Innovation-July-August-2023

F E A T U R E

Still, he says human intervention and sound processes are needed to vet AI appropriately and determine levels at which it should be permissible in tasks and projects, such as assessment, development, or actual integration into a product. Weber worries people are jumping on solutions based on buzz about AI, and it’s moving faster than we can keep up when it comes to safeguards and identifying risks. Members of the Software Engineering Advisory Group at Engineers and Geoscientists BC have been discussing AI and how it relates to the profession. Weber says it’s important that regulators are involved in the dialogue. “I am quite grateful we have a good discourse in Canada about the risks of technology, but I’m also happy that we do not necessarily say right away that we can’t go in a direction that is risky. There is also an appetite to go into areas that open up the possibility of innovations that are very beneficial to society,” he says.

Weber has done his own academic research using ChatGPT, looking into whether generative AI can help support areas of the engineering process. Together with his graduate student, he recently tested ChatGPT’s ability to recognize hazards in a safety-critical system. In the study, researchers described parts of a made-up system with inherent hazards and asked ChatGPT to identify all the risks. Then they scored the results. Some of the answers were incorrect, some correct, and some not reliable—but overall, the responses made the pair of researchers think more deeply about hazards. When ChatGPT posed questions that puzzled them, they saw where they’d made implicit assumptions in their model that they shouldn’t have made without validating them. “It did help us find some holes in the system descriptions and in our thinking about hazards. It’s almost like a mirror or a sounding board,” he says. “There is some potential.”

“I believe artificial intelligence in engineering and in geoscience will allow us to build solutions to tackle the significant challenges that we have… when it comes to climate change, sustainability, more efficient use of resources (that are getting scarcer every year), adaptation to a changing environment, and health care. All of this requires some sort of an enabler, and AI can play an important role there.” Weber says we should closely monitor AI systems through a global or national incident database, even though, typically, there’s no requirement for engineers or geoscientists to report them. He says we should encourage people who work with AI to record incidents, near misses, and wrong results. “That’s how we learn as a society, from incidents, from failures, from past experience on how to safely use these technologies,” he says. NO CONSENSUS YET ON HOW TO VALIDATE AI TOOLS Mike Henrey, EIT, is the automation team lead at Kardium in Burnaby. He uses his know-how in robotics and automation working on manufacturing equipment that makes heart catheters. Henrey, who holds a degree in systems engineering and a master's in applied sciences from Simon Fraser University, says he has concerns about using AI. Some applications are just not a good fit, including manufacturing because of the need for each component be exact each time. “So we don’t use machine learning or artificial intelligence in our applications currently,” says Henrey. “Our risk is we have software that’s controlling the physical properties of the product; every application needs its own risk assessment to figure out tools that are appropriate.”

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