Sure.
The issue of the digital divide, as many of you know, is not new at all. What we learned during COVID—because people talked about adaptation during COVID with rapid digitization and everything moving online—was that, for example, indigenous people in rural and remote communities have less access. Most people know about that, but did you know that 42% of racialized children in the city of Toronto were doing their homework on iPhones because they didn't have access to high-speed Internet, computers and so on?
You can take those principles and understand that the digital divide is not just about physical access to broadband. It's about broadband. It's about affordability. It's about devices. It's about skills. I'll be the only boomer in the room, and I'll tell you that I am much more vulnerable to the misuse of AI because I answer my phone and think it's a human, or I look at a video and think it's real. We need a sophisticated understanding of, first of all, the dimensions of the digital divide, and then the ways in which artificial intelligence applications in all of their manifestations, for good and for evil, will have an impact on that.
The interesting thing that came out in a recent survey we did with Environics is that the gap between men and women in the use of AI tools—not the developers—is much smaller than we would see with other technologies. Indigenous people are using AI tools more than others in the population. Immigrants are using AI tools more than others and so on. It's interesting, because to me this signals that there are ways in which AI can bridge some of these gaps.
I referred to the discipline differences. In some ways, AI is the English major's revenge. You don't need coding and you don't need a background in computer science to be able to build tools. That's something we have to really pay attention to when we're thinking about our national AI strategy. We need a responsible AI for all approaches, in my view.
Does that answer the question?