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9 mo. ago

  • 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.

  • Taxes, then, are disinflationary, right? Which is why we need to tax the rich especially

  • Great ok so we at least agree that issuing currency is not the fiscal equivalent of drinking bleach, and that there are good and bad reasons to do it.

  • It's literally how we dealt with the first phase of the Covid pandemic. Was keeping millions of Canadians from being evicted a bad idea?

  • 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.

  • You're welcome to disagree - but everything I said is factual. If there's something you don't understand, I'm happy to explain - just ask.

  • The problem with the existence of billionaires is really the wealth inequality itself, not the number of dollars in their bank accounts.

    Inequality is what gives the ultra-wealthy their outsized influence in the political economy.

    Dollars are not scarce items; the government can issue currency essentially at will. Taxes aren't there to fund services. They exist to reduce inequality.

    So yes, tax the billionaires. And if they leave: we're better off that way too!

  • 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

  • Personally, I don't use AI and I don't use the self-checkout. Obviously there are plenty of other automations that have become part of the fabric of daily life, but none that are so disempowering and deskilling to the user as AI.

  • As I also alluded to in my edit, most of the "academics" are people developing AI, rather than analysing it from different perspectives.

    Philosophers of technology and/or science, academics in the humanities such as philosophers, or people who work in the theory of education, labour economists, civil rights groups and others working on understanding systemic oppression and bias, authors and musicians, to name a few of the types of folks who should be in the room when our government attempts to remake society in the tech-bro image.

    Edit: also, like, saying "only half of this team are part of the industry that this panel is supposed to create a regulatory framework for" is kinda wild to me. Especially given how disruptive folks like Carney & Solomon claim this tech is. You'd think we would want like 90% advocacy and civil society groups discussing the complete upheaval of our social systems rather than literally half the people being the dead-eyed freaks trying to make billions for themselves before the planet burns to a crisp

  • Was rhetorical, but sure OK, let's do this:

    • one person (the CEO!) from Cohere;
    • two people from Creative Destruction Labs;
    • one person (the CEO!) from CoLab software;
    • a VP from Moov.AI;
    • the chair of Build Canada, which is basically advocating for a Canadian version of DOGE policy;
    • executive chair of Coveo, a SaaS firm;
    • a partner from VC firm Inovia Capital;
    • president of the Council of Canadian Innovators, basically an industry lobbyist;
    • someone from RBC;
    • CTO of VDURA, a US software company;
    • CEO of Aptum, a US-owned service provider to data centers;
    • CEO of Digital Moment, a "charity" that pushes tech into education systems;
    • CEO of samdesk, an AI-powered surveillance company.

    Edit: not to mention that pretty much every academic on there has a vested interest in getting public funding for their work.

  • Fair enough, I guess I missed the lone labour rep in between all the folks from Cohere.

  • I don't see a single representative there from the arts community, the labour movement ... almost entirely industry folks.

    Last I heard, there were 7500+ responses to the AI consultation survey - I filled it out, but almost every one of the roughly two dozen long-form questions was geared toward industry, and the bulk of my responses began with questioning the premise of what was being asked. None of this has been about fact-finding, it's about clearing a path to pouring billions of public dollars into an industry whose most apparent use case is surveillance.