Keep high-tech talent here
In Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy, Sleeper, the hero is cryogenically frozen and brought back 200 years in the future — where he’s promptly spirited away in a self-driving car.
That futuristic vehicle, which seemed the stuff of fantasy when the movie came out, is now on the verge of becoming reality at companies such as General Motors, Google and Tesla, thanks to leaps in the field of artificial intelligence, or AI.
Indeed, rather than killing jobs (as dystopian science fiction predicted) AI is proving to be the key to opening up whole new frontiers and sources of employment.
Just last year, for example, GM announced 700 new high-tech engineering jobs in Ontario, dedicated largely to researching software and driverless cars.
That’s just one example of why it’s so important that Canada not just train high-tech talent, but retain it. Innovation, economic growth and future competitiveness depend on it.
So it’s good to see the federal and Ontario governments — as well as companies like Google, Air Canada, Loblaws and the Big Five banks — investing $150 million in a new institute devoted to artificial intelligence.
The Vector Institute, affiliated with the University of Toronto, will research new frontiers in AI and figure out how it can be used to make companies more competitive. Most importantly, it is designed to retain, repatriate and attract AI talent to “feed” that expertise into existing Canadian companies and startups.
Happily, on that last front, Vector is already attracting interest from researchers in the United States. In fact, Geoffrey Hinton, a former U of T professor, is one. He will divide his time between Google’s offices in Toronto and his position as Vector’s chief scientific adviser and says he’s already fielding inquiries from others interested in moving back.
There are great opportunities in this approach. Ed Clark, chair of the Vector Institute board, says, “We want those firms to grow to be a great worldwide supplier of AI capability, so that we turn this into a service export to the world, and not have a situation where all Canada does is produce PhDs and send them south.” He adds: “We want Toronto, Ontario, to be one of the core intellectual centres of artificial intelligence research in the world.”
In fact, Canadian universities are already major incubators of the high-tech talent that will create the next innovations. But keeping this talen here is a challenge. University of Waterloo engineering and math graduates, for example, are heavily recruited for jobs in Silicon Valley.
Part of the attraction is higher wages and better benefits, something Canadian companies may find hard to match. But part of it is job opportunities. Vector can be a step toward providing that.
That will be a key to future prosperity. Says Yoshua Bengio, who heads the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms: “AI is going to bring a lot of wealth, but if it’s made elsewhere we aren’t going to get a reasonable share of that wealth, even if we contributed to the original science.”
Right now the administration of Donald Trump has handed Canada an advantage in retaining and attracting AI engineers, mathematicians and scientists. For one thing, he is slashing budgets for scientific research, which is apparently driving some scientists to look here for opportunities.
At the same time, his immigration policies have already benefited Vector. Two researchers on Hinton’s new Toronto-based team are Iranian, one of the countries targeted in Trump’s immigration ban.
Finally, Trump isn’t focused on high-tech innovation but on “making America great again” by bringing back rust belt jobs. Indeed, his big job announcement this week was about ending the “war on coal” and bringing back miners’ jobs. No mention of creating new jobs in areas like green energy.
Far better to be looking ahead and betting on areas of future growth, including AI. Creation of the Vector Institute is a promising step in that direction.
Vector chair Ed Clark wants Toronto to be a hub for research into artificial intelligence