My apologies, that I don't have time yet to read your article as I am working hard at 72 making carbon untaxed firewood for heating. I can take a break to respond to the headline. The Canadians who are doing what they are supposed to be doing are all working hard. Some of the remainder are being overly coddled, enabling their "busy" work - read free drugs, activism, misspent public funds and political capital. Therein lies much of the issue. Always follow the money trail.
I think the decrease in output is less related to adoption of AI and more related to the coddling that has occurred as the far left beliefs have swept through society. People are arguing on facebook about universal basic income because they believe that there isn't enough work to go around, and that it would somehow solve all their financial woes, rather than seeking a job, furthering their training, and working hard. I know this may sound harsh, but I've lived in poverty and relied on government assistance for many of my early adult years. And yet - I was able to move myself out of that position through hard work and determination, despite disability significant enough to have led to me collecting CPP Disability for many years. Education is power. Motivation and believing that you can change your world (internal locus of control) is power.
Could AI have benefits? Sure, maybe. But will those benefits appear in the absence of individuals who are motivated to make their own decisions and control their own lives through hard work? No. I had a friend many years ago, chronically unemployed, because she wasn't willing to work for the wage I was working at. She chose to not work, and really not even look for work, because nobody would pay her enough.
When people think they're "too good" to do certain types of work, and that spreads through society, THAT is what reduces GDP and leads to many unfilled jobs. Yes, inflation is a problem. Unemployment, at the moment and for a few years now, has not been a problem of lack-of-jobs, rather it has been lack of people willing to take the jobs after the amount they were able to make through the government's covid payment program. SO many problems we are facing economically right now can be traced back to the covid money having been accessed with too much ease, by many who didn't qualify for it, and then all that extra money went into the economy and led to demand that far outpaced supply - leading to inflation and increasing the money supply at the same time as the government was running large deficits and decreasing the supply of loanable funds.
My work is using some AI in a limited capacity - it's actually very limited in what it can do well so it's not heavily used. BUT I don't think lack of AI is the economy's biggest problem. The lack of sufficient numbers of people who are willing to take responsibility for themselves and work hard is the larger problem. And that is one that will require a shift in societal values to address - AI won't be able to fix that. It starts with educators who don't undermine capitalism by promoting command economy ideas. and with legacy media who does a better job at providing context when reporting corporate earnings rather than just giving the accounting profit and making people feel that CEO's are sitting on billions of profit because of inflation. The average person doesn't understand how the economy works, or that there are economic costs to running a business that don't show up on a balance sheet - and these are important things.
Please watch the following video of an AI robot versus a human at ping pong. The immediate contest is will the human run out of energy leading to an error in concentration or execution or will the robot drain its battery or encounter a scenario that isn't currently within its algorithms? The fundamental contest is when will humans stop having fun playing ping pong against robots and only use them as training tools in preparation for human against human matches?
Thank you very much, Ice Skater40. AI is just another tool for us to use. Properly, I hope. With proper balancing laws, if my hope is too pollyannaish. Like any tool, some will use it to benefit mankind and some will use it to benefit themselves.
Canada has always produced cutting edge technology. The problem is that we don't nurture it all the way. We have this bad habit to either destroy it like the Avro Arrow, or export its practitioners to Silicon Valley, or tax the life out of it rather than reinvest the benefits in the virtuous cycle. This is the country of: the telephone, insulin, Archie the first internet search engine, the 56k modem, computerized Braille, the cesium atomic clock, Blackberry, sonar, the g-suit for high altitude pilots, the alkaline battery, egg cartons, incandescent light bulbs, plexiglass, cardiac pacemaker, television camera, paint roller, electric wheelchair, Canadarm, Candu Reactor ... and on and on. Our oil patch and mineral geologists have also contributed abundantly. Our banks were at the cutting edge of banking at the turn of the century. We have amazingly successful companies like Converge Technology Solutions, and its peers.
We are by no means of any negative imagination a developing country - just a poorly governed one.
There is much to be proud of here but which of these things was invented in the past 25 years? In terms of GDP per capita and average disposable income, how has Canadian society benefitted from innovation in the past 25 years?
We have exported a lot of talent to the USA in that time period that in all probability sends remittances back to Canada, if that counts. Companies in the Converge Technology Solutions, Lightspeed, Descartes, CAE, Enghouse, Open Text, Kinaxis, Shopify, ATS Corporation, Magna, Linamar, Martinrea, genre have made a lot of coding, technological and practical advances, if you are willing to count those as inventions. Their taxes go into the communal pot. Most of them are global companies making remittances to Canada. Our Canadian banks have made huge inroads into the US economy over that time frame. I would be hard pressed to label that negative to the Canadian pot.
Bombardier invented an airliner that is the toast of the industry; but nearly bankrupted itself doing it. Kudos for selling it off and concentrating on a market where its great in house skills could be put to more profitable use.
We have the talent. We have the imagination. We have the skills. We have world class companies. What remains for me to ask you is what is your 25 year time frame’s missing ingredient? Is it good government? Is it just the natural cycle of technology? Do we do too much on the international stage, to domestic detriment?
You already have a great wealth of information and I couldn't possibly know just how patriotic corporate Canada is. What I do I know is corporate Canada needs to be more comfortable taking risks within this country. We should never bailout a company that can't survive a little recession or defer prosecution to a mega corp for corruption in a country like Libya. But if the company spends 400 million on R & D and it backfires for some unforseen reason, they could probably use a bailout.
Corporations are no different than individual citizens. There’s always a bad apple in the bushel. SNC-Lavalin paid the price, has new management, spent years in purgatory, has a new name and is now contributing to the communal pot. We could debate forever what was the prudent punishment and the optimal outcome for Canada. If it was, and could have been, hit harder I suspect it would have broken up and I suspect some employees would have started a plethora of new Canadian engineering companies while others would have left Canada. Each case is unique. The merits become a bitter fight with reputational, monetary, societal and political risks. Is creative destruction a bonus or a hindrance? Tough call.
Ideally no company should be bailed out for any reason because a history of bailouts creates moral creep. There is a limit to idealism in the real world; so the best we can do is fight over the individual merits of each case and come to a sensible decision.
Ultimately it's about culture and in the Canadian culture we just spend too much working to counteract creative destruction. We have too many sacred cows to protect which drags us down.
I am yet to see an article on AI's impact that is NOT generic and broad. I am still looking for some specifics and realistic examples of implementation and how that can impact our lives on a day to day basis. Instead all I read (including this article) are narratives about AI, productivity and some generic discussion on the potential dangers. If there are people writing on AI where they go into specifics, examples, and details, I would love to know.
One aspect of AI technology I know I use everyday is having my email replies mostly written immediately, using my syntax and vocabulary. Sentences get completed with one keystroke. It's getting better weekly as well.
I do recall seeing something somewhere about preventing transfer-throughs to agents and AI being able to resolve simple inquiries for customers, reducing wait time for the customer and keeping the customer service staff available to handle more complex inquiries. AI is still growing and I think part of its limits right now are how people imagine it as being able to be used.
I have heard of people describing having chat GPT write an outline for something, and then they go through the outline or instructions and make the needed corrections. I've heard teacher's use it for lesson plans, programmers use it to help get a starting base for coding. It's at a level now where it's actually quite powerful and reasonably accurate for translating. (It can't replace a translator if you're in a formal setting - but it can mean the translator is doing a final proof read and swapping out a few words here and there rather than translating an entire work.)
How else might it be used? Maybe traffic control? Maybe as an additional layer of safety for dispatch (confirming an address is correctly entered, for instance, or instantly sending a dispatch to the best unit?)
These are just a few specific examples that I could see it potentially being useful for. I'm still cautious about it and worry about over-reliance and over-use, but it's useful for some things for sure.
My apologies, that I don't have time yet to read your article as I am working hard at 72 making carbon untaxed firewood for heating. I can take a break to respond to the headline. The Canadians who are doing what they are supposed to be doing are all working hard. Some of the remainder are being overly coddled, enabling their "busy" work - read free drugs, activism, misspent public funds and political capital. Therein lies much of the issue. Always follow the money trail.
I think the decrease in output is less related to adoption of AI and more related to the coddling that has occurred as the far left beliefs have swept through society. People are arguing on facebook about universal basic income because they believe that there isn't enough work to go around, and that it would somehow solve all their financial woes, rather than seeking a job, furthering their training, and working hard. I know this may sound harsh, but I've lived in poverty and relied on government assistance for many of my early adult years. And yet - I was able to move myself out of that position through hard work and determination, despite disability significant enough to have led to me collecting CPP Disability for many years. Education is power. Motivation and believing that you can change your world (internal locus of control) is power.
Could AI have benefits? Sure, maybe. But will those benefits appear in the absence of individuals who are motivated to make their own decisions and control their own lives through hard work? No. I had a friend many years ago, chronically unemployed, because she wasn't willing to work for the wage I was working at. She chose to not work, and really not even look for work, because nobody would pay her enough.
When people think they're "too good" to do certain types of work, and that spreads through society, THAT is what reduces GDP and leads to many unfilled jobs. Yes, inflation is a problem. Unemployment, at the moment and for a few years now, has not been a problem of lack-of-jobs, rather it has been lack of people willing to take the jobs after the amount they were able to make through the government's covid payment program. SO many problems we are facing economically right now can be traced back to the covid money having been accessed with too much ease, by many who didn't qualify for it, and then all that extra money went into the economy and led to demand that far outpaced supply - leading to inflation and increasing the money supply at the same time as the government was running large deficits and decreasing the supply of loanable funds.
My work is using some AI in a limited capacity - it's actually very limited in what it can do well so it's not heavily used. BUT I don't think lack of AI is the economy's biggest problem. The lack of sufficient numbers of people who are willing to take responsibility for themselves and work hard is the larger problem. And that is one that will require a shift in societal values to address - AI won't be able to fix that. It starts with educators who don't undermine capitalism by promoting command economy ideas. and with legacy media who does a better job at providing context when reporting corporate earnings rather than just giving the accounting profit and making people feel that CEO's are sitting on billions of profit because of inflation. The average person doesn't understand how the economy works, or that there are economic costs to running a business that don't show up on a balance sheet - and these are important things.
Please watch the following video of an AI robot versus a human at ping pong. The immediate contest is will the human run out of energy leading to an error in concentration or execution or will the robot drain its battery or encounter a scenario that isn't currently within its algorithms? The fundamental contest is when will humans stop having fun playing ping pong against robots and only use them as training tools in preparation for human against human matches?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nmHzvQr3kYE
Thank you very much, Ice Skater40. AI is just another tool for us to use. Properly, I hope. With proper balancing laws, if my hope is too pollyannaish. Like any tool, some will use it to benefit mankind and some will use it to benefit themselves.
Please see my reply to Wayne's post below.
Lagging behind on cutting edge technology is what developing countries do. I suppose that is what we are now.
Canada has always produced cutting edge technology. The problem is that we don't nurture it all the way. We have this bad habit to either destroy it like the Avro Arrow, or export its practitioners to Silicon Valley, or tax the life out of it rather than reinvest the benefits in the virtuous cycle. This is the country of: the telephone, insulin, Archie the first internet search engine, the 56k modem, computerized Braille, the cesium atomic clock, Blackberry, sonar, the g-suit for high altitude pilots, the alkaline battery, egg cartons, incandescent light bulbs, plexiglass, cardiac pacemaker, television camera, paint roller, electric wheelchair, Canadarm, Candu Reactor ... and on and on. Our oil patch and mineral geologists have also contributed abundantly. Our banks were at the cutting edge of banking at the turn of the century. We have amazingly successful companies like Converge Technology Solutions, and its peers.
We are by no means of any negative imagination a developing country - just a poorly governed one.
There is much to be proud of here but which of these things was invented in the past 25 years? In terms of GDP per capita and average disposable income, how has Canadian society benefitted from innovation in the past 25 years?
Touché Wayne. Innovation in the oil patch over the last 25 years has contributed significant sums into the communal pot; but if I must strictly limit wracking my memory, or Google’s, to 1998 and specific inventions, then I concede that portion of the debate to you.
We have exported a lot of talent to the USA in that time period that in all probability sends remittances back to Canada, if that counts. Companies in the Converge Technology Solutions, Lightspeed, Descartes, CAE, Enghouse, Open Text, Kinaxis, Shopify, ATS Corporation, Magna, Linamar, Martinrea, genre have made a lot of coding, technological and practical advances, if you are willing to count those as inventions. Their taxes go into the communal pot. Most of them are global companies making remittances to Canada. Our Canadian banks have made huge inroads into the US economy over that time frame. I would be hard pressed to label that negative to the Canadian pot.
Bombardier invented an airliner that is the toast of the industry; but nearly bankrupted itself doing it. Kudos for selling it off and concentrating on a market where its great in house skills could be put to more profitable use.
We have the talent. We have the imagination. We have the skills. We have world class companies. What remains for me to ask you is what is your 25 year time frame’s missing ingredient? Is it good government? Is it just the natural cycle of technology? Do we do too much on the international stage, to domestic detriment?
You already have a great wealth of information and I couldn't possibly know just how patriotic corporate Canada is. What I do I know is corporate Canada needs to be more comfortable taking risks within this country. We should never bailout a company that can't survive a little recession or defer prosecution to a mega corp for corruption in a country like Libya. But if the company spends 400 million on R & D and it backfires for some unforseen reason, they could probably use a bailout.
Corporations are no different than individual citizens. There’s always a bad apple in the bushel. SNC-Lavalin paid the price, has new management, spent years in purgatory, has a new name and is now contributing to the communal pot. We could debate forever what was the prudent punishment and the optimal outcome for Canada. If it was, and could have been, hit harder I suspect it would have broken up and I suspect some employees would have started a plethora of new Canadian engineering companies while others would have left Canada. Each case is unique. The merits become a bitter fight with reputational, monetary, societal and political risks. Is creative destruction a bonus or a hindrance? Tough call.
Ideally no company should be bailed out for any reason because a history of bailouts creates moral creep. There is a limit to idealism in the real world; so the best we can do is fight over the individual merits of each case and come to a sensible decision.
Ultimately it's about culture and in the Canadian culture we just spend too much working to counteract creative destruction. We have too many sacred cows to protect which drags us down.
I am yet to see an article on AI's impact that is NOT generic and broad. I am still looking for some specifics and realistic examples of implementation and how that can impact our lives on a day to day basis. Instead all I read (including this article) are narratives about AI, productivity and some generic discussion on the potential dangers. If there are people writing on AI where they go into specifics, examples, and details, I would love to know.
One aspect of AI technology I know I use everyday is having my email replies mostly written immediately, using my syntax and vocabulary. Sentences get completed with one keystroke. It's getting better weekly as well.
https://www.zendesk.com/blog/consumer-perceptions-ai/ - this is a white paper.
I do recall seeing something somewhere about preventing transfer-throughs to agents and AI being able to resolve simple inquiries for customers, reducing wait time for the customer and keeping the customer service staff available to handle more complex inquiries. AI is still growing and I think part of its limits right now are how people imagine it as being able to be used.
I have heard of people describing having chat GPT write an outline for something, and then they go through the outline or instructions and make the needed corrections. I've heard teacher's use it for lesson plans, programmers use it to help get a starting base for coding. It's at a level now where it's actually quite powerful and reasonably accurate for translating. (It can't replace a translator if you're in a formal setting - but it can mean the translator is doing a final proof read and swapping out a few words here and there rather than translating an entire work.)
How else might it be used? Maybe traffic control? Maybe as an additional layer of safety for dispatch (confirming an address is correctly entered, for instance, or instantly sending a dispatch to the best unit?)
These are just a few specific examples that I could see it potentially being useful for. I'm still cautious about it and worry about over-reliance and over-use, but it's useful for some things for sure.
Enjoyed this. Nice to have pieces on AI that lay people can grasp. Canada has a lot of work to do to get our economy turned around.
Can we remove all politicians and put AI in there.