The AI ministry is a necessity imo. Lemmy often gets caught up in shitting on OpenAI and other AI stuff (which is generally justified imo).
However, the potential of this tech to become a nightmare if not implemented correctly is huge. The worst case (depends how you look at it) scenario of this tech is mass unemployment.
In other words, good or bad, AI has the potential to massively change how the economy works, and thus change how our lives look like. If this does indeed happen, and we are not prepared to handle the worst case scenario, then that would be bad.
I certainly agree that it needs government oversight and attention. A ministry, though…I’m not convinced, and inclined to think the worst when “we’ll use AI to fix the government” was a consistent taking point during the campaign.
But it was rightly pointed out that AI is only part of the name. I’d just as soon it not be there, but we’ll see what happens.
Former journalist Evan Solomon takes on a newly created role as minister of artificial intelligence.
Ugh.
This isn’t inherently an issue. I mean, it’s the Liberals, so it probably is, but having a minister whose role is to actually sit down and critically learn about the topic, and report back to cabinet would be great.
It’ll probably be a role focused on figuring out which specific confidence game to invest in, but it could be so much better than that.
I don’t know if there’s any scenario where I think it’s worthy of its own ministry.
Depends on what the goal ends up being. If they try to create (and actuallyenforce) some regulations around AI, I could see that being an endeavor that would occupy a full time position.
Carney has spoken a lot about using AI to lower the operating costs of government. I don’t think the minister is there strictly to regulate.
Yep, the goal of this ministry will be to replace public servants.
in other words, Canada’s version of DOGE?
Nah DOGE has never been about efficiency, it’s just plain old cutting services by making institutions dysfunctional.
Not that the results of replacing public servants with AI with give wildly different results, but at least it’s going to be ridiculously slow and expensive so it’s easier to rollback
Well to be fair it’s:
Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation; and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario
It’s still embarrassing to throw AI in there.
Really what we need is a Minister of (dis)Information to stop foreign tech companies from fucking us over so much.
Yeah, it should be the Ministry of Digital Innovation and Emerging Technology or something. A whole ministry just for AI feels like a misstep via an unnecessarily narrow focus.
What do you mean? I’m sure the minister of artificial intelligence will do a fine job, working closely with the minister of cryptocurrency and the minister of cloud experiences to engage transformative leverage in a way that will enhance governance innovation.
