The reality of
artificial
intelligence
in Montreal
The city is playing a leading role in pushing AI beyond the realm of sci-fi, with major consequences for business and society.
There is a lot of buzz around artificial intelligence (AI), especially in Montreal. The city is quickly transforming into an international hub for research and business in the game-changing field. Recently, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Samsung all invested heavily in the burgeoning local AI scene, with other tech heavy hitters slated to join them.
However, a recent survey by Havas Canada uncovered that 86 per cent of Canadians don’t actually understand what AI means, despite its potential to fundamentally change the way we live, work and play.
At its core, AI focuses on getting computers to simulate human intelligence. It’s still in its early days, but already we’re seeing AI’s effects in the form of self-driving vehicles and voice-activated virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri. Machine learning is a major component this. That is, the ability for computers, using mathematical algorithms and data analysis, to make decisions and learn new tasks on their own.
“Before the recent advances in AI, computers were really bad at what us humans are really good at — perceiving the world around us,” says Philippe Beaudoin, senior vice-president of the Research Group at Montreal’s Element AI, Canada’s largest privately owned AI research and development lab.
“Computers today can spot images and understand sound and natural language in a way that is much closer to what humans do. This was absolutely unthinkable five years ago.”
But as AI advances at breakneck speed, the concern is that it will replace the need for humans in the workforce.
“This has always been the issue with industrialization, back to the times when the first machines were used and mechanical processes were automated,” says Rustam Vahidov, professor of supply chain and business technology management at the John Molson School of Business.
Judging from history, Vahidov predicts that the answer to job loss by AI will be that workers move on to higher-level positions.
“We don’t see society losing overall from this process,” he explains. “Economies adapt and people manage to find different roles.”
Vahidov predicts that the answer to job loss by AI will be that workers will move on to higher level types of jobs.
‘Where the action and expertise is’
Yoshua Bengio is as close as they come to being a rock star in the field of AI. When the Université de Montréal professor and co-founder of Element AI hits international stages to talk about the current and future state of the industry, people flock to hear his thoughts. This fall, Bengio sat down for a Q&A session organized by Alcove, a local organization that hosts public micro-conferences featuring game-changers and visionaries in their fields.
Bengio agrees that when it comes to AI, things are really working in Montreal’s favour. The momentum of investments and top scientists coming here is laying a solid foundation for the city to be a world leader.
“It used to be that in tech industries, if you wanted to get US venture capital you basically had to move your company to Silicon Valley,” he explains.
“Things have changed. Venture capitalists are happy to invest and have a company stay because they know that it’s a place where the action and the expertise is.”
Keeping top AI talent in Montreal, and the rest of Canada, will increasingly become a challenge, however. Silicon Valley is luring away PhDs in AI with starting salaries of around USD $500,000 plus stock options. Bengio has been vocal about the need for different levels of government to step up and help grow Canada’s AI community, and it seems they’re listening.
The Government of Canada recently announced the $950-million Innovation Superclusters Initiative, which will help support the country’s AI’s ecosystem.
“They’re really keen on making Canada a worldwide leader in AI and are actually putting down the money to try to make that happen.”
AI BY THE NUMBERS
The Canadian AI ecosystem includes:
160 +AI focused startups
15 major research groups
1,300 researchers and collaborators
$1 billion in public and private investments in 2016 alone
800 PhD students set to graduate in the next few years
CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM
But as the line separating humanity from computers thins, AI is steering us into unchartered territory, which raises some ethical questions.
“I believe that AI is going to have a huge impact on society and we better start thinking about it,” Bengio says. “It can be used for good, but it can be used for bad reasons as well.”
A report produced by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs concludes that the effects of AI in the military (think autonomous weapons and robot hackers) could rival those of nuclear weapons. Bengio recently co-signed an open letter spearheaded by Tesla’s Elon Musk calling on the United Nations to ban the development and use of so-called “killer robots” in the military.
For his part, Bengio views AI as an opportunity to bring positive change into the world, especially in areas like medicine, where the technology holds the ability for us to tackle disease in a whole new way.
“You’re starting to see the use of AI to take advantage of details in your genome in order to come up with treatments just for you,” he says. “We could cure things that right now seem incurable. I’m optimistic.”