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Al Vigier: Canada's AI strategy shouldn't include secret Palantir bills
- ClearwayLaw 4mo agoInstead, buy domestic product, and out in the open.
- autoexec 4mo agoBetter yet, build a domestic product for government use and tightly regulate and oversee it so that you can be sure it's being used lawfully, only when needed for government use, and only when necessary. Democratic nations have power over their government but not over corporations. I know which one I'd rather have ruling over me and spying on my every move.
- Exoristos 4mo ago> ... build a domestic product for government use and tightly regulate and oversee it ... Government to tightly regulate and oversee itself, I perceive. > Democratic nations have power over their government but not over corporations. Democratic governments and corporations have been around about as many centuries, and both have long ago perfected techniques to make sure the people have no direct power over either of them, often in tandem. That said, it seems remarkable that you're less anxious about the partner in this age-old dance that has the warplanes and myriads of armed enforcers.
- autoexec 4mo agoIn my country more people are killed by corporations than by their government's "warplanes and myriads of armed enforcers". Corporations have literally poisoned you and your entire family already. They've contaminated every living creature on earth and every source of water. Even the rain that falls is no longer safe to drink. (https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals.html https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals...) No one has spent even one day in jail for it. You can't vote them out of power.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- altmanaltman 4mo agoI mean no public strategy should include secret bills, Palantir or no Palantir. If you're idealogically opposed to Palantir, how will a home-grown Palantir help? It would likely do the same things Palantir does but with a Canadian Alex Karp
- gpm 4mo agoWell there's a clear difference between a creepy company spying on you and a creepy company closely aligned with a government that has threatened to annex you spying on you. Neither are great, but one is worse.
- dreambuffer 4mo agoThere likely isn't a Canadian Alex Karp. Karp is a unique byproduct of American culture. The specific brand of arrogance, hunger for war, and callous disregard for human life, all in service of a right wing ideological project, is simply not as present in Canada because Canada is a middle power with more liberal values who prefer diplomacy over war.
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoI appreciate that you think so highly of Canada, but no. There are still plenty of people that fit that description born in Canada. I think the main thing is they all move to California or New York as soon as they can, because they can't achieve their sociopath ambitions as easily here.
- somenameforme 4mo agoI think you can't really measure a country's approach to war unless that country is already quite powerful. This is the reason that it's said that power corrupts. It's easy to have good values when it's difficult to have bad values, or there is minimal benefit to such. But give a man (or country) tremendous power, and suddenly having bad values can be immensely rewarding on short to medium time scales.
- constantius 4mo agoHe fills a niche, particularly successfully ,but the required substrate exists in every society. In societies that superficially reward other qualities, these people mold themselves to fill other niches that provide power: politics, tech, press. When the niche appears in Canada, or Germany, or the UK, these people will come out of the woodworks wearing whatever face they need to at the time. Granted, America's been leading on encouraging the worse angels of our nature for the last, what, 70 years? But these personalities exist everywhere.
- userbinator 4mo agoWhat a title. I misread and thought an "AI Vigier" was an official tasked with being vigilant about AI.
- jschrf 4mo agoCanada shouldn't include Palantir at all.
- gatvol 4mo agoWhy not?
- free_bip 4mo agoIt's pretty obvious this comment didn't come from a Canadian. Because if it was, you'd know that Palantir is elbow-deep in the Trump administration, the same one that has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada. That is not a threat to be taken lightly, and the Canadian public agrees, which is why the trump-opposing Liberal party is currently enjoying a parliamentary majority. A more relevant question would be "Why would anyone with Canada's interests in mind even consider Palantir in the first place?"
- thaumasiotes 4mo ago> Palantir is elbow-deep in the Trump administration, the same one that has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada. That is not a threat to be taken lightly, and the Canadian public agrees Are they making any preparations for war, at all, that they weren't also doing in 2021?
- jmye 4mo ago[flagged]
- thaumasiotes 4mo agoAssuming the answer is "no", that is sufficient to demonstrate that the Canadian public sees the threat as one to be taken lightly, and indeed one to which the most appropriate reaction is to ignore it.
- 4mo ago
- maxdo 4mo agoCanada and domestic product simply not possible The only two countries who can run domestic products of this kind are USA and China . The rest is just gimmick or a lie.
- bigyabai 4mo agoPalantir's software stack is not really that complex, and their FDE workforce is famously... undereducated. Canada should be able to pull it off, there's much to improve on.
- ihsw 4mo agoYou overestimate the willingness of Canadian software engineer employers to pay anything beyond peanuts. Any competent developer already immediately flees to the US to triple their take-home pay at first chance and Canadian employers are fully aware of this.
- mitthrowaway2 4mo agoI know lots of competent developers in Canada. Some better than any I have yet met in the Bay area. They know they could triple their income by moving to the US, but they have other attachments, priorities, and concerns. Lots do move to the US too, but it's a filter for ambition, not competence. Don't confuse the two.
- tamimio 4mo agoThey didn’t pay well before the AI hype, now software developers are seen far worse. The other day I was looking at embedded/robotics engineers jobs in canada, the salaries are CAD$60k to CAD$90k (far less than USD for who doesn’t know), and the job description I swear is enough to send rockets to the space, what an absolute joke. Meanwhile in the US they are paid $250k USD, with defined scope (say only vision or autonomy). Canada is a based on service economy, nursing or plumbing or similar will make better than staff software engineers, hell, a heavy equipment operator who moves few joysticks and listens to music all day make CAD$115k and unionized too.. and the delusionals think that will replace US decades of investment in tech industry while dancing to “elbows up!” in a festival. The only way is Canada joining the EU in making their own tech, but even then, this will take at least a decade to materialize, if any, don’t forget all infrastructure hardware is still US, hp/dell/nvidia/etc plus decades of software and OSes, so yeah.
- tamimio 4mo agoThe sovereign initiative in Canada is laughable, most if not all critical infrastructure are 100% relying on US cloud products, from the usuals like MS and google all the way to cybersecurity and other products, and we are not even talking about supply chains and the likes. So practically speaking, the US can in a click, turn off Canada’s grid and banking, in minutes without a single bullet, the country will collapse. That’s why whenever I see all that buzz words of “sovereign xyz” I know it’s a just a way to funnel tax money back to some companies or programs, without having so much questions about it.
- Waterluvian 4mo agoStep by step we need to de-Americanize, for sure. Can’t just happen overnight.
- tamimio 4mo agoThere’re no steps taken, when I brought it to different managers in both utilities and banking, they laughed and some even rolled their eyes, because everything (and I mean everything from operations to hr to all) is built on top of these products, no way to rebuild the multi billions company from scratch and train the employees on a whole new systems only to find out they are not reliable or at least not how they used to do their work. For example in some power utility companies, to install few auxiliary sensors to monitor xyz only in a pilot project is a 3 years work.. upgrading old 3G modems is done in stages over years just not to interrupt the operations, and all of these are terminal devices, not core or servers where a tiny mistake in that foundation migration will send the city into dark ages.
- righthand 4mo agoYou can throw a rock and hit another company (for example, HR/Payroll companies), these aren't exactly industry secrets that can’t be swapped out. Half of the IT depts current existence is replacing systems software just because “hip new thing”.
- jmyeet 4mo agoI don't think there's a government in the world, including the US, that should allow Palantir anywhere near their data or systems. I consider Palantir a national security threat. I also feel this way about McKinsey (and Bain, BCG, etc). I also think any form of platform AI usage to be a national security threat in the absence of stringent controls over that data and the platform. At some point I think governments and companies will wake up to this and demand local LLMs or, in the very least, a cloud platform within their jurisdiction, ownership and control. The 1980s and 1990s ushered in this idea of "small government", privatization and public-private partnerships that I think was a huge mistake with catastrophic consequences. It's simply letting the foxes into the hen house. It leads to regulatory capture, a revolving door and a massive government-to-private wealth transfer. What's funny is that a lot of this stems from a now throughly debunked idea of the "tragedy of the commons" [1]. [1]: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/03/02/privatization-not-the-answer-for-saving-the-commons https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/03...
- bamei8ai 4mo ago[dead]
- tomComb 4mo agoI don’t know the specifics of this case, but in Canada, calls like this (all wrapped up in the flag), usually come from Canadian companies hoping for some sort of sole sourced contract that they have no business getting. So so perhaps we should be excluding American companies at this time, but in the name of competition and openness, we should allow bids from our real allies, such as the Europeans or the Asians.
- soupbowl 4mo agoExcluding China, I hope.
- singpolyma3 4mo agoWhy?
- soupbowl 4mo agoBecause they are a communist country aligned with Russia.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Georgelemental 4mo agoChina is more capitalist than the USA these days
- soupbowl 4mo agoYes, The Communist Party of China does indeed do some capitalistic things as well as communist things.
- protocolture 4mo agoChina is the most sensible current superpower. They are barely communist at all since Deng and have a better recent track record in terms of maintaining global trade. And at least in recent years they are probably the least worst super power in terms of imprisoning minorities. Oh and Premier Xi lives under your bed.
- thesmtsolver2 4mo agoCanada and Europe call for banning American companies in their the name of sovereignty: upvoted and praised as necessary America tries that for valid reasons (unfair subsidies, human or labor rights violations, BYD): get called fascist or stupid
- protocolture 4mo agoCanada and Europe call for banning American companies in their the name of America Threatening to go apeshit and do stupid stuff: upvoted and praised as necessary. America tries that for stupid xenophobic reasons, gets called stupid or xenophobic.
- brookst 4mo agoYes, intent matters. Call the police on the crack house next door, neighbors celebrate you. Call the police to harass the Black people door, neighbors shun you. This shouldn’t be surprising.
- freakynit 4mo agoPalantir is giving me "Samaritan" vibes from the show: "Person of Interest". For the ones who haven't watched this amazing show, here is a small Google AI summary: Samaritan is the primary antagonist of the later seasons of the sci-fi series Person of Interest. It is a fictional, totalitarian artificial superintelligence created by Arthur Claypool. Unlike its counterpart, the Machine, Samaritan has no moral constraints, viewing human free will as a flaw requiring aggressive control and mass surveillance
- nickdothutton 4mo agoI don't think the Canadian government is dropping a big contract on a company that is 24 months old vs one 24 years old, more or less.
- another_twist 4mo agoWtf does Palantir have to do with AI. Nobody at Palantir can train an LLM from scratch or even fine tune.
- crimsoneer 4mo agoThe idea we're going to stop people like special forces and intelligence buying the software they want to run on on prem, air gapped stacks that they control in the name of sovereignty is silly.