It sometimes seems like half of all articles in the newspaper are something to do with artificial intelligence, sometimes something good, often something bad.
Canadian news outlets are all reporting and commenting on Prime Minister Mark Carney's big reveal of Canada's AI strategy yesterday, outlining the government's approach to what he calls "the defining technology of our era". Under the banner "AI For All", Carney's upbeat, if somewhat vague, presentation promises: protections for Canadians, young and old, from the risks and potential online harms of AI (through modernizing consumer privacy legsislation, introducing online safety laws, watermarking AI-generated content, creating a Canada trusted AI certification program, protecting elections from interference, etc); access to free AI literacy training (an area where Canada particularly lags), including for post-secondary students; up to 90,000 AI-related job opportunities for young Canadians, plus another 250,000 new jobs through increased AI adoption by 2031; boosting business adoption of AI from 12% today to 60% by 2034; building a world-leading supercomputer by 2031; building up a multilateral alliance giving Canada "sovereign autonomy" in key AI capabilities; and $2 billion in direct investment to achieve these strategic aims.
It all sounds very forward-thinking, ambitious, even Panglossian, although what it is really is Canada trying to make up some lost ground on everyone else.
Critics of the strategy have questioned how AI is supposed to create so many thousands of jobs rather than cost jobs, as many are predicting (Signal 49 warns that AI and automation could lead to 550,000 Canadian job losses by 2030 as businesses restructure.) Others have complained that the strategy is vague on timelines and specific safety measures.
Be that as it may, the Canadian government had to make some kind of an announcement about how it is pursuing and dealing with AI, if only because everyone else is.
It's interesting, though, that it comes on the heels of Pope Leo XIV's papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which warns about the urgent need tor an ethical framework for AI, to prevent it from becoming an instrument of domination and an agent of lethal autonomous warfare, to avoid the manipulation of reality (e.g. deepfakes), and to protect the rights of workers, the marginalized and the vulnerable.
It also comes just as major AI developer Anthropic warns that maybe there should be a coordinated and verifiable pause in AI development, because AI systems are approaching the point where they can improve themselves, without human intervention, faster than society can manage the risks.
This, then, is the environment in which Canada is, somewhat belatedly, committing itself to accelerating AI development and adoption.
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