The Summerland Gazette is barely out of the gate, and already the Luddites have come crawling out of their dark holes to complain about it.
That was predictable.
This website is, more than anything else, a community service. It exists to help residents understand what their local government is doing, what council is discussing, what decisions are being made, and what those decisions may mean to the people who actually live in Summerland. Apparently, even that is enough to offend some people.
A friend who lives in Summerland recently sent me a screenshot from the Summerland Locals Facebook page. I found it revealing, because I think it illustrates at least part of the reason there appears to be such a persistent communication problem between some residents, the District, council, and municipal staff.
Reading some of the comments, you would think we had wandered back into the nineteenth century.
There is a peculiar combination of negativity, hostility, and technological illiteracy in some of the criticism. Artificial intelligence is apparently evil, dangerous, fraudulent, or intellectually dishonest simply because somebody used it. Yet hand the same critic a column of numbers and they will reach for a calculator without worrying that they are practising “artificial mathematics.”
That contradiction apparently escapes them.
This is not uniquely a Summerland problem. Every community has a collection of people who seem determined to see the worst in everything. If you build something, they complain. If you improve something, they complain. If you use new technology, they complain. If you do nothing, they complain about that too.
They are not critics in the constructive sense. They are weather systems. They arrive carrying dark clouds and spend their time looking for somewhere to rain.
The current hostility toward AI is simply the latest version of an old phenomenon. Every major technological advancement has produced people who were convinced civilization was about to collapse because somebody invented a better tool.
AI is not going away.
It will improve. It will become embedded in more software, more vehicles, more businesses, more government systems, more research tools, and more communications platforms. The relevant question is no longer whether the technology exists. The relevant question is whether the person using it knows what they are doing.
AI is only as useful, accurate, disciplined, and intelligent as the person directing it.
There is also a growing argument that the term “artificial intelligence” is itself misleading. I recently wrote about replacing that terminology with something more accurate: Strategic Intelligence Technology, or SIT. That article travelled much farther than I expected and attracted attention well beyond British Columbia.
The distinction matters because we are not dealing with some magical artificial brain floating independently of human direction. We are dealing with increasingly sophisticated technology capable of organizing information, finding relationships, identifying patterns, summarizing large volumes of material, comparing records, analyzing documents, and presenting information in forms people can actually use.
Consider municipal government.
A council meeting may last several hours. There may be reports, delegations, motions, amendments, staff recommendations, financial figures, development proposals, zoning questions, and policy discussions. Most residents are not going to sit through the entire video.
That does not mean they do not care.
It means they have lives.
Strategic intelligence technology can review those meetings, work through transcripts and supporting material, identify the principal issues, distinguish motions from discussion, extract the important figures, and produce an executive briefing that a resident can read in minutes rather than spending three hours watching a council video.
Explain to me why that is a bad thing.
People regularly complain that government does not communicate clearly enough. They complain that municipal reports are difficult to understand. They complain that decisions happen without enough public awareness.
Then somebody builds a publication designed to bridge that communication gap, and some of the same people immediately start complaining because technology was used to help do it.
- You cannot have it both ways.
- How many people attacking the Summerland Gazette attend council meetings regularly?
- How many watch the complete council videos?
- How many read the staff reports?
- How many examine the appendices, financial schedules, zoning documents, planning reports, bylaws, and supporting material?
The Summerland Gazette is going to do much of that work for you.
- We are going to listen.
- We are going to read.
- We are going to analyze.
- We are going to summarize.
And we are going to put the information into language ordinary residents can understand without requiring them to spend half their week becoming municipal policy analysts.
That should be considered useful.
Instead, some people apparently become emotionally distressed because an image was generated using artificial intelligence.
That is what it means to miss the forest for the trees.
If you become so preoccupied with whether an illustration was created by AI that you completely ignore the research, municipal records, council proceedings, policy questions, public-interest issues, and factual information accompanying it, that is not a Summerland problem.
That is a you problem.
Modern life is already filled with automated technology.
You drive vehicles in which computers control fuel injection, braking systems, traction control, transmission behaviour, collision detection, navigation, engine management, and dozens of other functions. You do not stop on Highway 97 and demand a return to the carburetor because software has infiltrated your automobile.
- You use calculators.
- You use search engines.
- You use spellcheck.
- You use online banking.
- You use automated tax software.
- You use digital cameras that computationally process every photograph you take.
- You use smartphones containing hundreds of automated systems most users could not begin to explain.
Yet somehow the apocalypse arrives when somebody uses advanced technology to summarize a council meeting.
Please.
The Summerland Gazette intends to use Strategic Intelligence Technology extensively. We will use it to help examine municipal information, organize data, review documents, identify questions, compare statements, summarize public meetings, and make complicated material easier for residents to understand.
We will also use human judgment.
The two are not enemies.
Technology is a tool. Judgment remains the responsibility of the person holding it.
As for the small group of habitual critics and professional malcontents who populate local social-media pages, Summerland is hardly unique. Every community seems to have them. Often it is the same relatively small collection of people appearing repeatedly, feeding off one another, escalating every grievance, and convincing themselves that their Facebook thread represents the entire community.
It does not.
- Volume is not consensus.
- Anger is not evidence.
- Cynicism is not intelligence.
- And hostility toward technology is not wisdom.
So, to the Summerland Luddites, I offer a very simple solution.
Do not visit the Summerland Gazette.
It costs you nothing. There is no subscription. Attendance is not compulsory. Nobody will be dispatched to your home to force you to read an executive briefing.
You are completely free to remain uninformed the old-fashioned way.
The rest of us will carry on.
The Summerland Gazette will continue trying to help residents understand what the District is saying, while also helping identify what residents are asking of the District. Somewhere between those two sides lies a communication gap, and that is precisely the space this publication intends to occupy.
We are not being created as an attack site against the municipality.
We are not being created to serve as an attack site against council.
And despite the temptation occasionally presented by social media, we are not being created to wage war against the loudest and least thoughtful voices in the community either.
We are here to improve the flow of information.
If that threatens someone, the problem probably is not the technology.