Killer Robots Are Coming

Rapid advances in autonomous weapons technologies and an increasingly tense global order have brought added urgency to the debate over the merits and risks of the use of real-life killer robots, technically classified as lethal autonomous weapons systems. As Kyle Hiebert writes, these technologies and their potential uses are progressing too fast, and the international consensus is too fractured, to hope for a moratorium: acceptable norms around their use must be established in advance of wide adoption.

In this policy brief, Dan Ciuriak and Robert Fay argue that Canada should join the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement early, so as to participate in its development in a way that meets the needs of Canada as a small, open economy. They outline areas in the agreement needing particular attention and how Canada could be influential in working with like-minded countries seeking alternatives to being defined by the interests and concerns of the governments and firms of the major data realms.

Profound transformations of society and the economy are being signalled by terms such as the “metaverse” and “Web3.” While these concepts have yet to snap into sharp definition, investors are plowing money into innovative technologies such as virtual and augmented reality technologies, decentralized financing and payments systems, and even brain-computer interfaces. Dan Ciuriak writes that it is important to think through these developments and their implications for economies.

Ten years ago, in the largest ever online protest, more than 100,000 websites went “dark” to protest two US intellectual property bills. Two days later, the bills were dead. But the victory was illusionary. Even as the protests raged, a small group secretly circumvented democracy and instituted handshake agreements echoing many of the bills’ provisions. Among the lessons, Natasha Tusikov writes, is that in areas of civil rights and public policy, tech companies are only ever contingent allies.

Many experts lauded the creation of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), believing that it allowed Canada to finally catch up to its key security allies in making national security accountability a parliamentary reality. But as Hugh Segal, Ann Fitz-Gerald, Kent Roach and Wesley Wark explain in this piece originally published at iPolitics, the NSICOP experiment is now in grave danger. The functioning of NSICOP must be restored, and an ad hoc committee should be allowed to study the records of the National Microbiology Lab case and report to Parliament.