The AI industry in Canada has been pushing to essentially ‘self-regulate’, and (at least in this layperson’s opinion) seems like the legislative method for giving them what they want.

What happened to the rule of law? This is undermining public transparency and the role of parliament in much the same way that Trump has neutered the US Congressional branch and centralized power in the admin. If you’re pissed off at Danielle Smith and Doug Ford, this is just as bad!

maybe someone made a NFT of it

/s

Avi is honestly really great IMO and it’s awesome to have a leadership candidate who understands media

A recent episode of Tech Won’t Save Us about cars made a nice point about this stuff:

if you build near transit and remove rules around minimum levels for parking spots, you can lower the cost of development significantly, since you either need less underground parking, or less land for parking lots.

Cars make housing less affordable!

I’ll give it a go, sure :)

If they still have the old seasons of Commons available, there’s some incredible work there by Arshy Mann (who now runs an outlet/podcast called The Hatchet which I really need to check out). The season called ‘Corruption’ is fantastic

yeah the last time I checked out one of their shows was maybe a couple years ago and I was pretty shocked at how bad it had gotten. I was a regular listener once upon a time, but no more.

Suddenly realising most of my podcast lineup is US-based - but here are a few Canadian standouts:

‘Tech Won’t Save Us’ is a fantastic tech-critical podcast;

‘Theory & Philosophy’ is David Guignion, from Montreal(?), doing excellent and accessible explanations of a wide range of thinkers;

‘The Breach Show’ is journalists Desmond Cole and Martin Lukacs talking about Canadian politics from a left perspective.

Edit: Oh, and Front Burner is a relatively listenable CBC politics podcast.

Just curious if you knew that CUPW decided to move to rotating strikes right now precisely so that people who rely on paper bills aren’t unfairly burdened. The union gets it. Maybe we should listen to them more.

I can’t remember where I heard it (maybe on a CBC panel?) but MPs can vote remotely now, like on their phone or whatever. I wasn’t aware of this before, but it does mean that an abstention can no longer be handwaved away.

Minority governments require negotiation. Every leader met w/ Carney pre-budget; none got anything they asked for. If Carney wanted to “get things done”, then why is he not working with the other elected members of parliament to do so?

Edit: also recent polling doesn’t look that amazing for the Liberals or Carney. The NDP could regain official party status in a new election, and disapproval of Carney and the Liberals has been rising. A majority is still within reach, but it’s not a foregone conclusion IMO.

My best guess at this point is that any potential floor-crosser is currently trying to extract as much federal spending for their riding as they can. Carney will be happy to oblige, of course; he just wants power.

My secret hope is that a couple of the Liberals that still care about climate and social programs (Gould? Erskine-Smith?) will leave the party, but I don’t think any of them have real backbone. Happy to be surprised though.

Some heavy hitters in the list of signatories: Amnesty International, CCPA, Ana Brandusescu, Ron Deibert, Mél Hogan, Paris Marx, Robert Gehl (these are just a few of the names I recognise of people whose work I admire).

Looks like it’s a billion dollars for AI, and they’re scrapping the greenwashing rules that might have made it expensive to lie about the impact of data centres :(

Most of these things would be easily solved by postal banking!

I cannot see any possible justification for doing this. Just shameful.

Um, I’m not ignoring it, it’s simply that the “overall government approach” has been clearly spelled out by the Minister of AI, who has said he will not “over-index on regulation”.

That’s why we haven’t had consultations on any other aspect of AI, only how we can help the industry make money.

As for your question about the grounding of my “belief” about AI - what kind of answer were you expecting, or would you not have acted dismissively toward?

If Canada had a national strategy group on achieving leadership in the arts, would you say 90% of members must be from outside the arts

First off, I would love to see that happen. But this question misses the point. Would “leadership in the arts” have a massive impact on tech policy, in the way that “leadership on AI” is likely to impact the arts?

They have an objective to provide an industrial strategy document.

Right, this is the problem - nowhere, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, are they asking “should we do this”, and instead they’re only asking “how can we do this”. If the discussion of “should” is off the table, then there is no point in me continuing this conversation here.

You didn’t like the questions in the survey? They provided an email address to receive open-ended responses

The entire survey was open-ended responses - well, other than a (pretty generous) character limit on the input fields.

if Canadians don’t like the strategic guidance produced by any of these groups, they can pressure their representatives to shape the actual legislation around them.

There has been loads of pushback. I have yet to see this government budge.

Out of curiosity, what is the actual grounding of your beliefs about AI and AI policy?

What is the “grounding” of any belief about anything? That’s a much more interesting question, one that AI boosters would do well to think more deeply about.

The text part of the original post was a quote from the article

I can see three posts saying “citation?” including the one above.

But I’m not sure exactly what you are asking to see a citation for