The annual Donner Prize honours Canadian books on policy issues facing our society and governments today, spurring debate on these matters among policy makers and the public. This year’s $60,000 prize will be announced at a gala dinner in Toronto on May 8. The Globe and Mail asked the shortlisted authors to reveal the biggest surprises that came about in the writing and researching of their books.
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The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better, by Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie (University of Toronto Press)
As law professors, we have spent our careers studying the law. We have seen firsthand how legal complexity can create significant barriers to fairness, efficiency and access to justice. In years past, we may have joined calls for simplifying the law itself as the solution to these problems.
However, the greatest revelation from writing The Legal Singularity was that increasing the complexity of the law “under the hood,” when paired with AI-powered tools to navigate that complexity, can yield a dramatically simpler and more accessible legal system. Indeed, sophisticated AI can cut through legal complexity like Alexander slicing the Gordian knot, translating byzantine legislation and case law into clear and practical guidance.
Canadians should be able to meet their legal obligations with confidence and clarity, not confusion and anxiety. Our book lays out a vision in which AI enables people to understand the rules that govern their lives with unprecedented ease, while the system underneath grows in complexity to accommodate ever-greater nuance and precision. Our research explains how the result can be a legal system that is at once more fair, more equitable and more efficient than anything we have access to today.
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Who Owns Outer Space? International Law, Astrophysics, and the Sustainable Development of Space by Michael Byers and Aaron Boley (Cambridge University Press)
We were surprised by how quickly developments in space were moving as we tried to write about them. More satellites have been launched in the past six years than in the previous 60, driven largely by a single company, SpaceX. That same company demonstrated the feasibility of vertical landing and reusable rockets, which promises to greatly change the economics of space launches.
SpaceX’s conduct has also raised concerns about the Earth-space environmental implications of unfettered space use, including alterations to the upper atmosphere and the night sky. Suborbital and orbital tourism emerged, as well as feasible plans for lunar tourism. We saw two tests of ground-based missiles as anti-satellite weapons, juxtaposed with a growing awareness of the dangers of space debris. There was also a sudden change in the degree to which commercial satellites are being used in military conflicts.
The first planetary defence asteroid deflection test was carried out, and an international law-making competition emerged over whether and to what extent commercial space mining can occur. As we wrote the book, it felt like we were aiming at a moving target. We already know that we’ll have to update everything and release a second edition within the next four to five years.
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The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy, by Ignacio Cofone (Cambridge University Press)
I was surprised by the extent to which powerful companies are not held accountable for what they do with people’s information. I knew companies can often get away with harmful actions that are profitable, but I hadn’t realized that there’s a whole system that, as long as they get people to click “I agree,” enables them to do almost anything.
Tech companies use AI to reveal behavioural patterns, group preferences and even predict future actions. This knowledge allows them to influence things people wouldn’t expect, from consumption habits to political outcomes. This has included using profile pictures from dating sites to train facial recognition software used in killer drones. And it has included developing decision-making AI for the criminal process that mistakenly classifies Black people as “high risk,” keeping them in jail for longer.
When companies can hide behind “I agree” clicks, there’s no stopping them from using your data in ways that benefit them but not you. That’s why the book argues that tech companies need to be held responsible not only for what they promise in their policies, but also for the consequences of their actions that bring them power and profit.
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Wrongfully Convicted: Guilty Pleas, Imagined Crimes, and What Canada Must Do to Safeguard Justice, by Kent Roach (Simon & Schuster Canada)
Before helping to create the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions and writing my book, I saw wrongful convictions as mainly “who done it?” cases where the system got the wrong perpetrator. These still happen, but a third of Canada’s 89 remedied wrongful convictions relate to crimes that never happened. Close to 20 per cent involve people pleading guilty to crimes that they did not commit. These more insidious cases are more difficult to correct and remedy than famous cases such as David Milgaard’s, where DNA or other evidence can identify the real perpetrator.
Police, expert witnesses and prosecutors can be so suspicious of some people that they see crime when there was only accidents or natural deaths. This is especially so if there are stereotypes relating suspects to certain crimes. Women who are not perceived as “good mothers” are vulnerable to being convicted of killing children who died naturally. Indigenous and other racialized people can be wrongfully convicted in part because of stereotypes associating them with crime. The criminal justice system also gives accused powerful inducements through much shorter sentences if they plead guilty. Many accused lose faith in trying to fight the system. They accept the deal.
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Pandemic Panic: How Canadian Government Responses to COVID-19 Changed Civil Liberties Forever, by Joanna Baron and Christine Van Geyn (Optimum Publishing International)
As lawyers at a charity that defends Canadians against government intrusions, state overreach during the pandemic was something we ate, slept and breathed. So when we set out to write a book about the various impacts on constitutional liberties the pandemic occasioned in mid-2021, we thought the thorniest issues and most egregious instances of overreach remained fairly fresh in our minds. These included vaccine passports, quarantine hotels and the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the freedom convoy.
What was most surprising from our book writing and research, though, was how much we had mysteriously forgotten. We forgot that police were caught accessing public-health databases out of lurid curiosity about people’s COVID status. We forgot that early on in the pandemic, the Liberals attempted to pass a bill that would give the executive unilateral authority to raise taxes without consulting Parliament. We forgot about Toronto roping off the cherry blossoms and Quebec requiring unvaccinated individuals to be chaperoned in plexiglass golf carts in big-box stores.
We realized that if we – professional civil liberties watchdogs of sorts – were forgetting these surreal intrusions of government into the most mundane areas of our lives, many more serious instances must have been similarly memory-holed by Canadians, making a written record imperative to prevent a future repeat.