u/parceltheory

okay so I went down a rabbit hole last night and I genuinely cannot stop thinking about this

Canada has zero AI laws. not weak ones. ZERO. we had a bill. they pulled it. our AI minister has been in office for a year and produced nothing. says he's worried laws would slow down innovation

some of the staff from that same minister's office left and went to work for elon musk's companies late last year. quietly. no consequences. no rules to break. and when grok was generating images of children our government stayed completely silent. the people whose job it is to protect us. silent.

big corporations have had to regulate themselves because nobody else is doing it. that is the only protection canadian entrepreneurs have right now. corporate policy. not law.

as someone building a business in canada this keeps me up at night

because the longer canadian entrepreneurs sit out of AI the harder it gets to compete. your competitor who figured out how to cut their operating costs in half using these tools isn't going to wait for you to catch up. and when they don't need the same budget you do anymore something has to give. usually it's staff. or the business itself.

no sheriff. no rules. no protection. just us figuring it out.

anyone else or is it just me?

okay so I went down a rabbit hole last night and now I can't sleep so you're all coming with me

Canada has zero AI laws. not like "oh they're working on it" zero. ZERO zero. we had a bill. they pulled it. our AI minister has been in office for a year and has done nothing. his reason is that laws would "slow down innovation"

bro. sir. ma'am. miss. bonjour. hello.

some of the people who worked in that same minister's office quietly went to go work for elon musk's companies late last year. no consequences because there are literally no rules. and when grok was out here generating images of children our government said absolutely nothing. the minister whose whole job is protecting Canadians from this stuff. said. nothing.

so who's protecting us? corporations. big companies had to write their own internal rules because our government didn't. that's where we are.

and here's the thing that actually scares me as a canadian small business owner...

not using AI might actually be the thing that kills our businesses. if your competitor figures out how to run their whole operation for half your budget using AI tools and you didn't, you're not losing to AI. you're losing to a person who used it. your storefront. your employees. gone. not because of robots. because of budget.

we're in the wild west up here. no sheriff. no rules. no protection.

is anyone else actually paying attention to this or is it just me?

EDIT: hey all. so people keep saying that I'm afraid of AI and just to work harder. That's not it. I'm excited to see what AI does in the future because its literally so damned cool! A LOT of people over the past 15 years have said that regulation would mean a stop to innovation. it's not. its an agreed boundary that our morals and values are saying that we all agree we won't step over. Here's my wish list and I'm going to tell you the reason for each wish too. All of this is real information very much verifiable and happened within our borders.

- data sovereignty to Canadians. in september of last year, the US sunsetted their data transparency laws that were for Big Business. the law was SUPPOSED to be for incidents of data breaches and cyber attacks to those Big Businesses. the companies would give the information to the government and there would be communication between the government and the company to better the risk. now? silence from the White House. and that included the data of Canadians since our information doesn't stay in our borders. we only have laws that say that the company needs to have reasonable control on Canadian info. sucks... i know. feel free to google.

- IP protections. most of our IP rights get stolen or taken. some of Canada's best and brightest companies have lost their IP rights, the talent that built it and the companies that pushed it forward. we suck and we need to do better to protect our own ideas and talent.

- BASIC protections on image generations of children. late last year the criminal convictions of 2 PDFs were overturned for 2 reasons. they held hundreds of thousands of images of children in compromising positions. 1. many of the images that they had were generated therefore counting as "art" and protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms 2. imposing a min sentence on child p*rn was also deemed a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Claiming that the images aren't real isn't good enough for me personally and i will physically fight anyone who says otherwise. like i will headbutt them. test me. i'll do it. then i will laugh afterwards and take the charges against me.

- requirements for AI training on the job so that people don't lose their jobs. kpmg has ranked canada 3rd last out of 47 countries for AI training with 1 in 4 people getting training at work. this means that people who are willing to learn would have to do it on their personal time and still risk losing their jobs. we are now behind developing nations and our job cuts in favour of AI or outsourcing is growing. it sucks too. i remember when my mom had to take computer classes when i was a kid to learn Lotus Notes (omg im old) and Word in 97. unfortunately, we're all going to need to do that to buff up our skillsets.

I'm not afraid of AI. I want an easy life in the Great White North. I want a life that we see in movies and television and the ONLY way to do that is with innovation (bi*ch i want to TELEPORT TO PARIS ON WEEKENDS. Claude can definitely use up my tokens if we could do that! Imagine fighting with Expedia about your teleporting travel tokens.🤣) That's the future that I want to see being built. it's idyllic...yes but it sounds fun! But people are CRAZY and we all know that. they do crazy things with their bodies and other people's bodies, the jobs aren't being replaced once the jobs are cut, medtech is expanding and Canada is holding on to coattails hoping we don't fall off.