Welcome to Inside Policy Talks, the flagship video podcast of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

In this episode, Peter Copeland, Deputy Director of MLI’s Domestic Policy Program, is joined by Ryan Khurana, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and Machine Learning Lead at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE). Together, they discuss first what it is and what it is not, and the many prospects it has, both good and bad.

Khurana delves into the great deal of warranted and unwarranted hype and concern for AI across its many applications: it holds great economic and productivity promise, as part of what is becoming known as the fourth industrial revolution, as well as peril.

Some speculate that we will enter the singularity and be replaced, while others point to more realistic futures and already present scenarios, such as those of job loss and transformation, to other threats to human well-being and dignity, from deployment of psychologically manipulative and addictive algorithms, to the negative effects on health and welfare from a technology-saturated and mediated environment, in which we are increasingly online, disconnected from one another and unwell.

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