Michael McGrath, the EU commissioner for democracy, justice, the rule of law and consumer protection, is visiting Canada as the Liberal government pursues an AI policy that puts less emphasis on regulation and more on adoption.
Speaking at a conference in Montreal Thursday, he outlined upcoming legislation that will tackle issues such as addictive design, unfair personalization and holding influencers accountable.
Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon has cited the U.S.’s anti-regulation stance as a reason to go easy on regulatory efforts, saying Canada would be wasting its time by going it alone.
Yes, let’s do it more like the US instead of the EU. 🤦
Boy if the Libs hitch our wagon to the AI bubble … and then it pops…
It’s going to pop soon, I hope.
I’m afraid it’ll take that for us to unhitch and the sooner, the less deep in the shit we’d be. The US look already deep enough for a major meltdown. We might scrape by with a fleshwound.
I mean, am I wrong that whatever we do here is basically irrelevant? It’s like taxes on the ultra-rich. Whoever has the least regulation, is where they’ll setup shop.
The US is already where most of the biggest tech companies in the world are, besides China, and they’re pretty hard-committed to regulating “absolutely nothing”, so it’s not like anyone was running to develop major AI competition in Canada regardless.
My understanding is that so long as we’re short of offering huge tax breaks and incentives to AI companies, or blocking access to these tools, anything the government really does is just noise making and political posturing. I wouldn’t really care as an EU official either.
As a European, I find this a ‘non-news’. The EU’s democracy commissioner just said that the EU won’t “lecture” other countries such as Canada, which is a just and fair statement imo as it is on Canada (and other countries) to find its way. I do hope that Ottawa will join the EU and push ahead on regulating tech platforms and artificial intelligence, but the decision is up on Canada, of course.
