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Trudeaus words echoed U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan who used a major policy address Thursday to point the direction the White House plans to take in the global economy.

Were at a moment now where we need to build capacity to produce the goods and invent the technologies of the future, Sullivan said at the Brookings Institution. And were going to do that us plus anyone else who wants to get in on the deal.

Trudeau used his speech to relay his big-picture vision of what Canadas role in a rapidly changing world, repeatedly slagging Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, though not by name.

No election has been called in Canada, but a quirk of Trudeaus minority government means one could happen at any time before the next fixed election more than two years away.

Weve been investing in the middle class, not ginning up anger and telling them everything is broken and you need to burn it down, he said, taking a swipe at his rivals sloganeering, which has helped Conservatives smash fundraising records in a non-election year.

Trudeau also mirrored themes raised by President Joe Biden during his address to the House of Commons last month, evoking the truism that the destinies of Canada and the U.S. are intertwined. Just as Biden did in Ottawa, Trudeau took time in New York to address anxieties about a liberal democratic world order under duress following Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The prime ministers three-term government is under fire; critics suggest its worn out and unable to deal with new economic and geopolitical crises. Russias war and tensions with China have increased the political value of defense and industrial policies two areas that were not Liberal priorities when they swept into power in 2015.

A leaked Pentagon assessment recently obtained by The Washington Post claims Trudeau privately told NATO officials that Canada will never meet the alliances defense-spending target. On Friday, Trudeau dumped the blame on Conservatives, ignoring the fact his government has been in power for nearly eight years.

We need to continue to invest more in defense, among many other things, the prime minister said. The previous Conservative government, for all its saber-rattling in our country, managed to drop defense spending to below one percent of our GDP.

As a sign of progress, he referenced Canadas $14.2-billion deal to buy 88 F-35 stealth fighter jets from the United States.

Trudeau, both during his speech and in lengthy responses to subsequent questions, worked to establish himself as a big-picture thinker and contender in the coming election whenever it is.

America is also entering an election season Biden confirmed his re-election campaign earlier this week.

Asked if hes worried about democracy and Americas future, Trudeau replied: Obviously.

He again noted the economies of Canada and the U.S. are interconnected.

You guys are the greatest democracy in the world. And right now, its not just that its being taken for granted by so many of your citizens. Its actually being devalued to a certain extent. Its not peoples fault, he said.

The same forces are happening in Canada and elsewhere.

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This years Law Day theme, Cornerstones of Democracy: Civics, Civility, and Collaboration, could not have been announced at a more germane time. In recent years, our countrys increasingly acrimonious political battles have raised serious doubts about the integrity ofand sparked threats towardour democratic institutions, including the judiciary. Citizens on opposite ends of the political spectrum not only disagree on matters of policy, but also engage in vitriolic discourse and some have even gone so far as to engage in political violence. Sadly, the animus that has been setting our country at odds has shown little sign of abating.

Many of us in the legal community have been concerned about this crisis for quite some time, wondering how we, as a nation, can extricate ourselves from these divisive, contentious circumstances. There are certainly several ideas being circulated, but in my view, little will bear fruit unless we teach our younger citizens about the full meaning of democracy and give them a vocabulary and tone with which to speak about it. We must equip our children with the information and values necessary to engage intelligently and respectfully on topics such as the rights and duties of citizenship, our tripartite system of government, and how to debate and disagree about difficult issues without hate, vitriol or violence.

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Respect for Democracy and Citizenship Must Be Instilled Early ... - Law.com

Contributing columnist|AddFollow

April 26, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

Tech and democracy are not friends right now. We need to change that fast.

As Ive discussed previously in this series, social media has already knocked a pillar out from under our democratic institutions by making it exceptionally easy for people with extreme views to connect and coordinate. The designers of the Constitution thought geographic dispersal would put a brake on the potential power of dangerous factions. But people no longer need to go through political representatives to get their views into the public sphere.

Our democracy is reeling from this impact. We are only just beginning the work of renovating our representative institutions to find mechanisms (ranked choice voting, for instance) that can replace geographic dispersal as a brake on faction.

Now, here comes generative artificial intelligence, a tool that will help bad actors further accelerate the spread of misinformation.

A healthy democracy could govern this new technology and put it to good use in countless ways. It would also develop defenses against those who put it to adversarial use. And it would look ahead to probable economic transformation and begin to lay out plans to navigate what will be a rapid and startling set of transitions. But is our democracy ready to address these governance challenges?

Im worried about the answer to that, which is why I joined a long list of technologists, academics and even controversial visionaries such as Elon Musk in signing an open letter calling for a pause for at least six months of "the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This letter was occasioned by the release last month of GPT-4 from the lab OpenAI. GPT-4 significantly improves on the power and functionality of ChatGPT, which was released in November.

The field of technology is convulsed by a debate about whether we have reached the Age of AGI. Not just an Age of AI, where machines and software, like Siri, perform specific and narrow tasks, but an Age of Artificial General Intelligence, in which technology can meet and match humans on just about any task. This would be a game changer giving us not just more problems of misinformation and fraud, but also all kinds of unpredictable emergent properties and powers from the technology.

The newest generative foundation models powering GPT-4 can match the best humans in a range of fields, from coding to the LSAT. But is the power of generative AI evidence of the arrival of what has for some been a long-sought goal artificial general intelligence? Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, which has sought to break away from its rivals via intense investment in OpenAI, says no and argues that the capability of GPT-4 and other large language models is still constrained to limited tasks. But a team of researchers at Microsoft Research, in a comprehensive review of the capability of GPT-4, says yes. They see sparks of artificial general intelligence in the newest machine-learning models. My own take is that the research team is right. (Disclosure: My research lab has received funding support from Microsoft Research.)

But regardless of which side of the debate one comes down on, and whether the time has indeed come (as I think it has) to figure out how to regulate an intelligence that functions in ways we cannot predict, it is also the case that the near-term benefits and potential harms of this breakthrough are already clear, and attention must be paid. Numerous human activities including many white-collar jobs can now be automated. We used to worry about the impacts of AI on truck drivers; now its also the effects on lawyers, coders and anyone who depends on intellectual property for their livelihood. This advance will increase productivity but also supercharge dislocation.

In comments that sound uncannily as if from the early years of globalization, Gates said this about the anticipated pluses and minuses: When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home. Of course, there are serious questions about what kind of support and retraining people will need. Governments need to help workers transition into other roles.

And we all know how that went.

For a sense of the myriad things to worry about, consider this (partial) list of activities that OpenAI knows its technology can enable and that it therefore prohibits in its usage policies:

Illegal activity. Child sexual-abuse material. Generation of hateful, harassing or violent content. Generation of malware. Activity that has high risk of physical harm, including: weapons development; military and warfare; management or operation of critical infrastructure in energy, transportation and water; content that promotes, encourages or depicts acts of self-harm. Activity that has a high risk of economic harm, including: multilevel marketing, gambling, payday lending, automated determinations of eligibility for credit, employment, educational institutions or public assistance services. Fraudulent or deceptive activity, including: scams, coordinated inauthentic behavior, plagiarism, astroturfing, disinformation, pseudo-pharmaceuticals. Adult content. Political campaigning or lobbying by generating high volumes of campaign materials. Activities that violate privacy. Unauthorized practice of law or medicine or provision of financial advice.

The point of the open letter is not to say that this technology is all negative. On the contrary. There are countless benefits to be had. It could at long last truly enable the personalization of learning. And if we can use what generative AI is poised to create to compensate internet users for the production of the raw data its built upon treat that human contribution as paid labor, in other words we might be able to redirect the basic dynamics of the economy away from the ever-greater concentration of power in big tech.

But whats the hurry? We are simply ill-prepared for the impact of yet another massive social transformation. We should avoid rushing into all of this with only a few engineers at a small number of labs setting the direction for all of humanity. We need a breather for some collective learning about what humanity has created, how to govern it, and how to ensure that there will be accountability for the creation and use of new tools.

There are already many things we can and should do. We should be making scaled-up public-sector investments into third-party auditing, so we can actually know what models are capable of and what data theyre ingesting. We need to accelerate a standards-setting process that builds on work by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We must investigate and pursue compute governance, which means regulation of the use of the massive amounts of energy necessary for the computing power that drives the new models. This would be akin to regulating access to uranium for the production of nuclear technologies.

More than that, we need to strengthen the tools of democracy itself. A pause in further training of generative AI could give our democracy the chance both to govern technology and to experiment with using some of these new tools to improve governance. The Commerce Department recently solicited input on potential regulation for the new AI models; what if we used some of the tools the AI field is generating to make that public comment process even more robust and meaningful?

We need to govern these emerging technologies and also deploy them for next-generation governance. But thinking through the challenges of how to make sure these technologies are good for democracy requires time we havent yet had. And this is thinking even GPT-4 cant do for us.

Danielle Allen on renovating democracy

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Opinion | Artificial generative intelligence could prove too much for ... - The Washington Post

You may have recently heard the term democratic backsliding bandied about in the mainstream media by reporters and commentators alike.

Its easy enough to conjure up a definition for mass consumption: its when a democratically elected government legally curtails the rights and privileges of its citizens, in defiance of previously-established norms, in order to stay in office or enhance their own power.

That definition is fair enough, and if it were applied equally to all elected governments all over the world, using it would be completely fair. The problem is that most commentators dont apply it equally or fairly they only use it when conservative governments do it, not when liberal governments do it. If we drop that bias, we can see that both sides do it, or at least try to including right here in Maine.

The issue being raised at the moment is a seemingly innocuous one: the standards by which towns recall local elected officials, including school board members. Right now, state law says they can only be recalled (that is, removed from office) for criminal conduct, not merely over policy disagreements or for political reasons. There are a few competing proposals to change that, though: one would limit the reasons for recalls even more while increasing the signature requirements, essentially making recalls even more difficult than they already are. The other proposals would allow towns to have ordinances that allowed for recalls for any reason whatsoever.

Regardless of how one feels about recalls, it ought to be clear that one of these approaches limits democracy while the other expands it. In this case, though, its Republicans who are trying to expand democracy by letting towns have recalls for any reason they like, while a Democrat is trying to stifle democracy by restricting them even further. Imposing even more restrictions on local recalls isnt just a solution in search of a problem, it would undermine two cherished Maine traditions: local control and direct democracy.

Town government is more powerful in New England than in most of the rest of the country, and Maine is no exception to that rule. Many towns all over the state still implement the traditional town meeting, when all citizens gather once a year to act as a legislative body in person. Others have abandoned that form of government, or shifted to a ballot-based system rather than an in-person meeting, but they did so after a robust public debate amongst the citizens not based on some edict from Augusta.

Those towns and cities that have chosen to adopt recall ordinances have done the same, and theres no need for the Legislature to step in to save them from themselves. If a town wants to impose additional restrictions on their own recall ordinance above and beyond what the state does, theyre free to do so.

Similarly, if they dont want to have a recall ordinance at all, they dont have to or if they wish to repeal it because its caused too many problems, theyre free to do so.

On the flip side, if the Republican proposals to expand the reasons for recalls in state law pass, that doesnt mean that every town and city would suddenly be forced to implement an expensive, anything-goes recall ordinance. Indeed, it might not affect any municipality at all: towns could continue to restrict their recalls to certain reasons, impose signature requirements all on their own, or not pass any recall ordinance at all.

It ought to be completely clear, though, that its the Democratic proposal to limit recalls that stifles democracy, while the Republican proposal to expand them enhances it. Every municipality across the state should be given the freedom to write and implement their own recall ordinance, not be blocked from doing so merely because progressive politicians in Augusta want to protect their allies. Any attempt to further limit local recall is a clear example of democratic backsliding especially because its unnecessary and unjustifiable.

Lets hold politicians the world over, regardless of their ideology, to the same standards when it comes to upholding democratic values.

If that ends up impugning one side more than the other, thats just fine, providing its done fairly. Lets stop pretending, though, that its a unique ideological problem and instead try to fight it no matter who is proposing it. Thats what would happen if we wanted to treat it as a real issue, rather than as a rallying cry to bludgeon our political opponents.

Jim Fossel, a conservative activist from Gardiner, worked for Sen. Susan Collins.He can be contacted at:[emailprotected]Twitter:@jimfossel

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Jim Fossel: Limits on recall of officials stifle democracy - Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel

A lot can happen between now and next years election, but President Joe Bidens decision to run and former President Donald Trumps barely diminished standing with Republicans make a repeat of their 2020 contest quite likely.

Pause for a moment to consider this prospect and the epic failure it represents.

The Democrats best offer to the nation is a leader whos 80 going on 90, who cant safely be allowed off-script or put in front of reporters and whose grasp of policy and his own personal history was tenuous even in his prime.

The Republicans leading applicant for the worlds most important job is admittedly still a youngster at 76. On the other hand, he led an administration that set new standards of chaotic and incompetent government, encouraged a riotous assault on the U.S. Capitol, is the subject of several criminal and civil investigations, and is defending a lawsuit alleging hes a rapist.

This extravaganza of unfitness is unsurprising, even rational, to people who follow U.S. politics closely.

Everybody else that is, a plurality of Americans, as well as the rest of the world must wonder whether following U.S. politics closely drives you mad.

Its less about madness, in fact, than systemic political failure.

Bidens candidacy does make sense; so does Trumps. To be precise: They and their supporters arent behaving irrationally. They are acting within an electoral system that is incapable of dealing with the deep class and cultural divides of American society.Both parties could bring forward candidates whod be more popular with the general electorate than Biden or Trump. Why dont they? Because those kinds of candidates dont tend to be popular with people who vote in primaries.

This more committed subset of voters favors candidates who mirror its own passionately held preferences.

How the candidates will fare in the general election isnt always front of mind.

At the moment, Trump has more support among Republicans than, say, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, even though DeSantis looks more likely to beat Biden in a general election. For now, at least, the party is on course to choose the candidate with the better chance of losing.

The Democratic case is more complicated, because Biden, as the incumbent, has always been the presumed nominee. If he stepped aside to allow an open competition for the succession, progressive champions such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders might have a better shot than moderates such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo or former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (either of whom, Im guessing, would win more general election votes than Biden or the progressive torch-bearers).

Even though about 70% of voters and 51% of Democrats dont want Biden to run, he will likely do better in the general election than Warren or Sanders. So his choosing to run might in fact serve the interests of both the party and the public. But notice how: by foreclosing a system apt to choose somebody worse.

The defects of Americas system of primaries arent new. But America has changed in ways that make them more pernicious. The ideological distance between the parties has increased; the cultural distance has increased even more.

To be sure, this isnt necessarily fatal for centrists and pragmatists. As loathing of the enemy increases, so does fear of the consequences of an enemy victory. In 2020 this helped Biden, who was able to present himself within the party as a centrist and unifier: The threat of Trump was scary enough to quell the partys heightened distaste for compromise.

The problem lies one step back. The affective separation of the parties so-called negative polarization makes it harder for pragmatic compromisers to build support within their party and establish themselves as credible contenders. If youre willing to do business with the evil-doers on the other side, youre impaired from the start. It takes extraordinary political talent think Barack Obama in 2008 to appeal to both energetic partisans and the distracted, wavering middle.

The angrier politics gets, the harder that kind of breakthrough becomes.

Improbable as it might seem, Biden might indeed be the Democrats best bet in 2024. His divisive record in office will make it harder for him to play the bridge-building centrist; on the other hand, most voters will find the prospect of a second Trump term even scarier than the first. The bottom lines the same: If the choice is Biden versus Trump, American democracy is surely broken.

What will repairing it require? Things may have to get worse before they get better. The question is how much worse. In 2019, it was possible to imagine that a global pandemic causing more than 1 million deaths nationwide and colossal economic damage would have united Americans around a sense of urgent common purpose.

In fact it divided them even more deeply for and againstlockdowns, for and against masks, for and against vaccine mandates, for and against expert authority.

If this still-worsening rupture cant be mended, the outlook for U.S. peace and prosperity is grim.

A prerequisite for any kind of repair is political leaders willing to try.

Where are they?

Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering economics. Previously, he was deputy editor of the Economist and chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times.

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OPINION: A Biden-Trump rematch? It shows American democracy is ... - Midland Daily News