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It was a packed house at Platform Calgary on Wednesday as Canada’s minister for AI and digital innovation, Evan Solomon, explained more on how the government is looking to support the growing AI industry.
“We are on a mission for ‘team yes’ to find answers,” explained Solomon. “My job is to facilitate ‘team yes.’ To get out of the way when we need to, and to give a boost when we have to.”
According to Solomon, Canada is at a critical juncture where we are living through a period of political and technological change happening at an exponential rate.
“This political and this technological realignment poses real challenges to our sovereignty, to our values, to our communities… but it also presents opportunities,” Solomon noted.
Minister Solomon noted that there seem to be two distinct sides of the AI coin. Those with pompoms, who believe AI will solve all the world’s problems, and others with pitchforks, who say AI will take away jobs, harm the environment and our future.
“We’ve got to be open to the opportunities here and not stifle the innovation, and make sure that we’re candid about their concerns,” said Solomon. “Privacy, data, jobs, and we will protect those things as well.”
Alberta-based AI firms are responding positively to the idea that the fed’s are willing to fight to keep Canadian companies in the country.
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“That spirit of collaboration and ecosystem growth, built on an actual federal level? I think that’s absolutely key,” affirmed Ferdinand Hingerl, chief technology officer with Ambyint.
“With such a strong neighbour in the south that we always have to deal with (brain drain), the question is how can we address that challenge so that all the money we invest in our people here stays in Canada.”
There are three key pillars to the federal government’s plan: ensuring access to capital, computing, and consumers.
“Most companies would rather have a contract than a grant, and the federal government can play a big role in that,” said Shannon Vander Meulen, co-founder of WaitWell. “There’s a bit of a double-edged sword with that because obviously a lot of companies like mine sell extensively into the U.S.”
Currently, Canada only has a voluntary code of conduct for the development and management of advanced generative AI systems. Solomon tells Global News that he and other ministers are working on introducing new legislation to provide more concrete framework to protect Canadians and their data.
“The justice minister has tabled legislation on the non-consensual sharing of sexual and synthetic deep-fake imagery, to criminalize that,” Solomon shared.
“I will be tabling legislation to update our privacy, to protect our consumers, to protect our children, and make sure our children’s information is safe… And then Marc Miller is going to have the online harms element.”
At Mount Royal University, information design associate professor Lauren Dwyer says sorting out a mandatory framework to protect Canadians is hugely important.
“We are driving next to a cliff with potential huge consequences if we aren’t managing this properly,” noted Dwyer. “And we’ve seen some of the most deadly versions of this when we look at what happened in Tumbler Ridge.”
Dwyer’s research focuses on a number of different areas within the sphere of artificial intelligence, including how the design of AI shapes communication, our behaviour, and what people do about it.
To her, if we want to remove the human element, there needs to be a greater focus on accuracy.
“When we’re using this tool to make things more efficient, we’re also removing the possibility of a person at every single step,” Dwyer said. “We love to talk about artificial intelligence with this ‘human in the loop,’ someone supervising the decisions being made, and that’s fantastic if efficiency isn’t the goal. If you’re supervising all these decisions but you’re being urged to move faster, and chances are you’re only taking a quick glance.”
Dwyer notes that, traditionally, in order for a new technology to be adopted, there has to be a foundation.
“A study coming out of Toronto Metropolitan University’s social media lab showed the majority of Canadians that they surveyed were using AI, specifically gen-artificial intelligence like ChatGPT,” explained Dwyer. “And yet the majority of Canadians (who were surveyed) said they didn’t trust the information that was coming out of it. So we’re seeing those models start to break.”
But Dwyer is optimistic that Canada is following other jurisdictions when it comes to coming up with those regulations.
“The European Union is doing a phenomenal job with regulation and it’s doing a much stronger job than let’s say the U.S. is doing with regulation,” Dwyer said.
“That doesn’t mean that they have it perfectly figured out, and that the work the EU is doing isn’t without its flaws. Canada is right to be taking its own path on this and figuring out how to strike the best balance.”
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