I’m continuing to gather data around the state of play relative to Canada’s pending AI bill, AIDA or Bill C-27. One promising thing I identified is that here is a cross-party caucus for Emerging Technology that has been convened, and I read somewhere is speaking with different expert witness groups every couple weeks over the summer parliamentary recess. I guess that’s good news, but when I see this kind of thinking, it worries me:

“Recommendations should be informed by industry and academics who have a really good understanding, and that can be done in a very short period of time,” Ms. Rempel Garner said.

Rempel Garner seems to be one of the MPs involved with the Emerging Technology caucus, and I’ve seen a number of quotes from her on the topic of AI in a few different sources now, and she seems the right amount of worried.

For me though, what I’ve seen is that asking industry and asking academics and stopping there is just not completing the job.

Why? Because industry has an extremely strong vested interest in presenting the technology in an ideal light. And academics by and large are not power users of these kinds of technologies. They are used to theory and critique, but it’s less informed by actual practical use. So, if you’re only asking academics, and industry, then the only people who will be speaking from a place of being informed about how the products actually work, is industry, who is always going to sugarcoat and try to “garden” their environment in a way favorable to their continuation.

It worries me then that policymakers ask only those two groups, both of whose views are extremely skewed. And for something like this, it seems more rare they would actually ask *users* of the technology…

But that’s precisely why I emailed everyone I could find on this caucus the AI TOS. I’ve seen Sen. Colin Deacon talk about using needing to be more “agile” – well, here it is & written as Agile user stories to boot. Call me.

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