Thank you very much. Good afternoon.
My name is Gillian Hadfield. I'm a professor of law and of strategic management at the University of Toronto, where I hold the Schwartz Reisman chair in technology and society and the Canada CIFAR AI chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. I'm appearing in a personal capacity.
Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you on this subject of such critical importance.
I want to highlight four key aspects of the impacts of AI on the labour market.
First, AI is a general-purpose technology that is likely to transform almost all aspects of our economy and our society.
Second, the latest advances in AI can be adopted relatively quickly, but Canadian businesses to date have been slow to adopt AI.
Third, current AI systems are rapidly evolving to perform highly sophisticated tasks, meaning that high-income and high-education occupations may face the greatest exposure to this latest round of automation.
Fourth, the profound impacts of AI across our economy and society demand regulatory shifts to ensure that the full benefits of AI can be realized.
Let me go through each of these in a little more detail.
First, AI is a general-purpose technology. This means it will transform almost all aspects of our economy and society, similar to the impact of the steam engine or information technology. For example, publicly available large language models such as generative pretrained transformers, GPTs, demonstrate the potential for AI to radically reshape the nature of work. These systems are designed to understand and generate human-like text, including computer code, on a massive scale, increasingly to reason and problem-solve, facilitating an almost unlimited range of applications.
Second, the latest advances in AI can be adopted relatively quickly. ChatGPT's swift integration into everyday applications over the last year demonstrates this and suggests that the most recent strides in AI can be implemented relatively quickly, outpacing the adoption rates seen with earlier iterations of this technology. This presents an opportunity for Canadian business and policy-makers to boost productivity and economic growth; however, the committee should take note that Canada has to date been slow to adopt AI. According to a study by Statistics Canada, only 3.7% of companies were using AI at the end of 2021. Studies conducted by IBM and the OECD also suggest that Canada lags behind other economies according to AI adoption metrics.
Third, AI systems are rapidly evolving to perform highly sophisticated and complex tasks. Specifically, AI is being fine-tuned in sector-specific software applications. A notable instance from my own field is CoCounsel, which is a LLM system built on top of GPT-4, functioning as an AI legal assistant for tasks such as legal research, writing and document analysis. CoCounsel has managed to achieve a higher score on the American uniform bar exam than the average test taker—in fact, 90% of test takers. It is also designed to address inherent risks such as AI hallucinations.
Other examples beyond LLM systems include things like AlphaFold, which has solved the protein folding problem, described by a leading computational biologist as the first time an AI system has solved a major scientific problem. These advancements mean that AI can be harnessed more safely and effectively, particularly in sensitive and cognitively complex domains like law, science and health care.
In one study, OpenAI researchers found that GPT exposure was higher at the higher income and education levels. That's something for us to take into account, thinking about how this would look different than in previous innovations.
This brings me to my final and crucial point. The profound impacts that AI will have across our economy and society demand regulatory shifts to ensure that the full benefits of AI can be realized. Our current legal and regulatory frameworks were designed for a pre-AI era and may restrict innovative and productive uses of AI in workplaces. To harness the benefits of AI, we must update these frameworks to address the unique challenges and opportunities that AI presents. Furthermore, given that the nature of AI is rapidly developing technology, effective governance of AI demands that policy-makers move quickly to adopt an AI-enabling regulatory posture that seeks to properly regulate risks, as we do with all other economic activities, while supporting innovation and investment.
In conclusion, we stand at the cusp of a transformative era, and we should be acting to ensure that the benefits of AI are realized equitably and responsibly.
Thank you.