Reframing Canada’s global AI leadership: a realistic path to the top

All signs point to artificial intelligence (AI) being key to the new economy and perhaps even the 21st century as a whole. But in the world of policy, AI is an abused term that is subject to misinterpretation and political posturing, not to mention real confusion. In Canada, many decision-makers and commentators seem to agree that the country should strive for global leadership in AI, but relatively few possess much certainty about what that means or what achieving this goal might look like in practice. First, a dose of hard realism: Canada is decidedly not a first-place contender in the race for global AI leadership. In measures such as the volume of research publications produced, market size, activity in mergers and acquisitions, gross public research funding, number of people employed in the field, and so on, Canada’s AI-related work is dwarfed by that of the United States and China. We can be compared with mid-sized global players at best. And should we really be surprised to find that the top contenders in AI are the two global superpowers? Certainly, Canada has many competitive advantages, niches, and key strengths in AI for which we are well recognized globally and this deserves celebration. Yet, it’s also important to recognize that AI contains an extremely wide field of activity, and narrow excellence in particular parts of the field is not tantamount to comprehensive global leadership. Furthermore, a full-fledged pursuit of comprehensive global AI leadership would risk bringing Canada into similar development traps as have plagued our innovation policy in the past. Rather, Canada’s ambition for global AI leadership should be redirected into avenues that can realistically bear fruit and that will successfully play to our competitive advantages. Parcelling off the pursuit of AI leadership into more defined sub-categories is a good step. The Scale AI initiative selected by the superclusters program comes to mind, an undertaking that seeks to cultivate incontestable Canadian leadership in AI-backed supply-chain management. But what about bringing AI to the state itself? Few would deny that government operations have some catching up to do when it comes to technology, but why not take things a step further and actively pursue public administration leadership in this emerging technology area? Successfully bringing AI into government is a process that will leverage Canada’s existing advantages (namely an abundance of publicly funded research and skilled graduates) while improving government efficiency and quality of service delivery, all while helping to develop desperately needed in-house technical expertise in AI. Yes, cultivating an AI-enhanced government will entail taking risks, facing failures, and, perhaps hardest of all, committing to spend political capital to address public misconceptions. But the potential benefits of government AI are too high to ignore, as is the risk of inaction too dire. Indeed, the most terrifying situation on the horizon may well be a society run amok with sloppy corporate AI that nobody agreed to, and a federal government that is powerless to address it in any intelligent way due to a systematic lack of technical expertise. I suspect that the debate whether to embrace, delay, or deny government AI will eventually be revealed as meaningless. Global leadership in government AI is also a goal that is downright achievable for Canada. Third-party rankings have given Canada a favourable outlook in terms of government preparedness for AI. There are legions of motivated public servants who have made it their mission to intrapreneur with government AI, catalyzed to action by the looming deadlines of Blueprint 2020, the federal public service renewal plan. By contrast, the United States and many other of our peer countries face political turmoil and hand-to-mouth policy-making due to unstable conditions. This is hardly an environment conducive to public service reform. China may not face comparable turmoil, but as a secretive and non-democratic country, China also lacks capacity for the openness and co-creative processes that leverage the full potential of AI. The best way to earn Canada global leadership in AI is perhaps as simple to describe as it is difficult to implement: incremental action in every nook and cranny of the public administration, and targeted investments in niche applications that may never result in a political “announceable.” This means AI pilot programs, experimental systems, new hires (and hiring arrangements), and a tolerance for storming head-first into the unknown. This will not be easy and the benefits will take a long to time be realized. Whoever forms government in 2019 will have to rise above the pull of NIMTOism (not in my term of office) if we are to seriously pursue AI leadership. Canada has the potential for global AI leadership but it requires commitment to tackling hard problems related to policy, governance, and implementation strategies with little hope of public congratulations. Mark Robbins is a senior researcher with the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance. The Hill Times

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Reframing Canada’s global AI leadership: a realistic path to the top

Canada’s ambition should be redirected into avenues that can likely bear fruit and that will successfully play to our competitive advantages. AI-enhanced government is one bright spot.

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