My responses to the sixth theme of the Canada AI Survey, focusing on education and skills development.
This is part 6 of “Responses to the Canada AI Survey” - a series containing my responses to the eight themes of the Canadian government’s public consultation on artificial intelligence.
Theme 6: Education and Skills
Q1: What skills are required for a modern, digital economy, and how can Canada best support their development and deployment in the workforce?
Labour predictions are impossible. Policy makers need to humbly recognize that nearly every time an occupation has been predicted to become irrelevant, the timeline and/or the technological impact was too optimistic. This leads to a near term shortage and the adoption of less desirable secondary solutions. We also need to recognize that some predictions, especially those espoused by an industry, are self-fulfilling.
The question seeks an answer in the modern, digital economy, but we’ve long had a shortage of trades in many areas in Canada. I propose there is an appreciable percentage of white collar knowledge workers that may actually derive immense satisfaction from learning a trade. We could perhaps learn something from the Swiss vocational system where people participate in both apprenticeships and classroom-based learning and an engineer is often someone who was initially trained as a machinist.
In more vague terms, we should encourage education paths that train students in ways to think and approach problems in a more general sense. These are usually education programs that have historically had unclear career prospects (other than academia). Physics and philosophy are two that come to mind.
In the strictest sense, “AI-focused” careers will be a very small percentage of the workforce. It would be the equivalent of seeking to be ready for “cloud-focused” careers 15 years ago.
There is a large group of occupations where AI cannot replace humans or that we may want to resist this replacement. We should direct a great deal of effort to attract both the existing and future workforce to these roles, especially those that have a positive impact on human quality of life.
Canada is facing such a moment right now. The situation with Canada Post is a result of technological shift and automation in the face of inflexible historical norms.
Q2: How can we enhance AI literacy in Canada, including awareness of AI’s limitations and biases?
To begin, what do we mean by “AI literacy” will need to be defined. We leverage automobiles for transportation and also depend on them. Are all drivers “car literate” or only those that do their own oil changes or have read the owner’s manual? Or do we speak of the mechanics who can actually troubleshoot and resolve problems?
I don’t believe AI literacy is required from the public to achieve our goals. As technology has improved, we have become less “car literate” - fewer people change their own oil than ever before and oil level checks are done electronically by the car’s system. Nearly everyone uses the cloud in some way, understands the concept of it, but we haven’t done anything to increase “cloud literacy”, beyond the advertisement of cloud providers.
This is not to say that there are not any real dangers in terms of limitations, biases, misinformation, fake content, etc. But the guardrails and the safeguards are required of the systems that perform the functions, the systems that distribute them and the processes that use the outputs.
In the end, literacy is a very individual trait - it’s unfair and misguided to pin this requirement on the public. Our politicians and policy makers, however, should absolutely be AI literate, but they have so far often fallen short of it. Let’s start there.
Q3: What can Canada do to ensure equitable access to AI literacy across regions, demographics and socioeconomic groups?
There are (much more) fundamental things lacking equitable access across Canada. AI literacy is knowledge and knowledge travels freely on the internet (if one can cut through the noise and stay out of echo chambers).
Let’s start with equitable internet access - and more importantly - clear water and access to affordable housing and food.