Tech is wreaking 'catastrophic costs,' Jim Balsillie warns

The modern digital era, a “new era of human commodification,” violates fundamental human rights, warned BlackBerry founder Jim Balsillie in a speech on Sunday evening.

“The data generated by our experiences, choices, and even our thoughts, are captured, processed, and traded as raw material for manipulative algorithms deployed for profit and power, all with catastrophic costs to society, including mental health crisis, democratic erosion, societal polarization, lost economic dynamism and misinformation to name a few,” said Balsillie, according to notes of Balsillie’s speech, obtained by National Post in advance of his talk.

In his remarks, made to the Ditchley Foundation’s conference in Ottawa, the Canadian tech entrepreneur argued that we’re now living in a new economy where “wealth, power and security” are obtained via soft assets — intellectual property and data/artificial intelligence — rather than hard, tangible assets.

“With the shift to a knowledge-based economy 35 years ago, companies and countries focused on strategically generating valuable IP assets, and more recently, to strategically controlling valuable data assets,” Balsillie’s notes say. “Wealth accrues to the owners who amass these two rent-generating assets.”

Balsillie warned that Canada has no national data strategy and that there are only limited programs to build Canada’s IP assets, something, he said, which costs the country around $100 billion per year.

He argued that Canada needs to shift the way it thinks about innovation and make “a pivot to deliberate strategies that drive productivity, prosperity, and sovereignty in the 21st-century economy,” as Canada’s GDP is growing slowly compared to other countries, especially the United States.

“Because Canada missed the shift, we are seeing Canada’s standard of living in steady decline,” he warned, according to the notes.

Balsillie argued that Canada is spending $7.5 billion on research annually, but without a strategy to own and commercialize outcomes. One potential solution, he argued, is legislation to help Canada own its intellectual property. As one example, Balsillie says that Canada’s publicly funded research built the foundations of the artificial intelligence boom, but Canada is not on the list of top 100 patent holders globally.

“AI is transforming industries at scale in ways we haven’t seen since the rise of the internet,” Balsillie’s notes say.

There are structural forces that reshape the labour market. Globalization and offshoring or a data-driven economy that inspired gig work or the knowledge economy comprised of intangible assets, for example. But this also includes machine knowledge, which Balsillie identifies as a new “factor of production.”

In order to tackle the problems of rights violations and the languishing Canadian economy, Balsillie proposes a four-point plan, which he first articulated in a speech to the International Monetary Fund in 2018. Canada must protect national security in the digital era; ensure there’s fair access to the new means of production in the economy; enhance citizen welfare in the areas of “privacy, democracy, mental health, human rights”; and comply with all international agreements.

“Helping shape this in an integrated fashion is technically complex but also an opportunity and imperative for Canada,” said Balsillie on Sunday.

Balsillie, 64, was co-CEO of Waterloo-based Research in Motion, later renamed after its BlackBerry device. He founded the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Centre for Canadian Innovation.

• The dangers of Canada leaving its digital sovereignty in American hands
• Ian Cooper: Turning Canada into a technological powerhouse isn't rocket science

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