Your next auditor general might be a chatbot
Okay, so I’m sitting here, staring out at another perfectly reasonable Edmonton spring day – you know, the kind where the snow is still threatening but the sun promises better things, like the Oilers in the playoffs – and then I read this story about the University of Alberta. And I thought, well, that's certainly a choice. Turns out the U of A board officially canned their EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) policy from hiring, and how they did it is… something else. They used AI. An actual artificial intelligence machine. Someone fed "all of those consultations" into "some remarkable AI machine," and it spit out three words: access, community, and belonging. And *poof*, there goes EDI.
Honestly though, it’s like something out of a bad science fiction novel, only it's happening right here, just off University Avenue, near where you can almost smell the prairie crocuses trying to break through. You spend all this time with committees, with public forums, with discussions, and then you just feed it to a machine? It's almost too perfectly Edmonton, in its own stoic, slightly bewildered way. We’re a city that prides itself on ingenuity, on the grit of the North, but also on a certain, shall we say, *pragmatism*. Maybe this is just the ultimate extension of that – outsource the complicated human stuff to the robots. Efficiency, eh?
### The AI Takeover of Policy
Here's the skinny on what happened:
* The U of A board reviewed its EDI hiring policy. * They gathered a lot of consultation data, apparently. * Instead of, you know, having humans synthesize that, they used "some remarkable AI machine." * This AI produced a "word cloud" with "access, community, and belonging" at the top. * Based on these three AI-generated words, the EDI policy was scrapped.
It’s almost like they’re trying to tell us something, though I’m not entirely sure what. That human judgment is passé? That a neural network understands the nuances of fairness better than, say, a decade of social science? I've seen some questionable decisions made on Whyte Avenue after midnight, but this one, emanating from the hallowed halls of academia, takes a certain kind of… intellectual courage, I suppose. It's a curious turn for an institution that sits right in the heart of a city as diverse and complex as ours, a city that actually does value belonging, whether you're new to Mill Woods or a fifth-generation Albertan strolling the River Valley.
Edmonton doesn't need your approval. Never did.
For more of this kind of local colour, the team over at mornings.live have the goods.