Digital Policy Salon: Join Us Next Week Live

We’d like to extend an invitation to all our Digital Policy Salon readers to attend our upcoming digital future summit, ICTC Horizon, on February 1st and 2nd. 

We will be hosting several high-profile speakers, including Dr. Roberta Bondar – First Canadian Woman in Space; Hon. Perrin Beatty – President and CEO for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce; Ron Keller – Expert on International Financial, Economic and Geopolitical Matters; and Johan Rockström – Internationally Recognized Scientist on Global Sustainability Issues.

Check out our program and secure your virtual seat today 💡

This research report provides insight into how to strengthen Canada’s ability to commercialize artificial intelligence (AI) technology and support its responsible and sustainable growth.

The paper discusses:

Budget 2021 started building a comprehensive AI strategy by earmarking up to $443.8 million over 10 years for renewing the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy and making other significant investments in AI.

The first edition of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy was launched in 2017, with a $125 million budget proposal. The Strategy’s scope focused largely on academic research initiatives, with a limited focus on commercialization.

The three pillars of a comprehensive, sustainable, and adaptable national AI strategy focus on:

A clear industrial AI strategy will require multi-participatory and coordinated collaboration between government, industry, academia, civil society, and the public.

Read the full overview here 📝

On November 8, 2021, the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) partnered with Evergreen Canada and Sustainable Waterloo Region to host ICTC’s seventh smart cities community engagement session. The Waterloo Region session was the most recent instalment of ICTC’s multi-year, smart cities research initiative, which engages residents and community leaders across Canada to better understand their community’s experience with smart cities. Each session begins with one or two presentations by local community groups and ends with a group discussion. During the discussion, attendees can identify what challenges and opportunities technology creates in their communities while sharing how technology impacts their lives. The information gathered during these sessions contributes to ICTC’s research and helps shape Canada’s smart city ecosystem.

The Waterloo Region engagement session was attended by 20 individuals from various backgrounds, including residents, members of the tech community, public servants, and advocacy organizations. It began with an introduction to ICTC’s multi-year research project and two presentations by local community groups. A summary of the community presentations is provided below, followed by an overview of the group discussion.

Read the full article here 📝

The digital age enabled productivity but invited procrastination. Now writers are rebelling against their word processors.

For a long time, I believed that my only hope of becoming a professional writer was to find the perfect tool. A few months into my career as a book critic, I’d already run up against the limits of my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote and rewrote; the program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible.

I’d fallen into the trap that the philosopher Jacques Derrida identified in an interview from the mid-nineties. “With the computer, everything is rapid and so easy,” he complained. “An interminable revision, an infinite analysis is already on the horizon.” Derrida hadn’t even contended with the sirens of online life, which were driving writer friends to buy disconnected laptops or to quarantine their smartphones in storage bins with timed locks. Zadie Smith touted Freedom, a subscription service that cut off the user’s devices—a chastity belt for procrastinators.

The internet can be a distraction machine and a concentration killer. It’s also a critical tool for many writers (among countless other people). How can these two realities be better reconciled? As Lucas writes for the New Yorker, the answer might not be dropping the technology, but rather dropping the complication associated with the technology. There are a whole range of apps, tools, and devices designed to help people focus, ranging from high-tech digital notepads to plain old typewriters. One way in which all of this gets really interesting is figuring out how technology influences the process of writing. In the short space of 20 years or so, a significant portion of writing has become computer-based. This influences not only what gets written but the minds of those writing. In much the same way as some suggest that smartphones are a first step towards cyborg-hood, recent research argues that our minds function differently depending on their interaction with surrounding environments, tools, and people. On that note, don’t ask how many spellchecks and google searches were used in the process of writing this paragraph. - Khiran O'Neill