Digital Policy Salon: Forecasting Labour Market Futures

By Faun Rice, visualizations by Akshay Kotak

The departure of one of Black in AI’s founders, Timnit Gebru, from Google in November 2020 provoked outrage within the computer science community.

The prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researcher claimed that the company fired her after she declined to remove her name from a paper on the carbon footprint of language models in AI research. The paper also questioned whether this technology could harm marginalized groups. Two of Gebru’s colleagues rapidly quit over her treatment, a third resigned last month, citing the ongoing controversy, and many others have signed letters of protest. The now-notorious paper has been drawing new eyes to AI’s unintended social as well as environmental impacts.

Gebru and her colleagues are not the first to address this topic. “Green AI” research – AI research that’s more environmentally friendly and inclusive – explores AI’s carbon footprint and ways to reduce it. Green AI researchers see a trend in machine learning (ML) toward programs that require increasing power and that favour accuracy over efficiency, resulting in big experiments run many times without attention to their digital carbon footprints. This is not only bad for the environment; it also makes ML research prohibitively expensive for under-resourced researchers. While green AI addresses many applications of ML, Gebru and her colleagues focused on natural language processing (NLP) models, which improve machine interactions with human languages. In order to train one of the NLP tools powering Google Search, computer scientists run programs that can expend the same amount of energy as a trans-American flight.

Those of us who aren’t computer scientists may have a difficult time disentangling this carbon-footprint revelation from claims about the carbon-saving potential of AI in smart grids, emissions monitoring or precision forestry. The answer is that AI is neither “all good” nor “all bad” for the environment. There are a few core, simple lessons at the heart of this issue: methods matter; hardware, cloud storage providers and regional energy sources matter more; and – as Gebru and her colleagues point out – it’s worth weighing the social and environmental impacts of digital activity against its benefits. 

Read the full article here 📝

On September 9th, 1 pm-2 pm EDT, ICTC invites you to join Khiran O'Neill, Research & Policy Analyst at ICTC, and his esteemed subject matter experts for a virtual discussion, including four unique presentations, on how Canadians are navigating our new dynamic world of work.

The nature of work is changing. The “future of work” has transformed from a series of relatively hypothetical debates about the impact of digital transformation on work into very concrete and immediately relevant issues. Increasingly, people are moving away from long-term work relationships in offices to short-term, flexible work that takes place outside the traditional workplace. Along with the sudden shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, a steady collection of changes have gained momentum, including expanding digitalization, precarity, and flexibility. Technological developments are an important driver of some of these workplace changes, but a host of other factors are at play, including increasing short-term and task-based employment, weakened unions, and economic concentration.

Register here 🗓

On September 8th, 1 pm-3 pm CST, SaskTel in partnership with the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) will be holding a public engagement session via Zoom to discuss the state of Regina’s technology ecosystem and Canada’s smart cities project.

In this session, we invite Regina region residents to share and explore issues and opportunities that impact them today, and how smart technologies might contribute to those issues and opportunities.

Although ‘smart cities’ may be a bit of a buzzword, its impacts can be felt far and wide. Smart city technologies impact many aspects of our daily life, such as city infrastructure ranging from streetlights to sidewalks, to environmental sustainability. But the question is, what other smart city technologies can influence the way we live and work in Regina? How will new ‘smart’ developments impact your experience in Saskatchewan? What needs to take place to ensure that Regina implements smart technologies effectively, but also in a way that is inclusive and accessible?

Register here 🗓

Angle your head between two mirrors and watch yourself watching yourself for a while. I never understood what my 7-year-old self loved about it. Sandwiched between two floor-length mirrors, I would pretend that the little Black girls dancing behind me in an accordion-like formation were my back up, my chorus. Now I feel suffocated by the memory of cascading versions of myself, recessing further than my eyes could trace. In a hyper-online world, this feeling is mirrored in the way I see my image read, projected, and thrust back to me by unflinching algorithms and ever-reflective screens.

This was the winning essay in a recent competition that asked young people to discuss life in “a hyper-online world,” beating out more than 800 other essays. The author, Esther Abisola Omole, is relatable in her description of navigating life on the web, but also explains how her experience, as a young Black woman, is unique. Omole confronts a world of loneliness, addiction and entanglement, and emerges not by tuning out or switching off, but instead, in her words, by looking “to reclaim the myriad pathways technology was offering [her].”

Suffice to say, if you’ve read enough reports for the day and are after something a little more poetic, we’ve got you covered. - Khiran O'Neill

By Maryna Ivus and Akshay Kotak

Canada’s digital economy is expected to employ a total 2.26 million digitally skilled workers by 2025 (about 11% of all employment in the country), triggering a demand for an additional 250,000 jobs.

ICTC’s latest labour market forecast, Onwards and Upwards: Digital Talent Outlook 2025, examines the most in-demand occupations across the digital economy and their associated critical competencies and skills.

The forecast includes an analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on Canada’s economy, key trends in consumer behaviour and digitization, and the effect of new technologies on productivity, innovation, and the workforce.

A key focus of the study is an employment forecast for six key innovation areas:

Read the full study here 📖