving obstruction is routinely considered. The words of a late colleague who had just lost a daughter on one of our highways linger: “Concrete? It had to be concrete? Not a cable, a plastic barrier. Concrete?”

Why, after all, use plastic or cable when a single slab of concrete would do?

I kept counting occasions such as these when enlightened, weighted, nuanced solutions were being thrown in the fire in exchange for legislative concrete and steel with sharp edges.

So, a public threat is observed. Spurn precision and professional judgment for a state of public emergency with all attendant risks associated with suspending a wide swathe of human rights. So even as I ranted over its unlawful application back in 2011, there was in the background to this outrage, broad public advocacy for steel-reinforced concrete.

More recently, people wanted pepper spray. Take pepper spray. Enter a regime of requirements befitting far more harmful instruments of violence. How many pepper spray permits have been granted since then?

Three years ago, I saw it coming. Politicians in and out of parliament, civil society organisations (including well-resourced business chambers), social commentators – all desiring the application of a sledge-hammer – however desirable the expected outcome.

Ms Drayton kindly ridicules a notion of “teething problems” and notes “a failure to understand the full implications of meaningful procurement law and a lack of preparedness.” Indeed, fully in keeping with the “culture” to which I constantly allude, the former senator notes “suspicious public ‘jammin’ to proclaim the law.”

I recognised nothing “suspicious” though. Only an authoritarian culture working its way through the complexities of democracy. Early on, I turned to an influential business executive and asked whether the business community understand what it was asking for. This was not meant to be an insult, but simply to sound an alert at the approaching menace of a sightless, legislative sledgehammer.

Now, as usual, we have to set about repairing some damage and Ms Drayton’s prescriptions sound absolutely fitting.

They are repeated here because they will unfold as critical areas for consideration in the coming days. There has to be a temporary stay on the requirements of the Public Depository. Private sector players ought to have sounded much earlier, urgent alerts on this, but there we go.

The other point made by Ms Drayton relates heavily to my constant harping on the imperatives of real, non-cosmetic e-governance. Why should it be that there is a concern about the “ease of navigation” of the Depository website? Where are the experts on such matters?

Then there is, and more closely aligned to my own inexpert observation, the need to impose a sensible "spending threshold for public service accounting officer and the CEOs of other public entities within the law.” Why is it necessary to say this at this stage?

Finally, Ms Drayton proposes a six-month period “to improve the system” especially since there are close to 33,000 “lines of business pending prequalification.” She is a woman of boundless faith.

 

 

SOS of the Luddites

I can see it now. The massing of the public service technophobes. They told us so, didn’t they? It took a cyberattack to remind us, hasn’t it?

Witness the Luddite recoil. The resort to the “good old days” when paper and files grew yellow in the cupboards. All it took were locks and keys and cautionary memos.

And by the way, colleagues, “ransomware” refers to a very specific category of cyberattack. I thought Mark Lyndersay and Celia Gibbings made some of these things clear, courtesy the TTPBA recently.

Anyway, stand by for the resurrection of systems that empowered and enriched some by slowing the march to modernity.

Even so, I am still not failing to remind people that at approximately 2.20 p.m. on Thursday September 23, 2021 – in his capacity as minister in the Office of the Prime Minister - Stuart Young announced the arrival of “digital vaccination cards” in “four to six weeks.”

This is not at all to knock Minister Young personally. I am pretty certain he understands the immense value of digital governance and is a private practitioner when it comes to those automated things in life that make things easier and more convenient.

In fact, he probably moans and groans each time some of us go back to those fateful days of pandemic misery and the false hope that, at last, politicians and bureaucrats had joined together to acknowledge new realities and were prepared to embrace a different set of solutions.

Of course, all of this goes way beyond digital vaccination cards and their inexcusable non-appearance. But it was a useful test case with strong relevance to the fact that both strenuously active and quiet, disruptive resistance to change are perpetual features of our exceedingly slow march to innovation.

As I have said before, this is not unique to the public service and state authorities. Shiny, new digital facades to conceal manual processes are evident throughout the private sector in key areas.

However, the resources of the state are, by definition, assets of the population intended to sustain human and social development and to ensure tolerable levels of existence in our spaces.

Yet, the official instinct to prohibit rather than to facilitate appears to dominate the drive to digitalise and to move forward. In some instances, the move has been backward rather than forward.

I noted, for instance, PM Roosevelt Skerritt’s lament regarding the continued use of paper ED (Embarkation and Disembarkation) Cards for intra-regional air and sea travel between Caricom states. This was during 50th anniversary celebrations. He quite diplomatically did not mention T&T, where he delivered his speech, and where the absolutely unnecessary practice of collecting and collating ED cards continues. The folks at CARICOM-IMPACS must be the most patient people on the planet.

But we don’t only insist on printing those silly pieces of paper that do not even have enough space to spell the name of our own country (I usually write “T&T”). That’s clearly not enough. Now, the airlines want you to write, at the back of the slips, the expiry date of your passport!

This adds insult to the emotional injury of passengers who know that for entering numerous countries of the world (including Dominica, Grenada, Barbados, Saint Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and Jamaica), the trees used to print those useless pieces of paper (in defiance of the benefits of the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) and other technological platforms) are being saved.

Where are the airport kiosks on arrival in T&T, by the way? Could it be evidence of the agony occasioned by the relinquishing of authority and power? How come online payment for government services is being touted as some kind of modern, revolutionary marvel? Ditto downloadable PDF forms.

It cannot be that politicians and senior public servants do not know what is happening in so much of the rest of the world.

Now comes the cyber attack on the Attorney General’s office. I see several MPs (government and opposition) attended “a workshop” last week and some consequently claim to know all about the challenge being faced. Sigh.

Moving backward has a way of gaining momentum of its own. I see longer ED forms. Disappearing bar and QR codes. The return of the ledgers. Lines at the cashiers. Paper, paper everywhere.

Our souls would have been saved; I suppose. The Luddite SOS satisfied. The past embraced as a way of inching forward or, worse, standing still.