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Technology evolving as rapidly and unpredictably as artificial intelligence is bound to raise questions of trust. As AI drives rapid transformation in all facets of business and society, many leaders seem uncertain about its implications, regarding it with a mix of awe and anxiety about what AI might help us do—and what it might do to us.
But where some leaders feel trepidation, others feel optimism. With the right guardrails in place, AI can be a powerful tool in supporting humans’ efforts on urgent matters as varied as agriculture, urban planning, fighting human trafficking, and rooting out communication biases.
Each of these AI use cases for advancing human interest comes from the Mila–Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute in Montréal, an innovative research lab that views AI as a means to drive social benefits, build prosperity, and serve humans as a species: a philosophy of ethical AI.
“In its simplest form, ethical AI is a series of choices: core agreed-upon principles that lead to building systems we can trust,” says Valérie Pisano, CEO of Mila. “It’s a system for putting ethical principles into technological design. These choices can be highly contextual and local, but ethical AI comes down to human rights.”
Issues of trust in AI are rooted in three risks, Pisano says: misuse, with bad actors deploying well-designed AI; malfunction, including loss of control and unforeseen consequences; and unexpected systemic shocks of economic and social disruption. “People need to be thinking about ethics and safety,” Pisano says, “and the tremendous role governments can play.”
Ethical AI in Canada
Canada’s distinctively progressive and inclusive values, and its commitment to sustainability and sociocultural diversity, mean Mila is developing ethical AI’s guidance and guardrails in close collaboration with the Government of Canada.
Since its 2017 launch, the government’s Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy has made the nation an early adopter and practitioner, implementing AI throughout its economy and society by connecting its world-class talent pool and research capacity with AI-forward programs.
Along with two other National Artificial Intelligence Institutes—Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) in Edmonton and Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto—Mila now drives this AI adoption, translating its research into humanistic applications and projects such as:
• Biasly, a natural-language processing tool to identify conscious or unconscious gender bias in written text;
• Data-Driven Insights for Sustainable Agriculture, an AI tool that uses satellite imagery to enable regenerative agriculture that sequesters carbon and reduces soil erosion and water pollution;
• First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR), an initiative supporting Indigenous language revitalization through the use of AI; and
• Infrared, data-driven processes to flag signs of human trafficking, developed with lawyers, criminologists, and survivors.
Mila’s founder and scientific director, Yoshua Bengio, is a longtime pioneer in deep learning and ethical AI who is also a professor at Université de Montréal and the recipient of the prestigious A.M. Turing Award, among other honors. In 2024, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Bengio to the U.N. Scientific Advisory Board, and Bengio has chaired the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI. Time magazine named him one of its 100 most influential people of 2024.
Montréal was uniquely positioned for Bengio to establish Mila and the principles of ethical AI, given the city’s confluence of multicultural experience; its abundance of research institutes, ingenuity, and talent; and its powerful government backing.
“This city is a rich environment for curiosity, for discovery, for innovative research programs, with an incredible talent pipeline coming through various universities,” Pisano says.
“Historically, Montréal represents the coming together of people,” she says. “Multiculturalism emerged very naturally, and it continues to be one of the things that’s so distinctive and attractive about Canadian AI: that Canada brings this diverse set of perspectives that make these connections happen.”
Just as vital to Mila’s visionary approach to technology is its human workforce of 150 full-time employees and 1,500 researchers, who bring a wealth of widely varied perspectives and experiences as they collaborate with more than 140 private companies in Canada and beyond.
Conferencing in Canada
Montréal and other digital hotspots in Canada have become magnets for leaders of visionary organizations to meet at business events where they can forge ties for collaboration and innovation in fields as diverse as manufacturing, life sciences, finance and insurance, agribusiness, and natural resources.
Tech and AI, driving transformation in all these sectors and many others, are the focus of such annual events as All In, World Summit AI Americas, the InCyber Forum, and C2 Montréal, which all take place in Montreal, as well as Elevate Festival in Toronto and NeurlPS and the Web Summit in Vancouver. Pisano’s own career, as a consultant at McKinsey and as chief talent officer of Cirque du Soleil before she came to Mila, tells a classic only-in-Montréal story: a pathway to opportunities she could not have found elsewhere.
“Canada and Montréal play a unique role as this global hub for scientific advances,” Pisano says. “Montréal is a small big town, a tightly knit ecosystem with a creative entrepreneurial spirit and deep human-centric values that reach every region of the world.”
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