Thank you for that.
As Ms. Wylie said, I could give you so many examples, right now, of specific types of harms, real-world implications and everything that's changing all the time, but I want to zoom out a little and talk about why labour is important to look at.
Before getting into who can do this, it seems paradoxical to me to want agility in technologies that are so complex. We don't understand them. Most people don't. The black box is still there. Engineers don't understand them still, to this day. Workers are being continuously impacted. When I say “impacted”, I mean negative impacts and harms. I submitted a brief to your committee with Dr. Renee Sieber, and we discuss those at length. You have multiple studies to look at, from multiple years. I've been following Sama for five years now, the company that is a self-proclaimed “ethical AI” company. When we look at who says they're ethical, and what ethical is, we should really question that, as well.
In my first five minutes, I said that AI being a societal benefit is being shoved down our throats. That is the case. “We need digital literacy. We need AI literacy. We know it's good and it's here to stay.” I'm here to sometimes reject that. We should be able to ban AI when we need to. We should be able to listen to the workers and see what they want and what they think. What does their day-to-day job look like? Do they have enough breaks? Look at what Amazon is doing, micromanaging every millisecond of their lives. The factory workers are living in a limbo space. I wouldn't even say “a limbo space”. They're in hell.
How do we prevent that? Why not go to labour departments that know those strengths? This is why ISED is not fit to do this alone. Earlier, I was asked what other agency could do this. It cannot just be one. It has to be multiple. This is a team effort. This goes back to democracy. Slow it down a bit and listen to the public. We don't know what the public wants, because the public wasn't involved. We need to listen to labour organizations, departments that deal with labour everywhere in this country, and the workers themselves. This is why we cannot just have people in these rooms. We cannot just have this televised. We need to have people come to you. We need you to come to the people. We need to look at town halls. We need to look at off-line methods. We need to look at different times and places to do public participation, because we live in a digitized world.
You're saying we need to change everything for AI. No. As Ms. Wylie said before, AI needs to change for us.