The year is 2035.
The last auto worker has retired from what remains of the auto plants in Canada. The factories still make cars, but they run ‘dark.’ There are no people in the plant. The last functions that required a human have been replaced by humanoid robots.
The plant runs three shifts now. But no-one works in the factory.
Fantasy? Hardly.
But in this future, there is a key question. Where are our children working?
The real answer to that question is, nobody really knows with certainty. All we can do is imagine that future, with the best data we have.
For instance, we know that it is possible today to run some factories without any workers at all. The Chinese are doing it today. We know that in the next year, already highly automated auto plants will see a new wave of automation.
This year, a full decade before our 2035 date, Honda, at its plants in China is planning to decrease their workforce 30% with new automation that is taking jobs formerly done only by humans – an automation that is the synergy of artificial intelligence and robotics.
We know that the workforce of 2035 will be totally different than it is today. Even the cars they are making will be self driving.The wealth of our nation will be increasingly created by robotics, automation and artificial intelligence, an AI that will make what we do today look like child’s play.
The questions is not whether artificial intelligence and automation will be a large part of how wealth is created. The questions whose artificial intelligence? Whose automation?
That’s the key question.
There is a common phrase used today to describe how we need to adapt to AI. “You won’t be replaced by AI – you will be replaced by someone using AI.”
In a world where AI and automation are the biggest creators of products and services, how will we earn our living? In the long run? No one is certain.
But looking forward and seeing a world where most of our jobs are done by AI, the optimists will say that we will create new jobs that revolve around the use of AI. Others say that AI will replace us and that we will need a new means of distributing wealth.
Or maybe the future is somewhere in between. The fact is, we just don’t know.
We do know one thing for certain. We can only use automation and AI to create wealth for Canada if we own and master the use of AI and automation. If we don’t , we will be poorer not just as individuals, but as a nation.
Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor, wrote in 1963, at the very beginning of the computer revolution that led us to today, “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented”
And Canadians have invented the future of AI. When you look at a list of the accomplishments in neural networks that led to generative AI and will ultimately lead to artificial super intelligence, Canadian universities and researchers have led the way. Geoffrey Hinton, the recent Nobel prize winner and a list of researchers who went on to power the developments at Google and OpenAI and other US companies learned their craft in Canada.
Across our country in our universities, there are researchers working on the next developments. There are entrepreneurs who are hungry to bring new ideas to life. There are organizations in both the private and public sector that desperately need to increase their productivity to meet the demands for their services.
But there is a danger. What if the knowledge that we created, only serves to develop and power an AI that is owned by a large company in another country. That’s exactly what has happened. And we have financed it. Our universities have developed the intellectual property over decades. Our government has funded and subsidized research for foreign companies.
Today, in our struggles with the US, we must learn one lesson. If the power over an industry is owned by another country, we are already their economic colony. We are powerless.
For example, if the US does take their auto plants, owned by US companies and move the jobs south, what can we really do? It may have given us years of comfortable, well paid jobs, but it weakened us as many predicated it would.
But surely the auto companies won’t desert us? We’ve been loyal and productive workers. We gave them concessions to build plants. We even bailed them out when they were on the brink of bankruptcy. Surely they would never desert us?
But in fact, that’s exactly what they will do. Foreign companies act in their own self interest.
But the question is not what they will do. It’s what will we do?
We can’t keep funding research and development or sponsoring start ups and then having them bought up by large companies with billions to spend. Even in the United States, courts are realizing that their large companies remain competitive not by innovating, but by buying up ideas, entrepreneurs and wiping out their competition with a chequebook and limitless piles of cash.
We can’t beat them at that game.
We need to play a different game?
We missed the opportunity to capitalize on the decades of work in AI that were done in Canada. Large companies own that and today, they sell it back to us. Whether it’s Google, OpenAI, Microsoft or a host of others, we buy back, actually we rent the ideas that we once subsidized and championed. But its not just the ideas. We also pay for the computing cycles that run the AI. Even if they use our cheap and plentiful power to develop their data centres.
But there is an opportunity today. Almost all of AI and even robotics is distributed and shared freely using open source.
And make no mistake, open source AI is not a poor substitute. These new models have all of the power of any of the large closed models. Some are more efficient than the current frontier models from the large US developers.
We need only to recognize that the Emperor has no clothes. We don’t need their proprietary systems.
Those who developed Linux proved over the past decades. Linux now powers the internet and is the most widely used operating system in the world. And it’s open source. Developers of Linux compete, not for profit, but to make the best and most secure software possible. They share their knowledge and their effort.
More than that, companies recognize the value that Linux provides and they help fund it, even though they cannot own it.
What if we took this same model and created an open source AI. We might not match the huge capital investments of the US firms. But we have something that they cannot buy – the collaborative spirit of Canadians.
This is the vision of Maiple. An open source AI developed and maintained by Canadians to meet our unique needs. Taking the best of open source AI and continuing to develop it for the good of all Canadians.
Think about what it could do.
We could use it in education, making AI freely available to every student in the country, rich or poor. We could use it in healthcare solving the challenges of an aging population and declining budgets. Our entrepreneurs could use it to develop new and unique services for Canadians and for the world.
The possibilities are limitless. AI can enrich our lives, improve our services, decrease our costs and more. If we embrace it.
And that’s the choice for our future. We can remain a renter in the AI world of US companies. Or we can collaborate to own a Canadian AI – one that does what Canada does best, collaborating and still unleashing our entrepreneurial drive and passion.
We can have a nation that has a bountiful infrastructure of AI in the same way that we have water, hydro power or even the internet. We can build it with Canadian data and maybe even with a Canadian sensibility – to be used for the good of us all in the public and private sector, for entrepreneurs and for large companies.
So we’ve created Maiple, with the aim of helping to:
- Promote the development of a Canadian open source AI
- Make that AI available as a resource to all
With that Canadians can unleash their creativity. Entrepreneurs will develop new uses and services. Governments, agencies, not for profits and others will use it to develop new and better services. Others will collaborate to bring new ideas that we have not yet imagined.
We need not fear a future that we create together. It’s a future that “cannot be predicted,” but is is a future that “can be invented.”
We can invent it. Together. Why not join us?
How do you get stared? Sign the Maple Manifesto
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