Canada plans to regulate search and social media use of AI
michaelgeist.ca
michaelgeist.ca
Assuming all of Canada has internet access, Canada makes up less than 1% of people with internet. I wonder if companies will respond by simply blocking Canadians, as it would be cheaper, and encourage them to repeal this. Not that I want that at all, but it seems like a possibility.
What is the cost of making a Canadian team to tune results to Canada's laws? Is that less than possible earnings? Are all people equally valuable to Google or are people in wealthy nations worth proportionally more.
What if other countries follow suit?
I am talking about things from big providers like cloud flare, and some for pay options like private relay.
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Whem. Either I'm misunderstanding something (I've only quickly skimmed through the bill, can't say I understood any much), or the title is clickbait-ish, and this is:
1) Not about any AI at all (and here I was hoping to see a legal definition of an "AI", haha). The definition of "automated decision system" seem to cover just about anything from some fancy ML stuff to your basic fortune(6) program. Basically, if a machine rather than a human (or something else that is not a machine) had picked something, then it's an "automated decision system". At the very least, I have not found any sophistication requirements (but I could've missed it).
2) Only seem to apply when it's about use of personally identifying information. If I got it right, then if you track someone and a machine makes a "decision about the individual that could have a significant impact on them", then it applies. Otherwise, not so much. Again, I could be wrong, missing something or not really understanding what I've just read.
I haven't really understood how this applies to moderation. I suspect it's about when moderation system is building an user profile and feeding it to an automatic decision system, but that'd be weird (because every single mailhost with an anti-spam system would be affected).
Search engines, on the other hand? If I got it right, only those that do "personalized results" are affected.
So, some LLM processing search hits for a query and making a decision on what's good result and what's a spam is seemingly not covered. Tracking cookies seem to be the core component of this thing, not AI.
So like between this and their online harms bill they are proposing not to mention their massive screw up with their other tech bills, is CA just trying to cut the Internet out of the lives of their citizens? Seriously what is going on there? Anyone in CA want to comment?
We also have extremely high grocery prices, to the point where a lot of people have started cross-border shopping for groceries in the U.S.
Anyway, those are the big issues Canadians worry about right now. These sorts of tech laws, as bad as they may be, aren’t even on the radar. People are just waiting for the next election so we can vote for some new people, who will in time cause other problems.
Maybe a pedantic point, but it's HN after all:
Canada has always been sparsely populated but for a narrow band along the Canada/US border. This is due to a number of factors, not least of which is the climate of most of that area.
Now, certainly the unaffordability crisis is arguably largly due to policy choices of this and previous gov'ts, but Canada's land mass is not really a huge part of this equation.
Here in Canada though? It’s absurd how much space we have and yet we can’t get anything done. This emphasizes the degree of government dysfunction, which was my original point.
I heard Canadian government is also working on climate change, so they are apparently trying to make more land amenable to housing. (Although it's not clear whether the land gain won't be countered by sea level rise.)
Taking away party from the debate, and we see the similiarties in our situations. The world is run by corperations who have been yeilding value from the supply chain over the last 40years, creating record profits, concentrating record power, printing record money. THIS IS THE RESULT THAT. No single government of today is to blame, its the system of picking sides that creates collatoral for polticans to barter with coperations for things like censorship, monopolistic access to markets via in/action of laws, etc etc.
The federal government essentially took all of the most onerous and costly regulations from pharmaceuticals, agriculture, tobacco, and alcohol production and sales and applied them to cannabis. Meanwhile law enforcement efforts to curb black market cannabis production and sales basically ceased.
Several studies have shown that THC and CBD labeling are nearly always made up when it comes to black market retail and online unregulated dispensaries. Nearly all of the products also contain levels of bacteria, mold, toxins, pesticides, fungicides, and heavy metals that far exceed what legal producers are required to pay expensive analytical chemistry labs to test for before sales. Most of these things wont cause immediate symptoms, but (for example) Tomato fungicides aren't meant to be soaked into flowers then heated and inhaled and repeated exposure will almost certainly cause unattributed health issues down the line.
On top of all of this, the federal government and provinces decided to apply sales, excise taxes, and other fees right out the gate. Then provinces decided to only sell/distribute through crown corporations where the mandatory markup may as well be considered another tax.
All in all, when you buy a gram of cannabis in Canada for $6-10, 80-90% of that is tax. The cost of production, regulatory compliance, and a profit margin somehow need to come from the other 10-20%.
Meanwhile the black market can sell tainted mislabeled products for as low as it takes to eat legal market share, with no overhead or taxes to worry about. With free delivery!
Legalization has been a success in the sense that nobody is getting in trouble for possession anymore. Nearly everything else has been a disaster behind the scenes.
Disclaimer: Yes, LPs overbuilt and overestimated demand. There was mismanagement by pubcos. I was there.
This only serves to further convince myself (and likely others) to pay the high prices. I don't need to get high, and I'm much more likely to pay for safety - just like in nearly every other product on the market that is marked up due to safety regulations. So given the choice, I'll cut back before I go with the unregulated.
I don't think I'm alone in this either, considering Canadians seem to have an international reputation (at least among some Americans) for being, among other things, risk-averse.
The news restrictions are because that's how the rest of the world will think Canada is great so we can import their slaves (citizens).
Legalized marijuana gets people excited, that's how sad it is.
It's easy to point the finger at a cohort and label them, stupid in this case. It is constructive to identify a trend and suggest something to improve the current state.
Sure, you might argue that the Liberal party hasn’t been defeated in an election so they’re not technically a lame duck government yet. But my point is that they see the writing on the wall and they’re behaving like one. This is what I think explains the recent anti-tech laws. They’re doing their old media friends “a solid” before they leave office.
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-poilievre-housing-e...
Our media landscape is controlled by an oligopoly that has a stronghold on our federal politicians and web neutrality threatens that oligopoly.
Rogers, Telus, and Bell control practically all Canadian mobile/internet/tv/radio.
The bodies that are supposed to regulate them are run by former execs of these companies, and our competition bureau seems to think that anything short of one of them having 100% market share means they don’t need to actually intervene in any mergers or acquisitions.
Politicians obviously don’t want to upset three of the most powerful, well poised to influence public perception companies in Canada… which may as well be considered a single entity with respect to them actually competing at all. And so they basically all lobby for the same insane, protectionist, anti-competition, anti-consumer laws and regulations, and nearly always get their way.
In recent years this means prodding the government to introduce absurd regulations on the internet.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
There's also the problem of multi-draft convergence. They don't want to "out" a proposal being thought out in concert with another agency, or economy. In effect the document has to remain sealed until the most important one decides it's time to declare. So, across the life of the drafting there are huge reserved chunks. This happened in the TPP docs, which had sealed sections. They enraged local IT people in Australia because of the strong likelihood of the US trying to wedge the Australian 'right to repair' laws and their effect on DRM/IPR locks.
I have very briefly seen 'behind the curtain' of this kind of thing (a ministerial communique for a meeting) and people take the secrecy seriously, because you won't be invited back to draw up the next one, if you blab about this one. It doesn't have to reflect anything particularly special. I think it's likely the mystique is maintained for it's own sake: Vanity.
This kind of reminds me of the whole DeCSS thing. Everyone ripped their DVDs. Several years too late, it was declared "illegal". Someone golfed it down to a t-shirt. People continued removing the digital restrictions from their media. Physical media is now dead as an industry, and literally nobody minds. Everyone is happier and the content creators make more money than ever before. AI feels like it's going down the same route. I have already seen the "generative AI in 40 lines of C", and those can easily be t-shirts. Whatever efforts are made to make AI illegal at this point are too little too late. The cat is out of the bag. Whatever you think is going to happen because of AI will probably happen. So it's probably time to find some cash to solve those problems, instead of paying expert witnesses to define what "is is".
No government in human history has ever succeeded in making math illegal. Canada is unlikely to be the first. (It is even more futile than making alcohol illegal, which still makes me laugh when I think about it. You leave sugar water out in air and it turns into alcohol. You can't solve that "problem" by signing a piece of paper that says a government says so. You are going to need more fungicide than humanity has the capability to produce. It is an unwinnable war. Fighting against AI is going to be like that.)
I think the hype about the downfall of humanity is probably overrated (a bold claim, because if I'm wrong you won't be around to make fun of me). The biggest impact will probably be things like banks denying loans to people for the wrong reasons. If that's what we're worried, make some laws that makes that illegal. It shouldn't matter what tools you use to get a result; whether you use AI or a bunch of employees sitting in a room with a pencil and paper to run an illegal business, the outcome is the same, the business has illegal practices and the government should step in.
The results you're fed are based on a profile of you, and how those results differ for people of different race, creed, economic background, etc. absolutely can become a human rights issue.
An extreme example of this might be: An indigenous user performs a search for how to get healthcare and the "AI" / "Algorithm" (whatever term you want) buries resources on much later pages of search results that are otherwise shown for caucasians. Replace "how to get healthcare" with "apply for a scholarship" or other similar concepts.
In practice I suspect nothing that awful is happening today but we do see all kinds of systems like this being only as good as the training data.
Basically a service like Rumble, which is publicly traded and has HQ in Toronto must register with the Canadian government to be allowed to continue existing.
All political podcasts have been ordered to register with the government.
Lets not forget: https://www.international.gc.ca/global-affairs-affaires-mond...
To be a new journalist, you have to be accredited by the government. Naturally the government doesn't accredit their critics and bans them from going to things like the debates.
I just wish our governments would leave tech alone.
Politicians don't give a damn about being right, but rather to continue being elected.
What guarantees that the decision-makers at big companies like OpenAI are actually "smart techies" or even technical people at all? Doesn't being an executive or board member or high level decision maker actually attract people with the "soft skills" you need to reach those lofty heights?
I see this assumption a lot - "politicians are all stupid/incompetent" and it's weird to see it taken on faith by some people (I don't get the feeling you're one of them)
Those are both pretty strong assertions so I assume you mean something else and I'm just not seeing it.
The candidate that is most capable of being elected is the one that either:
- Can garner the most votes
- Can prevent other candidates from getting votes
Nowhere in the above is technical competency a requirement to be elected. It may help, but its far down the list of "electable attributes".
I am active in my county and if you breath and can be nice for 1h we will give you a position somewhere.
The skills to get elected rely on being about to lie to people and lie to yourself as much as possible and be a narcissist at the same time, so all of these factors make it VERY unlikely that they correlate with actual competency.
Because our current world is perfect and change is bad.
Those who claim that "US Democrats would be Conservatives in Canada" are completely wrong. Were Canada a part of the US in 2016, Trump would have won a majority of the vote in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and would have done very well in BC outside downtown Vancouver/Vancouver Island, Manitoba, and parts of the Greater Toronto Area and southern Ontario (probably not rural Ontario). In other words, the chunks of Canada that are the most similar to the chunks of the US that voted for Trump. The GTA parts I'm talking about are the ones that loved Rob Ford as mayor, and swung heavily for Doug Ford in 2018.
I think they know this too because they are pushing for disaggregation of services from Ottawa right now and actually have a chance of that because the cost of doing that is minimal and it will make their ultimate goal of leaving much easier if we have provincial pensions, police force, tax collection, etc. already in place.
Oh, sure, the meltdown on Reddit over the plans to establish Alberta's own pension is an indication of just how worried the opponents are. Since they can't deny Quebec's precedent here, they're freaking out over how it would destroy the CPP, while simultaneously avoiding the obvious implication that claiming such would reinforce Alberta's complaints about being drained to support the rest of the country. I haven't seen similar meltdowns about reestablishing APP but I probably just haven't looked hard enough.
My larger point is that, as I said, secession is legal in Canada. People are ignorant of/in denial over the full ramifications of Re Secession. <https://np.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/tkg5gf/who_has_...>
0: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/worst-deal-ever-the-407-is...
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/petro-cana...
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ontario-hy...
I'm not particularly convinced by claims of "intelligence" but that's not the point: the article uses "artificial intelligence system" sounding like that's the text, but what happens if you just say "this is a multidimensional statistical model", there is no intelligence, it is simply an automatically generated model?
Inflation is through the roof
Suppression of the free press (podcast) are planned and to be set in motion
The leader is doing vacation with Canadian's taxes
There is a carbon taxes that affect the middle-class and poor family
Housing prices are sky rocketing
Buy healthy grocery has gotten really expensive
CERB was a joke and facade on the first place
Corporations are given lee-way with what they can do
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Please explain as to why it is not remotely true!!!
- Dictionary Brittanica.