TORONTO, March 22, 2017 /CNW/ - The Government of Canada is funding a Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy for research and talent that will cement Canada's position as a world leader in AI. The $125 million strategy will attract and retain top academic talent in Canada, increase the number of post-graduate trainees and researchers studying artificial intelligence, and promote collaboration between Canada's main centres of expertise in Montreal, Toronto-Waterloo and Edmonton. The program will be administered through CIFAR, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The new program was announced in the federal budget released on Wednesday. "The Canadian government clearly recognizes the importance of artificial intelligence as a platform technology that cuts across many areas of innovation today," says Dr. Alan Bernstein, President and CEO of CIFAR.

Is a guaranteed paycheck from the government, with no strings attached, the answer to the relentless rise of automation? The concept might sound far-fetched, but a so-called universal basic income (UBI), is currently one of the most hotly debated policy topics being floated as a means to address income inequality and the disruption that technology poses to the workforce. UBI is being tested in Finland and other international markets, but has received decidedly mixed reactions. Meanwhile, developments in robotics and artificial intelligence have grave implications for the labor force. A report issued this week from consulting firm PwC found that more than a third of U.S. jobs were at risk from automation, upping the ante for policy makers to cushion the blow to workers. Advocates for UBI argue that a guaranteed paycheck could serve as a way to fight poverty and uncertainty in an evolving U.S. economy, and encourage workers to take more risks in the job market if they had some extra money as a cushion.

It's not yet clear whether, with the rise of artificial intelligence, workforce automation will lead to an overall rise or drop in human job creation. That's the argument put forward by University of Geneva professor and tax lawyer Xavier Oberson. Oberson argues that as robots take over more and more jobs – particularly in the industry and service sectors – there will be a rise in unemployment and a corresponding drop in tax and social security receipts by governments all over the world. He believes that imposing a tax on work done by robots could help offset these losses. Logistically, he says this could be managed by creating a "legal entity" representing robots, just as is done today for corporations.

The Trump administration appears to be taking a hands-off approach to preparing for the future of automation and artificial intelligence, despite warnings from tech analysts who say AI is already here and helped guide policy measures enacted in the waning months of the Obama presidency. During a press event last week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters he's not concerned by the prospect of millions of Americans losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, saying he doesn't expect the technological shift to happen for a long time. "That is so far in the future, in terms of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs, we're like so far away from that, not even on my radar screen," Mnuchin said at an event hosted by news website Axios. "I think it's 50 or 100 more years." Although it's unclear whether Mnuchin's comments represent a formal administration position, the treasury secretary is traditionally one of the president's most influential economic advisers.

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Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says artificial intelligence is "so far in the future" that it's "not even on my radar screen." He says we won't have to worry about how it affects the workforce for "50 or 100 more years." Steve Mnuchin is not concerned one bit with AI and automation. In fairness to Mnuchin, the question was specifically about artificial intelligence, not robots. It's a fine distinction, but an important one -- while robots that can perform repetitive tasks have been in wide industrial use for decades now, artificial intelligence is a class of software that can "learn" and let machines do more sophisticated jobs.

If you're a brand advertiser at a car company or a cereal maker, you may want to know when your product appears, unscripted, in hundreds of hours of TV shows or online videos. How to track that without watching all of it? An artificial intelligence startup has the answer. Matroid, founded by Stanford University adjunct professor Reza Zadeh, can scan video for all sorts of things like when President Donald Trump appears, or how often a man holding a gun is recorded. Users can easily write a filter--Matroid calls them detectors--of their own to find particular people or objects, or they can pick from a library of pre-programmed filters designed by the startup.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says he's "not at all" worried about robots displacing American workers, and his definition of artificial intelligence comes from Star Wars. In an interview today with Axios' Mike Allen, Mnuchin said he was unconcerned about the effects of automation, both with physical machines and artificial intelligence. "In terms of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs, I think we're so far away from that that it's not even on my radar screen," he said in response to a question from Allen. "I think it's 50 or 100 more years." When pressed, Mnuchin said that he wasn't talking about things like self-driving cars, which he believes could run from coast to coast in the not-so-distant future.

If there's one thing that labor economists and leaders in Silicon Valley generally seem to agree on, it's that increasingly sophisticated technology is coming to replace American jobs. According to a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, 38 percent of U.S. jobs are at high risk of being replaced by automation in the next 15 years, compared with 30 percent of jobs in the U.K. and 21 percent in Japan. The United States, like the United Kingdom, is dominated by service jobs in sectors like manufacturing, transportation, finance, and food service, and U.S. jobs are particularly at risk because, according to PwC's chief U.K. economist John Hawksworth, the tasks American workers perform are just easier to automate. Still, the White House seems completely uninterested in the imminent threat facing U.S. employment and wages, choosing to cast blame instead on China and Mexico for the decline of U.S. manufacturing jobs. "We want products made by our workers in our factories stamped with those four magnificent words--made in the U.S.A.," President Donald Trump declared on a recent trip to a Boeing plant in South Carolina.

Both artificial intelligence and blockchain technology have made major advances in the past few years. Could they be combined to bring us the money of the future? Recently, many advances have been made in the field of artificial intelligence. In the past few years, we saw artificial intelligence beat one of the world's best players at Go, save drivers from car crashes, and predict the outcome of the US Presidential Election. Many companies, both established market leaders and new startups, have started to incorporate artificial intelligence into mainstream products.