We can all breathe a sigh of relief. Our federal government now has a plan for how it’s going to develop this country into an artificial intelligence superpower while protecting Canadians from the harms of this quickly evolving technology. So it says.
“The question isn’t whether AI will transform our lives. It will,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney last week, introducing the new strategy. “The question is, will it improve the lives of all Canadians, or benefit only a few?” Ensuring the former is what this government is trying to convince us it will do.
The strategy, called “AI for All”, positions artificial intelligence as key to innovation and economic growth. It says investing some $2.3 billion in Canada’s AI industry will create 250,000 jobs in the next five years, boost this country’s GDP by three per cent, strengthen Canadian sovereignty and enhance the everyday life of Canadians.
To bring this utopian vision to bear, the promised money will be invested in supporting small and medium businesses in adopting AI technologies, making sure all Canadians know how to use the technology, and supposedly protecting Canadians from some of the dangers associated with it, including kids. Oh, and building a world-leading supercomputer that will give Canadian businesses and researchers “access to secure, sovereign, high-performance compute for cutting-edge public and industry-driven innovation.” Sounds fancy.
But for this investment to do anything, Canadians need to trust AI, and the numbers show we’re not quite ready to do that. A survey published last week by Ipsos AI Monitor reports on sentiments towards AI across 32 countries. In Canada, 67 percent of people are nervous about the technology, and only 26 percent feel excited about it. Stats quoted in Canada’s AI strategy show that this country ranks 44th of 47 countries on AI training and literacy, and 42nd when it comes to trust in AI systems. Half of Canadians believe AI is a threat to humanity.
This should be a point of national pride. I am delighted to live in a country that has some skepticism around opening the floodgates to a technology that is fundamentally anti-human.
Its potential for solving problems in health care, or finding cost-saving efficiencies in agriculture, to name but a couple of the humanity-helping promises its promoters chant, is now undeniable.
But the government’s new strategy seems to insist the only obstacle between Canada and realizing its best AI self is the lack of education and training around how to use AI, not a fundamental concern for how the technology will affect Canadian children, will use Canadians’ personal data, will accelerate the drain on this planet’s natural resources, and put people out of their jobs. The strategy doesn’t, for example, include any forecasting for how many jobs will be lost due to the adoption of this technology. Apparently this number is too difficult to predict.
Sure, there’s likely an education gap, but promising that every post-secondary student will have access to a “trusted AI agent” does not address the root cause of this gap. Using the word “trust” over and over again (it appears 43 times in this strategy) will not win it.
Canadians need evidence of a plan that puts forward real measures for regulating the industry, but many experts studying AI policy say this strategy falls short of offering this, and lays out a system that in large part depends on the good will of the companies involved. We saw how this played out in Tumbler Ridge.
The government’s insistence that Canadians’ lack of trust around AI stems from a lack of familiarity with the technology rather than an absence of any evidence that the government is willing to draw hard lines around what these companies can and can’t do is condescending.