8 ms·

Canada plans to regulate search and social media use of AI

93 points by markdog12 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago
No doubt this will prick up the ears of the luddite Australian government who will become extremely enthused about doing the same thing. I just wish our governments would leave tech alone.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  What makes the average politician automatically dumber than the average AI startup or social media company decision-maker?
  - momirlan 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    Size of organization is correlated with tolerance of stupidity and level of competition is inversely correlated. Governments are the largest organizations and are monopolies. You get max level of stupidity as expected.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Being a politician has an inverse correlation to competency
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected? Or just that only incompetent people become politicians? Those are both pretty strong assertions so I assume you mean something else and I'm just not seeing it.
      - ekianjo 3y ago
        > Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected? The skills to get elected rely on being about to lie to people and lie to yourself as much as possible and be a narcissist at the same time, so all of these factors make it VERY unlikely that they correlate with actual competency.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - x-complexity 3y ago
        > Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected? Or just that only incompetent people become politicians? The candidate that is most capable of being elected is the one that either: - Can garner the most votes - Can prevent other candidates from getting votes Nowhere in the above is technical competency a requirement to be elected. It may help, but its far down the list of "electable attributes".
        rightbyte 3y ago
        Another way of putting it is that the hardest thing with being a (high level) politician is being elected. I am active in my county and if you breath and can be nice for 1h we will give you a position somewhere.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Politicians are people-persons. They’re generally not technical people at all. It’s pretty rare for someone to be both a tech person and a people person. I have no idea why this is the case (other than stereotypes).
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      I'll grant that politics is a field that attracts "people persons", but the OP originally said (paraphrasing, since it's gone and I don't remember the exact language they used) that politicians were all dumb, with the implication that we should let tech startups decide everything re: AI instead. What guarantees that the decision-makers at big companies like OpenAI are actually "smart techies" or even technical people at all? Doesn't being an executive or board member or high level decision maker actually attract people with the "soft skills" you need to reach those lofty heights? I see this assumption a lot - "politicians are all stupid/incompetent" and it's weird to see it taken on faith by some people (I don't get the feeling you're one of them)
    - konschubert 3y ago
      It's a matter of focus. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
  - langsoul-com 3y ago
    Incentives. Politicians don't give a damn about being right, but rather to continue being elected.
    - thinkerswell 3y ago
      Businesses don’t care about being right, but about making money.
- konschubert 3y ago
  And then the EU. Because our current world is perfect and change is bad.
filereaper 3y ago
I strongly encourage watching Bill Gurley's talk from the All-In Summit about whenever Government gets involved with regulations and technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM
- mieko 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - lib-dev 3y ago
    Meh I learned a thing or two.
gustavus 3y ago
> The regulation plans are revealed in a letter from ISED Minister François-Philippe Champagne to the Industry committee studying Bill C-27, the privacy reform and AI regulation bill. The government is refusing to disclose the actual text of planned amendments to the bill. So like between this and their online harms bill they are proposing not to mention their massive screw up with their other tech bills, is CA just trying to cut the Internet out of the lives of their citizens? Seriously what is going on there? Anyone in CA want to comment?
- momirlan 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    - momirlan 3y ago
      i appreciate your concern. the above is my sincere opinion, however I will refrain from posting political comments if that offends you.
- dpc050505 3y ago
  >Anyone in CA want to comment? Our media landscape is controlled by an oligopoly that has a stronghold on our federal politicians and web neutrality threatens that oligopoly.
  - transcriptase 3y ago
    Precisely. Rogers, Telus, and Bell control practically all Canadian mobile/internet/tv/radio. The bodies that are supposed to regulate them are run by former execs of these companies, and our competition bureau seems to think that anything short of one of them having 100% market share means they don’t need to actually intervene in any mergers or acquisitions. Politicians obviously don’t want to upset three of the most powerful, well poised to influence public perception companies in Canada… which may as well be considered a single entity with respect to them actually competing at all. And so they basically all lobby for the same insane, protectionist, anti-competition, anti-consumer laws and regulations, and nearly always get their way. In recent years this means prodding the government to introduce absurd regulations on the internet.
momirlan 3y ago
[flagged]
GaggiX 3y ago
Why? What's wrong about using AI to moderate your platform? Are you supposed to underpaid workers from Colombia to do it and make them see horrible content?
drdaeman 3y ago
UPD: It seems that the bill itself is not about the AI, but there are some undisclosed amendments to the bill that aren't yet public and that are said to target AI specifically. My bad. On the bright side - my wish to see a legal definition of an "AI" may still be granted :-) --- Original comment below --- Whem. Either I'm misunderstanding something (I've only quickly skimmed through the bill, can't say I understood any much), or the title is clickbait-ish, and this is: 1) Not about any AI at all (and here I was hoping to see a legal definition of an "AI", haha). The definition of "automated decision system" seem to cover just about anything from some fancy ML stuff to your basic fortune(6) program. Basically, if a machine rather than a human (or something else that is not a machine) had picked something, then it's an "automated decision system". At the very least, I have not found any sophistication requirements (but I could've missed it). 2) Only seem to apply when it's about use of personally identifying information. If I got it right, then if you track someone and a machine makes a "decision about the individual that could have a significant impact on them", then it applies. Otherwise, not so much. Again, I could be wrong, missing something or not really understanding what I've just read. I haven't really understood how this applies to moderation. I suspect it's about when moderation system is building an user profile and feeding it to an automatic decision system, but that'd be weird (because every single mailhost with an anti-spam system would be affected). Search engines, on the other hand? If I got it right, only those that do "personalized results" are affected. So, some LLM processing search hits for a query and making a decision on what's good result and what's a spam is seemingly not covered. Tracking cookies seem to be the core component of this thing, not AI.
ggm 3y ago
The "refused to discuss draft state" thing is remarkably common. I am unsure why so many governments do this. I suspect it's because a large number of bad ideas get dropped before public draft, and nobody wants to wear the newspaper headlines which say "Government considering mandating second head for all voting citizens" when the 2 head idea is only going to get dropped before the document goes live. There's also the problem of multi-draft convergence. They don't want to "out" a proposal being thought out in concert with another agency, or economy. In effect the document has to remain sealed until the most important one decides it's time to declare. So, across the life of the drafting there are huge reserved chunks. This happened in the TPP docs, which had sealed sections. They enraged local IT people in Australia because of the strong likelihood of the US trying to wedge the Australian 'right to repair' laws and their effect on DRM/IPR locks. I have very briefly seen 'behind the curtain' of this kind of thing (a ministerial communique for a meeting) and people take the secrecy seriously, because you won't be invited back to draw up the next one, if you blab about this one. It doesn't have to reflect anything particularly special. I think it's likely the mystique is maintained for it's own sake: Vanity.
- qp11 3y ago
  That's a response to the problem of things scaling to global levels faster than they can react to it.
  - ggm 3y ago
    Yes. If you see a lot of "move fast and break things" happening in a space which you may need to regulate, you throw everything into the bag, shake it around and see what sticks when you turn it out again. Every idea under the sun including internet licences, eyeball scanning, and second heads will be in the bag at some point. The Second head speaks french. Don't ask me which one they will keep...
    - qp11 3y ago
      They need to be taking stakes in the companies when things (exploitation/loss of control etc) start escalating ala British East India Company taken over by the Queen after shit hits the fan. Or atleast the threat should be hanging over everyones head. There is no other way to slow the self important tech buffoon class down. Their 3 inch chimp brains aren't growing at the same speed as the tech and consequences of tech are. We already see some of early stages of this, with internet shutdowns every time they lose control of Jurassic Park. Regulations and the law are a total waste of time.
emptybits 3y ago
Canadian here. Government sticking its nose into AI bias in human rights issues like law enforcement powers and employment standards … OK. But regulating search algorithms … feels worlds apart in importance and maybe too far.
- kredd 3y ago
  I feel exactly the same way. There’s a huge amount of common sense that’s being missed, and I can’t understand why our government is trying to get there before anyone else.
- BeefWellington 3y ago
  While I'd generally agree and do not expect the government to do this correctly (no government succeeds with tech it seems), I do think there's a discussion to be had about just how search algorithms intersect with human rights issues. The results you're fed are based on a profile of you, and how those results differ for people of different race, creed, economic background, etc. absolutely can become a human rights issue. An extreme example of this might be: An indigenous user performs a search for how to get healthcare and the "AI" / "Algorithm" (whatever term you want) buries resources on much later pages of search results that are otherwise shown for caucasians. Replace "how to get healthcare" with "apply for a scholarship" or other similar concepts. In practice I suspect nothing that awful is happening today but we do see all kinds of systems like this being only as good as the training data.
jlk34tlaerg 3y ago
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jlk34tlaerg 3y ago
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jrockway 3y ago
That sound you hear is billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet as tech companies pay expert witnesses (and lots of attorneys) to convince judges and juries that they're using "algorithms" instead of "artificial intelligence". (Keep telling the shareholders it's AI, though.) This kind of reminds me of the whole DeCSS thing. Everyone ripped their DVDs. Several years too late, it was declared "illegal". Someone golfed it down to a t-shirt. People continued removing the digital restrictions from their media. Physical media is now dead as an industry, and literally nobody minds. Everyone is happier and the content creators make more money than ever before. AI feels like it's going down the same route. I have already seen the "generative AI in 40 lines of C", and those can easily be t-shirts. Whatever efforts are made to make AI illegal at this point are too little too late. The cat is out of the bag. Whatever you think is going to happen because of AI will probably happen. So it's probably time to find some cash to solve those problems, instead of paying expert witnesses to define what "is is". No government in human history has ever succeeded in making math illegal. Canada is unlikely to be the first. (It is even more futile than making alcohol illegal, which still makes me laugh when I think about it. You leave sugar water out in air and it turns into alcohol. You can't solve that "problem" by signing a piece of paper that says a government says so. You are going to need more fungicide than humanity has the capability to produce. It is an unwinnable war. Fighting against AI is going to be like that.) I think the hype about the downfall of humanity is probably overrated (a bold claim, because if I'm wrong you won't be around to make fun of me). The biggest impact will probably be things like banks denying loans to people for the wrong reasons. If that's what we're worried, make some laws that makes that illegal. It shouldn't matter what tools you use to get a result; whether you use AI or a bunch of employees sitting in a room with a pencil and paper to run an illegal business, the outcome is the same, the business has illegal practices and the government should step in.
Zambyte 3y ago
> Failure to abide by the regulations can result in penalties as high as 3% of gross global revenues Assuming all of Canada has internet access, Canada makes up less than 1% of people with internet. I wonder if companies will respond by simply blocking Canadians, as it would be cheaper, and encourage them to repeal this. Not that I want that at all, but it seems like a possibility.
- wmf 3y ago
  That's exactly what the companies will do. They're already blocking news in Canada.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    Are they? At least Google doesn't seem to be.
    - peanuty1 3y ago
      Google has said they will block news once the law is in effect.
      - sqeaky 3y ago
        Is that a bluff or not? Would Canada actually prefer it one way or the other? What is the cost of making a Canadian team to tune results to Canada's laws? Is that less than possible earnings? Are all people equally valuable to Google or are people in wealthy nations worth proportionally more. What if other countries follow suit?
        tamiral 3y ago
        news is already blocked on Meta owned companies.
  - red_trumpet 3y ago
    I guess that Google news brings in a lot less revenue than Google search. So might it be possible that the trade-offs are different?
narenkeshav 3y ago
Canada is turning out to be a banana republic.
- extasia 3y ago
  I don't think that's even remotely true.
  - narenkeshav 3y ago
    There is a housing bubble that none on the top likes to care about Inflation is through the roof Suppression of the free press (podcast) are planned and to be set in motion The leader is doing vacation with Canadian's taxes There is a carbon taxes that affect the middle-class and poor family Housing prices are sky rocketing Buy healthy grocery has gotten really expensive CERB was a joke and facade on the first place Corporations are given lee-way with what they can do ------------------- Please explain as to why it is not remotely true!!!
    - extasia 3y ago
      >Banana republic, derogatory term for a country that has an economy dependent solely on revenue from exporting a single product or commodity. As a result, such countries are typically controlled by foreign-owned companies or industries. Banana republics usually have a highly stratified socioeconomic structure, with a small ruling class that controls access to wealth and resources, and are politically unstable. The term has its origins in the development of banana plantations by American corporations and their exploitation of land and workers in Central and South America beginning in the late 19th century. - Dictionary Brittanica.
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snapplebobapple 3y ago
I'm sorry guys, Eastern Canada has lost it's mind (and has been this way for some time) and keeps electing idiots....
- TMWNN 3y ago
  This is why there is a secession movement in Alberta with meaningful support, and significant support for it in Saskatchewan and BC. As Peter Zeihan points out, secession in Canada is legal. Those who claim that "US Democrats would be Conservatives in Canada" are completely wrong. Were Canada a part of the US in 2016, Trump would have won a majority of the vote in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and would have done very well in BC outside downtown Vancouver/Vancouver Island, Manitoba, and parts of the Greater Toronto Area and southern Ontario (probably not rural Ontario). In other words, the chunks of Canada that are the most similar to the chunks of the US that voted for Trump. The GTA parts I'm talking about are the ones that loved Rob Ford as mayor, and swung heavily for Doug Ford in 2018.
  - snapplebobapple 3y ago
    I don't really buy the meaningful support thing yet. I would say a small minority of vocal people that have zero chance of winning a secession referendum at this time. If the east keeps taking 20+ billion a year in taxes for ~5 billion in services provided while simultaneously blocking resource development and doing other obviously unjust things like including resource revenue in Alberta's transfer payment calculation and not including resource revenue from hydro in Quebec's then maybe in 20-30 years they will have a slim chance. I think they know this too because they are pushing for disaggregation of services from Ottawa right now and actually have a chance of that because the cost of doing that is minimal and it will make their ultimate goal of leaving much easier if we have provincial pensions, police force, tax collection, etc. already in place.
    - TMWNN 3y ago
      >I think they know this too because they are pushing for disaggregation of services from Ottawa right now and actually have a chance of that because the cost of doing that is minimal and it will make their ultimate goal of leaving much easier if we have provincial pensions, police force, tax collection, etc. already in place. Oh, sure, the meltdown on Reddit over the plans to establish Alberta's own pension is an indication of just how worried the opponents are. Since they can't deny Quebec's precedent here, they're freaking out over how it would destroy the CPP, while simultaneously avoiding the obvious implication that claiming such would reinforce Alberta's complaints about being drained to support the rest of the country. I haven't seen similar meltdowns about reestablishing APP but I probably just haven't looked hard enough. My larger point is that, as I said, secession is legal in Canada. People are ignorant of/in denial over the full ramifications of Re Secession. <https://np.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/tkg5gf/who_has_more_autonomy_canadian_provinces_american/i1s9jgh/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/tkg5gf/who_has_...>
olliej 3y ago
Is this going to result in less use of "AI" or less use of "AI" as a marketing term for "glorified statistical model"? I'm not particularly convinced by claims of "intelligence" but that's not the point: the article uses "artificial intelligence system" sounding like that's the text, but what happens if you just say "this is a multidimensional statistical model", there is no intelligence, it is simply an automatically generated model?
incomingpain 3y ago
To be clear, Canada is regulating speech online, not just AI and search. Also by Michael Geist not long ago: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/10/crtcregistrationruling/ https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/10/crtcregistrationruling/ Basically a service like Rumble, which is publicly traded and has HQ in Toronto must register with the Canadian government to be allowed to continue existing. All political podcasts have been ordered to register with the government. Lets not forget: https://www.international.gc.ca/global-affairs-affaires-mondiales/corporate-ministere/contact-contactez/media-accreditation-medias.aspx?lang=eng https://www.international.gc.ca/global-affairs-affaires-mond... To be a new journalist, you have to be accredited by the government. Naturally the government doesn't accredit their critics and bans them from going to things like the debates.
k12sosse 3y ago
Not much can be said about the business acumen of Canadian (Ontario) politicians. [0] 0: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/worst-deal-ever-the-407-is-worth-30-b-today-ontario-sold-it-for-31-b-in-1998-181642680.html https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/worst-deal-ever-the-407-is... https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/petro-canada https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/petro-cana... https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ontario-hydro-to-be-privatized https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ontario-hy...

93 points by markdog12 3y ago

No doubt this will prick up the ears of the luddite Australian government who will become extremely enthused about doing the same thing. I just wish our governments would leave tech alone.

kevingadd 3y ago
What makes the average politician automatically dumber than the average AI startup or social media company decision-maker?
- momirlan 3y ago
  [flagged]
- fallingknife 3y ago
  Size of organization is correlated with tolerance of stupidity and level of competition is inversely correlated. Governments are the largest organizations and are monopolies. You get max level of stupidity as expected.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Being a politician has an inverse correlation to competency
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected? Or just that only incompetent people become politicians? Those are both pretty strong assertions so I assume you mean something else and I'm just not seeing it.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      > Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected? The skills to get elected rely on being about to lie to people and lie to yourself as much as possible and be a narcissist at the same time, so all of these factors make it VERY unlikely that they correlate with actual competency.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - x-complexity 3y ago
      > Are you saying the least competent candidate is always the one who gets elected? Or just that only incompetent people become politicians? The candidate that is most capable of being elected is the one that either: - Can garner the most votes - Can prevent other candidates from getting votes Nowhere in the above is technical competency a requirement to be elected. It may help, but its far down the list of "electable attributes".
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        Another way of putting it is that the hardest thing with being a (high level) politician is being elected. I am active in my county and if you breath and can be nice for 1h we will give you a position somewhere.
- chongli 3y ago
  Politicians are people-persons. They’re generally not technical people at all. It’s pretty rare for someone to be both a tech person and a people person. I have no idea why this is the case (other than stereotypes).
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    I'll grant that politics is a field that attracts "people persons", but the OP originally said (paraphrasing, since it's gone and I don't remember the exact language they used) that politicians were all dumb, with the implication that we should let tech startups decide everything re: AI instead. What guarantees that the decision-makers at big companies like OpenAI are actually "smart techies" or even technical people at all? Doesn't being an executive or board member or high level decision maker actually attract people with the "soft skills" you need to reach those lofty heights? I see this assumption a lot - "politicians are all stupid/incompetent" and it's weird to see it taken on faith by some people (I don't get the feeling you're one of them)
  - konschubert 3y ago
    It's a matter of focus. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
- langsoul-com 3y ago
  Incentives. Politicians don't give a damn about being right, but rather to continue being elected.
  - thinkerswell 3y ago
    Businesses don’t care about being right, but about making money.
konschubert 3y ago
And then the EU. Because our current world is perfect and change is bad.

filereaper 3y ago

I strongly encourage watching Bill Gurley's talk from the All-In Summit about whenever Government gets involved with regulations and technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM

mieko 3y ago
[flagged]
- lib-dev 3y ago
  Meh I learned a thing or two.

gustavus 3y ago

> The regulation plans are revealed in a letter from ISED Minister François-Philippe Champagne to the Industry committee studying Bill C-27, the privacy reform and AI regulation bill. The government is refusing to disclose the actual text of planned amendments to the bill. So like between this and their online harms bill they are proposing not to mention their massive screw up with their other tech bills, is CA just trying to cut the Internet out of the lives of their citizens? Seriously what is going on there? Anyone in CA want to comment?

momirlan 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - momirlan 3y ago
    i appreciate your concern. the above is my sincere opinion, however I will refrain from posting political comments if that offends you.
dpc050505 3y ago
>Anyone in CA want to comment? Our media landscape is controlled by an oligopoly that has a stronghold on our federal politicians and web neutrality threatens that oligopoly.
- transcriptase 3y ago
  Precisely. Rogers, Telus, and Bell control practically all Canadian mobile/internet/tv/radio. The bodies that are supposed to regulate them are run by former execs of these companies, and our competition bureau seems to think that anything short of one of them having 100% market share means they don’t need to actually intervene in any mergers or acquisitions. Politicians obviously don’t want to upset three of the most powerful, well poised to influence public perception companies in Canada… which may as well be considered a single entity with respect to them actually competing at all. And so they basically all lobby for the same insane, protectionist, anti-competition, anti-consumer laws and regulations, and nearly always get their way. In recent years this means prodding the government to introduce absurd regulations on the internet.

momirlan 3y ago

[flagged]

GaggiX 3y ago

Why? What's wrong about using AI to moderate your platform? Are you supposed to underpaid workers from Colombia to do it and make them see horrible content?

drdaeman 3y ago

UPD: It seems that the bill itself is not about the AI, but there are some undisclosed amendments to the bill that aren't yet public and that are said to target AI specifically. My bad. On the bright side - my wish to see a legal definition of an "AI" may still be granted :-) --- Original comment below --- Whem. Either I'm misunderstanding something (I've only quickly skimmed through the bill, can't say I understood any much), or the title is clickbait-ish, and this is: 1) Not about any AI at all (and here I was hoping to see a legal definition of an "AI", haha). The definition of "automated decision system" seem to cover just about anything from some fancy ML stuff to your basic fortune(6) program. Basically, if a machine rather than a human (or something else that is not a machine) had picked something, then it's an "automated decision system". At the very least, I have not found any sophistication requirements (but I could've missed it). 2) Only seem to apply when it's about use of personally identifying information. If I got it right, then if you track someone and a machine makes a "decision about the individual that could have a significant impact on them", then it applies. Otherwise, not so much. Again, I could be wrong, missing something or not really understanding what I've just read. I haven't really understood how this applies to moderation. I suspect it's about when moderation system is building an user profile and feeding it to an automatic decision system, but that'd be weird (because every single mailhost with an anti-spam system would be affected). Search engines, on the other hand? If I got it right, only those that do "personalized results" are affected. So, some LLM processing search hits for a query and making a decision on what's good result and what's a spam is seemingly not covered. Tracking cookies seem to be the core component of this thing, not AI.

ggm 3y ago

The "refused to discuss draft state" thing is remarkably common. I am unsure why so many governments do this. I suspect it's because a large number of bad ideas get dropped before public draft, and nobody wants to wear the newspaper headlines which say "Government considering mandating second head for all voting citizens" when the 2 head idea is only going to get dropped before the document goes live. There's also the problem of multi-draft convergence. They don't want to "out" a proposal being thought out in concert with another agency, or economy. In effect the document has to remain sealed until the most important one decides it's time to declare. So, across the life of the drafting there are huge reserved chunks. This happened in the TPP docs, which had sealed sections. They enraged local IT people in Australia because of the strong likelihood of the US trying to wedge the Australian 'right to repair' laws and their effect on DRM/IPR locks. I have very briefly seen 'behind the curtain' of this kind of thing (a ministerial communique for a meeting) and people take the secrecy seriously, because you won't be invited back to draw up the next one, if you blab about this one. It doesn't have to reflect anything particularly special. I think it's likely the mystique is maintained for it's own sake: Vanity.

qp11 3y ago
That's a response to the problem of things scaling to global levels faster than they can react to it.
- ggm 3y ago
  Yes. If you see a lot of "move fast and break things" happening in a space which you may need to regulate, you throw everything into the bag, shake it around and see what sticks when you turn it out again. Every idea under the sun including internet licences, eyeball scanning, and second heads will be in the bag at some point. The Second head speaks french. Don't ask me which one they will keep...
  - qp11 3y ago
    They need to be taking stakes in the companies when things (exploitation/loss of control etc) start escalating ala British East India Company taken over by the Queen after shit hits the fan. Or atleast the threat should be hanging over everyones head. There is no other way to slow the self important tech buffoon class down. Their 3 inch chimp brains aren't growing at the same speed as the tech and consequences of tech are. We already see some of early stages of this, with internet shutdowns every time they lose control of Jurassic Park. Regulations and the law are a total waste of time.

emptybits 3y ago

Canadian here. Government sticking its nose into AI bias in human rights issues like law enforcement powers and employment standards … OK. But regulating search algorithms … feels worlds apart in importance and maybe too far.

kredd 3y ago
I feel exactly the same way. There’s a huge amount of common sense that’s being missed, and I can’t understand why our government is trying to get there before anyone else.
BeefWellington 3y ago
While I'd generally agree and do not expect the government to do this correctly (no government succeeds with tech it seems), I do think there's a discussion to be had about just how search algorithms intersect with human rights issues. The results you're fed are based on a profile of you, and how those results differ for people of different race, creed, economic background, etc. absolutely can become a human rights issue. An extreme example of this might be: An indigenous user performs a search for how to get healthcare and the "AI" / "Algorithm" (whatever term you want) buries resources on much later pages of search results that are otherwise shown for caucasians. Replace "how to get healthcare" with "apply for a scholarship" or other similar concepts. In practice I suspect nothing that awful is happening today but we do see all kinds of systems like this being only as good as the training data.

jlk34tlaerg 3y ago

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jlk34tlaerg 3y ago

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jrockway 3y ago

That sound you hear is billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet as tech companies pay expert witnesses (and lots of attorneys) to convince judges and juries that they're using "algorithms" instead of "artificial intelligence". (Keep telling the shareholders it's AI, though.) This kind of reminds me of the whole DeCSS thing. Everyone ripped their DVDs. Several years too late, it was declared "illegal". Someone golfed it down to a t-shirt. People continued removing the digital restrictions from their media. Physical media is now dead as an industry, and literally nobody minds. Everyone is happier and the content creators make more money than ever before. AI feels like it's going down the same route. I have already seen the "generative AI in 40 lines of C", and those can easily be t-shirts. Whatever efforts are made to make AI illegal at this point are too little too late. The cat is out of the bag. Whatever you think is going to happen because of AI will probably happen. So it's probably time to find some cash to solve those problems, instead of paying expert witnesses to define what "is is". No government in human history has ever succeeded in making math illegal. Canada is unlikely to be the first. (It is even more futile than making alcohol illegal, which still makes me laugh when I think about it. You leave sugar water out in air and it turns into alcohol. You can't solve that "problem" by signing a piece of paper that says a government says so. You are going to need more fungicide than humanity has the capability to produce. It is an unwinnable war. Fighting against AI is going to be like that.) I think the hype about the downfall of humanity is probably overrated (a bold claim, because if I'm wrong you won't be around to make fun of me). The biggest impact will probably be things like banks denying loans to people for the wrong reasons. If that's what we're worried, make some laws that makes that illegal. It shouldn't matter what tools you use to get a result; whether you use AI or a bunch of employees sitting in a room with a pencil and paper to run an illegal business, the outcome is the same, the business has illegal practices and the government should step in.

Zambyte 3y ago

> Failure to abide by the regulations can result in penalties as high as 3% of gross global revenues Assuming all of Canada has internet access, Canada makes up less than 1% of people with internet. I wonder if companies will respond by simply blocking Canadians, as it would be cheaper, and encourage them to repeal this. Not that I want that at all, but it seems like a possibility.

wmf 3y ago
That's exactly what the companies will do. They're already blocking news in Canada.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Are they? At least Google doesn't seem to be.
  - peanuty1 3y ago
    Google has said they will block news once the law is in effect.
    - sqeaky 3y ago
      Is that a bluff or not? Would Canada actually prefer it one way or the other? What is the cost of making a Canadian team to tune results to Canada's laws? Is that less than possible earnings? Are all people equally valuable to Google or are people in wealthy nations worth proportionally more. What if other countries follow suit?
      - tamiral 3y ago
        news is already blocked on Meta owned companies.
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  I guess that Google news brings in a lot less revenue than Google search. So might it be possible that the trade-offs are different?

narenkeshav 3y ago

Canada is turning out to be a banana republic.

extasia 3y ago
I don't think that's even remotely true.
- narenkeshav 3y ago
  There is a housing bubble that none on the top likes to care about Inflation is through the roof Suppression of the free press (podcast) are planned and to be set in motion The leader is doing vacation with Canadian's taxes There is a carbon taxes that affect the middle-class and poor family Housing prices are sky rocketing Buy healthy grocery has gotten really expensive CERB was a joke and facade on the first place Corporations are given lee-way with what they can do ------------------- Please explain as to why it is not remotely true!!!
  - extasia 3y ago
    >Banana republic, derogatory term for a country that has an economy dependent solely on revenue from exporting a single product or commodity. As a result, such countries are typically controlled by foreign-owned companies or industries. Banana republics usually have a highly stratified socioeconomic structure, with a small ruling class that controls access to wealth and resources, and are politically unstable. The term has its origins in the development of banana plantations by American corporations and their exploitation of land and workers in Central and South America beginning in the late 19th century. - Dictionary Brittanica.

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snapplebobapple 3y ago

I'm sorry guys, Eastern Canada has lost it's mind (and has been this way for some time) and keeps electing idiots....

TMWNN 3y ago
This is why there is a secession movement in Alberta with meaningful support, and significant support for it in Saskatchewan and BC. As Peter Zeihan points out, secession in Canada is legal. Those who claim that "US Democrats would be Conservatives in Canada" are completely wrong. Were Canada a part of the US in 2016, Trump would have won a majority of the vote in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and would have done very well in BC outside downtown Vancouver/Vancouver Island, Manitoba, and parts of the Greater Toronto Area and southern Ontario (probably not rural Ontario). In other words, the chunks of Canada that are the most similar to the chunks of the US that voted for Trump. The GTA parts I'm talking about are the ones that loved Rob Ford as mayor, and swung heavily for Doug Ford in 2018.
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  I don't really buy the meaningful support thing yet. I would say a small minority of vocal people that have zero chance of winning a secession referendum at this time. If the east keeps taking 20+ billion a year in taxes for ~5 billion in services provided while simultaneously blocking resource development and doing other obviously unjust things like including resource revenue in Alberta's transfer payment calculation and not including resource revenue from hydro in Quebec's then maybe in 20-30 years they will have a slim chance. I think they know this too because they are pushing for disaggregation of services from Ottawa right now and actually have a chance of that because the cost of doing that is minimal and it will make their ultimate goal of leaving much easier if we have provincial pensions, police force, tax collection, etc. already in place.
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    >I think they know this too because they are pushing for disaggregation of services from Ottawa right now and actually have a chance of that because the cost of doing that is minimal and it will make their ultimate goal of leaving much easier if we have provincial pensions, police force, tax collection, etc. already in place. Oh, sure, the meltdown on Reddit over the plans to establish Alberta's own pension is an indication of just how worried the opponents are. Since they can't deny Quebec's precedent here, they're freaking out over how it would destroy the CPP, while simultaneously avoiding the obvious implication that claiming such would reinforce Alberta's complaints about being drained to support the rest of the country. I haven't seen similar meltdowns about reestablishing APP but I probably just haven't looked hard enough. My larger point is that, as I said, secession is legal in Canada. People are ignorant of/in denial over the full ramifications of Re Secession. <https://np.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/tkg5gf/who_has_more_autonomy_canadian_provinces_american/i1s9jgh/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/tkg5gf/who_has_...>

olliej 3y ago

Is this going to result in less use of "AI" or less use of "AI" as a marketing term for "glorified statistical model"? I'm not particularly convinced by claims of "intelligence" but that's not the point: the article uses "artificial intelligence system" sounding like that's the text, but what happens if you just say "this is a multidimensional statistical model", there is no intelligence, it is simply an automatically generated model?

incomingpain 3y ago

To be clear, Canada is regulating speech online, not just AI and search. Also by Michael Geist not long ago: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/10/crtcregistrationruling/ https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/10/crtcregistrationruling/ Basically a service like Rumble, which is publicly traded and has HQ in Toronto must register with the Canadian government to be allowed to continue existing. All political podcasts have been ordered to register with the government. Lets not forget: https://www.international.gc.ca/global-affairs-affaires-mondiales/corporate-ministere/contact-contactez/media-accreditation-medias.aspx?lang=eng https://www.international.gc.ca/global-affairs-affaires-mond... To be a new journalist, you have to be accredited by the government. Naturally the government doesn't accredit their critics and bans them from going to things like the debates.

k12sosse 3y ago

Not much can be said about the business acumen of Canadian (Ontario) politicians. [0] 0: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/worst-deal-ever-the-407-is-worth-30-b-today-ontario-sold-it-for-31-b-in-1998-181642680.html https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/worst-deal-ever-the-407-is... https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/petro-canada https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/petro-cana... https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ontario-hydro-to-be-privatized https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ontario-hy...