Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 61

I would never take another position like that without giving myself a little bit of time to do some retrospect—or forward look—on what would be the things or interference that would cause me walk away from the job or be ready to take a big hit for it. I did not have that figured out when I started, and that caused me a lot of stress. For example, with the AI work.

We pushed for the policy that citizens cannot be serviced by an AI black box forever. If you are going to do AI in the Government of Canada, we need to have access to your code and be able to trace the decision from the machine. We were asking to have a dialogue on this, and it brought on heavy lobby toward senior government. Obviously, the vendors did not like the policy, because the code is proprietary.

In the end, we did change the tune and the position. We only did that because we got pushed back openly. But it made me realize that not everybody in this game of government is out there for the better good of serving citizens. That is why I think anybody taking a national CIO or any CIO job needs to be very comfortable with themselves about where they are going to draw the line on ethical matters. I was ready to jump on the grenade for our AI policy, so to speak, because the work our team was doing and how they were doing it—because I fundamentally believed in it. Even if lobbyists got some politicians to not like it.

The question to ask yourself—and myself next time—is what is the line that you will draw in the sand? What are your convictions? What are you willing to take a stand for, if asked to do something or not do something that you fundamentally disagree with?