AI minister says focus is more on economic benefits, less on regulation

Canada’s new minister of artificial intelligence said Tuesday he’ll put less emphasis on AI regulation and more on finding ways to harness the technology’s economic benefits.

In his first speech since becoming Canada’s first-ever AI minister, Evan Solomon said Canada will move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” to make sure the economy benefits from AI.

His regulatory focus will be on data protection and privacy, he told the audience at an event in Ottawa Tuesday morning organized by the think tank Canada 2020.

Solomon said regulation isn’t about finding “a saddle to throw on the bucking bronco called AI innovation. That’s hard. But it is to make sure that the horse doesn’t kick people in the face. And we need to protect people’s data and their privacy.”

The previous government introduced a privacy and AI regulation bill that targeted high-impact AI systems. It did not become law before the election was called.

That bill is “not gone, but we have to re-examine in this new environment where we’re going to be on that,” Solomon said.

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He said constraints on AI have not worked at the international level.

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“It’s really hard. There’s lots of leakages,” he said. “The United States and China have no desire to buy into any constraint or regulation.”

That doesn’t mean regulation won’t exist, he said, but it will have to be assembled in steps.

Canada won’t go it alone, Solomon added, because it’s a “waste of time.”

Getting AI regulation right is critical to Canada’s “economic destiny,” he said.

Soloman said that includes government investments in data centres and research, protecting Canadian intellectual property “and, critically, cranking up our commercialization.”

Solomon outlined four priorities for his ministry — scaling up Canada’s AI industry, driving adoption and ensuring Canadians have trust in and sovereignty over the technology.

He said that includes supporting Canadian AI companies like Cohere, which he said “means using government as essentially an industrial policy to champion our champions.”

While big companies are leading in using AI, small and medium enterprises are not, and the government needs to encourage them, Solomon said.

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