Nations — Canada included — are running out of time to design and implement comprehensive safeguards on the development and deployment of advanced artificial intelligence systems, a leading AI safety company warned this week.
In a worst-case scenario, power-seeking superhuman AI systems could escape their creators’ control and pose an “extinction-level” threat to humanity, AI researchers wrote in a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of State entitled Defence in Depth: An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI.
The department insists the views the authors expressed in the report do not reflect the views of the U.S. government.
But the report’s message is bringing the Canadian government’s actions to date on AI safety and regulation back into the spotlight — and one Conservative MP is warning the government’s proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act is already out of date.
AI vs. everyone
The U.S.-based company Gladstone AI, which advocates for the responsible development of safe artificial intelligence, produced the report. Its warnings fall into two main categories.
The first concerns the risk of AI developers losing control of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. The authors define AGI as an AI system that can outperform humans across all economic and strategically relevant domains.
While no AGI systems exist to date, many AI researchers believe they are not far off.
“There is evidence to suggest that as advanced AI approaches AGI-like levels of human and superhuman general capability, it may become effectively uncontrollable. Specifically, in the absence of countermeasures, a highly capable AI system may engage in so-called power seeking behaviours,” the authors wrote, adding that these behaviours could include strategies to prevent the AI itself from being shut off or having its goals modified.
In a worst-case scenario, the authors warn that such a loss of control “could pose an extinction-level threat to the human species.”
“There’s this risk that these systems start to get essentially dangerously creative. They’re able to invent dangerously creative strategies that achieve their programmed objectives while having very harmful side effects. So that’s kind of the risk we’re looking at with loss of control,” Gladstone AI CEO Jeremie Harris, one of the authors of the report, said Thursday in an interview with CBC’s Power & Politics.
Artificial intelligence could pose extinction-level threat to humans, expert warns
A new report is warning the U.S. government that if artificial intelligence laboratories lose control of superhuman AI systems, it could pose an extinction-level threat to the human species. Gladstone AI CEO Jeremie Harris, who co-authored the report, joined Power & Politics to discuss the perils of rapidly advancing AI systems.
The second category of catastrophic risk cited in the report is the potential use of advanced AI systems as weapons.
“One example is cyber risk,” Harris told P&P host David Cochrane. “We’re already seeing, for example, autonomous agents. You can go to one of these systems now and ask,… ‘Hey, I want you to build an app for me, right?’ That’s an amazing thing. It’s basically automating software engineering. This entire industry. That’s a wicked good thing.
“But imagine the same system … you’re asking it to carry out a massive distributed denial of service attack or some other cyber attack. The barrier to entry for some of these very powerful optimization applications drops, and the destructive footprint of malicious actors who use these systems increases rapidly as they get more powerful.”
Harris warned that the misuse of advanced AI systems could extend into the realm of weapons of mass destruction, including biological and chemical weapons.
The report proposes a series of urgent actions nations, beginning with the U.S., should take to safeguard against these catastrophic risks, including export controls, regulations and responsible AI development laws.
Is Canada’s legislation already defunct?
Canada currently has no regulatory framework in place that is specific to AI.
The government introduced the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) as part of Bill C-27 in November of 2021. It’s intended to set a foundation for the responsible design, development and deployment of AI systems in Canada.
The bill has passed second reading in the House of Commons and is currently being studied by the industry and technology committee.
The federal government also introduced in 2023 the Voluntary Code of Conduct on the Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI Systems, a code designed to temporarily provide Canadian companies with common standards until AIDA comes into effect.
At a press conference on Friday, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne was asked why — given the severity of the warnings in the Gladstone AI report — he remains confident that the government’s proposed AI bill is equipped to regulate the rapidly advancing technology.
“Everyone is praising C-27,” said Champagne. “I had the chance to talk to my G7 colleagues and … they see Canada at the forefront of AI, you know, to build trust and responsible AI.”
Conservative member of Parliament Michelle Rempel Garner says the government’s proposed artificial intelligence bill is out of date and inadequate. Rempel Garner is pictured here holding a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
In an interview with CBC News, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner said Champagne’s characterization of Bill C-27 was nonsense.
“That’s not what the experts have been saying in testimony at committee and it’s just not reality,” said Rempel Garner, who co-chairs the Parliamentary Caucus on Emerging Technology and has been writing about the need for government to act faster on AI.
“C-27 is so out of date.”
AIDA was introduced before OpenAI, one of the world’s leading AI companies, unveiled ChatGPT in 2022. The AI chatbot represented a stunning evolution in AI technology.
“The fact that the government has not substantively addressed the fact that they put forward this bill before a fundamental change in technology came out … it’s kind of like trying to regulate scribes after the printing press has gone into widespread distribution,” said Rempel Garner. “The government probably needs to go back to the drawing board.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law hearing on artificial intelligence, Tuesday, May 16, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Patrick Semansky/The Associated Press)
In December 2023, Gladstone AI’s Harris told the House of Commons industry and technology committee that AIDA needs to be amended.
“By the time AIDA comes into force, the year will be 2026. Frontier AI systems will have been scaled hundreds to thousands of times beyond what we see today,” Harris told MPs. “AIDA needs to be designed with that level of risk in mind.”
Harris told the committee that AIDA needs to explicitly ban systems that introduce extreme risks, address open source development of dangerously powerful AI models, and ensure that AI developers bear responsibility for ensuring the safe development of their systems — by, among other things, preventing their theft by state and non-state actors.
“AIDA is an improvement over the status quo, but it requires significant amendments to meet the full challenge likely to come from near-future AI capabilities,” Harris told MPs.
VANCOUVER – Contract negotiations resume today in Vancouver in a labour dispute that has paralyzed container cargo shipping at British Columbia’s ports since Monday.
The BC Maritime Employers Association and International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 514 are scheduled to meet for the next three days in mediated talks to try to break a deadlock in negotiations.
The union, which represents more than 700 longshore supervisors at ports, including Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Nanaimo, has been without a contract since March last year.
The latest talks come after employers locked out workers in response to what it said was “strike activity” by union members.
The start of the lockout was then followed by several days of no engagement between the two parties, prompting federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon to speak with leaders on both sides, asking them to restart talks.
MacKinnon had said that the talks were “progressing at an insufficient pace, indicating a concerning absence of urgency from the parties involved” — a sentiment echoed by several business groups across Canada.
In a joint letter, more than 100 organizations, including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Business Council of Canada and associations representing industries from automotive and fertilizer to retail and mining, urged the government to do whatever it takes to end the work stoppage.
“While we acknowledge efforts to continue with mediation, parties have not been able to come to a negotiated agreement,” the letter says. “So, the federal government must take decisive action, using every tool at its disposal to resolve this dispute and limit the damage caused by this disruption.
“We simply cannot afford to once again put Canadian businesses at risk, which in turn puts Canadian livelihoods at risk.”
In the meantime, the union says it has filed a complaint to the Canada Industrial Relations Board against the employers, alleging the association threatened to pull existing conditions out of the last contract in direct contact with its members.
“The BCMEA is trying to undermine the union by attempting to turn members against its democratically elected leadership and bargaining committee — despite the fact that the BCMEA knows full well we received a 96 per cent mandate to take job action if needed,” union president Frank Morena said in a statement.
The employers have responded by calling the complaint “another meritless claim,” adding the final offer to the union that includes a 19.2 per cent wage increase over a four-year term remains on the table.
“The final offer has been on the table for over a week and represents a fair and balanced proposal for employees, and if accepted would end this dispute,” the employers’ statement says. “The offer does not require any concessions from the union.”
The union says the offer does not address the key issue of staffing requirement at the terminals as the port introduces more automation to cargo loading and unloading, which could potentially require fewer workers to operate than older systems.
The Port of Vancouver is the largest in Canada and has seen a number of labour disruptions, including two instances involving the rail and grain storage sectors earlier this year.
A 13-day strike by another group of workers at the port last year resulted in the disruption of a significant amount of shipping and trade.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
The Royal Canadian Legion says a new partnership with e-commerce giant Amazon is helping boost its veterans’ fund, and will hopefully expand its donor base in the digital world.
Since the Oct. 25 launch of its Amazon.ca storefront, the legion says it has received nearly 10,000 orders for poppies.
Online shoppers can order lapel poppies on Amazon in exchange for donations or buy items such as “We Remember” lawn signs, Remembrance Day pins and other accessories, with all proceeds going to the legion’s Poppy Trust Fund for Canadian veterans and their families.
Nujma Bond, the legion’s national spokesperson, said the organization sees this move as keeping up with modern purchasing habits.
“As the world around us evolves we have been looking at different ways to distribute poppies and to make it easier for people to access them,” she said in an interview.
“This is definitely a way to reach a wider number of Canadians of all ages. And certainly younger Canadians are much more active on the web, on social media in general, so we’re also engaging in that way.”
Al Plume, a member of a legion branch in Trenton, Ont., said the online store can also help with outreach to veterans who are far from home.
“For veterans that are overseas and are away, (or) can’t get to a store they can order them online, it’s Amazon.” Plume said.
Plume spent 35 years in the military with the Royal Engineers, and retired eight years ago. He said making sure veterans are looked after is his passion.
“I’ve seen the struggles that our veterans have had with Veterans Affairs … and that’s why I got involved, with making sure that the people get to them and help the veterans with their paperwork.”
But the message about the Amazon storefront didn’t appear to reach all of the legion’s locations, with volunteers at Branch 179 on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive saying they hadn’t heard about the online push.
Holly Paddon, the branch’s poppy campaign co-ordinator and bartender, said the Amazon partnership never came up in meetings with other legion volunteers and officials.
“I work at the legion, I work with the Vancouver poppy office and I go to the meetings for the Vancouver poppy campaign — which includes all the legions in Vancouver — and not once has this been mentioned,” she said.
Paddon said the initiative is a great idea, but she would like to have known more about it.
The legion also sells a larger collection of items at poppystore.ca.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
