In September of last year, AI Minister Evan Solomon commissioned a task force of some 30 members with one simple ask: what the hell should Canada do about AI?
This month, the federal government released the results: some 30 submissions and 300 supplementary documents, alongside thousands of responses from public consultations.
“If we don’t get our AI ducks in a row at some point and we miss that boat to shore up our industries right now, it’s not really going to matter what regulations we have on the table. Because we won’t have control.”
Jaxson Khan
And I’ll be honest, folks, I’m not going to read all of that (though I did make reporter Josh Scott read it). Nor will I use AI to summarize the findings as the federal government did. Instead, I turn once again to Jaxson Khan, founder and CEO of Aperature AI, a Munk School senior fellow, and former senior policy advisor for ISED.
That last point on Khan’s resume is the most important. As someone familiar with how the federal government approaches these consultations, he’s able to offer insider analysis on this latest offering, including the feds’ decision to use AI to review and summarize the data. Unlike me, he also took the time to read the 32 different task force submissions and provide his own analysis.
Khan’s take? “The diagnosis is often remarkably consistent, but the prescriptions are not.”
On the diagnosis front, there’s consensus that Canada remains a leader in AI research, but a laggard in commercialization. Domestic compute capacity and capital remain issues. The prescriptions are varied, but they do point to important questions that the federal government will eventually have to answer. How can Canada successfully scale local champions? How will Canada balance the conflicting demands of sovereign tech and a robust economy? And with so many opportunities (and threats), what should Canada prioritize most?
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It’s all very complex, and perhaps worthy of the word count. The AI task force report has a lot of recommendations, and some may be the right ones. So, what does this public consultation tell us about what Canada should do about AI?
Let’s dig in.
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