Air Canada CEO falls foul of language laws again

Canada's language battles continue, this time when the CEO of Air Canada aired a condolence message for the families of the two Air Canada pilots who were killed in an accident at La Guardia airport in New York a couple of days ago. He managed a "bonjour" at the start and a "merci" at the end of his piece, which, given that one of the pilots was a francophone, that the flight originated in Montreal, and that the Air Canada company is based in Montreal, has been lambasted as insufficient, disrespectful and downright outrageous by many. There were renewed calls for his ouster.

CEO Michael Rousseau (despite his name) has been called out before by the Quebec language police. This time, though, others have involved themselves, including Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose French is not brilliant but he learned enough to get by for his election campaign.

Poor Mr. Rousseau apologized for his lack of French, which he admits is inadequate "despite many lessons over several years". I can sympathize - some people just don't have the gift. He took flak for asserting that his busy schedule just did not allow him to focus on learning a new language, which he said he had not needed in his 14 years of living in Montreal.

While Air Canada is not a federal government agency, it is a federal public corporation and is subject to Canada's Official Languages Act. Announcements on board are made in both English and French, and service in both languages is guaranteed. As a high-profile "flag carrier", Air Canada in particular is expected to uphold the myth of Canadian bilingualism and, as CEO, Rousseau is first in the firing line.

More AI prophets of doom

There seem to be two irreconcilable trends in artificial intelligence (AI) development. There are the boosters, largely comprised of tech giants and other large companies, who see oodles of money to be made from it and are doing everything they can to promote it and establish it as the default go-to solution for pretty much everything, even at the expense of flesh-and-blood people, and despite the fact that very little money is actually being made from it thus far. 

And then there are what you might call the prophets of doom, the more thoughtful, cautious contingent, largely comprised of eggheads and theorists (including most of the early pioneers), who are warning that AI development is proceeding too quickly and with insufficient safeguards, or - at the extreme end of the spectrum, but far from isolated - those who are warning that current development trajectories are probably headed towards human extinction.

The former trend seems to be winning at the moment, but that doesn't mean that we should just ignore the eggheads and theorists. The latest warnings come from a researcher called Nate Soares, perhaps not officially in the egghead category, but still a smart cookie with a gift for useful analogies and a well-turned simile.

Soares points out that when (not if) superintelligent AI becomes better than humans at absolutely everything, then "things would get wild". In fact, things would get wild long before that: "It's sort of like saying if you dropped a 500-ton weight on a chicken, the chicken would die. I'm not saying smaller weights wouldn't work. I'm, like, this weight is definitely big enough."

We can't actually design AI to be safer, because AI is not really designed, it grows like an organism. And it is hugely complex, so you can't just point to, say, Line 73 in the code and say, "that needs to be changed". It's more like disciplining a naughty child - we can't just rewire their brains. Worse, machines don't have empathy, sympathy and human emotions, so we can't even appeal to that.

You can actually force an AI application to admit that it made something up, or that it had a "hallucination". It will say that it knows you didn't want it to do that, but it did it anyway. This drive to produce something even if it is incorrect is just one worrying sign we are already seeing of AI going rogue. 

In the same way, while no-one is saying that AI wants to deliberately harm humans, that's not to say that it won't do so while trying to achieve some other task or goal. It doesn't actually care about us - is not capable of caring about us - so this utter indifference combined with its great technological might may result in it just rolling over us en route to completion of an otherwise unimportant task.

AI company Anthropic, for example, may be training its AI according to a "constitution" to try to align it with human values, but even the head of Anthropic thinks there is a 25% chance that AI will go catastrophically wrong. That's a pretty big chance. And yet these companies are still barrelling ahead, most with much less ethical questioning than Anthropic. This is happening mainly because they think, "If I don't do it, somebody else will, and they will probably do an even worse job of it". And that's those who are not motivated by much more base considerations, like money.

Mr. Soares concludes with another analogy: we wouldn't build a plane with no landing gear and just assume that such a minor problem could be fixed while the plane is in flight. Nor would we launch a plane that we were 75%, or even 90%, sure was safe. But that's kind of what we are doing with AI.

I thought it was funny that the article ended with an Editor's Note: "AI tools assisted with condensing the original podcast transcript".

Social media's Big Tobacco moment

I confess I'm surprised it ever came to this, but kudos to the American courts system for having the gumption to rule against the combined might of Meta/Instagram/Facebook and Google/YouTube in finding the social media companies liable for intentionally building addictive social media platforms that harm the mental health of young people.

In this case, it was a 20-year old woman called Kaley (or K.G.M.). She sued Meta and Google over her childhood addiction to social media, claiming the platforms left her with body dysmorphia, depression and suicidal thoughts. Yesterday, she won US$6 million in compensatory and punitive damages, of which 70% is to come from Meta and 30% from Google. (TikTok and SnapChat both settled out of court with the same plaintiff for an unknown sum before the Meta/Google trial began.)

Now, $6 million is not really going to make the likes of Meta and Google sit up and take note - the plaintiff's counsel was initially claiming $1 billion! - but, given that there are tens of thousands of such victims lining up to sue Big Tech, this precedent could indeed be material. This is social media's Big Tobacco moment.

Of course, it's not over until it's over, and both companies say they will appeal the ruling, to try and stanch the bleeding which could indeed cost them dearly over time. If they manage to get the case overturned, is it still a landmark case? Probably. It validates the legal theory that social media sites or apps can cause personal injury, that it is essentially a defective product, if you will. And it will almost certainly encourage many more tentative litigants to try their luck with the legal system, although that is not a task for the faint of heart.

Trump now lives in a Democratic district

Pretty funny: Donald Trump now lives in a Democrat-held electoral district.

The "special election" (by-election) in Florida District 87 - in which Trump's Mar A Lago estate is located - has been flipped by the Democrats. The young first-time Democrat candidate Emily Gregory handily beat out Trump-backed Republican Jon Maples, in a district where the the Republicans won by 19% in 2024.

Mr. Trump is now Ms. Gregory's constituent.

The complicated mix that is Danish politics

Denmark held a general election yesterday, and the expectation was that Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen's Social Democrats would handily win. As it turned out, her party did win the most votes although it was still the party's worst showing in over a century. Luckily, the main right-wing party, Venstre (Danish Liberal Party), also had its worst showing in a century. 

But individual parties are not the be-all-and-end-all of Danish politics, it's all about the "blocs": the "red bloc" of left-wing parties, and the "blue bloc" of right-wing parties. Joining the Social Democrats (with its 38 seats) are the Green Left (20 seats), the Red-Green Alliance (11 seats), the Danish Social Liberal Party (10 seats), and the Alternative (5 seats), giving the red bloc a total of 84 seats. The blue bloc, consisting of Venstre and a rag-tag bunch of other parties, total 77 seats. So, neither bloc achieved the 90 seats needed for a majority, leaving the Moderates party (14 seats) as potential kingmakers in the ensuing negotiations.

That's a lot of different parties, all with some level of influence on the national political scene. It's fascinating stuff, for an outsider like me, used to two (maybe three or four) main political parties. But I guess the Danes are used to all the argy-bargy and bargaining that their politics entails.

Trump is apparently negotiating with himself

Desperately seeking an off-ramp from his disastrous war in Iran, Donald Trump insists that Iran is negotiating a deal. "They want a deal so badly", he assures us. In fact, he seems to think that they have had "GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS" already, and some "very, very strong talks".

Unfortunately, Iran doesn't seem to know anything about this. Iran's foreign ministry issued to a terse statement saying that, "There is no dialogue between Tehran and Washington". The speaker of Iran's parliament confirmed that, "No negotiations have been held with the US, and fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped". A spokesperson for Iran's military was less subtle: "You are negotiating with yourselves ... someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you. Not now, not ever".

As usual, Trump seems cocooned in his own little world, more concerned with appearances than actual substance. Meanwhile, the US and Israel continue bombing the hell out of Iran, and Iran continues bombing anybody it can reach. Put it down to the fog of war?

Clean power as an energy security issue

Perhaps it's not much, but maybe something good might come out of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Spooked by the precipitous increase in oil and has prices, Britain's biggest energy company, Octopus Energy, has already seen a 50% rise in solar panel sales in the few weeks since the war started, as well as a spike in heat pumps and enquiries about electric vehicles and chargers. Something very similar is happening in Europe.

Now, the UK is introducing new rules to the effect that all new homes built there (from 2028) must be installed with heat pumps and solar panels. In addition, plug-in solar panels are to be widely available in stores in Britain. The idea is to avoid being held hostage by the globalized oil and gas market, as is happening in the aftermath of the Iran war, and to move closer to "energy sovereignty" for the country.

Hey, maybe we could do that too, here in sunny Canada? Ah, no, Alberta would never allow that!

Canada's Supreme Court hears one of its most important cases ever

The Supreme Court of Canada will spend most of this week debating the legality and constitutionality of Quebec's controversial Bill 21, also known as the "secularism law", which would ban religious symbols and clothing for public employees (including teachers) in positions of authority.

It is expected be one of the Supreme Court's longest ever cases, and is being called "one of the most consequential constitutional cases in the country's recent history", "the case to end all cases", and "the most important charter case in a generation", among other superlatives. That's largely because the "Act Respecting the Laicity of the State" essentially hangs on the Quebec government's invocation of Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the dreaded "notwithstanding clause". 

Originally intended to be used only very sparingly and in cases of absolute necessity, the clause has been invoked increasingly frequently in recent years, and even pre-emptively. It effectively allows governments to pass legislation which they know contravenes the fundamental rights and freedoms of Canadians that are supposedly protected by the Charter. In recent years, it has become a favourite tool of provincial governments, particular the right-wing populist governments we have been saddled with recently in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. It's the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card.

The Supreme Court case this week should give some much-needed clarity on how and when such a nuclear option can reasonably be employed. Unfortunately, the Court will not be able to get rid of the ill-conceived clause completely, but let's hope that a precedent will have been set discouraging governments from over-using it. Either way, though, we won't hear any decisions from the Court for some months, so don't hold your breath.