Dear editor:

I want to thank Dr. William Brown for his excellent column (“Science and the gods of the 21st century,” The Lake Report, Dec. 7) and his review of scientific advances and inventions that have made the last few centuries so amazing and interesting.

That’s certainly the sort of information that will benefits all of us in this technological age.

However, I was stopped in my tracks when Dr. Brown apparently introduced politics into his fine scientific story.

Suddenly he included this paragraph, “We’ve heard how threatening AI can be in China these days as a means of tracking dissenters using data on smartphones and facial recognition technologies.”

Surely the good doctor has read news items regarding law enforcement organizations in Canada and the United States that also seize phones and use facial-recognition in the pursuit of troublesome citizens.

Perhaps politics, in this instance, was just an unnecessary distraction.

George Dunbar
Toronto