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Title: The Accelerating Rise & Foreseeable Future of Artificial Intelligence: Threats & Opportunities
Abstract: Given the title, this webinar will address AI from several perspectives, notably:
- Technical advances & challenges
- Infrastructure needs & implications
- The AI Race – What is it?
- Social benefits & threats
Biography:
Peter MacKinnon is an artificial intelligence commercialisation and AI policy pioneer. Founder of the largest AI company in Canada in the 1980s; he was seconded to the Federal Government in 1986 as Special Advisor for Advanced Information Technologies to write the 1st Memorandum to the Cabinet on AI. In the process he played a pivotal role in bringing the Internet to Canada; creating Canarie, Canada’s research and education network; creating Compute Canada, now called the Digital Research Alliance of Canada for supercomputing; creating the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) for the domain name ‘.ca’; and creating PRECARN, Canada’s first AI collaboratory involving industry, academe and government.
Peter represented Canada for 5 years on the Information, Computers and Communications Policy Committee of the OECD in Paris. One of the Committee’s priorities was addressing what was perceived as a coming issue in the commercialisation of the Internet around data sovereignty. Prior to recent times this was referred to as transborder data flows.
In recent years he has been serving on domestic and international AI advisory committees, lectures globally, and mentors’ students, entrepreneurs and business and government executives on issues related to AI’s impact on individuals, organisations and society. He also writes op-eds on AI for policy organizations such as the Centre for International Governance Innovation (Waterloo) and Research Money (Toronto) and as a member of the IEEE-USA AI Policy Committee for the White House and Congress, among other US Government organisations. In addition, he serves on the IEEE Standards Association Working Group on AI & Ethics with representatives from some 30 countries.
On the business side, Peter serves on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, Fortune Magazine’s AIQ Committee, and as an AI advisor to MIT’s Sloan School of Management’s publication Sloan Management Review.
He is a Board Member of the Partnership Group for Science & Engineering, which serves the Parliament of Canada, as well as being the Executive Director of the Global Research Institute on Integrity for Technology, founded in Vienna, Austria; a nascent organisation with its initial program in AI Safety & Society.
At uOttawa, he is the Project Executive Manager of a multi-university/multi-business partnership involving AI in connected & autonomous vehicles within the Faculty of Engineering. He also chairs the Foresight Synergy Network, which is hosted by the Telfer School of Management.
Peter also has been seconded as a Canadian Diplomat, based in London, UK; where he specialized in Foreign Direct Investment. .He also lived in Shanghai, China for 6 years as a management consultant and e-commerce lecturer and co-authored a book with 4 Chinese academics on the Role of the Chief Information Officer in Modern Organisations and available in Mandarin. Peter also lived in the Bahamas where he led a 3-year project transforming the national health system from analog to digital.
In an earlier decade of his life he was a glaciologist participating in mountain and polar expeditions concerned with climate change, During that time he was asked to be the Chief Glaciologist at the World Data Center for Glaciology in Boulder, Colorado where among other things he participated in the team developing the concept of Nuclear Winter.
