Quebec’s chief innovator, Luc Sirois, unveiled the conclusions of a brand new study on artificial intelligence on Tuesday. A fascinating report from the Quebec Innovation Council: we discover the strengths and weaknesses of what could position us as one of the driving forces of artificial intelligence on an international scale, with a major impact on our Company. After all, it is here that luminaries of artificial intelligence have developed their expertise and deployed companies that make the biggest players in this ecosystem envious.
One of the important drawbacks of this report, and you certainly suspect it, is the data from the Quebec government.
A few weeks ago, several voices from a multitude of circles were raised to denounce being fed up with this data chaos and to demand a major data project in Quebec so that we can equip ourselves good tools for collecting, processing and sharing relevant information from the Quebec population.
The new study by the chief innovator confirms this major problem and goes even further by “recommending the government of Quebec to develop a real national strategy to promote digital data from the private sector, research and administration. public and civil society in order to encourage the sharing of data between these sectors. (pg. 25)
Indeed, without organized, homogenized, connected and secure data, we can say goodbye to artificial intelligence. Without a major data project set up by the government, putting artificial intelligence to work amounts to trying to look for a needle in a haystack because of incomplete or missing information.
Worse still, this amounts to asking an intelligent system to remain a stupid machine.
When will the government take an interest in data and provide Quebec with a real strategy allowing it to make decisions based on convincing information?
If you still doubted the seriousness of this approach, did you know that the Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital Affairs does not even know the number of databases that the Quebec government holds?
This bodes badly for artificial intelligence, and even more so for the cybersecurity of our personal information…