Michael McGrath, the EU commissioner for democracy, justice, the rule of law and consumer protection, is visiting Canada as the Liberal government pursues an AI policy that puts less emphasis on regulation and more on adoption.
Speaking at a conference in Montreal Thursday, he outlined upcoming legislation that will tackle issues such as addictive design, unfair personalization and holding influencers accountable.
Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon has cited the U.S.’s anti-regulation stance as a reason to go easy on regulatory efforts, saying Canada would be wasting its time by going it alone.
I mean, am I wrong that whatever we do here is basically irrelevant? It’s like taxes on the ultra-rich. Whoever has the least regulation, is where they’ll setup shop.
The US is already where most of the biggest tech companies in the world are, besides China, and they’re pretty hard-committed to regulating “absolutely nothing”, so it’s not like anyone was running to develop major AI competition in Canada regardless.
My understanding is that so long as we’re short of offering huge tax breaks and incentives to AI companies, or blocking access to these tools, anything the government really does is just noise making and political posturing. I wouldn’t really care as an EU official either.