Much of what follows below consists of a reflection on two years of work at the intersection of AI, democracy and the labour market. My focus has progressed from AGI and global governance and alignment to Canadian AI governance and deliberative democratic technologies for AI alignment. From Public AI and Canada’s AI investments to Dais’ analysis of AI and the labour market, AI commercialization, and AI trust, literacy and adoption.

Most recently, I have become thoroughly disillusioned with the genAI hype cycle and believe its short-term benefits for productivity and impact on jobs, short of AGI, are vastly and intentionally overstated. But before I get there a couple quick notes on the rest of life, which I am only now realizing in my middle age (so hard to write that!), is what matters most.

The Accident

As this past summer came to an end, just after Ami’s first birthday and just before I was supposed to spend a final month back on pat leave after starting full-time employment at the Dais, I almost died. I was “doored” on my morning bike ride to work. I caught the corner of the car door on my shoulder and then hit my chest, collapsing my lung. While I was writhing on the street, a number of pedestrians called 911. After an hour of them calling every 10-15 minutes without an ambulance arriving, I got in the back of a passerby’s minivan with her kid and dog. On the way to the hospital we passed an ambulance: I stumbled out of the van and banged on the windshield and was informed that, yes, my lung had collapsed, and that as long as I was going over 20km an hour and flew at least 6 feet they could rush me to a trauma centre. Twenty minutes later I was pumped full of ketamine and slid into a CT scanner. As I kaleidoscoped between reality and my k-induced delirium, I started saying goodbye to my baby and family.

Never have I been more grateful, first for my wife, who was hit the hardest by having to take care of me and our families and work, while I recovered. And then for the rest of my family and friends who were incredibly supportive. The accident confirmed, after exploring life with Ami, Kaeko (my mother in law), and Elina in Spain, Italy and Japan this past year, that we made the right decision in making Roncesvalles, Toronto our home. Like parenthood and her becoming a Managing Director at Accenture and our primary breadwinner just before mat leave, the accident also reinforced how lucky I am to be married to Elina.

Roncesvalles, Toronto, Canada

We joke that I should become an ambassador for the Ronci BIA because our new neighbourhood has so much of the community we were looking for in the other countries that we explored. Ronci feels like a “shtetl“ with dozens of family and friends just blocks away and a farmers market, local school and high street that make it feel like a 15-minute city—until, that is, we have to get downtown. With my parents, parents-in-law, closest aunt and uncle and cousins and a majority of my friends all in Toronto and with my identity more firmly tied to Canada by the day, there is nowhere I would rather live and devote my work to supporting.

Ami

I am still processing fatherhood and the new me that is the result of the feelings of joy, exhaustion, inadequacy and meaning that Ami inspires. The experience of being a father is so different that I cannot describe it adequately. From the cliches of discovering the world through Ami’s magnificent eyes (airline attendant “is she wearing contacts?”), to sleep deprivation and constant colds and flus, to being unable to find a new game or toy to keep Ami entertained for another 10 minutes, I have learned that parenthood is the most rewarding and hardest job.

I hope to return to this subject in the future when I have made the time and space to understand these feelings. In the meantime, I feel guilty when at work or on my phone or writing about AI instead of focusing on Ami.

The photos of Ami littered throughout this article are just a sample of the tens of thousands I’ve taken.

The Dais

Part of my motivation for leaving LinkedIn was to better align my work with my values. For some time now I have been refining what I hope to have on my tombstone and then align my work with this statement: Jake improved the lives of his family, community and their futures. My work at the Dais has come the closest to helping me achieve this, so much so that I feel less urgency to regularly review my projects or priorities. The people I am working with and work itself, including kids and tech, democracy revitalization and tech’s role in society, just feel right. I post and write about this work almost daily so I’ll leave it at that but there are a smattering of calls for collaboration on Dais’ projects below.

3 Recommendations for Canadian AI today

This 2023 post explains why I became obsessed with AI. It was inspired by the writings of Hinton and Bengio and the Pause letters. My early research focused on the justified fear of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and led me to focus on AI regulation in Canada and AI-human values alignment.

After contributing to Dais-led roundtables on Canada’s AI bill and an event with Geoffrey Hinton on AI Safety, I began working with the Dais to build a consensus around how Canada should invest in compute. Since then our work has expanded, continuing the Brookfield Institute’s long standing Canadian innovation research into the impact of AI on different sectors of the labour market (public, finance, creative, and non profit). We have developed partnerships with CIFAR, Mila, DIGITAL, the Human Feedback Foundation, and many others that contributed to the recent consultation on the Pan Canadian AI Strategy. Our research spans AI adoption, commercialization, ethical data and data commons, dual-use technologies and building trust through provenance technologies.

Here are three recommendations based on my current thinking:

Recommendation 1: Ignore the AGI Hype; focus on GenAI’s “normal” utility.

We are in a hype cycle. Stop listening to Big Tech and instead distinguish between genAI and AGI. We have agency over the former, a normal technology, that will have normal impacts on our labour market, as explained below.

Recommendation 2: Double down on Clean Energy (Canada’s AI superpower).

Clean energy is Canada’s foremost comparative advantage in AI after talent and it is the best medium to long term investment in AI.

Recommendation 3: Invest in Public AI (The “CBC of Compute”).

Build Public AI and a Data Commons (both explained in the two articles at the end of this post). Allocate dedicated funds within the next Canadian AI strategy and the $2.4B allocated to compute for sovereign compute and open-source development in addition to creating a Public AI crown corporation.

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Democracy x AI: Adoption and AI Literacy

As I went from a very part-time collaborator to a more regular Senior Fellow to the Director of Partnerships and Advocacy at the Dais, the three pillars of our work—technology, democracy and education—intertwined with our methods – research, convening and advocacy – each reinforcing the other thereby painting a more complete picture of AI’s challenges and opportunities.

Trust has justifiably become central to Canada’s debate about AI. The fact that, as Canadian AI Minister Even Solomon has regularly said, “adoption moves at the speed of trust” explains Canada’s low adoption compared to others in the developed world. In the past I believed this could result in Canada being left behind in the race to increase productivity. I now believe our risk aversion may be appropriate skepticism in the face of a generative AI hype cycle and widespread confusion between genAI and AGI’s impacts on the economy and labour market intentionally generated by Big tech and its bankers and consultants.

I have now taught six cohorts totalling 400+ students and multiple non-profit organizations about responsible AI governance and use cases. Essentials of Responsible AI Governance, a three-week virtual course designed for nonprofit leaders who want to navigate AI governance challenges with integrity, helped leaders understand that those who govern AI effectively not only safeguard their organizations but also contribute to a healthier democracy.

These cohorts also confirmed my long standing belief that lifelong learning is one of the keys to solving Canada’s productivity challenges—more so than genAI or any other technology without it. Our historic expectation that learning is batch-loaded till your twenties at which point you’re supposed to be set for the “working” phase of your life is no longer reasonable. Groups like Learning Society thankfully continue to elevate continuous learning as a new paradigm. On-the-job training will similarly remedy some of Canada’s adoption and commercialization challenges, in addition to helping address threats to our democracy like misinformation and disinformation.

At the Dais, we’re looking for opportunities to expand our training including with Digital Moment on youth AI literacy and with the Human Feedback Foundation on non profit AI governance and use cases. If you are looking for values-aligned AI education, do reach out.

Democracy x AI: Deliberative and Participatory Technologies

The erosion of democracy that began with social media and continued with Big Tech’s domination of advertising is being accelerated by genAI as it speeds up the enshitification of the internet and the polarization and hollowing of the political centre. Yet with Big Tech locked in a race to superintelligence without caring about the world it is creating, I spend a lot of my time thinking about alternatives to our current global domination by billionaire plutocrats.

In the summer of 2024, research into how to align AI with human values led me to rediscover deliberative democracy and the beginning of an obsession with deliberative and participatory technologies via the Metagov movement.

Through Metagov, I found Public AI which I have championed ever since, eventually becoming a Canadian Public AI Fellow. Public AI has become central to my thinking about how liberal democratic governments should support AI and technology more generally. This builds on many years of support for digital public infrastructure. My focus on “delibTech” began with my advising the Centre for Media, Tech and Democracy’s essay series on Deliberative Approaches to Inclusive Governance. It continued in 2025 with participation in Foundations for the Digital Commons which explored how technology, law, and innovation can better serve the common good. It continues with the more recent integration of Ethelo into the Dais’s Screen Break initiative, recently renamed Heads Up.

Moving forward we’re exploring the idea of hosting a curated group of Canadian and international democracy technology leaders, builders and advocates to shape strategies and concrete opportunities for using Canada, and related jurisdictions, as DemTech demonstration sandboxes as part of broader efforts at democratic renewal. From Make.org to Decidum, Pol.is and Crowdshy and Talk to the City to MAPLE, we’re keen on leveraging technology to revitalize rather than disrupt democracy. Interested? Get in touch!

AI is a Normal Technology

My personal disillusionment with genAI’s hallucinations has combined with witnessing

large-scale enterprise applications fail to live up to their expectations. GenAI has changed the world and AI will continue to be the defining technology of this moment. But let’s get our priorities straight and listen to the Nobel Prize winning labour market economists who think it will have a similar impact on productivity as previous technologies have rather than the promises of tech giants who claim that it will save your company or economy if you just give them more control.

Let’s prioritize empowering humans in their jobs, particularly those in the care economy, who are woefully underpaid, rather than using AI as an excuse to fire, or not hire, because of stock market optics.

And unlike what happened during the Industrial Revolution, let’s take advantage of knowing we are in the midst of this revolution to empower democratic, interoperable, open, public, equitable, accessible and end-user owned and aligned technology, instead of sacrificing our agency by claiming AI is “agentic”.

A couple of representative pieces by folks I have relied on for a less biased and more evidence-based understanding of GenAI:

- Benedict Evans: GenAI’s adoption puzzle

- Gary Marcus: What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud? Some possible economic and geopolitical implications

- Daron Acemoglu: The Simple Macroeconomics of AI

Finally, the forthcoming book “AI as Normal Technology: An alternative to the vision of AI as a potential superintelligence mirrors much of my thinking. It is based on the similarly named piece, perhaps the best piece on AI this year:

“We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

The statement “AI is normal technology” suggests three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future.

The normal technology frame is about the relationship between technology and society. It rejects technological determinism, especially the notion of AI itself as an agent in determining its future. We advocate for reducing uncertainty as a first-rate policy goal and resilience as the overarching approach to catastrophic risks. We argue that drastic interventions premised on the difficulty of controlling superintelligent AI will, in fact, make things much worse if AI turns out to be normal technology—the downsides of which will be likely to mirror those of previous technologies that are deployed in capitalistic societies, such as inequality.”

Democracy x AI: Public AI

For those that missed it, this is the abstract of a paper I wrote with Nicholas Vincent, Assistant Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, and Mark Surman, President of the Mozilla Foundation, on “Canada as a Champion for Public AI: Data, Compute and Open Source Infrastructure for Economic Growth and Inclusive Innovation“:

“Current AI models and products are predominantly built by a very small number of actors within only two incentive systems and political contexts, namely (1) big tech, centred in Silicon Valley and (2) China. This poses serious concerns about how AI will impact the rest of the world. The concentration of influence could prevent building AI as a public good, inhibit nations like Canada from unlocking transformative economic change, and increase risks—including democratic deficits, greater inequality, and existential concerns—worldwide.

In this article, we outline a tractable roadmap for Canada to work with a coalition of public and private actors around the world to champion a third option: “Public AI”. These actors should include government institutions, private funds and companies, research institutes, open source projects, and civic organizations. This proposal builds on others’ extensive research on AI as a public good or utility, such as calls for a “CERN for AI” or “Airbus for AI”. If successful, this proposal would allow Canada and allies around the world to build and deploy competitive public AI infrastructure that drives economic growth and public benefit.

Publicly backed AI research and compute programs, as well as commercial and nonprofit open source AI projects, already provide a solid foundation. What we still need is:

1. greater and faster international collaboration,

2. explicit, publicly backed open source and standards-based strategies that make it possible for innovations and improvements in one country, company, or lab to accrue into a common pool of interoperable public goods used by all actors, and

3. explicit data strategies that enable AI development and public interest uses of AI.

The views expressed in the article have since gained wider acceptance. For example, at a presentation to 40+ Canadian Senators, the Dais team was asked about Public AI, I presented on many senior federal civil servants at the Canadian School of Public Service and have engaged the Government of Canada’s AI leadership on how to invest based on its principles. Because international cooperation lies at its core, I have begun integrating ideas from thought leaders like Jon Shell, Chair of Social Capital Partners, Danielle Goldfarb, a CIGI, CSA and Munk Fellow, and Ana Serrano, President of OCAD U (see more below) into this thesis.

Jon, Nick Vincent and Eric Meerkamper, co-founder the Centre for Social Innovation and adviser to the Montreal Institute for Global Security and I wrote the following piece on why “At the G7 Next Week, Canada Should Focus on Building a Coalition of Open Democratic Economies and Investing in Public AI”:

“Canada is presented with a unique opportunity to create substantial economic prosperity for players beyond Big Tech and China. As compute resources concentrate, data sources are exhausted or locked up, and technical talent flows to a handful of companies that are led by a small number of billionaires with decreasing democratic checks on their power, AI’s potential future benefits for the average human relative to its risks diminish.

Currently, most AI models are being built and deployed by a very small number of organizations and actors in the US and China. The vast majority of private capital, such as Softbank investments in Stargate, is flowing to the US; in terms of public spending on AI, China is outpacing other countries. This is creating massive concentration of influence, which could prevent building AI as a public good, inhibit nations like Canada from unlocking transformative economic change, and increase risks, from democratic deficits, to greater inequality, to existential concerns, worldwide.

If there was one issue for Canada to champion globally and urgently it is Public AI. Canada can work with a coalition of public and private actors around the world including governments, institutions, private funds, companies, and research institutes. Building on extensive research on AI as a public good or utility, such as proposals for a CERN or Airbus for AI, Canada, in conjunction with public and private allies around the world should build and deploy competitive public AI infrastructure that drives economic growth and public benefit.

We define Public AI as public infrastructure, provisioned like electricity, parks, highways, libraries, or the Internet itself. Public AI is publicly accessible: ensuring AI delivers benefits to all. Public AI is publicly accountable: ensuring AI reflects society’s values. And Public AI creates permanent public goods: ensuring AI is a reliable foundation.

Canada led the world in Public AI before the term acquired its current meaning through its Pan-Canadian AI Strategy. The talent leading Canada’s AI Institutes and their many academic partners are at the top of global AI talent rankings and remain amongst our country’s greatest resources. Yet our adoption of AI is at the bottom of these rankings as is our ability to commercialize and scale these institutions’ research.

Publicly backed AI research and compute programs and commercial and nonprofit open source AI projects provide a solid foundation. What we need is: 1) greater and faster international collaboration, 2) explicit, publicly backed open source and standards-based strategies that make it possible for innovations and improvements in one country, company, or lab to accrue into a common pool of interoperable public goods used by all actors, and 3) explicit public data strategies that enable AI development and public interest uses of AI.

Public AI supports and relies on individual digital sovereignty: ownership of one’s data as a human including all the rights associated with one’s personhood from agency to compensation. Canada’s diversity and good governance lend themselves to the creation of an ethical data economy. Canada can lead the world in building such an economy and Public AI on top of it as a Digital Public Infrastructure.

A consortium of liberal-democratic countries can wield as much or more economic power, technological influence and natural resources as either the US or China. Working together, they can form a new Alliance to counter these superpowers economically and with shared technology and resources, to protect democracy and to work toward social and environmental sustainability. Pooling capital, talent and data among values-aligned democracies could help counter Big Tech’s dominance.

It is now impossible to imagine a better future with America playing as large a role as it does today. Extraordinary effort has been put into international agreements like the Paris Accord and the Global Minimum Tax only to have them rendered toothless after being abandoned by the US. As long as we depend on American leadership, it will be hard to face other threats that require collective action, like climate change, inequality, and the increasing influence of the tech billionaires. Add progress towards artificial general intelligence and the clock is ticking on many of these threats.

Collaboration can overcome Big Tech and China’s concentration of power and money by connecting many existing publicly backed and open source AI initiatives internationally so that they add up to more than the sum of their parts. Values can be a greater draw for talent than dollars. Academia, government and civil society can work more effectively with companies to create value through carefully choreographed public-private partnerships and ecosystems rather than black and white zero sum competition that we see with Big Tech.”

More recently, Fenwick McKelvey, Associate Professor at Concordia University, discussed the links between public service media and public language models, and asked: “What AI would mean if built more like a public service?”, while Mark Daley and Vivek Goal have advocated for Canada to build its own LLM. Ethan Phillips supported their piece in “How about a made-in-Canada public option for AI?”

Germany is developing a non-profit generative AI model to compete with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Canada should do the same. Canada should also follow the lead of Swiss AI which just launched Apertus and develop public AI infrastructure with a focus on open source, international collaboration and ethical data: “Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity,” according to Joshua Tan, a leading proponent in making AI a public infrastructure.

Public AI, and a Canadian Data and AI Commons

I have spent a lot of time the past few months thinking about how to better support artists, civil society and nonprofits that do not have access to the proprietary or expensive data and software resources necessary to achieve the AI creativity, productivity and wellbeing benefits touted by those with the most wealth. One idea that I continue to be excited about is Ana Serrano’s concept of an AI commons—”public infrastructure—compute, data, tools and education made widely accessible so Canadians are not only users but creators”—which aligns with how “Canada has always built for public use when the stakes were high—public health care, the CBC, community-led digital networks in remote regions. Canada’s strength has come from public institutions that gave everyone a stake, not just private monopolies at the top.”

Ana argues that sovereignty is not just about servers on Canadian land or keeping intellectual property at home. It is also about shaping the culture of how AI is built and shared in this country.

Education, she notes, is broad—classrooms, maker spaces, libraries, workplaces and cultural institutions—so individuals can explore AI for themselves and adapt it to their own challenges.

Many AI innovations will come not from tech giants but from smaller teams—artists, designers, cultural workers, creative technologists and small and medium-sized enterprises (which make up 98 percent of Canadian firms and nearly half our gross domestic product).

Ana is right that “Canada’s $2.4 billion is promising but partial. It does not yet add up to a commons—one that links infrastructure, education, governance and open access through the mix of public investment, procurement and partnerships that has built our national institutions.”

Ana has articulated the vision. It will inevitably run up against Big Tech and Canada’s monopolies but there is more public good and there are more of us, on the side of the AI Commons. Now it is time to build them.

Stefaan Verhulst, a global leader in digital public infrastructure, describes how to structure a data commons in response to changes to the open source, open data and open content movement forced by the advent of genAI:

“The contours of a reinvented digital commons are only beginning to come into focus...

First, such a commons would be modular, allowing different levels of access depending on the sensitivity and provenance of the data, as well as the status of the stakeholder requesting the data.

Second, a revitalized commons would embed benefit-sharing protocols, so that those who supply or steward data—whether individuals, communities, or institutions—receive recognition, compensation, or access to the resulting AI application when that data is reused.

Third, it would incorporate participatory governance, including participatory boards representing data contributors, users, and affected communities...

And finally ... it would use technology, making use of tools—such as data provenance tracking, audit trails, and licensing metadata—to ensure that openness does not mean loss of control.”

I couldn’t be more excited to announce that I’m moving from Senior Fellow at Canada’s foremost think tank, the Dais, to head of partnerships. The past year has solidified my belief in the Dais’ potential to create meaningful change. This is the team I want to be working with in the place I want to be working.

This year has also been a mind-expanding journey into fatherhood and where our family wants to live:

Ami:

With every new movement, Ami continues to amaze: never could I imagine my excitement at a first wave or clap, or the ability to drink out of a straw. Ami remains the most beautiful human ever (not that I’m biased). She’s also increasingly challenging to keep from hurting herself, and I am incredibly grateful to my wife Elina for her herculean parenting of our extremely active, hungry, and happy baby.

Toronto:

I have moved every year or few for most of my life. As I clocked my 12th year here in Toronto, the urge or itch to move was too strong to resist. Again, I’m grateful to Elina for allowing us to explore life elsewhere including spending a chunk of her maternity leave in Spain, Italy and Japan.

While some of our closest friends have built an incredible community in Barcelona, the city is not welcoming tourists or expats and has alienated many of its artists and entrepreneurs. We loved spending February with them in Barcelona but decided against creating a commune there.

While we are drawn more to Italy’s warm and rich culture than almost any other, dozens of Italians were so critical of its economy and future that they dissuaded us from moving to Rome, rural Tuscany or Turin, where we lived in March.

And Japan, where Elina spent some of her childhood, has epic food, design, art, and which was incredibly easy to travel through 7 cities in April, particularly with a child (e.g. every bathroom has a seat to put your infant in!), is too far from home and Japanese too strong a requirement to work there.

So in short, after Ami’s umpteenth flight and train ride, we recommitted our family to living in Toronto, Canada. This city has more of our hearts and our extended families than any other and this country has our souls, particularly as so much of what we know of the international order breaks down.

The Dais:

There is some symmetry to my landing my first full-time role after a decade working at LinkedIn with the counterparts of my first major success at LinkedIn. This province-wide online learning for higher education agreement was with a government of Ontario administration that included my new boss, André Côté, among other past and present Daisies. Similarly, there was no colleague with whom I connected more closely than Marium Hamid, who left LinkedIn to join the Dais a year before me. Both are as thoughtful and empathetic as they are strategic and realistic, as hardworking as they are balanced. The rest of the Dais team is equally inspiring, punching above their weight in classically Canadian fashion.

Perhaps my most important professional lesson of this past year post-LinkedIn relates to the the importance of working with folks you love. Values alignment, similar styles of work and related professional ambitions are paramount.

My goal after leaving Big Tech was to fix society’s relationship with technology. The Dais is the ideal home to pursue this mission. The quality of our think tank’s research is second-to-none in Canada. “Canada’s platform for bold policies and better leaders,” the Dais currently focuses on “Kids and Tech”, “Renewing Democracy” and “AI and the Innovation Economy”.

The Dais holds a unique position in Canada's civic innovation ecosystem. It can be the light guiding Canada as global engine for policy innovation, civic leadership, and inclusive prosperity.

As a Senior Fellow, I've seen how the team convenes and catalyzes change across technology, education, and democracy. My work with the Dais on compute advanced Canada’s contributions to my focus this past year, Public AI. The Dais’ work on AI adoption and its impacts on the labour market is definitive and should be the basis for policy and investing decisions at enterprise, provincial and federal levels. The Dais work on online harms justifies regulatory action. And its work on screens in schools will change how children like mine engage with tech.

Let’s partner! Get in touch!

Returning to Canada after 3 months of travel, it feels like the country has turned a historic corner. Unified by a trade war, there is hope in a new Liberal government which has rallied Conservative leaders like Ontario’s Premier.

This new government should:

- focus innovation and digital economy investments on Public AI, and the open source-, sovereign- and public digital- infrastructure and data ecosystems necessary to support it.

- rapidly grow Canada’s multilateral relationships, particularly in trade, research, foreign investment and aid, with like-minded values-aligned countries such as Japan, Scandinavia, Taiwan, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the UK and France, Spain and Italy ideally to create a coalition of these liberal democratic economies

Below I quote a manifesto by advocating for the coalition and then include excerpts from a forthcoming paper by (SFU), (Mozilla) and me on Canada as a Champion for Public AI.

Please reach out if you’d like to support either or both proposals.

Jon Shell’s Manifesto for the Rest(o)

Since I learned from my father about Canada’s multilateral leadership under Lester B Pearson in the creation of the International Declaration of Human Rights and under Lloyd Axworthy as the leading soft and middle power in securing treaties on land mines and CFCs, I’ve dreamt about returning our country and the world to similarly positive and ambitious missions. Jon Shell proposes exactly this in his brilliant manifesto:

“The short version: 10 countries, aligned and similar in many ways, have as much economic power and natural resources as either the US or China. Working together, they could form a new Alliance to counter the superpowers both militarily and economically, to protect democracy and to work toward social and environmental sustainability. They could lead the building of a new world, safe for our children and our grandchildren. Right now, it’s the only project that matters.

[…]

the fraying started before Donald Trump. Across the Western countries that formed the post-war coalition inequality has been on the rise and faith in capitalism and democracy in decline. Most no longer believe that children will be better off than their parents and young urban workers are furious that they can’t afford housing. Authoritarian political parties are feeding off the anger and hopelessness, often blaming those very same institutions for the challenges we face.

[…]

This article is an attempt to imagine a world where “middle powers,” like my home country of Canada, work together to check the influence of China and the US. Where countries with similar approaches to democracy, social welfare and public safety can protect their prosperity and security in a world otherwise governed by raw power. And where hope for a better future for our children can be restored.

[…]

As the world re-arms, America is the dominant supplier of military technology, creating obvious risks when Trump admits they may supply inferior equipment because “someday maybe they’re not our allies.” Much of the western world uses American technology platforms in their work and home lives, creating data risks and making it harder to build and keep home-grown technology companies. The vast majority of new funding for AI technology is flowing to the US. And the current administration seems focused on supercharging capital flight to America, with policies like the $5M “gold” visa, slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and, of course, tariffs.

It is now impossible to imagine a better future with America playing as large a role as it does today. Extraordinary effort has been put into international agreements like the Paris Accord and the Global Minimum Tax to have them rendered toothless after being abandoned by the US. As long as we depend on American leadership for action, it will be hard to face other threats that require collective action, like climate change, inequality, and the increasing influence of the tech billionaires on elections around the world.

[...]

More hopefully, it is also suddenly more possible than ever to imagine a world where the US plays a less dominant role. Europe is gearing up to defend Ukraine — with or without the US. Canadian patriotism has reached a level that this Canadian did not think possible. Many Global South regional alliances are asserting greater influence and a desire for autonomy. Leaders across the world are expressing deep anger and betrayal at the actions of this administration. Some have declared the old world to be at an end. If there ever was a time to act and change our current course, it’s now.

[...]

Today, a set of wealthy countries with similar approaches to taxation, social welfare and public safety collectively rival the resources of both the United States and China. The five largest EU economies (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) plus Japan, the UK, Canada, South Korea and Australia (we’ll call it the “Core 10”) represent about a quarter of the global economy, compared to about 26% for the US and 17% for China, and almost 600 million people. They all have relatively strong democracies⁴ and generally low levels of corruption.⁵ They are good places to live and do business. Collectively, they possess significant reserves of natural resources, a strong manufacturing base, several global centres of finance, some of the world’s best universities and access to critical shipping lines.

While these countries have all had strong economies for a while, it’s critical to understand how unusual this is. The world tends to be dominated by a few major powers: think the Soviet Union and the US, the colonial powers, Persia, Rome. There has rarely been as many rich and independent countries with similar approaches to governance as there are today, controlling this much territory and wealth. There’s almost a default to see the world through a “superpower” lens, with the current version as the US vs. China. The rest of us sit on the sidelines, exerting influence where possible, but knowing the outcome is not in our hands.

[...]

The purpose of the Alliance is to save and protect democracy and multilateralism for generations to come and to ensure that superpowers no longer control global affairs. Free from the dominance of the United States and China, the Alliance will imagine new possibilities, with the collective influence and capacity to convince others. The more independent and resilient this Alliance of like-minded countries is, the more stable and safe the world will be.

[...]

Three commitments that could help a new alliance to ensure an independent future are to collectively be responsible for ensuring the security and prosperity of its members against both military and economic aggression, to cooperate in efficiently and judiciously developing, transporting and refining natural resources and to work and invest collaboratively in technology, governance and scientific discovery to support the resilience of its economies, enhance its security and improve the lives of its citizens.

[...]

A series of creative and aggressive moves in the short term, even prior to signing any sort of treaty, would demonstrate that the middle powers were independent and intent on a coordinated response. A very public meeting could be held in the short term, ending with a signed declaration to work toward a new Alliance. Prospective members could act to coordinate their foreign aid to replace some of the work of USAID, immediately growing soft power and embarrassing the US around the world. Non-European prospective members could make firm and specific commitments to join Europe in the defense of Ukraine. Prospective members could announce a flashy partnership, like a space mission.

Other measures could demonstrate the repercussions of recent American policy. For example, a partnership to build a munitions factory to supply European countries in Quebec to take advantage of both efficient energy supply and a surplus of aluminum now subject to unilateral American tariffs. Or deals to switch suppliers of military equipment from the US to companies in prospective member states.

On “Liberation Day” Robert Reich recommended a series of actions for Canada, Mexico, Japan, the UK and the EU, including tariffs, preventing American banks from accessing their stock markets and increasing taxes and regulations on American digital platforms. Cory Doctorow has a much more fun suggestion to allow the “jail-breaking” of Teslas outside the US so its owners can access all its services for free. At SCP we crowd-sourced a pile of ideas. With creativity and coordination, the rest of us could create the same kind of chaos for America as they’re creating for us.

[...]

Whatever specific path it takes, the Alliance could kick off decades of innovation to rival the period following WWII. Our imagination is currently shackled by the interests of superpowers and monopolists and working within a global framework that no longer seems fit for purpose. Donald Trump has removed the constraints that governed American policy. If we remove our own constraints, the rest of us can take advantage of the opportunity to work toward military, economic and technological independence, and to imagine a different world.

Find the full post here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/manifesto-resto-jon-shell-wa05f

DRAFT:

Canada as a Champion for Public AI: Data, Compute and Open Source Infrastructure for Economic Growth and Inclusive Innovation

This paper makes the case for Canada investing in — and building more international collaboration around — public AI, if we want to meet our innovation and economic development goals.

It's a working draft , and I recently presented at a conference on internet policy. Grateful if you would circulate widely. Please do get in touch if you agree with it or are working on related projects. We’re looking for allies and critiques and to build the coalition of people, countries, companies and organizations that can make a Public AI alternative a reality.

ABSTRACT

Current AI models and products are predominantly built by a very small number of actors within only two incentive systems and political contexts, namely big tech, centred in Silicon Valley and China. This poses serious concerns about how AI will impact the rest of the world. The concentration of influence could prevent building AI as a public good, inhibit nations like Canada from unlocking transformative economic change, and increase risks, from democratic deficits, to greater inequality, to existential concerns, worldwide. In this article, we outline a tractable roadmap for Canada to work with a coalition of public and private actors around the world to champion a third option: “Public AI”. These actors should include governments institutions, private funds and companies, research institutes, open source projects, and civic organizations. This proposal builds on others’ extensive research on AI as a public good or utility, such as proposals for a CERN or Airbus for AI. If successful, this proposal would allow Canada, in conjunction with public and private allies around the world, to build and deploy competitive public AI infrastructure that drives economic growth and public benefit. Publicly backed AI research and compute programs, as well as commercial and nonprofit open source AI projects, already provide a solid foundation. What we need is: 1) greater and faster international collaboration, 2) explicit, publicly backed open source and standards-based strategies that make it possible for innovations and improvements in one country, company, or lab to accrue into a common pool of interoperable public goods used by all actors, and 3) explicit public data strategies that enable AI development and public interest uses of AI.

PAPER

[...]

The internet, the web and the open source software stack that currently underpins most digital businesses and public services [...] created widely spread social and economic benefits in many parts of the world.

[...]

the current AI landscape is dominated by the market – and by a very small number of companies – in a way that may short circuit the potential economic and social benefits, as seen with earlier eras of digital technology. This structure makes it less likely for AI development to prioritize safety, democracy, trust, healthcare and education relative to their societal value.

[...]

The Our vision for public AI in this article – inspired heavily by the Public AI Network [24] and Mozilla and Columbia University’s recent work on open source [9], responsible data [8] and AI safety [2] – is a robust and geographically distributed ecosystem of initiatives that create public goods, have a public orientation, and facilitate public use throughout every step of AI development and deployment, including compute, data, tooling and talent.

[...]

Canada is ideally positioned to help build a coalition of governments, companies, non-profits, and open source projects investing in and stewarding public AI, based on its history of AI innovation, international coalition building, and leadership in areas like human rights and multiculturalism

[...]

By pursuing “digital sovereignty through collaboration” – pooling resources with others to create an "Airbus or CERN for AI", ideas for which other scholars have developed substantive and tractable proposals (outlined below) – Canada can help establish a third pole in AI development distinct from the big tech and China, enable pluralistic uses of AI, and secure both economic independence and social benefit.

[...]

public AI means building AI systems that are made available as public goods (like utilities, roads, or open source software [53]), and these systems must maintain public accessibility, democratic accountability, and financial and environmental sustainability

[...]

The reality is that neither a single government in a country like Canada nor mid-sized tech companies can compete alone against the massive AI investments of big tech and China. The solution is what we might call digital sovereignty through collaboration: pooling resources with like-minded governments, companies, academia, civil society and open source projects to create collective capacity.

This is the Airbus model - named after the European aircraft manufacturer created as a multinational consortium to compete with American aviation dominance. An "Airbus for AI" would bring together democratic nations with shared values to build public AI infrastructure at sufficient scale to serve as a meaningful third pole.

[...]

Data represents a potential “Achilles Heel” [32] for the current generation of generative AI products. These models are trained on data acquired through potentially illegal, anticompetitive, and certainly unsustainable methods, from including scraping creative works without compensation to and harvesting personal information without meaningful consent [30]. In some jurisdictions, current commercial AI products could be deemed illegal because of their data dependencies or could be rejected by consumers on moral grounds. This backlash could elevate open-access and openly licensed LLM data-based public AI models to become the most competitive AI offering.

[...]

Another opportunity for public AI allies to advance public interest data would be building new data intermediaries [28]. Data intermediaries could help reshape the flow of data between users and companies. For instance, when a user sends a query to an LLM or a post to social media, the actual content of that message could first be stored on a server operated by an intermediary, which governance processes to answer questions like: What types of data will be sent to private companies and what will be contributed to a commons? How will compensation work? An ecosystem of intermediaries would make it possible to honour creator preferences and compensate data creation while accumulating high-quality data in a public pool. Practically, intermediaries could be instantiated as public benefit companies, nonprofits or even governments in places where the rule of law is strong (the “intermediary” concept could actually involve multiple specific implementations, including trusts, brokerages, unions, and collectives).

[...]

Canada's climate, abundant clean energy (and long-term planning around energy), and world-class institutes like Mila, the Vector Institute, and Amii [10] all provide unique strengths for contributing towards compute pooling. However, this doesn't mean building all the capacity within Canada. Rather, we would contribute strategically to a distributed network that provides resilience, diversity, and scale far beyond what any single participant could achieve alone, building on existing initiatives in Europe and conversations like those at the Paris AI Action Summit.

Our partners should not just be European nor just nations: they should include countries across Asia and the global majority, large cities and regions, as well as non-state actors including corporations like Cohere and Hugging Face, experts in decentralization like the Ethereum Foundation and Project Liberty, foundations like the Future of Life Institute and key civil society actors from standards organizations to open source projects. To use one example, Canada should form a closer relationship with the leading chip manufacturer Taiwan, as we have discussed with its Tech Ambassador and former Minister of Digital Affairs Audrey Tang (who has written extensively on Plurality and decentralized collaboration [44]).

[...]

For public AI to succeed, we need to build a fully open stack for AI that makes these components available to anyone. This assertion is based on experience from the first era of the internet, where open source came to serve as the core underpinning of most infrastructure and a huge driver of economic growth. Over the last 20 years, the Linux stack has become the standard infrastructure upon which all things digital are built, underpinning 90% [46] of publicly available cloud computing services and running 100% of the top 500 super computers [38]. The core open source stack including Linux represents $4 billion in supply side value (how much it cost to create) and $8 trillion in demand side value (the value it created for businesses and governments) [23]. The technical and economic value created by open source in the last era of the internet emerged by many businesses and governments — including competitors — pooling resources to create robust core infrastructure that everyone can build on. Public AI needs to take a similar approach.

[...]

The good news is that many parts of the AI ecosystem are already open source — and we have seen a move towards open source in base models over the last two years (Hugging Face’s AI Action plan [34] and Stanford’s AI Index reports [50] provide coverage of these trends). This new wave of base models spans a spectrum of openness [2, 9] from those with openly licensed software, datasets and model weights (e.g., OLMo from the nonprofit AI2, the Allen Institute for AI [35] and Salamandra from BSC, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center [20]) to those with open model weights, training and fine tuning software but no access to the pretraining data (e.g. various models from Mistral) to those that simply offer open weights (e.g., Llama from Meta, though Meta has signalled [54] that they may not release the weights for future Llama models.). While the most rapid progress has been in open weight models like Llama, fully open models are catching up.

There are major upsides to investing in a fully open AI stack and major risks from relying on proprietary players. Having a fully open stack – with all training code and documentation alongside data for pretraining, post training, and evaluation – provides the freedom to fork any element of the stack. For example, it becomes possible to build a model deeply tuned to a specific cultural or language context by intervening at a particular checkpoint. A fully open stack also provides the transparency to fully scrutinise a trained model for cultural or language bias, for hidden security threats, or simply to better understand model behaviour. It also makes it easier for many different parties to contribute back to a common stack as they fork and innovate in their own context.

[...]

5. CONCRETE ACTIONS FOR CANADIAN PUBLIC AI LEADERSHIP

To push forward the vision outlined above, Canada should: (1) assemble a public-private, international, and interprovincial public AI collaboration strategy, (2) champion an internationally focused open source AI strategy, and (3) build a public AI focused national data strategy.

5.1 International and Public Private Collaboration

Canada is well positioned to act as a catalytic and central force within the public AI coalition. Specific actions – each of which will be an undertaking – that Canada should take include:

- Convene an "Airbus for AI" consortium consisting of a core set of governments, companies and international and civil society organizations.

- Develop and champion a proposal to coordinate AI compute investments with the EU, other nations, key international players like the OECD, UN, IGF and non-governmental players like foundations

- Prioritize clean energy locations and the $15 billion the federal government proposed to match $30 billion in pension fund support to build Canadian data centres [51]. Make these available to consortium members at cost.

- Use public AI strategy to coordinate investments between Canadian provinces.

- Fund civic organizations, cultural institutions, and public services to work with their international and interprovincial peers on public AI initiatives.

[...]

5.2 Open Source Strategy

Canada should find ways to encourage researchers and companies to use and contribute to the broader open source AI stack:

- Open source artifacts funded by public dollars such as those produced by national labs, and public-private partnerships

- Work with allies around the world to develop practical ways to pool and rapidly improve the public AI stack through a joint commitment to open source, open content and open data

- Ensure that base models are kept truly open and unrestricted while also allowing elements of the stack to be used in more restrictive settings

- Encourage international collaboration between existing open source efforts. Open sourcing is already happening with contributions from Canadian firms like Cohere and Transformer Labs, European firms like Mistral, nonprofit labs like AI2 and Kyutai, and national projects like AI Singapore, AI Sweden, BSC, and the UK AI Safety Institute.

[...]

5.3 Data Strategy

Canada should establish a data strategy that at once enables rapid progress on AI innovation and at the same time prioritizes fair compensation, privacy and representation. Specifically, Canada should:

- Create and support both data trusts (looking to examples like the Department of Canadian Heritage’s framework [15]) and sectoral data cooperatives in areas of Canadian strength, such as healthcare, clean energy, and financial services.

- Create new publicly managed “data flywheels” that feed high-quality data into said trusts, cooperatives, and open source projects

- Fund institutions that are producing, archiving, and curating public domain and openly licensed data, looking to the examples described above like the Internet Archive.

- Implement frameworks for indigenous data sovereignty to ensure that indigenous communities maintain control over their own data.

- Lead in establishing cross-border data sharing agreements specifically for public AI development

6. CONCLUSION: THE TIME FOR CANADIAN LEADERSHIP IS NOW

The window for establishing alternatives to the current trajectory of AI development and to create economic opportunity for players beyond big tech and China is rapidly closing. As compute resources concentrate, data sources are exhausted or locked up, and technical talent flows to a handful of companies that are led by a small number of billionaires with decreasing democratic checks on their power, AI’s potential future benefits for the average human relative to its risks diminish.

Canada has the expertise, resources, and diplomatic credibility to champion an alternative approach, with benefits for Canada and for democratic societies worldwide. By focusing on public infrastructure, international collaboration, and balancing public and private interests, we can create a distinctive and economically viable position in the global AI landscape. For the Canadian economy, this will have immediate benefits: we can support Canadian-based AI companies, attract international talent, and reduce dependencies on foreign AI platforms and associated economic leakage. Further, we can embed Canadian values of democracy and respect

for rights into AI systems, preserve Canadian cultural sovereignty and dignity in an era of AI-driven content and services, and contribute broadly to making AI systems that lead to fair outcomes for diverse populations.

Acting as a champion for a public AI consortium is a pragmatic economic strategy for a mid-sized power navigating between technologically advanced, economic superpowers. By leveraging our unique advantages and addressing the fundamental challenges of the current AI paradigm, Canada can secure both economic benefits and social goods. By pooling resources across compute, software, and data layers, this consortium could achieve the scale necessary to present a meaningful alternative to existing models.

For Canada, this represents both a return to our strengths in multilateralism and an innovative approach to technological development. Rather than attempting to win a game designed for larger players, we can help change the game itself - establishing rules and infrastructure that better serve democratic values and diverse interests. Canada can demonstrate the viability of alternatives to data acquired through potentially illegal, anticompetitive, and unsustainable methods. It can better balance regulation with funding and flexibility for innovation and talent to compete.

Collaboration can overcome big tech and China’s concentration of power and money by connecting the many existing publicly backed and open source AI initiatives so that they add up to more than the sum of their parts. Values can be a greater draw for talent than dollars. Academia, government and civil society can work more effectively with companies to create value through carefully choreographed public-private partnerships and ecosystems than black and white zero sum competition with the private sector. While this pooling approach can help to mitigate many of the reasons an ambitious undertaking like building public AI might fail, there is still work to be done in terms of documenting specific obstacles that will arise and producing reactive plans (e.g., how can public AI proceed if current compute investments targets are not met?)

The time to act is now. With clear vision, strategic investment, and international leadership, Canada can help ensure that the future of AI serves not just market interests, but public good. In doing so, we can secure our place in the next technological era while staying true to our values of pluralism, inclusion, and shared prosperity. And we can convert one of the most influential AI communities into one of the most lucrative and socially beneficial AI economies in the world.

A quick note on my next few months:

Elina and I are travelling during maternity / paternity leave with our now almost 5 month old daughter Ami.

We’re spending Jan to mid-Feb based in Barcelona and then traveling Italy till mid-March with trips to Paris and beyond in the works.

Drop a line if you’re in Western or Southern Europe.

March to April will be Japan.

We’re also renting our place in Toronto for the next few months. More deets here:

and here.

Ami-Chan Insights

I left LinkedIn 6 months ago, had a baby 5 months ago and, unsurprisingly, I am still growing up.

I thought I’d be writing more about lessons from the birth of my child. Ami has, as expected, changed me more than anyone else. More of my learnings have been about who I want to be than who I want her to be. And they’ve overlapped more with my attempt to redefine myself professionally than I expected.

Much of my career has been about hope, ambition for positive systemic social change, and disillusionment at my inability to create sufficient sustainable impact. This is how I’d characterize my work in international criminal law and access to medicines and more recently higher education and workforce development.

But like my dog Gio, Ami has taught me love. A feeling instead of a mindset, something that grows as a result of giving rather than receiving, and something completely intimate: a 1-1 relationship. Raising Ami isn’t about systems change, it’s about intimate generosity.

How Ami has changed my perspective on life and work:

Most importantly, and as expected, my world-view and prioritization have changed as much if not more than it did when I fell in love with our dog Gio. Here’s a few changes I’ve noticed:

• never has it been harder to focus on work or really anything other than Ami: whenever I’m not looking at her I want to be. This has created the largest shift in my priorities and how I want to spend my time: instead of theoretically wanting my family to be my top priority it now feels that way

• I thought I’d be more motivated by money but I’m now more focused on those projects which I care most about. This is a more narrow subset of the areas where I can create the greatest impact than I’d originally imagined (see more in an upcoming post on my 2025 ambitions and my first post on Ami).

• I feel more comfortable as an adult, more confident in relying on wisdom and experience rather than youthful energy and curiosity, like I’m finally turning my Pan complex into an asset instead of a liability. I feel more confident in turning down work that will just make money and no longer want to rely only on my charisma and persuasion. Instead I’m exploring more openly who I want to be in the future (though I still feel too much of the need for social reinforcement and other dopamine hits)

• finally, and this is where I’m really still processing, I’m discovering a new kind of meaning and fulfillment I didn’t know I wanted or needed. Friends recently threw an event to connect people to “an emerging Toronto scene” and particularly to expand the web or circle of their networks to include new people, ideas and communities that in turn would expand who each of us were. I’ve been unconsciously engaging in a similar exercise for decades and as [I’ve said before], I am more interested in strengthening a small number of connections than building new ones these days. Ami is facilitating more exploration of this new part of my inner web (or neural network): she is completing the inner circle that represents who I am in ways I could not have imagined.

I’ve been working on my next post for some time as it is all about my projects for 2025 (spoiler: they involve digital public infrastructure and public AI) but will leave you with one last pick of Ami:

It’s been a hell of a year.

I’ve never been more lucky: the addition of my 5 month old Ami to Elina and my family has added more meaning and been more positive than I could have imagined. I am so grateful for a broader family and community that are safe, healthy and full of love.

Yet as a Jew with Ukrainian roots, I appreciate how hard it’s been for many others. I’ll write more about the impact of my baby Ami on me and, seperately, on my 2025 work priorities, in subsequent posts, but for now I wanted to re-post my father’s thoughts on the decision by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister, its ex Minister of Defence and the Hamas militant, Mohammed Deif.

I have personal reasons for weighing in on this particular aspect of the current Palestine-Israel conflict:

• my mother is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. The ICC was in part created as a result of the Holocaust, as my father, who was involved in the creation of the Court, explains in more detail

• I was brought to tears in undergrad by stories of massacres in Rwanda and Sudan. This motivated my leading McGill’s clinics for the Special Court of Sierra Leone and several other tribunals and eventually interning on defence teams at the international criminal tribunals for Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia

• I was an international clerk at the Supreme Court of Israel in the summer of 2010, when my father was Canada’s Ambassador to Israel. I am a proud Jew and I am devastated by the state of Israel’s politics and the actions of its military and current leadership

Yet my expertise in this area has diminished since I left law over a decade ago. As such, I’ll leave it to my dad, who’s views I share, to convey his thoughts on the ICC arrest warrants:

The International Criminal Court Warrants Issued for the Arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant: Is the Criticism of the Court Justified?

by Jon Allen

Before discussing the particular cases of the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments against Bibi Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the current Prime Minister of Israel and the former Defense Minister, respectively, and of Mohammad Deif, the Hamas militant leader (who may be dead) , I wanted to preface my remarks by noting that I take no pleasure in arguing that the Court may be justified in moving to prosecute an Israeli Prime Minister and its former Minister of Defence. Indeed, it is a very sad time, in my view, and a sad statement about where the current Israeli coalition government has taken the country.

I also want to talk briefly about why I consider the Court and its objectives to be so important. For me, the ICC, why it was established and what it stands for have both personal and professional resonance.

The idea of such a Court came into being following WWII and, more specifically, the Holocaust as did many of the provisions of the Geneva Conventions that are intended to govern the conduct of military and political leaders and combatants and the treatment of civilians, prisoners and combatants in war time.

In part, those laws and the Court were meant to address, deter and punish the worst of crimes, many of which are now prohibited under customary international law, i.e., they don’t require a treaty to bind states and individuals. Although not naïve about what they hoped they could achieve, the founders believed in the words “never again” and those words didn’t mean and shouldn’t mean just never again to the Jews but rather never again to all mankind.

I studied international law including courses in international human rights. I then practiced international human right’s law at Canada’s then Department of Foreign Affairs. They were difficult times when the world witnessed the genocide in Rwanda, the atrocities in the Balkans, in Sierra Leone and other brutal conflicts.

I headed our first delegation to the negotiations of the Statute of the ICC when the Americans were amongst the Court’s strongest supporters. They only dropped that support when it became clear that other states were not going to allow the UN Security Council to prevent a prosecution going forward. In other words, as long as American leaders and soldiers believed that they wouldn’t be open to the possibility of a prosecution by the Court, they were happy to support the treaty.

I’ll come back to the US’ inconsistent position on the court.

So, let’s discuss the charges against Prime Minister Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant and Mohammad Deif.

With respect to the Prime Minister and Gallant, the Chamber of the ICC found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each has committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. The Chamber also found reasonable grounds to believe that they are each responsible for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against civilians. Finally, the Chamber issued a warrant of arrest for Mohammad Dief for the alleged crimes against humanity of murder, extermination, torture, and rape and other forms of sexual violence and for various war crimes.

First, I’d like to address the charges of moral equivalence that some, including American, British and Canadian ministers initially argued. In examining the actions of individuals directing a war, the court does not measure which party committed the more serious war crime and then choose the worst to prosecute. Individuals’ actions are rather measured against the principles of international humanitarian law (IHL). In this case both the Hamas militants and Bibi and Gallant are alleged to have breached IHL. Why did the prosecutor announce both sets of applications for arrest at the same time? Not because a two-week siege is equivalent to the murder of innocent women and children but because both are breaches of IHL and because if the Prosecutor had announced either application first and separately, he would have been condemned for ignoring possible charges and warrants against the other side.

Second, Israel had and has options to avoid these charges. First, they didn’t have to impose a two-week siege on the Gaza Strip immediately following the October 7 attacks by Hamas and then for over a year refuse to provide sufficient humanitarian assistance to 2.2 million Gazans. In this regard, I reject completely the suggestions by some that more than enough food and other assistance has entered the strip. The US wasn’t on the verge of sanctioning Israel months ago because sufficient food, water and medicines have been flowing into Gaza. Indeed, the US and many aid agencies currently operating in the Gaza Strip confirmed that Israel had met none of the US’ humanitarian assistance benchmarks after the 30 day deadline it had imposed. The US and countries like Canada, the UK and Germany are still demanding that more be done. The US didn’t build a failed pier at the cost of some $350 million because enough food was getting to innocent Palestinian men, women and children. Jordan and others were not air dropping food, water and medicines because enough assistance was getting in. And the NGOs and international organizations on the ground in Gaza today are not lying when they describe surgeries without anesthetics, disease from unsafe water, and malnutrition among children.

Yes, some shipments are being hijacked by criminal gangs and Hamas. But that’s in part because there is currently no rule of law in Gaza. Israel has forced the disbanding of the Gazan police. As both the occupying power and the military force on the ground, it has specific obligations to allow the assistance in and then to ensure it reaches the population. Simply allowing an insufficient number of trucks into Gaza and then abandoning them as they enter the territory is not compliance with IHL.

Third, had Israel followed the US’ advice based on their failed experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and engaged in more targeted killings of Hamas leaders rather dropping 2000-pound bombs and more in a dense urban area, Israel might have avoided the accusation of crimes against humanity for indiscriminate killing. In addition, but unrelated to the ICC warrants, a far less blunt Israeli approach might also have avoided radicalizing the young Palestinian population in both Gaza and the West Bank that has survived.

Yes, Israel absolutely had and has the right to self defence. No one should deny it. Moreover, we are all aware of how difficult it is to fight in the narrow urban confines of Gaza. We have seen the tunnels and know that the hostages have been hidden deep in them.

We are also aware that some of those tunnels are built under hospitals, schools and universities. But these realities may not justify killing thirty or forty or fifty innocent Gazans per day for eleven months in order to eliminate one or two or three Hamas militants. Among the questions the Court will have to decide if a trial ever takes place is whether Israel fought a just war unjustly.

I have not seen the evidence for these alleged crimes. It has not been made public. But given the massive death toll (upward of 45,00 of which some 2/3 could be innocent women children and men), the over 100,000 injured, the widespread destruction (60-70% of Gaza in rubble including hospitals, schools, universities and apartment buildings) and the continuing daily deaths reported (97 one day, 26 the next, 40 the next) all of which are justified by the alleged presence of Hamas militants hiding beneath the buildings being bombed and fired upon, it doesn’t surprise me that allegations of disproportionate killings have been made.

I am aware that there are some who argue the opposite, that the number of militants killed as a proportion of the total deaths is comparable to or better than in other recent conflicts. In the end, the ICC or an Israeli state commission of inquiry, if one is ultimately established, may have to decide.

Fourth, the ICC operates under the principle of complementarity which provides that if a state is willing and able to investigate and prosecute the alleged crimes it can do so instead of the court.

This is what the ICC prosecutor had to say on this issue when he announced the warrants:

“In line with the Rome Statute, the door to complementarity continues to remain open. As with all situations, we will continue to actively assess the application of this fundamental principle, which requires genuine domestic investigations and any necessary prosecution of the same individuals for substantially the same conduct.”

To date, Israel has refused to do just that, as it has refused, despite much Israeli precedent, to establish a state commission of inquiry to investigate what happened on Oct. 7 and thereafter. The fact that the current government has attempted to severely weaken and politicize the Israeli Supreme Court, the police and the office of the Attorney General, frequently threatening to fire the latter, likely did not help its case. Ironically, Gallant himself warned Bibi Netanyahu before October 7 that the attempted judicial coup, by destroying the independence of the court, could expose Israeli military officers to prosecution by the Court.

Equally important to note is the fact that both Gallant and his Chief of Staff stated publicly months ago that Israel had achieved its military objectives in Gaza and that the so-called “total victory” that was demanded by the Prime Minister, was impossible. So, if Israel’s military objectives have largely been achieved, how does it justify the continued daily killings of innocent civilians. Indeed, those deaths are almost by definition disproportionate to the IDF’s war aims.

Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum, an organization for which I have much respect, has argued recently that because the Prime Minister and Yoav Gallant likely never will appear before the Court, that such a prosecution exposes the Court’s impotence. That’s quite a proposition. If we take this argument to its logical conclusion, international tribunals should pursue only those international criminals whom the prosecutor is sure he can bring before the Court. Otherwise, he’ll discredit himself and the tribunal. Frankly neither international law nor international humanitarian law would exist if enforceability was the criterion. Do countries and individuals breach international law and sometimes evade condemnation or prosecution. Yes, probably more often than not. Will Vladimir Putin end up in the Hague. Not as long as he’s Russia’s Czar. But Slobodan Milosevic never imagined that he would end up before an international criminal tribunal. Nor did the accused at Nuremberg and nor did those prosecuted in tribunals for crimes committed in Sierra Leone or Cambodia. Moreover, Putin has now been forced to avoid both a BRICS meeting in South Africa and the G-20 Summit in Brazil. What will happen after he steps down, if he ever does, is not clear. I imagine that Prime Minister Netanyahu will also avoid visiting those countries that are Party to the ICC Statute and which have indicated a willingness to abide by its provisions.

Moreover, regarding Putin’s indictment, the U.S. government that criticized the Court and the warrants in question as “outrageous”, praised the same Court when Putin’s arrest warrant was issued. The President ordered US intelligence agencies to provide the Court with all available evidence to support the prosecutor’s case. It seems, therefore, that trust and confidence in the objectivity of an institution and its prosecutor is inconsistently proffered depending on whether the defendant is friend or foe.

But returning to Michael Koplow’s argument, even if only a few international criminals are convicted and serve their sentences, that is no reason to abandon international humanitarian law or the ICC. How may violations have they prevented because of the possible consequences. How many prisoners have avoided being tortured because of humanitarian and human rights law? How many soldiers’ lives have been saved because chemical weapons are prohibited? How many citizens are alive because of the laws prohibiting disproportionate killings? Not enough, I would argue, but hopefully enough to ensure that humanitarian law is supported by all states that believe in human rights and the rule of law.

Another point raised by Koplow needs to be challenged. He questions whether a democratically elected leader should be issued a warrant. International law decisions aren’t based - nor should they be - on whether the person charged is freely elected. Adolf Hitler was democratically elected. So was Milosevic. Augusto Pinochet was democratically elected years after his coup d’état and the tens of thousands of murders for which he was responsible. Should being elected shield anyone if they subsequently commit war crimes or crimes against humanity? I think not.

Finally, Koplow suggests that the warrants for the Prime Minister et al will sour Israel’s and Israeli’s relationship with the UN. This is the same country that declared the UN Secretary General persona non grata months ago and that declared UNRWA a terrorist organization. It is the same country that allegedly fired on and killed UNIFIL Observers in Lebanon both in the 2006 war, including a Canadian soldier, and in the most recent war.

I’m not sure Michael Koplow was listening as the Israeli Ambassador at the UN disparaged the organization labelling it anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, or the way Benjamin Netanyahu did the same when he recently spoke before the UN General Assembly and before the U.S. Congress. Arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant certainly won’t help that relationship but I doubt there is much left to resuscitate as long as the current coalition is in power. Frankly I highly doubt that Israel would ever allow a UN force to engage in the reconstruction and in re-establishing the rule of law in Gaza that Koplow suggests could happen if such a prosecution was not in process. I agree that there will have to be a coalition of forces, perhaps supported by a UN Security Council mandate to assist in rebuilding Gaza in all its aspects, but not a UN force.

Then we have Canada’s former Finance Minister, Joe Oliver, in the National Post claiming that the Prosecutor’s charges are false and are a biased prosecution of the Jewish state. He claims that the ICC warrants are similar to the prosecution in the Dreyfus case.

The Dreyfus case was based on outright lies. Here, six prominent international jurists, including Ted Meron, a former Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Legal Adviser, reviewed the arrest warrants before they were issued and agreed with the Prosecutor that there was sufficient evidence to justify sending them to the Tribunal. Three independent judges led by an experienced French jurist, also agreed that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the crimes have been committed. If they ever end up in the Hague or if Israel ever chooses to prosecute them, the Prime Minister and Gallant may well be able to disprove the allegations. But this not the Dreyfus case revisited.

Oliver also asks why Bashar al Assad was not prosecuted. This is classic “what aboutism”, i.e., we should ignore the siege, other possible war crimes, Israel’s illegal settlements and the occupation because Syria, Russia, Iran and China have done and are doing worse.

Unfortunately, Assad was not prosecuted because a) Syria is not party to the ICC statute; and b) because he committed those horrific crimes on his own citizens within his own territory. The Court does not have jurisdiction in such cases. If the Court had tried to go after him, critics would, as some are now doing in this case, be arguing judicial overreach. Assad is now, of course, seeking protection in Russia from his erstwhile ally, Vladimir Putin.

Finally on the question of the court’s jurisdiction, i.e., whether Palestine is properly a State within the Court’s definition, that is an issue that was discussed and decided some years ago. Israel knew very well that Palestine was a party to the ICC Statute when it responded to Hamas’ attacks on October 8 and following. Notwithstanding that, Netanyahu and Gallant have the right to argue both this jurisdictional issue and the view that they did not receive timely notification of the charges if and when they appear before the Court.

To note on the question of Palestine’s status more generally, at least 146 states have recognized Palestine as a state. As Canada’s Legal Adviser recently testified before a House of Commons Committee examining Canada’s possible recognition of Palestine, while there are internationally recognized criteria for state recognition, the ultimate decision by one state to recognize another is purely political. As of 2012, Palestine became a Permanent Observer State at the UN. Full membership can only be attained when approved by the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly.

My father also recently testified to the House of Commons standing committee on foreign affairs that Canada should recognize a Palestinian state now.

From the admittedly impossible task of work life balance, to working in a manner that aligns with my values, the birth of my first child, Ami has brought life further into focus.

Ami is now 30 days old and I’m already wishing I took more paternity leave and had committed to less projects. At the same time, I wanted to say a few words about how excited I am to be working on what I want with who I want. To be more specific, I’m excited to surround myself with values aligned people that I am constantly learning from on projects that I am proud of explaining to Ami.

I wanted to highlight one project called Canadian Democracy @ Work that is at the core of my fellowship with the think tank, The Dais. It exemplifies my new direction and I need your help on it:

Immediately below this I’ve pasted the text from our new and still-in-development website explaining the project. Below that, I’ve pasted my update on Ami’s birth and to reiterate, she’s a big part of my clarity to work projects like this, which is to say, to work on what I want, with whom I want. In the coming weeks, I’m excited to announce a number of other projects.

Canadian Democracy @ Work

Civics education is good for business and society.

Canadian democracy is under immense pressure. 

Polarization has increased. Trust in public institutions and civic literacy have decreased. The proliferation and influence of mis- and disinformation have accelerated. Together, these trends are contributing to decreased social cohesion and democratic engagement, as well as increased radicalization, across the country. 

Strengthening democracy must be a priority for all parts of Canadian society – including Canadian employers. 

According to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, employers are the most trusted and credible organizations in Canada. In fact, employer communications are cited as more trustworthy than media reports, social media posts, and government releases. The relationship between employers and employees, therefore, presents a critical avenue to champion democratic renewal and restore trust in our institutions. 

The Canadian Democracy @ Work initiative (Democracy@Work), in collaboration with employers across the country, is working to reinvigorate civic engagement, combat rising disinformation, and equip Canadians with the knowledge and skills they need to navigate a changing digital world, including better understanding the impact of AI and emergent technologies on the state of democracy. 

Why do we need Democracy @ Work? 

Information and civic literacy are typically only taught in schools. There is little training or education for adults on these crucial topics. Yet, as the internet has become an increasingly significant political arena, and as the digital landscape has changed drastically, it is essential that adults update their knowledge and skills to navigate this evolving environment effectively. 

The modules developed through this project will equip Canadian adults with an understanding of fast-moving developments in artificial intelligence, deepfake technology, and digital manipulation – and the relevance of these advances to their civic lives. The knowledge and skills developed in the course of these modules will, therefore, enable Canadian adults to better participate in democratic processes, contribute to informed public discourse, and safeguard democratic institutions. 

Why should businesses care about democracy? 

First, because business success depends on good governance. The stable social and economic operating environment on which businesses rely can only be maintained if our democracy functions well. 

And second, because threats that affect democratic institutions are also cause for concern for businesses. Canadians’ difficulties in differentiating true content from false, for instance, presents serious problems for democratic institutions. It is also a problem for businesses. Companies are often the targets of disinformation. Companies are amongst the groups most frequently victimized by false, reputation-harming content, preceded only by political parties.

How does the project work?

This project is grounded in extensive consultation with major Canadian employers to inform the content and structure of the modules and training materials. These consultations are underway, and will continue into Fall 2024. The employer- and expert-informed modules and training materials will be beta-tested starting Winter 2025. They will then be refined, and the project will be scaled-up to reach more employees, beginning Spring 2025.

Back to the fun stuff - here’s how I introduced Ami to the world on LinkedIn:

Part 2: introducing baby Ami Allen

Part 1 was a call for someone to replace me so that, as my brother and others recommended, I could leave LinkedIn well, Part 2 is the beginning of an explanation of what’s next, grounded in the most important event of my life, the birth of my daughter Ami.

As I explained in my last post on how my values have shifted since joining LinkedIn, my hope is to be proud of my explanations to Ami about what I work on and why. For instance, my addiction to social media and tech relates to my interest in working at LinkedIn but also now to my desire to focus the next phase of my career on fixing society’s relationship with tech.

I was wrestling with whether to post on Ami’s birth because this act in itself succumbs to the need for social validation, the dopamine hits of your congratulations.

I also struggled with where this would fall on the line of acceptability between professional and personal posts on LinkedIn. I struggle with the line between personal and professional in general, combining work and play gleefully, but also confusingly, for my family and friends and me.

Yet I thought the below post, originally for Instagram, would help explain why this month, and this year, and even hopefully for much of Ami’s life, I will be less online, and working less, with a 7 pound baby tipping the balance in favour of family.

Introducing Ami Lawrie-Allen

One friend described having your first child like crossing an event horizon. For some time I’ve been excited for, and scared of Ami’s delivery as the third Kuhnsian paradigm shift in my experience of love after my wife and dog.

Few could have imagined me “settling down” a decade ago. Now the home and community that Elina Lawrie and I have built make me grateful and proud that she proved us all wrong and turned my mind 180 degrees.

Similarly, if in a different dimension, I’ve understood love and the world very differently after the arrival of our whippet, Alberto Giacometti. Elina taught me to imagine a life built with another human being and Gio taught me I could love an animal so much that going for a run with him is my favourite activity.

While these shifts were positive, like all change and learning, they were also uncomfortable and hard (responsibility for a house?! Or the patience to train a puppy).

I’m going to pull back from work this month and making a conscious effort to do so multiple times this year to fully support my wife and daughter and immerse myself in this paradigm shift to fatherhood.

Apologies if correspondence is delayed or if I drop any balls: almost all the balls that don’t relate to Elina, Gio or Ami have gone from glass to rock or rubber and while still scared, the excitement for the growth, learning and love that will follow these sleepless nights already exceeds my fears.

If urgent, as always, text my cell.

I’ll leave you with the penultimate update on Ami’s arrival that I sent our family this past week:

Nine and a half years ago, I joined my first large company, Linkedin, for a mix of largely unrelated and idiosyncratic reasons:

• I’ve loved networking so much that people for years had joked I was “JakedIn”

• I wanted to explore applying the networking, partnerships and business development experience from my time running a software development company within the context of a larger corporation, practicing what I’d later learn is called intrapreneurship

• I was an early user of social networks: in undergrad I helped host facebook.utoronto.ca, one of Canada’s first mainstream social networks, and I remain inspired by the OG Twitter: open-source, API based, network-as-infrastructure

• I needed a job as a result of a quintessential co-founder conflict.

The next 9 years involved far more growth and learning, more flights, airports and hotel rooms, more Zoom calls and Teams messages than I could ever imagine. At their core, they taught me my most important lesson, that living and working one’s values is more important than anything else, from money, to fame, to even social impact. Values define how much you value each of these things and what they mean to you.

Early at Linkedin, I helped my friend and colleague Scott Parish create a massive survey of purpose at work. It showed companies do better across every metric (sales, customer success, employee satisfaction, retention and productivity) when their employees’ values are genuinely aligned with their corporate values. Now, at the top of my list of work-related projects, I draft and revise the words I hope will be engraved on my tombstone (metaphorically, as I’m not exactly sure how I’m gonna be buried…) and how I would explain my work to my child (arriving in ~2 weeks!!!). These remind me to ensure I live my life and work in alignment with the person I want to be.

While my views on topics like the role of government, civil society and the public sector in our economy and society as well as technological interoperability, decentralization, competition and user data ownership eventually evolved away from Linkedin to the point where I felt I had to leave the company, Linkedin’s values remain powerful guides and successfully defined much of my time at the company.

For instance, Linkedin used to have a value that “relationships matter” and this has become amongst my most important personal values. Its meaning has changed: I used to form as many relationships as possible and 29K Linkedin connections later, this approach was wildly successful at generating a profit for Linkedin and a range of professional benefits. But as I explain in more depth in my latest User Manual, I now want to go deeper into the relationships I value most.

Part of why I had to leave Linkedin is because I am at the point in my career where I want to choose who I work with, how and when. This is particularly challenging within a large corporation. In most cases I nevertheless found Linkedin truly embodied the latest evolution of this value ”We trust and care about each other”.

Yet in some other cases, I felt Linkedin failed to live up to its vision.

For instance, the value that “We put members first” is powerful. If Linkedin and other companies can learn to put stakeholders other than shareholders first, they will succeed in the long term instead of at their next shareholder meeting. And they will build a healthier society and planet. Unfortunately, Linkedin’s layoffs an hour before its parent company Microsoft’s shareholder meetings led me to question whether it was prioritizing its employees or members over dollars. The friction I faced in attempting to advance member data ownership and interoperability similarly countered this value.

One value I will prioritize moving forward is being “open, honest and constructive”. Within Linkedin this primarily meant with each other but following in the footsteps of my father who was on Transparency International’s Canadian board, I plan to align what I say publicly, for instance about open data, in my work moving forward. Sunlight can remove not just the corruption Transparency International fights but can also help us live and work in alignment with more positive values like LinkedIn’s.

Linkedin’s vision to “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce” was and remains particularly inspiring but also extremely hard to live up to. Linkedin advanced such opportunity for its powerful and paying members. Yet I now believe open and public technological infrastructure - from job boards and exchanges to open digital wallets, learning and employment records and open online learning and data - will better advance this vision than a walled garden containing perhaps the most valuable database of labour market information.

That said, Linkedin nailed many of its values and this is why I continue to believe it is one of the most impressive companies and particularly employers in the world. It truly “embod[ied] diversity, inclusion and belonging” and “We dream big, get things done and know how to have fun”.

Colleagues like Efrem Bycer, Amanda Penrice, Deanna Grady, Richard Wiltshire, Jennison Asuncion, Jay Singh, Chris Cohen and many more lived up to the belief that “talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not, and we realize our responsibility both on our platform and in our company to create a more equitable and inclusive world of work.” From its employee resource groups (see logos above) to testing the potential impact of its platform on any minority and even to open sourcing the Linkedin Fairness Toolkit, recognizing the importance of helping people measure fairness and bias, as well as detecting statistically significant differences in model performance across different subgroups, Linkedin excelled at building an inclusive, warm, productive and impactful community.

Similarly, by spoiling its employees from plentiful healthy meals and workouts at our offices around the world to incredible travel and team building opportunities, Linkedin built the best culture of any organization to which I’ve been exposed.

Linkedin also remained remarkably nimble and flat despite growing from under 10K employees when I joined in 2015 to almost 20K employees by my departure. This facilitated rapid development and deployment of new ideas. For instance, I had remarkably access to LinkedIn’s most senior leaders: I’m grateful to Farhan Syed, Dan Shapiro, Mike Derezin, Mark Lobosco (Sales) Jonathan Rochelle, Hari (Product) and Dan Roth (Editorial), among others that opened their doors and their minds to my often unorthodox ideas.

I hope to bring some of these lessons to my next organizations and remain grateful to my Linkedin colleagues for a remarkable decade.

More on the lessons related to workforce development and higher education, edtech, jobtech and HRtech and beyond in the coming months.

Till then, wish me luck with parenthood!

Endnote: Got this helpful response from my colleague Marium Hamid:

“…the nuance Jay might refer to is along the lines that I don’t personally think LinkedIn has failed its mission. I think that it’s not moving at the bold way and pace maybe people like you and I hoped for it to be. Much like many other things in life, I know you outgrew it and needed to have a bigger container for the ideas you want to test out. I feel like LinkedIn was the sandbox where you learned the rules of the games, but you are probably ready to break some of those rules as you look to the future.”

As I leave LinkedIn, I hope to use this guide, also known as a Personal Operating Manual, as “a way to shorten the learning curve when you build new teams and bring new people on board.” More pragmatically, I hope it will help my colleagues work more effectively with me by shortening the "norming" stage of group or team development. Credit to Jay Singh for giving me the idea and David Torrens for joining me in writing my first guide way back when he was an intern.

Like me, this manual is a work-in-progress and I would be grateful for feedback on it. Help me know myself better and I will endeavor to return the favour.

About me:

• I am curious and happiest while learning, get me excited about an idea and resilience, persistence and passion will follow

• I love nature, particularly dense forests, design, contemporary art, photography

• My sports include ultimate frisbee, hiking, innertube waterpolo, biking, yoga, rock climbing and I used to row

• Efficient at running on little sleep but happiest when well rested

• I enjoy coincidences, apparent randomness and complexity and question order, rules and the status quo

• I'm good at - and take pleasure in - making connections, with people, between people, between ideas and organizations and even systems

• I expect others to work as hard and as effectively as I do, bringing past experiences and new insights to hard problems with an ethical lens. I expect this of myself as well and of those I love and respect most. I ask that you tell me when I don’t meet this expectation

• My dog Gio (a whippet, full name Alberto Giacometti) taught me love and my wife and I are expecting a child soon who I expect will precipitate another paradigm change in my emotions and life with implications for this manual

• My favourite thing to do is run in the woods in British Columbia with Gio.

• I live in Toronto but travel frequently, particularly to Vancouver, Ottawa, DC, NY, Montreal and Europe.

Still working on:

• I'm good at inspiring and teaching others but not as good at listening to them or exercising patience with them

• I am learning empathy but still struggle with viewing things from others' perspectives

• I'm good at starting projects and bad at finishing them, I'm more about the ideas than the execution

• I'm outgoing and love public speaking but can't project sound well

• I talk, think, judge and act fast but often don't reflect enough before I speak or do

• While I love beautiful perfect products, I often do the minimum necessary when I don't value a task sufficiently

• Bad at mornings, good in the evenings, late to rise and late to sleep

• I'm terrible at carving out space and time for myself: I love company and fear loneliness, I live to be busy and fear boredom

• I think I can multi-task better than I can, often juggling multiple calls and tasks while knowing that this is less efficient than being focused on one task. I want to do less better.

• I have serious issues with FOMO

How to help me:

• I have a hard time saying no: Overly generous with my time to the point of burnout and neglecting commitments. Help me say no

• When well rested or when I have too much caffeine, I can be a little manic so please let me know when I'm going to fast or don't exhibit enough compassion

• I'm always eating and hungry so I appreciate regular breaks in long meetings and excuse me if I'm eating on our call

• I need fitness and mindfulness but have a hard time making time for it so social pressure to do so is helpful

• Excitable and ambitious but often not realistic: reign me in

• While good at persuading others, I see myself as poor at negotiating in general and often prefer that someone else play bad cop

• I'm not very organized but I'm good at being told what to do even by my reports

• I'm good at hard rational deadlines

Communication preferences:

• I'll always take an in-person meeting over a call, a call over a synchronous message and an SMS over an email

• Please don't take my short, cryptic or blunt emails/ messages/ communication as critical or neglectful: I'm just multi-tasking (or trying to use my time efficiently). Instead, seek clarity whenever necessary: more productive communication and feedback is always appreciated

• I use my inbox, tabs, and have a dozen other queues as to-do lists but things often get lost there as they do amongst the chaos of my life

• I move around a lot which means I'll often take calls in transit.

• I have to stare at a screen too much so am always grateful to convert a video call to audio.

How and why I work:

• I love the macro: systems change, international vs. local, etc. and while I love seeing the grassroots impact of my work, I am quickly exhausted by the emotional toll of frontline social impact work

• I network constantly: I'll weave through a networking event, conference or party to interact with every group, always asking to add someone on LinkedIn and find reassurance in lasting online connection after often-fleeting in person connections.

• I can make friends fast and am charismatic but unfortunately my networks have gotten so large and memory has always been so flawed that I often forget people or our interactions. I don't like this about myself and am seeking to deepen a smaller network

• I don't do a good job of putting my loved ones ahead of professional contacts and while I value family, friends and community above most other objects of my attention, my desire for social impact and legacy, and my inability to say no, often overwhelm this value

This is one of the hardest articles I’ve had to write. I’m splitting it in into 3 parts:

- this first, posting my current job,

- the second, describing some of what’s coming next for me, and

- the third (or more), once I’ve had some time to digest the past decade of employment at (and identification with) LinkedIn, summarizing its lessons.

I’m incredibly proud of this work’s impact and grateful for the unparalleled support I’ve received from LinkedIn and I want to find the perfect successor to continue this momentum.

So here’s a few words on the most formative role of my career:

In short, my job involves innovating and building citizen-facing public private partnerships for LinkedIn Talent Solutions (LTS). LTS is the part of LinkedIn’s sales organization that sells our hiring, recruiting, job and company promotion, labour market information and online learning software, insights and content. The rest of LTS’ salespeople focus on helping an organization to hire or train their own employees.

I build partnerships where governments or non-profits buy these software-as-a-service products, usually at substantial scale, to support jobseekers and workforce development organizations. Working as on overlay on a few dozen sales representatives on our North American government and nonprofit teams, I build ecosystems in which their clients use LTS to support folks outside their organizations. Americans typically describe these workforce development organizations as workforce boards and Departments of Labor while in Canada they would range from employment service organizations and their associations and service managers, to Ministries of Labour. More recently we’ve begun exploring economic development public private partnerships supporting companies or regions with hiring and placement as well.

This document summarizes the work of this role to date. It includes many case studies of the public private partnerships I lead in my current capacity working with our government and non-profit teams. The higher education examples refer to a previous role on that team and the writing spans both periods as well as work outside of LinkedIn.

Another substantial portion of my role has been developing Business Development, channel or sales partnerships for LinkedIn’s government team. The goal here is to partner with LinkedIn’s BD team to negotiate partnerships with other companies that already sell into government, primarily in support of internal human capital functions, so we can sell LTS together into these teams.

Finally, as you’ll see from the formal job posting (please DM me if interested before applying), the role is explicitly entrepreneurial, flexible and driven by creativity. This innovation is bounded by LinkedIn’s current product offerings and sales and policy organizations and their processes. It was the ideal role to execute on the plan I hatched 10 years ago to apply my entrepreneurial connecting nature born out of a startup I co-founded, to navigating the inside of a 18K (LinkedIn) and 220K (Microsoft) employee company. Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn and LinkedIn’s of Lynda.com increased the reach and products at my disposal as I partnered closely with Microsoft’s policy team, like LinkedIn’s, and LinkedIn Learning remains a pillar of this work.

One last word on LinkedIn as a whole. Not only does it run the most trusted major social network, the most important job exchange, perhaps the greatest labour market information database, and amongst the most effective SAAS sales organizations, but it also has remained open to product and process innovation. This allowed me to grow movements like the following in collaboration with our Product, BD, Policy, Marketing, and many other teams:

- skills-based-hiring and -learning,

- digital ID and verifiable credentials

- online and hybrid learning

- microcredentials, work-integrated- and work-based-learning

- higher education, workforce development and economic development systems reform and integration.

And one final thank you to you all, and particularly my colleagues, for turning these wonky, altruistic and unorthodox dreams into realities.

Over the past six months, my pivot to focus on AI policy has been exhilarating. My colleague at The Dais, Graham and I wrote this report on how the government of Canada should invest in artificial intelligence compute capacity. It was followed by this announcement.

Graham and I have since drafted an OECD blog post and Toronto Star Op-Ed on how the government’s $2.4 billion dollar commitment should be deployed.

I’ve included both below and would encourage those who want to work with us on this strategy to reach out:

“We have the brain. Now we need the mainframe.”

The “mainframe” that the Innovation Minister, François-Philippe Champagne, was referring to earlier this year to is AI Compute (AIC) infrastructure. It is the computational horsepower needed to build and test state-of-the-art AI algorithms. AI infrastructure is a critical input in advancing Canada’s national AI ambitions; for a country falling behind on productivity, no technology shows more promise. 

Since launching the pan-Canadian AI strategy in 2017, Canada has maintained its position as a world leader in AI research and talent. The federal government’s recent $2.4-billion investment announcement to establish a domestic AI computing infrastructure policy is the first of many steps to boost Canada’s lagging productivity in a rapidly changing global innovation economy.

But how the minister disburses the money will determine the impact of this investment. And time is of the essence. Our recent research shows that right now, the United States has 90 times more raw computing power than we do. Adjusting for population and size of the economy, the U.S. still has 7.6 times more than Canada; Italy outdoes us by a factor of nine.

If we don’t act quickly, we stand to fail to attract and retain the talent desperately needed to jump-start productivity, leaving us further behind on the global competitive scale. 

How can we ensure the federal government makes good on these investment dollars by building the new infrastructure needed to scale AI adoption while ensuring that all Canadians have the opportunity to benefit from this new technology? 

• Consult with the public. It must include a wide breadth of public and private sectors with a particular focus on groups historically left behind during previous waves of technological adoption. 

Of course, this will require tremendous consultation, research and co-ordination efforts. The good news is, the playbook has already been written. 

Taiwan’s Digital Affairs Minister, Audrey Tang, has demonstrated stellar leadership in this field. Like Taiwan, Canada should build our AI infrastructure and industry policy with a lens of inclusive prosperity. This approach requires the voices of scale-ups, small-to-medium enterprises, and marginalized communities to be heard in the wake of AI’s growing impact on everyday life.

• Invest in public-private partnerships. We envision the federal government convening a consortium of major Canadian capital providers who could build high-performance computing capacity. This capacity could be made available to various private-sector actors such as scale-ups and small and medium-sized businesses at globally market-competitive rates. 

AI computing infrastructure support programs will also need to benefit those outside the AI ecosystem, incentivizing purpose-built technology and services endemic to Canada’s long-standing productivity and capital investment challenges. 

• Collaborate further with key trade partners for AI compute. By partnering with countries like the U.K., France, and others within frameworks like the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, Canada can secure more favourable purchasing power and access to AIC infrastructure procurement and cloud services for its AI ecosystem. 

Over the next few decades, establishing international procurement agreements is critical to expanding domestic computing capacity. Shared purchasing power through these agreements will further drive down initial fixed capital investments for AIC, ensuring resilient and sovereign computing expansion strategies are cost-effective.

Too often, benefits from government funding and programs have ended up in the hands of the few, failing to realize the broader economic effects of government intervention. 

We must ask, just as one of AI’s pioneers Yoshua Bengio has, how to direct AI toward implementations that benefit all Canadians. Bengio focuses on health care and safety, but we must have input and insight from a broader set of stakeholders across Canada, technologists and non-technologists alike. At the same time, innovators, businesses, and Canadians more broadly will only realize the benefits from this investment if the federal government deploys the capital fast.

We have the brain and, soon, the mainframe. Now, we need the heart.

Graham Dobbs is a senior economist with the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University. Jake Hirsch-Allen is a senior adviser. The Dais is a public policy and leadership think tank at TMU.

Canada’s plans to bridge the AI compute gap and how it can make industry policy inclusive and sustainable

Graham Dobbs, Jake Hirsch-Allen April 16, 2024

The new frontier in national competitiveness

As countries race to solidify their positions as leaders in artificial intelligence (AI), the foundation of this innovation increasingly rests not just on AI talent and research capacity but on the robustness of computational infrastructure. Canada, a country celebrated for its pioneering spirit in AI research and development, now faces a pivotal challenge: the AI compute (AIC) gap. This gap threatens Canada’s standing on the global stage and raises questions about inclusive and sustainable economic growth.

This week, the government announced a $2.4 billion investment to cultivate domestic AI infrastructure and realign itself with peer nations. Last month, we released a report outlining Canada’s policy options to close the AI compute gap. Here, we go over our main findings and use the OECD’s framework of national computing infrastructure to understand Canada’s AIC capacity, its effectiveness and resilience challenges.

Canada’s compute dilemma

“We have the brain. Now we need the mainframe.” Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, Francois-Phillipe Champagne, highlights a critical shortfall in the country’s AI infrastructure—the computational horsepower required to develop and test state-of-the-art AI systems. Despite a commendable history of innovation and a strategic national AI agenda initiated in 2017, Canada’s research and enterprise-ready computational capabilities are lagging not just in comparison to its southern neighbour, the United States, but to all other G7 Nations.

Canada’s storied history in AI research and policy

Recent AI research accolades

The country is home to trailblazers in the AI field, notably Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who worked extensively on neural network algorithms, and Richard Sutton in reinforcement learning. From 2022 to 2023, Canada showcased significant advancements in its AI sector, illustrating the country’s growing influence and innovation in the global AI landscape. With over 140,000 actively engaged AI professionals, representing a 29% increase from the previous year, Canada has cemented its status as a leading hub for AI talent. The country is home to 10% of the world’s top-tier AI researchers, ranking second globally in this metric. Additionally, Canada leads in gender diversity within the AI field, experiencing a 67% growth in the number of women in AI during 2022-23, the highest year-over-year increase worldwide. It also tops the G7 nations in both the growth of AI talent and the number of AI-related academic papers published per capita since 2019.

Canadian compute capacity in figures

Canada’s computational deficit is an urgent call to action. Even when adjusting for population and economic differences, Canada’s high-performance computing infrastructure lags behind most of its peer G7 nations. In comparative terms, the US leads Canada in adjusted AIC capabilities by a factor of 8 to 11 times. Japan leads by approximately eight times and France and Germany by two to three times.

To account for economic market size and population differences, we calculate a per-capita adjustment ratio, and GDP adjustment ratio using TOP500’s supercomputer sub-list generator as of November 2023.

Government support for industry and forthcoming AI compute strategy

In 2017, Canada was the first to launch a national plan for AI development, the (PCAIS), led by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). The $443 plan is the backbone of Canada’s position as a leader in AI research, talent, and start-up growth. Yet only $40 million of that funding was directly earmarked for AI compute initiatives. Most AI compute infrastructure is the responsibility of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and its research partners. However, the PCAIS does not include programmes directly targeting private-sector actors’ AI compute needs, including companies seeking to scale or grow public AI computing infrastructure.

In April 2024, the Canadian Government announced a $2.4 billion investment to cultivate domestic AI infrastructure, a crucial step in addressing its AIC compute gap.

This investment package includes $2 billion to enhance computing capabilities and technological infrastructure for AI researchers, startups, and scale-ups. It provides consultations for a new AI Compute Access Fund and a Canadian AI Sovereign Compute Strategy, ensuring access to state-of-the-art infrastructure, attracting global investments, and fostering Canadian talent. An additional $200 million will support AI startups and the adoption of AI in critical sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, and manufacturing.

Furthermore, $100 million will be allocated to the Natural Research Council’s Innovation Research Assistance AI Assist Program to aid small and medium-sized businesses integrate AI solutions to boost productivity. The plan also includes $50 million for the Sectoral Workforce Solutions Program to offer new skills training for workers in sectors potentially disrupted by AI advancements and $50 million to establish a Canadian AI Safety Institute for the safe development and deployment of AI. Lastly, $5.1 million will be dedicated to enforcing the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, guiding AI innovation responsibly and protecting Canadians from potential risks.

We posit that the efficacy of this newest investment hinges on its ability to democratise AI’s benefits across all Canadian sectors. This underscores the urgency of a comprehensive, inclusive strategy that addresses the computing gap and ensures equitable access to AI’s transformative potential.

The path forward: recommendations for a unified strategy with AI infrastructure for all

Addressing the compute gap requires more than a financial investment; it demands a commitment to inclusive and equitable access to AIC infrastructure and services. The process must start with extensive public consultation, incorporating voices from a wide array of sectors, particularly those traditionally marginalised in tech innovation. Inspired by international examples such as Taiwan’s digital democracy, Canada’s approach should focus on creating infrastructure and policies that foster inclusive prosperity, ensuring that the benefits of AI extend across the entire spectrum of society. This approach ensures that the voices of scale-ups, small-to-medium enterprises, and marginalised communities are heard in the wake of AI’s growing impact on everyday life.

Once available, the AIC procurement and adoption strategy should be integrated with existing business and digital adoption support policies, such as the Canadian federal government’s innovation subsidies through the Industrial Research Assistance Program and tax incentives via the Scientific Research & Experimental Development Program, to provide rapid and ongoing support for those who need the infrastructure and services to reap AI’s potential for the broader Canadian economy.

AIC policy considerations: Applying the OECD’s national computing framework

Public policy must be designed so that investments benefit the broadest array of AI ecosystem firms and stakeholders. Public investment must not simply replace private investment. Instead, AI computing support strategies should be well-governed and adaptive to evolving policy and industry circumstances. Expediency is key when addressing the current challenges of Canada’s AI sector, and any executed policy has short-to-long-term considerations for expanding high-performance computing infrastructure.

Here is a strategic set of policy options to address current and longer-term computing gaps for Canada developed using the OECD’s framework for national AI computing infrastructure:

• Build domestic AI computing capacity: This approach aims to provide Canadian researchers and firms with direct access to top-tier AIC, fostering innovation and reducing reliance on foreign computing resources. However, this approach faces high upfront costs and the risk of not procuring effective or sufficient AIC capacity in the long run. Programmes to offset domestic infrastructure expansion, like Finland’s LUMI supercomputer business access program, can alleviate downstream operational and maintenance costs.

• Effectively subsidise existing AIC cloud services: To boost the availability and use of AI computing resources, the federal government would need to immediately provide direct subsidies to start-up and early-growth firms. This could be through incumbent cloud service computing discounts and by incentivising domestic incorporation and operations. While this offers an expedient solution, it is temporary and risks increasing dependency on foreign cloud services and could lock in dependence on these digital ecosystems.

• Ensure sustainable, resilient AIC supply chains by collaborating with key trade partners: By partnering with countries like the UK, France, and others within frameworks like the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, Canada can secure more favourable purchasing power and access to AIC infrastructure procurement and cloud services for its AI ecosystem. This would benefit domestic firms and research institutions that face AIC shortages for future research and development needs and infrastructure procurement.

At the most macro level, any strategy to bridge the AI compute gap must align with Canada’s overarching goals to promote economic growth, ensure digital sovereignty, and maintain leadership in responsible AI innovation. Finally, Canada must distribute AI’s benefits across every part of society, including expanding AI adoption among small-to-medium enterprises and ensuring it supports the middle class and populations currently furthest from tech.

A call to action for a sustainable and inclusive AI sector in Canada

We recommend that Canada’s forthcoming AI policy be human-centred, carefully balancing equitable access to AI-driven economic growth while addressing the urgent computing needs of industry and innovation ecosystems. By prioritising public consultation, leveraging international partnerships, and focusing on sustainable and inclusive infrastructure development, Canada can navigate its current challenges and emerge as a leader in the practical, ethical, and equitable use of AI.

The journey to close Canada’s AI compute gap is not just an innovation challenge; it’s a societal imperative. This gap affects economic productivity and innovation sovereignty. As we venture further into the age of AI, today’s decisions will define Canada’s role in the global digital economy and its ability to foster a prosperous future. The time to act is now, with foresight, inclusivity, and a steadfast commitment to keeping up with computing incumbents and galvanising the prosperity and well-being of all Canadians in the new digital age.

Throughout an unorthodox career spanning law, technology entrepreneurship, and public-private partnerships, my common thread has been expanding genuine human prosperity through system change. Whether enabling access to vital medicines, using data analytics to connect disadvantaged individuals with meaningful livelihoods, or advising governments on technology's role in education and workforce development, my focus remains on bettering society and expanding opportunity. But the emergence of potentially society-altering technologies like generative AI demands careful governance rooted in ethics aligned first with human dignity to ensure they remain directed toward humanity's benefit, not centralized power or profit. For the first time, I am questioning the impact of the adoption of a new technology or the pace of innovation rather than encouraging it.  We face a choice about whether to "innovate first, ask questions later" or proactively build guardrails guided by human rights.

There is understandable excitement but also justified fear around the rapid development of generative AI models like GPT. While some hype is overblown, I'm heartened that renewed debate is prompting society to seriously reckon with our relationship with technology and its risks. Even more specifically, the genAI hype cycle is bringing up long-debated and yet far-from-resolved questions about data privacy, reliability and bias, about technological power and centralization, and about information and misinformation. COVID pulled back the curtain on an overly tech-dependent world, from Zoom fatigue to failures of remote learning. As the techlash grew, psychologists and governments began questioning Big Tech's influence on mental health and relationships.

Generative AI adds greater urgency to the need to address tech's existential threats in part because of the opaque nature of how it works – the creators of the technology understand it conceptually but are unable to predict or precisely explain the answer a GenAI system will give to a prompt.  That lack of transparency is made worse when the systems are concentrated in the hands of a powerful few.  Web 2.0 companies refused to reveal how their algorithms worked for competitive reasons. Web 4.0 companies don’t have to refuse because they don’t know how their products really work.

But dystopian futures are not inevitable if we build human dignity-aligned ethics into AI's architecture from the ground up. Core to this is recognizing that she who controls the data controls the AI. Responsible data regulation must balance openness to fuel innovation against preventing harmful uses violating human dignity. We cannot see AI itself as an autonomous force removed from human accountability, but a tool shaped by our values. We have agency over technology if we claim it.

One model is convening an IPCC-like organization to monitor AI's risks, along with shared public compute resources to develop beneficial applications serving the public interest. Regulation should be flexible policies within a universal legal framework, not blanket bans - keeping AI development as open as possible while firmly limiting dangerous uses, much as we allow free speech unless it directly harms others. New decentralized governance models and distributed deliberative and participatory democracy technology could allow faster and broader consultation and democratic input. Examples include citizen assemblies, Pol.is, and Remesh and quadratic voting.

Of course, no current AI possesses nuanced judgment over what is "good" or "bad" - this is where humans must remain firmly in the loop through oversight mechanisms ensuring consensus aligns with ethics and human dignity, as it does with Wikipedia. More humans in the loop, and a focus on the care economy, not just technical progress alone, will lead to generative AI that uplifts our communities. If developed and applied wisely with care and intention, AI could profoundly empower humanity's collective potential. But only if guided by our highest shared values.

This post was made with an AI tool from Casper Studios, developed by my friend Jay Singh. You can message him if you want to do a 30min live chat with him. He’ll take the interview and create content like this for you. Thanks to Adam Leonard and my dad for their edits and additions.

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My father was Canada’s ambassador to Israel and now spends much of his time supporting Project Rozana, a not-for-profit whose objective is to build bridges between Palestinians and Israelis via the health sector. I agree with almost all of his views below, most importantly because I see him presenting a realistic path to a potential end to this horrendous conflict.

I am grateful for the many civil and dissenting critics and supporters who reached out after I last posted a piece by my father. I apologize for not having been able to respond to all of them but hope to do so in the coming weeks and months.

The French, Germans and British were at various times in relatively recent history such mortal enemies that they massacred each other at unparalleled scales and yet now live in amongst the most stable and positive confederations ever to have been established. How do we go from a war so terrible that forgiveness seems impossible to a place where humanity and civility prevail?

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Did the Israel Defense Forces Underestimate Hamas?

An interview with a former Canadian ambassador to Israel

BY CARMINE STARNINO for The Walrus

ISRAEL’S WAR ON GAZA is a consequence multiplier. Every day brings horrific new after-effects—both regional and geopolitical—that have to be added to an ever-ramifying, ultimately unknown, outcome. Few experts can speak to the complexity of what is happening and may yet happen. Jon Allen is one of them. Canada’s ambassador to Israel from 2006 to 2010, he is currently a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and a distinguished fellow of the Canada International Council. In one role or another—as a diplomat, intellectual, and policy maker—he has been studying, researching, and thinking about the Middle East for much of his adult life. We recently spoke by email about the more strategic aspects of Israel’s military operation and where he believes events might end up.

Vowing to destroy Hamas following its October 7 massacre, Israel has laid waste to much of the Gaza Strip. The damage staggers: an estimated tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in bombing raids reportedly more intense than what we’ve seen in Ukraine, Syria, or even World War II. Yet Hamas still stands. In some ways, critics argue, Israeli operations have strengthened Hamas’s hand by reconfirming its legitimacy, among some, as a check on Israel. Did the Israel Defense Forces underestimate Hamas?

Despite warnings from the Americans to take previous US failures into account before the ground offensive began, and despite the IDF’s previous experiences in Gaza where rooting out Hamas had proved difficult, Israel went in with full force, dropping massive bombs and employing looser rules of engagement than in past conflicts with Hamas. They did it because they were humiliated and devastated by Hamas’s horrific attack. They did it because Israelis wanted revenge and to regain a sense of security. They convinced themselves that Israelis wouldn’t return to the south unless Hamas had been eliminated from Gaza. They likely convinced themselves that by destroying north and central Gaza, including the tunnel infrastructure which is so key to Hamas’ defences, they could kill and/or capture the major Hamas political and military leaders who remained in the Strip, and that they could do serious damage to many of the Hamas battalions in the process.

They did underestimate Hamas, and the IDF has already admitted that the mission is more difficult and taking longer than they expected. Indeed, three months into the war, Israel has been unable to assassinate even one of the three main Hamas leaders believed to be in Gaza. While they would have anticipated the criticism from the Middle East and the Global South more generally, they likely did not expect the almost universal demands for either humanitarian pauses or a full ceasefire that the carnage they have caused has generated. Because it is taking so long and because of the massive death and injury toll, Hamas has also won the political and ideological battle, both amongst Palestinians in the West Bank and among a largely younger demographic worldwide, including in North America and Europe.

What does winning that “political and ideological battle” look like for Hamas? Can you describe the current state of the debate around the military operation as you see it?

For Hamas, which knows it cannot win militarily against Israel, winning means putting the Palestinian issue back on the front burner in Israel and the front pages in Israel and worldwide. The ongoing and growing criticism of Israel in the Western media, the massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and the votes in the UN calling for a ceasefire are all victories for Hamas.

The current state of the debate around Israel’s military actions in Gaza centres on a couple of different issues. One is whether the goals—destroying Hamas, freeing the hostages, and convincing Israelis to return to their homes in the south and in the north, close to the Lebanese border—are achievable. Destroying all of the 30,000 to 40,000 militants and their ideology is clearly not achievable, so the question becomes how many leaders and how many militants need to be killed before Israel declares victory. Freeing the remaining hostages and continuing to pursue the Hamas leadership may be contradictory goals. At a minimum, a pause will be required. In early January, Hamas refused to negotiate a hostage release/exchange unless Israel agrees to a complete ceasefire. For some Israelis, the hostages should be priority number one. For the far-right members of Israel’s coalition government, eliminating Hamas is paramount.

Then there is the question of the nature of the continuing Israeli military actions and the speed at which they will adopt a more strategic, targeted approach that minimizes or at least reduces the number of innocents being affected and focuses on the Hamas leadership.

As mentioned, Israel’s progress has been slower than expected. Very few of the most prominent leaders have yet been killed. The number of IDF soldiers killed and seriously wounded is mounting. There have, no doubt, been IDF successes. The military estimates, for example, that some 9,000 Hamas fighters have been killed and infrastructure has been destroyed, but despite what Benjamin Netanyahu has to say, I doubt that this war will continue at this level for months to come.

In your estimation, why has Hamas been so difficult to root out?

It appears that Hamas had been planning this attack and its defence against the inevitable Israeli response for years. The extensive tunnel system that Hamas has created over the years is nicknamed “the Metro” because of how complex and deep it is. The tunnels allow Hamas operatives to move undetected throughout the Gaza Strip and pop up in unexpected locations. Hamas is able to store weapons and ammunition in the tunnels and has reportedly received sophisticated weapon systems from Iran and Hezbollah. It has also laid anti-personnel land mines and various other booby traps which make Israeli advances difficult and dangerous.

Hamas knows the terrain intimately. The IDF does not. Hamas is seemingly undeterred by the fact that thousands of innocent Palestinians have been killed and injured. When asked by journalists why, for all the tunnels they dug for themselves, Hamas never built bomb shelters for civilians, a spokesperson replied that the tunnels were for Hamas and that “it is the responsibility of the UN” to look after civilians.

Finally, the hostages complicate Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas leadership. It is likely that some hostages are providing the ultimate human shield for Israel’s most wanted Hamas chiefs.

There are fears that Israel is seizing the moment to trigger a second Nakba, or mass displacement. Several of the country’s lawmakers have made comments appearing to support it. Does the accusation have merit?

As much as most Israelis would probably support an exit of all Palestinians from Gaza (and probably the West Bank), only the most far-right members of the current coalition and far-right journalists have advocated such an outcome. It is not difficult to understand where such accusations against Israel come from when the IDF orders Gazans to move to the south of the Strip for safety and then begins bombing, thereby forcing hundreds of thousands of refugees farther south toward the Rafah crossing with Egypt.

It’s important to note that statements by government ministers, members of the legislature, and senior officials supporting such a mass displacement (even if not government policy) will be used against Israel in any efforts to bring the country before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, where Israel and/or some of its leadership could be accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Indeed, South Africa has already brought such a case against Israel at the ICJ, alleging genocide by the IDF.

With Hamas likely surviving the war in some form, do you believe Israel’s calculus around its military operation is changing? What is the post-war future for Gaza?

For now, Israel will continue to pursue the Hamas leadership both within and outside Gaza—note the recent assassination of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut. It will do everything possible to destroy Hamas’s infrastructure, especially the tunnels from which it so effectively operates. It has already captured a significant amount of Hamas weapons and the machinery required to produce weapons and rockets.

Israel’s overall strategy is already starting to evolve, with the IDF beginning to bow to US pressure and implement a more targeted approach, although the number of Gazan deaths and injuries remains unacceptably high. Israel has also begun to withdraw some of its reservists to allow these men and women to return to university and the workforce.

The post-war future for Gaza will involve a rebuilding and massive supply of humanitarian aid by some form of international grouping that will include the UN system, the US, the EU, and others. Hopefully, the Gulf states will contribute a significant amount of funding. Once the threat from a counterinsurgency has been dealt with—no easy task—some form of international governance system will begin to operate. It will not be under full UN control, as Israel would be opposed, but it will hopefully include international organizations as well as certain countries providing technical assistance. It will be important to demonstrate to Gazans that a Hamas replacement can be a better supplier of food, social services, education, and health services than Hamas was. There is talk of including members of the most important families in Gaza as a key part of this governance system.

Is there anything about this current situation that has surprised you? What has been the biggest takeaway from the events that have unfolded?

There are many aspects of the events of October 7 and following that have surprised me. First, the horrific nature of the attack, including the sexual assaults, the murders of innocent women, children, and the elderly, and much more. The tragic irony of this attack is that many of the kibbutzniks living along the border were peace activists. For example, Vivian Silver, a Canadian Israeli whom my wife and I knew well and who devoted her life to improving relations between Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis and between Israelis and Palestinians, was one of those killed on October 7.

Second, the absolute failure of the massive intelligence resources at Israel’s disposal and the equally disturbing failure of the IDF to have sufficient forces in the region and to respond quickly to the attack.

Third, the extent of the cynicism and the manipulation of Netanyahu in his dealings with Hamas, on the one hand, and the Palestinian Authority, on the other, was also shocking and has fully been exposed only now. Bibi supported Hamas and knowingly allowed it to grow, weaponize, and build its infrastructure. At the same time, he was denigrating the PA, which was protecting Israelis from terrorist attacks from the West Bank and working hand in hand with Israeli security services. This enabled him to convince the Israeli public that there was no partner for peace, a refrain I have been listening to for over a decade and which the establishment diaspora community and most Israelis believe and preach. So, instead of creating a political horizon for peace and encouraging Palestinians who were willing to engage with Israel, Bibi encouraged settlement construction, allowed illegal settlements to multiply, and ultimately formed a government with the most right-wing and racist parties ever to govern the country. The coalition agreement Bibi signed with these parties actually calls for the annexation of the West Bank that would effectively put to rest the idea of two states for two peoples.

Fourth, perhaps most surprising to me—and in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been—was the effect of the attack, and the failure of the government to effectively respond to it, on all Israelis. They have been gutted, humiliated, and paralyzed emotionally by the events of October 7. Their contract with their government was broken, they have become fearful, and they saw and still see the war in Gaza, the elimination of Hamas, and the return of the hostages as the only way, at least in the short term, to begin to heal and move on.

Israelis—with whom I have worked for years on ending the occupation, stopping the settlements, and supporting a two-state solution—were, at least initially, in favour of a massive ground invasion irrespective of the cost to innocent Palestinians. They and their leaders were unwilling to listen to the advice of Joe Biden and many others who, based on recent experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and fighting ISIS, cautioned Israel that a massive response like the one they have engaged in will not be able to achieve its goals, will only radicalize Palestinians and their supporters, and will allow Hamas to declare a public relations victory. Most Israelis seem ambivalent about the horrific tragedy taking place in Gaza. They blame Hamas, not the IDF, for the death and injury toll, accusing Hamas, correctly, of using civilians as human shields. This is beginning to change, but the vast majority of Israelis watch and listen only to Israeli media, which is partially censored, extremely biased, and does not show the kinds of pictures of dead and dying innocent Palestinians that we in the rest of the world see every day and night.

Fifth, I would say that the extent of support, both military and emotional, that the US government in general and the president in particular provided Israel was unprecedented. This included a strike force in the Mediterranean, a presidential visit days after the attack, massive supplies of weapons and ammunition, and continuing support despite the obvious differences between the US government’s and Netanyahu’s visions of the way forward. Indeed, the president is already paying a significant price in the polls, especially among young Democrats who oppose his continuing, almost unqualified support for Israel.

A difficult question, perhaps, but do you have any hope for the future?

What allows me to continue to be hopeful about the eventual outcome of this tragedy and previous conflicts before it is the revival of the realization that the two-state solution is the only way forward if these two people are going to be able to live in peace and security. Obviously, this is not a time when either Israelis or many Palestinians are even willing to contemplate two states. But it is important that Western governments have finally woken up to the fact that their past acquiescence in Israeli settlement expansion, land theft, and violence against Palestinians has only brought instability to the region and injustice to Palestinians. They and former Israeli leaders, like Ehud Olmet, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni, and hundreds of ex Israeli generals and heads of the IDF, Mossad, and the Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic security service) understand that creating a horizon for peace, stopping the settlement expansion, and supporting international efforts to improve PA governance is the only way forward. The bottom line is that neither of these two peoples is going anywhere, so they must learn how to share the land. Two separate states is the only option given the lack of trust that currently exists. Over time, they can perhaps move toward a friendly divorce.

Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino (@cstarnino) is editor-in-chief of The Walrus.

NOTE: All photos are my own from my time in Israel while the above text is quoted directly from The Walrus and can be found here: https://thewalrus.ca/idf-underestimate-hamas/

For my previous article see here:

In an effort to foster a balanced dialogue on the subject that has most divided my friends and community, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’m posting my father's latest speech. I hope this post and speech can bring my extended family together in deep, heartfelt and thoughtful conversation instead of the often superficial hatred I see regularly on both sides.

I share most of my father's views and echo his call for peace and a two-state solution.

First and foremost, the indiscriminate suffering inflicted on Palestinians and Israelis must stop.

The pervasive hate and extremism, including Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Palestinian sentiments, particularly among the youth, must end. Such bigotry, often exacerbated by social media algorithms, detracts from the core issues and inhibits constructive engagement.

20 years ago, my self-designed Archetypal Mythology major at the University of Toronto included courses on the Quran and the Christian and Jewish bibles and complimented my major in international relations. It taught me the extent both religions can be manipulated by radical leaders, like political ideologues before and after, and in ways that are not inherent, to justify wars. It also taught how me how as children of Abraham, we are very similar people with similar histories and intertwined religions.

The policies and actions of Israel's government and leader have not only fueled domestic unrest but have also contributed to the international conflict we witness today. Hamas’ horrific massacre on October 7th, has solidified the notion that peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians are deeply intertwined. The way forward lies in a steadfast commitment to a two-state solution—a sentiment echoed by leaders and peacemakers worldwide.

For a lasting peace, both sides, including of my community, must exercise restraint, engage in dialogue, and work towards a future where two states for two peoples is not just a possibility but a reality.

I am excited to engage in productive conversation with those who agree and disagree with me. I ask only that you read my father’s peace first to demonstrate your willingness to engage deeply and openly in this subject.

Let us move beyond polarizing rhetoric to connect with each other around the nuanced complexities of this enduring conflict, with the hope that reason and empathy will guide us towards a peaceful resolution as it has in Ireland, South Africa, the former Yugoslavia and so many other divided and war torn corners of our planet before.

This lecture was delivered for the Foundation for Palestinian Studies Fund at the University of Waterloo, Nov. 23, 2023

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama pronounced the end of history and he came to regret it. About 8 weeks ago Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser, said at an Atlantic Monthly conference: “the Middle East is quieter than it has been in decades”

To be fair to Jake, he was talking about Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. But what a horrifying difference a couple of months make.

I want to be fully transparent with you before I start. I’m a Jew. My wife is the child of Holocaust survivors. I have a sister, nieces, and nephews who live on a kibbutz in Israel not far from the Lebanese border and Hezbollah and Hamas rockets. Second, I have been opposed to the Israeli settlement project, the Occupation and the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since long before I became Ambassador to Israel. I continue to believe in and advocate for a two-state solution as a means of ending the conflict.

I am emotionally torn as I hold in my heart my feelings of sympathy for thousands of innocent Palestinians, on the one hand, and for the families of the dead Israelis and injured Israelis, on the other. Understanding and dissecting this war may be complicated but recognizing the death and destruction that it has produced on both sides is not.

Finally, I’m also distressed by the hate and extremism and rampant anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian and Arab racism that has been generated by so many people, especially young people, who refuse to understand that this a complex and longstanding conflict and that there is plenty of blame to lay on both sides.

But, before talking about the current conflict, I think it is important to  go back to the results of the Nov. 2022 election in Israel that turned the country from a complicated and imperfect but fully functioning democracy into a polarized nation that was showing signs of falling apart at the seams. It’s worth a quick review because some of the policies, actions and personalities of the government that was elected last Nov. contributed directly or indirectly to the Oct. 7 attacks and the war that we have been witnessing. Some of those actors continue to polarize the country, advocate for a continuation of the conflict and ignite violence in the West Bank.

 I’ll then turn to massacre on Oct. 7, and I’ll conclude by briefly explaining why I continue to believe that two states for two peoples remains the only solution for these two traumatized peoples if they are ever to live in peace and security going forward.

Prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, as you all know, Israel was already in crisis. The country had just experienced 39 weeks of massive protests against its far-right wing government. For the first time in Israel’s history army reservists were refusing to serve; sitting judges were on the streets in their robes protesting; and Israelis from the right, the left and the centre, both secular and some religious, hi-tech CEOs, and union members, all were demanding an end to the government’s proposals on judicial and religious reforms.

In the West Bank, settlements were expanding faster than ever before, and new illegal outposts were being constructed. Settler violence against Palestinians was rampant, including what people on both sides of the Green Line called a pogrom in the Palestinian town of Hawara. Over 100 Palestinians had been killed by a combination of IDF soldiers and settlers since the beginning of 2023 while over 30 Israelis were murdered in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and in parts of the West Bank in terrorist incidents.

Ironically though, it was eerily quiet in Gaza where the Netanyahu government was under the impression that by granting work permits to twenty thousand Gazans, and by allowing Qatar to deliver millions of dollars per month to Hamas, the Gaza strip and Hamas were under control.

Prior to the Nov. 22 election that brought Bibi Netanyahu and company back to power, Israel had a broad coalition government that included politicians from the right, the centre, the left and even Israeli Arabs. It was far from perfect, but it brought together disparate elements of Israeli society rather than exploit their divisions. Given its multi-party character, it avoided radical or controversial policy proposals. It passed a budget that provided much need funding for health, education, and the Arab Israeli sector. And it tentatively held out an olive branch to those Palestinians who were ready to talk peace.

In November 2022, Israelis elected a very different coalition, one that included Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud party and other parties which hoped to use a majority in the Knesset to pursue a radical right-wing nationalist and religious agenda. Bibi’s goal, as it has been since he was first indicted for three criminal charges, was to guarantee himself a “get out of jail” card. His coalition partners’ objective was to remove the major obstacle to their religious and expansionist intentions – the power of Israel’s Supreme Court.

So, what brought hundreds of thousands of Israeli protestors onto the streets of almost every city in Israel for 39 straight weeks?

First, there were the government’s own ministers and their policies.

Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister of National Security, had a history of criminal convictions for racism and terrorism. He has called repeatedly for the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel.

Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance with added responsibilities for the West Bank is the leader of a far-right Religious Zionist party that advocates for full Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and a ban on Israeli Arab political parties. He opposes the rights of the LGBTQ community.

Aryeh Dery, the leader of an orthodox religious party called Shas and was appointed Minister of Health, Minister of Interior and Vice-Prime Minister, had been convicted three times for tax fraud.

And, of course, the Prime Minister was himself under indictment.

Second, the protestors opposed specific reforms that the coalition was trying to expedite through the Knesset. These included political control over appointments of judges to Israeli courts and a parliamentary override of Supreme Court decisions that would have left Israel as a tyranny of the majority.

Had these reforms passed, with a one seat majority vote there would have been no other institution in the country able to protect the rights of the LGBTQ community, Arab Israelis, workers, refugees, or any other minority group. Recall that Israel has no constitution, no Charter or Bill of rights and no bicameral legislature, i.e., no sober second chamber to review and possibly oppose legislation.

And the reforms didn’t stop with the Courts. The government wanted to equate the status and the salaries of orthodox religious students with those of soldiers and exempt the former from military service. These measures would have further polarized the country with secular Israelis sending their children to the army to defend the country, while they subsidized a growing orthodox community whose young men spend their lives studying Torah.

Some of the most extreme reforms were aimed directly at the Arab Israeli sector and included banning the Palestine flag within the Green Line, imposing the death penalty on Israeli Arabs convicted of terrorism, and deporting Israeli Arabs if convicted of the ill-defined crime of “disloyalty”. These provisions would not have applied to Jewish Israelis.

Missing, for the most part, from the protests ,however, was any attention to the treatment of Arab Israelis in Israel or of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. While I understand why this was the case - the organizers wanted to minimize the fissures between the various groups of protesters - Israel will be an imperfect democracy as long as it continues to discriminate against Arab Israeli citizens of Israel, and it continues to occupy the West Bank and Gaza.

The attack

So let me turn now to the events which began Saturday, Oct. 7.

The massacre by Hamas terrorists that day, and it was a horrific massacre, resulted in the largest number of Jewish civilians killed in one day since the Holocaust. I raise this fact not because Israeli blood is any different than Palestinian blood and I will come to the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinians in Gaza in a moment. But it is key to understanding the almost universal support for a decisive and no holds barred response to the events of Oct. 7 that exists in Israel today. And it is in part why seemingly rationale arguments for a more cautious and strategic way forward were rejected. And why folks that I considered true peaceniks have taken a surprisingly hard line regarding the conflict.

Oct. 7 has been compared by the media to 9/11 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. There are of course similarities, but it was also different: it was the first attack on pre-1967 Israeli soil. It represented so massive an intelligence and military failure that it has shaken Israelis to the core, broken their contract with the state, the IDF and the Mossad, and made them question whether they can ever again be secure in the region, in their country and in their homes.

Israel’s stated war objectives, to eliminate the Hamas political and military leadership, also raise comparisons with the failed US efforts in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The difference, however, is that those wars didn’t take place on American soil. Israelis will tell you that they have nowhere else to go; for them, what took place on Oct. 7 is existential.

Suffice it to say, the attack was extremely well planned. Some 2200 terrorists entered southern Israel and Hamas fired some 3000 rockets in one day. It took Hamas a month to fire that many rockets during the last Hamas Israeli conflict. Indeed, Hamas and Hezbollah rockets continue to hit Israel 7 months into the conflict.

The ease and success of the Hamas mission – killing 1200, wounding 3300 and taking some 240 hostages, seems to have gone beyond Hamas’ wildest dreams. 

So how did it happen?

I’m going to talk here about the proximate causes of the attack and not about the historical root causes which I will come back to, and which are more complicated but equally important.

First, as alluded to, let’s recall that the Hamas Charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the elimination of Jews from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. It has controlled Gaza with an iron fist since 2007 when it violently ousted the Palestinian Authority from the territory.

If that isn’t clear enough, a senior Hamas leader told the New York Times three weeks ago that “Israel can expect a second, third and fourth attack until it is eliminated from the map. He added that “We must annihilate the country.”

There is much speculation about why Hamas attacked when it did. It was, for example, 50 years plus a day from the start of the Yom Kippur War and on a holiday when many soldiers spent the day with families and friends.

Contrary to previously agreed protocols between Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians, certain Israeli coalition ministers had been praying on the grounds of the Al Aqsa Mosque - shades of Ariel Sharon’s provocation  in advance of the Second Intifada.

A key factor seems to have been the fact that the IDF and Israel’s intelligence agencies had taken their eyes off Gaza. Three military units were shifted to the West Bank to quell violence there – violence that was provoked by the coalition’s polices of settlement expansion and threats of annexation.

Indeed, southern Israel along the Gaza border was woefully unprepared and far too reliant on technological solution such as smart fences, sensors, drones, remote-controlled machine guns.

Then, there was the Israel/US/Saudi agreement that was being negotiated and that would have specifically targeted Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. And, as with the Abraham Accords before it, there was no guarantee that the agreement was going to provide much in the way of support for the Palestinian cause.

Indeed, Bibi Netanyahu appeared this year before the UN General Assembly and held up a map depicting an Israel that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. Moreover, he frequently boasts that Israel can now gain recognition from key Arab states without addressing Palestinian demands for a state of its own. The agreement he entered into with his right-wing coalition partners actually calls for the annexation of the West Bank.

It's therefore not surprising that Hamas leaders have boasted since Oct. 7 that their actions have finally put the Palestinian question back on the front pages.

Finally, it’s also been said that the Netanyahu government contributed to the crisis more generally by polarizing the country and exposing its internal weaknesses to its enemies. The Minister of Defense told the Prime Minister as much months before the attack but Bibi ignored the warnings.

So where are we now?

After 8 weeks of war, 6 weeks of bombing and leveling approximately one half of the buildings of northern Gaza, the IDF has now encircled Gaza City and the tunnels where they believe Hamas military and political leaders were hiding. Some 14,000 Palestinians are believed to have been killed and some 35,000 injured. The vast majority are innocent civilians including upwards of four thousand children. Those that have survived have been largely starved of food, water, medicines, and fuel. Approximately 1.3 million Gazans have moved to the south creating a humanitarian crisis of its own.

I fully acknowledge Israel’s right to self-defence and sympathise with the trauma and suffering of the survivors, injured and the remaining hostages. I join those welcoming the release of the hostages grabbed on Oct. 7. It’s also clear that fighting inside Gaza, a densely populated built up urban area where Hamas intentionally uses the civilian population as human shields and does indeed use hospitals and schools as safe havens for its fighters, leaves Israel between a rock and a hard place.

You may have read that when the leader of Hamas in Gaza was asked by the New York Times why ordinary Gazans were not being protected in the tunnels, he replied: “The tunnels are for us. UNRWA is supposed to take care of the civilians.”

But whatever Israel’s rights and fears are, these do not, in my view, justify the siege and collective punishment that Israel initially imposed; nor the trickle of humanitarian supplies that it has permitted to enter Gaza up to now; nor the massive number of deaths and injuries of innocent Palestinian men, women and children.

Clearly, not unlike other militaries, Israel is choosing to minimize the casualties to its own forces, almost irrespective of the collateral damage its operations cause.

At a very minimum, a humanitarian pause should have been agreed to earlier on that would have allowed for the delivery of water, food, medicines, and other aid to those in need and to permit as many hostages and foreign nationals as possible to escape Gaza.

Israel can’t order 1.3 million Palestinians to move to the south of the Gaza Strip and continue to bomb there. It should realize that its actions will further radicalize Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and Muslims worldwide. It must realize that eliminating an ideology is far more difficult than killing Hamas’ leaders and destroying its infrastructure if that is possible.

And Israel must make clear that suggestions by some Israeli ministers to rid Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza or to suggest that all Gazans were responsible for Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7, are abhorrent and that those who mouth them should be held accountable.

There is, of course, much debate over whether a cease fire should be agreed to with many international institutions, including the UN, and most NGOs demanding it. If Israel is going to restart the war in order to further root out Hamas leadership, and it may do so once the majority of hostages are released, and possibly before, it is incumbent on it to significantly reduce the number of deaths and injuries it is causing going forward. It must adopt a far more surgical, targeted and strategic approach that minimizes the loss of innocent life.

The Occupation, the threats of annexation, and the failure of Israel for 15 years to even contemplate a horizon for peace don’t and cannot justify the horrific attacks of Oct 7. But they do help explain why Israel quickly loses the sympathy of so many countries, the media and the younger generation when their right to self-defence inevitably leads to the death and destruction we are witnessing today. The failure to address the Occupation, the covert support for Hamas aimed at dividing and conquering the Palestinians, and the day-to-day treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, especially under governments led by Bibi Netanyahu, mean that Israel does not come to the table with clean hands. Context and root causes cannot justify terror, but they, Israel’s bravado, and its insensitive advocacy, help to explain why sympathy and understanding for Israel's situation is often short lived. 

So, What next?

In Israel, I predict that Bibi Netanyahu will be ousted soon after the war ends. The 39 weeks of protests prior to the war combined with a majority view that he bears direct responsibility for this national trauma, should mean that he will be forced to resign, either by his Likud colleagues or by even more massive protests. He and his coalition partners are way down in the polls. His radical reform agenda is, I believe, now off the table. Whether a new Likud leader capable of holding the current coalition together can be found, or a new and better grouping will unite to lead the country or whether Israel will move to new elections remains unclear.

It is highly unlikely that Israel will want to re-occupy Gaza. Initially it will want to control the security situation in the Strip and be able to re-enter if there are signs of a resurgent Hamas. Hopefully, and over time, a new Israeli government will work with the US to install an interim, perhaps Gulf State led, force and eventually a Palestinian governance mechanism. Reconstruction and the delivery of humanitarian aid will be the first priorities.

For the West Bank, the best-case scenario would see the provision of aid and training leading eventually to free and fair elections followed over time with elections in Gaza. If Salam Fayyad, the best finance, and prime minister that the PA ever had, can be convinced to return, it would hasten the process. Hamas would not be allowed to participate in the elections. This all will take time and patience.

Perhaps the one glimmer of hope flowing from this horrific time for all concerned is that the push for a two-state solution is now back on the table. President Biden, Justin Trudeau, former Israeli PMs, Naftali Bennet, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert are all saying that now is the time to give this option a chance.

The key question in the medium term is whether Oct. 7 will move the country further right and, in my view, closer to the abyss, or whether Israelis will finally realize that a permanent separation from Palestinians is a far better solution than a continuing Occupation.

Four years after the Yom Kippur War, Anwar Sadat spoke in Israel’s parliament. The historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn took place after the first Intifada. No one believed that Apartheid would end in South Africa when it did. No one saw the Berlin Wall falling when it did. No one thought the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland could make peace after 400 years of fighting.

I continue to believe that two states for two peoples is the only solution for Israelis and Palestinians. The six final status issues to be resolved are well known and can be achieved with strong leadership backed by political will, with compromise from both sides and with the strength to withstand efforts by extremists on both sides to thwart peace. I hope that the horrific crisis that we are witnessing today may be the impetus for wiser men and women in Israel and Palestine to finally realize this.

To avoid these repeated cycles of violence, real efforts must be made to create a political horizon. The most important signal that Israel could send now would be to unequivocally stop settlement expansion and begin to dismantle the settlement outposts that its own Supreme Court has declared illegal. On the Palestinian side, Mahmoud Abbas should unequivocally denounce Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, reaffirm his support for a two-state solution, and pledge to move toward elections.

Thanks, I’ll stop there and I’m happy to take your questions.

Jon Allen (LL.B., LL.M.) is a Senior Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He joined Canada’s Department of External Affairs in 1981 and has held numerous posts including Director General, North America Bureau (2001-2004) and Minister (Political Affairs) at the Canadian Embassy in Washington (2004-2006). As Assistant Deputy Minister, Americas (2010-2012), he managed Canada’s relations with North America, Latin America and the Caribbean. From 2006 to 2010, Allen was Canada’s Ambassador to Israel. From 2012 to 2016 he was Ambassador to Spain and Andorra. Allen is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Canada International Council, the Chair of Project Rozana Canada, a not for profit whose objective is to build bridges between Palestinians and Israelis via the health sector, and a Member of the Board of AmbCanada.

This post was made with an AI tool from Casper Studios, developed by my friend Jay Singh. You can message him if you want to do a 30min live chat with him. He’ll take the interview and create content like this for you.

In my work spearheading partnerships between governments and technology companies like LinkedIn, I regularly contemplate how to best measure genuine societal "value" generated by emerging technologies rather than mere economic "productivity." While some productivity growth can provide resources to enable human flourishing, over-focusing on efficiency metrics risks losing sight of the deeper meaning and fulfillment that technology should provide.

As generative AI transforms entire categories of work, I envision the potential for an economy progressively shifting focus to more care-oriented roles. Teachers, nurses, childcare providers, elderly caregivers - professions centered on tending to human emotional and physical needs that are irreducible to automation. Parents could be compensated for the invaluable work of raising the next generation with knowledge, empathy, and resilience. With less time devoted to rote work, we could spend more effort building community, relationships, and meaning.

But this requires intention - we cannot assume progress automatically leads to beneficial outcomes for humanity. We must structure societal transitions with great care for human dignity and the vulnerable. Policy choices determine whether automation displaces workers and polarizes opportunity or allows more fulfilling roles. Some productivity growth can generate resources to uplift living standards, but solely chasing economic expansion often diverges from what benefits humanity holistically.

Reorienting technology to serve human values over profit will be a generational project as AI transforms life and work. But promising signs exist, from emerging wellbeing metrics beyond GDP to younger generations advocating ethics and sustainability along with innovation. No quick policy fix will create utopia, but we must center human needs and aspirations when evaluating technological change, not prioritize efficiency alone.

Progress begins with communities uniting around shared values and vision for the future. Technology should align with and serve these values. As AI automation accelerates, the question is whether it will drive ever-greater productivity and wealth concentration or enable more cooperative, resilient, and equitable societies where all can thrive. If developed wisely and applied with care, AI could help build a world where technology supports human dignity, creativity, and community.

The last year involved more change in my life than I can remember: On the one hand, a beautiful marriage thanks to my wife and our family and friends' hard work and amazing hearts; in addition to a month spent exploring Europe (see Instagram highlights scattered throughout this post and a summary of great stays here).

On the other hand, the disheartening reversal of global economic growth and the crash of tech and particularly edTech. Perhaps most disappointing, the dominance of deceit, self-interest and unfettered capitalism over human rights, equality, inclusion and democracy. As examples, see the moral and financial destruction by and of SBF and so many crypto- and blockchain-related companies; the bankruptcies of SVB and Credit Suisse; the evaporation of value from so many frothy edTech companies. Or Russia's criminal war with Ukraine; increased tensions with China; and the backsliding of global trade and governance, and therefore stability.

Yet more than any other change, I've been rocked by AI and our desperate need for its regulation. Below I explain why I'm pivoting my research to focus on global AI governance. 

Davos, Digital IDs and Verifiable Credentials

I began 2023 in awe of Switzerland's mountains and efficiency and left disillusioned by Davos where nations appeared to be failing to compete with a promenade lined with big tech and crypto, and where parties were full of a global elite that seemed to have missed a crippling crisis.

I spent much of my time focused on two technologies that I have long believed crucial to a better internet and improvements in education, communication and wellbeing: 1. user data ownership and 2. software interoperability. If WhatsApp and iMessage or Slack and Teams were interoperable, like different email clients, our communal mental burden of task and app switching would be reduced dramatically and our economic and social efficiency increased. If we owned our own data and were educated about how and when to share it, our democracies and minds wouldn't be threatened by ads and disinformation that capitalize on our addictions at the speed of light and the scale of millions.

And while recent EU legislation is promising in both respects (see the Digital Media Act and Digital Services Act), I worry that lobbying will result in these regulations being as impotent as the GDPR. This long awaited and now firmly established privacy legislation has, in my opinion, as much benefited incumbent giants and inconvenienced end users with Cookie pop ups, as it has increased privacy education or related rights.

More specifically I spent significant energy at the World Economic Forum on digital IDs and badges and specifically Learning and Employment Records. Progress on these technologies is advancing rapidly. They were catapulted back to the fore by the Web3 movement and, like democratic participation technologies, they are some of the tech that was positive and will remain prevalent after the crash of Web3. Secure verification of humans has similarly been reinforced by recent developments in AI as fears of deep fakes become omnipresent. Nevertheless, even my enthusiasm for these technologies has been tempered by lackluster usage and disorganization: the US landscape of competing standards and organizations is so complex that MIT, JFF, the US Chamber of Commerce and others continue to struggle to map it.

Like digital verification, improved regulation of data ownership is another crucial response to recent developments in AI. AI relies on the data it is fed. This means that not only is the usefulness or quality of AI determined by this data, i.e., garbage in, garbage out, but also that by regulating who owns our data, we can in turn regulate AI. In the words of my friend Adam Leonard, “Axiom 1: whoever owns the data controls the AI.”

AI and the end of the world as we know it

AI is a technology that has been on the periphery of my expertise for many years. Yet it has now dramatically supplanted data ownership and interoperability as the foremost priority for global regulation and development.

I see three overarching reasons for rapidly shifting my and our attention to the regulation and development of AI echoed in countless articles, including the recent letter calling for a great pause:

•  AI is being developed, deployed and used (including by relatively uneducated end-users) exponentially and faster than any technology we've built

•  if we continue AI development at our current pace it could end human existence

•  AI will change everything and could for the better: education (my Lighthouse Labs co-founder presciently asked me months ago if AI would disrupt all of education), health, climate change, war, business, etc.

Each of these reasons have been long discussed by experts. See for instance, still my favorite piece summarizing AI, from 8 years ago, The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence.

Quotes from a recent interview with "one of the three godfathers of AI" eloquently capture his fears:

"...we're about to sleepwalk towards an existential threat to civilization without anyone involved acting maliciously."

When a networked computer "learns something, all of them know it, and you can easily store more copies. So the good news is, we've discovered the secret or immortality. The bad news is, it's not for us."

"I don't know many examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things"

"imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we're more intelligent than a frog...and its going to read every single book that's ever been written on how to manipulate people"

"my confidence that this wasn't coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better."

"This development, [Hinton] argues is an unavoidable consequence of technology under capitalism...“[Google] decided not to release [generative AI] directly to the public. Google was worried about all the things we worry about...but...in a capitalist system, if your competitor then does that, there's nothing you can do but do the same."

Hinton raises examples like nuclear disarmament during the Cold War and Y2K as positive:

"It was nothing like this existential risk, but the fact that people saw it ahead of time and made a big fuss about it meant that people overreacted, which was a lot better than under-reacting."

China's arrest of the only doctor to ever create a clone is another example: we can prevent our own demise, if we act together.

This urgency for collaboration over competition and Hinton’s association of us having in part lost control of AI due to unbridled capitalism echoes my experience at Davos with web3 and crypto: we need to establish agency over AI via rules around its capabilities and uses. If we let AI be driven purely by the markets and our bank accounts, not only is democracy at risk, I would argue that our very existence is at stake.

A Role for Canada in Global AI Governance

I'm particularly excited to work on global AI governance as a Canadian with a background in international affairs. This is because Canada:

• has amongst the most storied AI histories of any country

• has a history of soft diplomacy and international convening on the most important issues of our time: from the International Declaration of Human Rights to world trade, landmines, acid rain treaties

• is a model of good governance and diversity with amongst the largest populations of new immigrants residing in a stable democracy with a high standard of living

Yushua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton are amongst the foremost contributors to machine learning and large language models and the Edmonton, Alberta, Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec-based institutes they founded remain global AI leaders. Yet Canada's ambitious history has not been matched with similarly ambitious foreign policy. Trudeau and Macron's Global Partnership on AI remains too slow moving as developments in AI exponentially outpace national regulation.

Nevertheless, we remain one of the most trusted countries internationally. While this trust is in part the result of our small economic and population size, it also allows us to punch above our weight as middle and soft power. See for instance, the fact that Canadian passports are among the most powerful in the world, granting visa-free entry to 115 countries. Canada is uniquely capable of pulling together the key actors in AI governance:

• nations: the OECD, the BRICs (start with India and force China's hand if you can’t show enough value for their participation before then...), the global south

• companies: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc.

• civil society: Partnership on AI, top academic institutions, human rights and advocacy non-profits, unions, etc.

A new international governance regime that can keep up with the pace and scale of AI

Internet 1.0, decentralization, web3 and particularly the new forms of governance these technologies facilitate offer the promise of real-time governance by the people and for humanity - giving those without power agency is the only way we can regulate AI to save ourselves. We have offered technology and those that build it a sense of agency in our collective consciousness and in society that they have not earned and should not maintain. By definition we create technology, we program AI and we may still have time to regulate it before, as most believe is inevitable if we continue on our current path, we no longer can. In debates about Uber and advertising technology, we have long offered technologies and the companies that sell them a false sense of authority and agency: Uber could not disrupt societies unless we built it to do so and then allowed it do so. Similarly, young minds can only be corrupted by Instagram or democracies threatened by disinformation, if these technologies that we built remain programmed in this way.

To catch up, we need new forms of governance that take advantage of the latest advances in govtech and democracy-tech. New civic engagement tools like citizen panels and quadratic voting provide an opportunity to more effectively involve citizens in the decision-making process around AI regulation.

Know more about related policies and technologies? Hit me up!

Why me

I'm still working on my personal role here drawing on my experiences:

• supporting the development of research in international criminal law through the creation of McGill's Clinic on the same

• advancing impact bonds and access to medicines by changing the way developed nations pay for some pharmaceuticals

• evolving how technology is taught in Canada through the co-founding of Lighthouse Labs, and

• more recently leading new ways for LinkedIn and Microsoft to partner with government in higher education and workforce development.

My latest thinking is that I could assist in being some form of formal or informal Sherpa on behalf of Canada's AI institutes or the government of Canada, trying to bring together governments, the most important actors in the private sector and civil society to build a new international governance regime that can keep up with the pace and scale of AI.

I struggle to understand why cables get entangled in my pocket let alone quantum mechanics, neural networks or string theory. I will never be able to support this movement through the depth of my understanding of its technology. But I can convene like few others and hope that our collective intelligence can overcome the perils of the artificial intelligence we have created.

Join me?

Epilogue: This is My perspective, not that of my Employer

Even more than in previous years I want to be clear that I'm writing on my own behalf. My LinkedIn work on workforce development continues apace including:

• LinkedIn Talent Solutions Partnership with the US National Association of State Workforce Agencies compliments our long standing nation-wide partnership with NASWA on the National Labor Exchange

• Virginia Career Works Northern leads an industry by helping job seekers into the workforce

• Government of Ontario partnership to support its unemployment services. Press release LinkedIn CEO’s post

• See more recent LinkedIn Talent Solutions workforce development announcements and related information here

I've also contributed to LinkedIn's recent work on verification and verified credentials and skills based hiring and learning.

In addition, I published a book chapter with my colleague Maria Langworthy. Check it out: (2022) Learning 3.0: Bringing the Next Education Paradigm Into Focus.” in New Models of Higher Education: Unbundled, Rebundled, Customized, and DIY

See more on his instagram here and mine here.

My thinking, and that of many of the organizations with which I work - LinkedIn, Microsoft; US and Canadian federal, state, and local governments; think tanks; investment firms; and many post-secondary institutions - has progressed from a focus on degrees and credentials to skills and jobs. The policies and practices that support skills as currency for better jobs present a particular opportunity for the workforce development industry.

While the below recommendations span time-tested leading practices and nascent innovations, most are based on long-standing principles that haven’t been applied in US workforce development for one reason or another (plus ça change). This 2019 three volume set from the Federal Reserve System, the Heldrich Center, the Ray Marshall Center, and the Upjohn Institute (four of the top “think tanks” in the space, rounded out by Jobs for the Future and Brookings) answers the question: “How can well-structured and effective workforce programs and policies result in better economic outcomes for individuals, businesses, and communities?” It was my introduction to fixing the US workforce system and I can’t recommend it enough.

The LinkedIn and Microsoft initiatives referenced throughout this document are intended only as examples of leading practices in the use of technology in workforce development. I’m struggling the most with how to scale such innovations and particularly the change management, digital literacy and capacity building necessary for successful large scale technology deployments.

I’m most excited about the marrying of private sector technology with public sector scale and impact in a relationship that Marriana Mazzucato would describe as symbiotic and mission driven. My workforce development work has progressed from bilateral public private partnerships to multilateral ecosystems with associations, labor, economic and workforce development organizations. Exemplary outcomes of these PPPs include university systems better able to deliver online learning and governments more capable of leveraging data and tech to fill jobs. 

Employer Engagement, Frontline LMI and Recruiting as a model for Workforce

Labour market information (LMI) is the foundation of the demand-driven workforce system. To ensure education and training systems deliver on social and economic outcomes governments need to start with robust labour market information. Providing granular, customizable and accessible LMI to both system administrators and local frontline workers also lays the foundation for state and national systems of lifelong learning.

Equip career counsellors, developers and navigators with the skills to use these LMI resources. They require digital and statistical fluency to navigate LMI and online career software, and ongoing learning in relevant fields such as behavioural economics and pedagogy.

Before, during and after participation, LMI must also be used to ensure education and training pathways deliver on their ROI. This analysis should be particular focused on those coming from the most underprivileged zip codes. Early in the pandemic, I pulled together these examples of LMI dashboards and have been excited by using LinkedIn Talent Insights for macroeconomic analysis at the state level and career development at the frontline. 

Across the US workforce system, State and local agencies are recognizing that recruiting is essential to the education to employment pipeline. Borrowing the best from staffing companies' approaches to recruitment and placement is also a new leading practice for workforce development. LinkedIn’s work in Oregon exemplifies this trend which is being scaled via our partnership with the National Association of Workforce Agencies explained below.

As André Côté, Gladys Okine-Ahovi and I put forward in our Public Policy Forum paper on How to Mobilize Higher Education and Workforce Development for the Rapid Re-Employment of Canadians after the pandemic:

The COVID-19 crisis has derailed the careers of millions of Canadians. To support them, workforce leaders, and policy and decision makers need to mobilize education and training systems in some key ways – starting with robust labour market information and laying the foundation for a national system of lifelong learning.

More Support for Workforce Development Practitioners 

A related and common recommendation for workforce development and higher education system reform is to fund career development. Further career development could begin in K12 and run through community colleges and universities through employers and the workforce development system. Career developers (also called Career Advisors, Coaches, Consultants, Counsellors, Practitioners) need to be paid more, be better trained and have more digital capacity including access to the latest labour market information and infrastructure to deliver their services either online or in a digitally enhanced hybrid manner. 

These essential actors at the core of the service-delivery model are not just under-paid but also under-supported. Prioritize resources for career development practitioners. Expand the scope of their roles and offering training and capacity building around career pathways design and navigation, and so they can offer further coaching and transitional supports to the most vulnerable clients. The wraparound social supports needed by career developers parallel those of their clients. They can could include elements of personal professional development (coaching sessions), self-care (extended healthcare benefits, counselling/therapy), and shoring up of external supports (childcare, transportation, food security).

This suggestion parallels Gladys, André and my Public Policy Forum recommendation that Canada:

increase support for employment and career development services geared to workers experiencing pre-existing and pandemic-related barriers.

Further Blurring Higher Ed and Workforce Development

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a cataclysm in the labour market, but also opens a policy and funding window to bring the higher education and workforce-development systems closer together and closer to employers to make them more effective.

My favourite jobtech (check out his market map) venture capitalist cited a recent article that summarized this well: 

“We need bridges between employers and higher education institutions… The bridges need to be supported by five elements: 

(1)       Programs should be designed backwards by identifying what relatively small minimum viable skill(s) job candidates must have in order to become 100% employable for that first job; 

(2)      Human skills and technical skills are required for that first job, so train to both… 

(3)      The educational pathway to an entry-level job… should be shorter and less expensive than a college degree… 

(4)      It must increase certainty that it will work – that it will lead to a job or a promotion… and decrease any failure risk for both the job candidate and the hiring employer. 

(5)      The program must be held accountable. Any program that does not fulfill #4 should be discontinued.”

Simple ideas are relatively easy to scale such as:

a)         expanding the placement of workforce development career developers in schools of all levels and

b)         community colleges unbundling and increasingly focusing on assessment of prior learning and skills from:

• work experience,

• 3rd party content like LinkedIn Learning, 

• international education and experience, etc.

c)          use of innovative technology to bridge the gaps between these systems:

• via Career Explorer, LinkedIn’s data uncovers career paths by matching your skills to thousands of job titles.

• Microsoft Career Coach uses AI and LinkedIn’s Economic Graph data to inform students’ career exploration with local and global job market trends.

Verticalizing Training, Recruitment and Assessment or Labor, Govt and Employers together

Running up against:

·       despair at lifeboat jobs, 

·       an increasing recognition that degrees are a poor investment, and 

·       online education and job matching, 

community college and workforce development systems will increasingly need to actively collaborate and recruit candidates online. They also need to work more closely with employers making work integrated learning in all its forms (apprenticeship, internship, etc.) as important as its national emphasis would suggest.

Perhaps the best model in America is Futuro Health: an employer (Kaiser Permanente) partnered with a union (SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West) "to grow the largest network of credentialed allied healthcare workers." By recruiting students into a pathway to employment, an employer was able to access a larger pool of candidates while training them more specifically for the skills necessary for its jobs. This project also replaced the zero-sum and competitive model often associated with the relationship between labor and the government and the private sector in the US, with the balancing of mutual benefit that some European systems have exemplified. In other words, this was an example of unions, government and employers collaborating on pathways, recognition and equity.

Another example of a symbiotic public private partnership to close skills gaps more efficiently is LinkedIn Talent Solutions recent expansion of its partnership with the US National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA). This compliments LinkedIn's long standing nation-wide and similarly symbiotic partnership with NASWA on the National Labor Exchange.

I’m excited to have recently joined the board of Ontario Tech TALENT which brings together many of the above recommendations in one organization from skills-based-hiring to recruiting as a model for workforce development and from greater use of LMI to ensure career outcomes to blurring higher ed and workforce development.

Online + Brick and Mortar Education

Invest in human skills, assessment, and interactions like networking, coaching and mentorship.

Many foundational, human or soft skills can only be learned through human interaction and these are the most universally in-demand and timeless or durable skills. Somewhat surprisingly, the result of increased online learning could be that less privileged populations have increasing access to technical skills but less access to skills like communication, collaboration and critical thinking. Instead, we need to highlight, teach, learn to communicate and value, human skills and human interaction more generally. Assessment, particularly of human skills, is usually the weakest component of workforce and training programs. The social determinants of employment and educational success also continue to be neglected.

Key take-aways include that we are all on a spectrum between learning best in person vs. online and between so many other “kinds” of learning from solitary to group work that the opportunity of online needs to be calibrated based on the kind of learning and world we want to create. Think of it as tuning edtech and jobtech or even our educational and workforce development systems to the needs of humanity instead of for the benefit of the VCs and politicians behind these technologies. Thinking again of Mazzucato’s mission-oriented policy making. 

Skills-Based Hiring and Learning and Good Jobs

Expand and incentivize tactical initiatives like skills-based hiring and blind interviews into systemwide initiatives in order to decrease bias such as towards credentials.

Social and soft skills are often how we distinguish ourselves. This could be based on the more formal class-structures that continue to pervade India and the UK or the more informal structures that have developed around education in the US and Canada. The combination of elites having greater access to in person education and this education having a greater impact on their human skills could result in greater inequality despite online education democratizing access to technical skills.

Removing bias through the removal of names, pictures, better interviewing tech and techniques, such as structured and blind interviewing, could help. Skills mapping and automated job matching could also be used to actively combat such bias by focusing on skills not associated with class or privilege and rather on other transferable skills. 

LinkedIn's Chief Economist Karin Kimbrough echoed these statements.

In this sense, skills are the new currency of the labor market. Recent LinkedIn data shows the skill sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015. By 2027, this number is expected to double.

[…]

Companies are realizing that skills-based hiring works: hirers leveraging skills data to find the right match are 60% more likely to find a successful hire than those not relying on skills. 

And by removing unnecessary credentials, more workers can transition into better paying jobs via the relevant skills they bring to the role. Research from Opportunity@Work shows that people Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs) have demonstrated skills for roles with salaries at least 50% higher than their current job. Black, Hispanic, and Veteran workers in particular are overrepresented as STARs in the U.S., and make up the majority of firstline workers. These groups stand to benefit most from a transition towards a skills-based talent ecosystem.”

New distributed identity and verified credential technologies are enabling learning and skills data to be intelligently mapped to jobs. Focusing on verifiable credentials like open badges, micro-credentials and portfolios that demonstrate skills could could result in greater labour market efficiency and economic productivity as well as inclusivity and equity. 

Good jobs are increasingly being defined in many different ways that go beyond living-wage salaries to include measurement of their purposefulness, career development, etc. Good jobs and skills-based-hiring lie at the heart of a growing ecosystem focused on skills including the good jobs impact investing private equity firm Two Sigma Impact  at and interview-tech company Hireguide. Their work aligns with statements from the Biden Administration:

"Employers need to adopt skills-based hiring, US officials say…Secretary Gina Raimondo​, the U.S. Department of Commerce​ secretary, is urging HR managers to adopt skills-based training and reduce their reliance on college degrees…Filling open jobs and improving equity in the workforce will take job training and skills-based hiring by employers, said The White House​ officials at a conference this week.

 All of these approaches require further piloting and evaluation as they could also have unintended DEI consequences.

Learning and Employment Records, Skills Wallets, Badges and Microcreds Deep-dive

There is growing interest and excitement around portable Learning and Employment Records (LERs). Key organizations working on skills wallets and LERs include the Open Skills Network, Western Governors University, the Walmart Foundation, IBM, MIT Media Lab, and Credential engine. Jobs for the Future has produced amongst the best market landscape of wallets, and the Indiana Achievement Wallet is among the best know state-wide initiatives

The very recent consolidation of the major badging platforms, with Pearson buying Credly and Instructure (Canvas) buying Concentric Sky (Badgr), suggests the largest education companies are paying attention to verifiable credentials just as they have become one of the few viable short term widespread use cases for blockchain in skills and employment. 

Statements about credentials on a blockchain as alternatives AND additions to degrees are commonplace. However, there is much less certainty about how an LER based system can be actualized across the education to employer to training cycle to actually reduce current labor market inefficiencies. Most importantly, I have yet to see a path to employer buy-in: how do we get employers, particularly SMBs excited about skills based hiring and specifically LERs or skills wallets? This is the challenge being addressed by amazing folks like Sharon Leu at JFF and Sean Murphy at Walmart.

Micro-credentialing efforts continue grow alongside if not with any more direction that the LER and skills wallet movements, as described in this recent summary.

Rapid response programs for re-employment

With large scale changes to the labour market ongoing, this excerpt from our PPF paper summarized some of the many short term training programs that have been responding successfully with Lighthouse Labs and NPower being amongst the most impactful organizations I’ve worked with in this space.

Triggered following a major business closure at a sectoral or regional scale, these programs create response teams to support large numbers of displaced workers. Delivered and funded provincially, the teams communicate with workers, employers and the community, and develop action plans that apply local LMI and engage local workforce agencies, and education and training providers. Examples include Ontario’s Dedicated Training and Employment Services Action Centre, which the province set up in response to the GM plant closure in Oshawa, and the Canada-Saskatchewan Rapid Response Teams. Australia rolled out a suite of heavily discounted, six-month online courses geared to workforce areas of “national priority” such as nursing, teaching, counselling and IT.

These programs should be collaboratively developed education-industry partnerships that identify and communicate employer-relevant skills and competencies, including online and work-integrated learning, and that offer career clarity and employer networks. Many programs of this type have emerged already. George Brown College in Toronto has launched an online micro-credential program in service robotics, co-developed with robotics solutions provider Global DWS. Software development bootcamps are another example of this immersive style of short training programs. Yet, while industry has long lamented the time it takes to develop new curriculum and training to meet emerging needs, this type of industry-partnered, rapidly incubated skills development remains rare outside continuing education schools.

With provincial funding, eCampus Ontario has incubated education-industry partnerships to create micro-certification programs for skills in high demand. With a national mandate, the Future Skills Centre recently announced $37 million of investments in 30 community-based pilot programs to support people moving to new jobs or industries.

Odds and Ends

My recent personal articles :

• (2021) Future Skills Centre and Blueprint report: Canadians aren’t equipped to navigate the messy new world of career-focused learning

• (2021) Skills and Jobs 2021: Lessons from ASU-GSV for the Future of Education and Workforce Development

• (2020) The Death of Degrees? A Turning Point in the History of Skills and Certification as Degrees Wane and Skills Wax

• (2020) mobilizing higher ed and workforce development for the rapid re-employment of Canadians

• (2020) what needs to change in Canada's higher education system and what's working

• (2016) the changing nature of education

• (2017) how I’m working with governments to fight inequality

A summary of LinkedIn’s workforce development and higher education system public private partnerships:

• Partnership with the US National Association of State Workforce Agencies

• How Oregon Used LinkedIn to Market and Strengthen Their Workforce Development Program

• Fortune article featuring a success story from our state-wide partnership with Virginia Career Works

• Ontario: We partnered with the Government of Ontario to support its unemployed and unemployment services. Press release LinkedIn CEO’s post

• The previous province wide LinkedIn Learning deployment to all million members of Ontario’s universities and colleges resulted in 300K+ individuals watching 4.7M+ videos. 

• It inspired this eCampusOntario Casebook and shows how LinkedIn can work with millions of clients as highlighted in this short video. 

• Washington State: Workforce SW WA partners with LinkedIn Learning to meet business skills needs and provide 500 job seekers online training options

• Charlotte, NC: LinkedIn Learning used by Mayor's Youth Employment program as part of a "virtual summer internship" Case Study 1 Case Study 2 and call out from NC’s Governor 

• Utah: Our state of Utah pilot resulted a 14% decrease in UI exhaustion and compliments our long standing nation-wide partnership with National Association of State Workforce Agencies on the National Labor Exchange. 

• Equus: 2020 PR on our work with the largest US workforce development contractor.

• Colombia: National Learning Service provides access to 500k workers.

• Maryland: Governor Announces PPP to Support Youth Recovery From COVID-19

Studies of impact of LinkedIn Learning on workforce development: 

• CivicAction explored the impact of 2000 licenses distributed to 75 employment service providers in Toronto which showed a 42% employment increase.

• AlphaPlus studied the benefits for Ontario career developers.

• Duke studied the impact of LinkedIn on Job Readiness Training

For additional background: 

• Our latest career explorer resource and the free content that’s part of our parent company Microsoft’s Global Skills Initiative 

• More background on our support for colleges and universities and a short video on the same. 

• A summary of LinkedIn’s Economic Graph work worldwide.

• Some examples of our work with specific disadvantaged populations include: veterans, the formerly incarcerated and people with disabilities.

Connect!

Finally, the groups I work with include the following - if you want to collaborate please do get in touch!

Ontario Tech TALENT (Director on the Board), 

Lighthouse Labs (co-founder), 

Hireguide (advisor)

Readocracy (advisor) 

Board roles with:  Canadian Council for Youth Prosperity, Information and Communications Technology Council, the Canadian Club and the Hot Docs Cinema Advisory

I've spent the past decade at the intersection of education and technology, cofounding Canada's largest software development bootcamp and the UN Special Envoy for Education's Global Education Platform and more recently pioneering LinkedIn's online learning, labour market information, higher education and workforce development public private partnerships. My thinking, and that of many of the organizations with which I work - Microsoft, the US, Canadian federal, state, and local governments; think tanks, investment firms; and hundreds of post-secondary institutions - has progressed from a focus on degrees and credentials to skills and jobs. This is evident in a couple recent videos that I recorded at ASU-GSV this year (thanks to American Student Assistance and WorkingNation) on how to help Americans out of despair and the merit of a greater focus on skills in education. 

Below I offer 6 recommendations for investing in education and workforce development preceded by a summary of the context for these recommendations.

Hope after the Great Resignation

Our labour markets likely face their greatest challenge in my lifetime, with an expected 40% of workers expected to change jobs this year (aptly named the “Great Resignation” or #GreatReshuffle) and a greater skills gap, particularly with employers unable to fill roles, than ever before. Yet there is also hope in technology being used to provide greater access to education and a more efficient allocation of labour or matching of individuals to jobs than ever before.

I remain hesitant to recommend technological solutions to a technology-enabled problem. While the increasingly rapid pace of change has not resulted in the mass unemployment regularly predicted during past industrial revolutions, I fear it has surpassed humans ability to adapt or learn fast enough to keep up. AI, in particularly, coupled with near instant global communication via the internet and the production of incomprehensible amounts of data, may already have surpassed our ability to keep up through either regulation or education. Similarly, I share the now widely discussed worry, famously popularized by the Center for Human Technology, that our phones and social networks, dark patterns and behavioural economics or nudging, could be irreparably harming our brains and bodies. Finally, I’ve recently been wrestling with the merits of the importance or meaning we find in work. Prioritizing other aspects of life and humanity might help address some of our personal and societal work-related challenges.

This only adds urgency to the need to examine how we, through our actions, laws or technology, can create a better society. Despite the bleak outlook above, I'm still also a believer in Steven Pinker. This is part of why I spent half a decade working on access to medicines and specifically on a global pharmaceutical pay-for-performance project called the Health Impact Fund. Life has gotten better for most humans over the past hundred years and has the potential to continue to do so with access to medicines having been amongst the greatest drivers of increased standards of living over the past century.

Narrowing in on the role of education and technology, I thought to describe both how these could be aggravating some of our foremost problems, such as inequality, and what glaring gaps and therefore (social impact) investment opportunities are presenting themselves in edTech and jobTech.

The democratization of asynchronous online learning began just as online learning, primarily in the form of MOOCs, first gained brief mainstream awareness a decade ago (think Coursera and edX, Open Education Resources and the Open Universities). Following in the tradition of public education and broadcasting, where innovation and access regularly came in surprising forms, such as Sesame Street, early asynchronous online education access was most impressively realized by free platforms such as Wikipedia and Khan Academy.

Accelerated by the pandemic, this movement has hit the mainstream in the US through the private sector. Platforms like Coursera and Guild are reaching a scale that could, eventually, be sustainable. They, Online Program Managers and unconventional universities (Phoenix, ASU, SNHU and WGU) are posing a significant challenge to established post-secondaries. The flip side of this incredible increase in access to learning, is, and could become permanently, a relative decrease in access to in-person learning for those with less privilege. In other words, as more of the world's population accesses online learning, less could have access to high quality teaching from other humans. 

Lessons Learned

I've spent a lot of the pandemic advising governments, companies and educational institutions on how to adapt. From urban to rural schools and from the most dynamic to the most dysfunctional workforce development systems, I've been trying to help these institutions move online and use technology. Here are a few specific recent lessons from this work:

1. Technical v human skills: Many foundational, human or soft skills can only be learned through human interaction and these are the most universally in-demand and timeless or durable skills. Somewhat surprisingly, the result of increased online learning could be that less privileged populations have increasing access to technical skills but less access to skills like communication, collaboration and critical thinking. Instead, I believe we need to highlight, teach, learn to communicate and value human skills and interaction more generally. Assessment, particularly of human skills, is a missing link and remains very underrated, as do the remaining social determinants of employment and educational success. Take away: invest in human skills, assessment, and interactions like networking, coaching and mentorship.

2. Reputation and unbundling: While the most elite post-secondary institutions will continue to increase in influence and popularity due largely to the social and repetitional benefits that their full bundle of services and history convey, most post-secondaries will struggle to remain relevant, particularly online. Many post secondaries, second tier and below, are extremely vulnerable. Those open to change could become vehicles for transformation of the sector while most will decline. Take away: focus on career development, wrap-around social services or emphasize some other aspect of the bundle of services that make up a post-secondary because their core offering has been democratized online.

3. Skills based hiring and blind interviews: Social and soft skills are often how we distinguish ourselves. This could be based on the more formal class-structures that continue to pervade India and the UK or the more informal structures that have developed around education in the US and Canada. The combination of elites having greater access to in person education and this education having a greater impact on their human skills could result in greater inequality despite online education democratizing access to technical skills. Removing bias through the removal of names, pictures, better interviewing tech and techniques, such as structured and blind interviewing, could help. Internal skills mapping and automated job matching could also be used to actively combat such bias by focusing on skills not associated with class or privilege and rather on other transferable skills. Focusing on verifiable credentials like open badges, micro-credentials and portfolios that demonstrate skills could help too. All of these could result in greater labour market efficiency and economic productivity as well as inclusivity and equity. Take away: find systems like skills-based hiring and blind interviews to decrease bias such as towards credentials.

4. Verticalization and staffing, integration and WIL: recognizing recruiting, staffing and job placement or career services as essential to the education to employment pipeline. Models include Futuro Health: an employer (Kaiser Permanente) partnered with a union (SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West) "to grow the largest network of credentialed allied healthcare workers." By recruiting students into a pathway to employment, an employer was able to access a larger pool of candidates while training them more specifically for the skills necessary for its jobs. Borrowing the best from staffing companies' approaches to recruitment and placement is also a new leading practice for workforce development. Take away: Running up against despair at lifeboat jobs, an increasing recognition that degrees are a poor investment, and online education and job matching, community college and workforce development systems will increasingly need to actively collaborate and recruit candidates online. They also need to work more closely with employers making work integrated learning in all its forms (apprenticeship, internship, etc.) as important as its national emphasis would suggest.

5. Labour Market Information (LMI) and competition: In the past, a lack of data on education and employment outcomes meant that schools could regularly get away with a negative ROI. Now students are asking why they should take a course online at your local university when you could instead take it from Cambridge, Sciences-Po, Harvard or their Chinese or Indian equivalents for the same cost (or free)? 10-week software and sales bootcamps offer jobs with better pay (or labour market outcomes) than most 4 year degrees. Post-secondaries will increasingly need to demonstrate the value of other aspects of their bundle of services from work integrated learning opportunities to community partnerships.

6. Career development: A related and common recommendation for workforce development and higher education system reform is to fund career development. Further career development could begin in K12 and run through community colleges and universities through employers and the workforce development system. Career developers (also called Career Advisors, Coaches, Consultants, Counsellors, Practitioners) need to be paid more, be better trained and have more digital capacity including access to the latest labour market information and infrastructure to deliver their services digitally. Take away: human career developers are the most important and underrated actors in workforce development systems

Next Steps

Further themes that I plan on continuing to develop include:

• using technology and change management to convert education and workforce systems that are calcified and offline to being impactful and deliver and function in a hybrid or exclusively digital manner

• how to extract the benefits of the private and public sector through workforce end education public private partnerships

• Higher ed and workforce development collaboration: schools teaching training and pedagogy and workforce teaching career development and employer relations

I’d be extremely grateful for any comments or feedback on the above. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Jake

A decade or so ago, a couple colleagues persuaded me to buy some bitcoin. I wasn't a hard sell. My affinity for all things shiny and new started young: from playing Civilization on an Apple Classic in New Delhi in the early '90s to typing all my notes on a Palm Pilot at Georgetown Day High School in Washington DC, my extensive and early use of technology did not always make me the most popular kid in class. And while negative responses continued through my status as one of Canada's first Google Glass-holes, my interest in cutting edge technology has not wained.

I am an early adopter - and I use the term loosely as it is no more meaningful than the platitude "futurist" or the currently massively trite "innovative" - with low technology too. Several years ago I began standing at work, or using what is now commonly described as a standing desk. Widely ascribed positive health and productivity benefits, standing desks are now de rigueur but you can bet I was mocked for standing at my double-Ikea desk in 2011 in much the same way I was taunted for typing on my Palm Pilot in 1998 or for using a Palm Treo as a cellphone in 2003.

Among the more interesting aspects of being an "early-adopter" for me are how one can simultaneously be at both ends of the "cool" spectrum. I have almost always been mocked for my early adoption, despite the frequent association of cool-ness with the latest gadgets. And while some currently describe me as a hipster, I have spent most of my life characterized as a geek. 

I've often gotten it wrong in jumping on the latest technologies: see my massive home-recorded minidisc collection. And other times I haven't been empowered to act on my prescience: I wanted to buy Bitcoin in 2010 but couldn't find anyone I trusted who also knew how to do so and didn't invest the time to learn myself. Similarly I wanted to invest in  Pinterest in 2011 but couldn't find an accredited investor to invest for me.

Back to crypto. With a small group of friends I've been slowly bringing myself up to speed on the current acronym soup of crypto utopianism (DAO, NFT...). From new financial systems to entirely new forms of government, my friend Jay kicked us off with his posts on the sociology and macroeconomics of crypto. More recently, Rohan asked whether “blockchain technologies are a harmful distraction or a much needed opportunity?”

This post is meant to be more personal, a description of how and why I've invested in cryptocurrencies, and why I'm doing so again after losing substantial sums in the past. 

The second part of this paper describes some of the investing lessons I fell upon as an early adopter and particularly the importance of diversification as an indication of how much to invest in crypto. In an upcoming post, I wax a bit more poetic about my relationship between trust and technology and how our genetic predisposition to memes might not be the best impulse on which to invest.

Part 2: Diversification and crypto as icing on a cake

Ironically, not too long after I'd given up on investing in bitcoin in 2011, I transitioned out of intellectual property law into tech and the first job I landed was at a Montreal-based startup called Wall Street Survivor. WSS educated its users on finance through paper-trading or gambling without the money. 

One of the lessons of this period I’ve retained is that all of investing is gambling, a game of chance, due to the number of variables involved, and human-ness of the system. In this respect, we do our best to bake into this game the risk entailed in a given bet. 

The best way I learned to de-risk an investment portfolio was to diversify this risk by investing across multiple risk profiles. In other words, a portfolio should include some relatively low risk investments (e.g. bonds) to balance higher risk investments (e.g. crypto). 

One can also view investments that are inversely related as hedges: many think crypto prices will go up as trust in fiat currencies decreases just as financial products with inverse relationships to inflation like public equities and bonds can be hedges.

As I invest back into the crypto market for the third time, I'm trying to take three factors among many others into account, trust, timing and risk. I'm trying to de-risk or increase my trust in the outcomes of these investments by 1. investing the right amount relative to the rest of my portfolio 2. at the right time based on the evolution of the technology behind crypto and the readiness of financial markets for this tech. "Right" here is defined by my comfort level, i.e. the amount of risk I'm willing to take on or the amount of money I'm willing to lose. (insert relevant not financial advice terms)

Vanity Fair's article on the debacle that consumed my second crypto experience, Ponzi Schemes, Private Yachts, And A Missing $250 Million In Crypto: The Strange Tale Of Quadriga is masterful. It reads like an action movie but it also captures why I trusted Quadriga with my Canadian crypto (I had my USD crypto on Coinbase):

In November 2013 Cotten [...] incorporated the Quadriga coin exchange, or QuadrigaCX (named, for reasons that were not immediately clear, after the horse-drawn chariots of the Roman Empire). In a small, inefficient market, Quadriga swiftly distinguished itself. It was the cheapest exchange, the fastest, and, by all appearances, the safest—the first Bitcoin trading platform to hold a money-services business license from FinTRAC, Canada’s anti-money-laundering authority. Quadriga installed a Bitcoin ATM in its office, the second of its kind in Canada, and accepted gold by the ounce, which could be dropped off in person. Investing with Quadriga was even patriotic: “People like the fact we’re located in Canada,” Cotten told an interviewer, a point he often emphasized. “They know where their money is going.”

Little did I know Quadriga's founder would be found dead only a couple years after I'd bet on it as the safest place to store crypto value in our slow-moving country. 

So this time round I'm trying to apply some of the lessons about diversification from my time at Wall Street Survivor to my investments. This is the clearest and most easily applicable lesson I hope to convey: 

no matter how much you invest in crypto, ensure your liquid investments or capital is sufficiently diversified to de-risk any particular asset class or investment.

Crypto is suffering from the same frothiness as Tulip Mania: people are buying in the dip but not selling at the top - so people just keep doubling down. As Wikipedia explains, “the term "tulip mania" is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values.”

Tim Nash, of Good Investing, described a psychology of all or nothing right now in crypto, from Gamestop or AMC, to Dogecoin or Crypto Kitties or NBA top shot, investors seem proud to be all in (Doge to the moon!) which is counter to one of the most fundamental rules of investing, diversification.

I'll conclude with a couple more paragraphs from the story of how I lost most of my second crypto fortune:

"A couple of years after graduation, Cotten moved to Vancouver and joined a clubby community of entrepreneurs who had become enamored with Bitcoin. He attended meetups at coffee shops and dorm rooms, organized by a core group of about 10 people, who called themselves the Vancouver Bitcoin Co-op. Most of these early acolytes were drawn to the digital currency’s libertarian ethos, its promises of decentralization, transparency, speed, and independence from governments and financial institutions. Bitcoin would enable more than two billion people who lacked access to banks to send and receive payment; it would offer stability to citizens of countries with chaotic currencies; it would eliminate all banking fees.

Cotten knew the catchphrases and the talking points, but he seemed most interested in Bitcoin’s speculative possibilities. The first Bitcoin block was created on January 3, 2009, and the currency gained economic value on May 22, 2010, a date enshrined in Bitcoin lore as “Pizza Day,” when a Florida man paid someone in England 10,000 Bitcoins to order him two pizzas from Papa John’s. The pizzas cost about $25, setting the price of a Bitcoin at one fourth of a penny. (At press time those pizzas would be valued at $82,373,500.) With that, Bitcoin became like any other form of currency, a mass delusion: It’s value derived from the belief that it had value."

In part 2 of this series I’ll go into more depth on Tim’s theory of diversification while continuing to question the merits of this crypto craze.

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’

This email summarizes some of my thoughts over the pandemic - a time when I have been more introspective, and have seen more reason for hope, optimism and despair than ever before.

I've added content drafted for those interested in Canadian higher education and workforce development policy and broadened the audience to basically everyone I know as a means of reconnecting with you. Grateful if you would treat this as the beginning of a conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts and even to work with you on the ideas below.

Higher Education and Workforce Development Policy

Since the beginning of Covid19, I've continued to support students and the unemployed through my work with LinkedIn and a number of Boards, Commissions and networks. Moving workforce development and education systems online overnight has proven far more challenging than experts had hoped. Yet I've seen slow progress across hundreds of job and community centres, local, state/provincial and federal governments and social service organizations. From newcomers to the formerly incarcerated, and from people with disabilities to otherwise structurally disadvantaged groups, there is both the potential for darker and brighter futures.

After healthcare, skills and jobs will be the most important component of our recovery. With the acceleration of digitalization, the coming semester should be taught online (at least beyond secondary) and micro-credentials and skills-based-training and -hiring must be adopted at scale to address growing inequality, unemployment and skills gaps.

I recently published a paper entitled “How to Mobilize Higher Education and Workforce Development for the Rapid Re-Employment of Canadians” with Gladys Okine (Canadian Centre for Youth Prosperity and Future Skills Council) and André Côté, public policy advocate. Earlier, this past summer, an assembly of higher education and workforce practitioners and I similarly published "A Policymaker’s Recovery Agenda for Higher Education." As government makes "the largest investment in Canadian history in training for workers” we’re keen to discuss our recommendations with Canada’s policy makers, and higher education and workforce development administrators and experts.

The pandemic has opened an Overton portal to a more equitable and inclusive economy but it can only be achieved through more impactful public private collaboration. In my capacity as North America Higher Ed and Workforce Development System Lead, I am eager to discuss how LinkedIn, the largest job board and skills-based online learning platform, is partnering with governments around skills-based hiring, micro-credentials and rapid, online re-skilling. LinkedIn’s career explorer microsite illustrates its potential to support the labour market, as do these case studies on our work with Ontario's higher education system, Utah's workforce development system, and the US National Labour Exchange (note: only the views in this paragraph are expressed on behalf of LinkedIn). 

Tentative Lessons from the Pandemic

“We’re experiencing 10 years of change in 10 weeks”

From explosions in safety net spending to sold-out sour dough and from dolphins in the Vatican to cocktails delivered to your door, our social, political, economic and even environmental ecosystems are changing more rapidly than ever before. Squirrels, dogs and kids are crashing zoom calls and economies worldwide have locked down resulting in historically high unemployment and recessions. 

Early this past summer, Microsoft's CEO described 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months, yet the positive bluster of tech giants is facing new social and geopolitical realities. As governments pour more money into social security and economic stimuli than ever in history, the fissures and faults in our social systems are also coming into relief: we're seeing how policy and technology can exacerbate inequalities of race, gender, socio-economic status and other demographics. We face annihilation due to climate change and a more imminent revolution due to extreme inequality. Never have both been more clear than during the pandemic, and more urgent.

Liberalism has resulted in family dynamics and definitions changing similarly dramatically. Multigenerational families and the social supports of a small-town tight-nit civil society or religious community look very different than today's metropolises with every niche interest and degree of wealth and status visible to all. No longer does the church or community center, school or town hall hold our communities together and dictate or at least shape our values. Robert Putnam was prescient in Bowling Alone: the decline of real-world social capital and the reduction in in-person social intercourse has undermined civic engagement and democracy.

Facebook ads and clickbait and YouTube rabbit holes have replaced physical meeting places and institutions that used to keep society together. Democracy has succumbed to the hope that startup accelerators and VCs will fill the gaping lack of connection to meaning, itself accelerated by private equity firms and hedge funds reinforcing the efficiency of economic gain for those who already have the most.

The pandemic may have awakened some to our universal responsibility for global forces. And some say more lives were saved in China due to decreased pollution than lost to the virus: "even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?" But climate change, like populism, is on the rise: human nature tends towards the most short term solution, that can be explained in the simplest language or follows the path of least resistance and most convenience. If only we could hold onto the choice of more pedestrian and bike friendly cities beyond a pandemic forcing them briefly upon us.

Creativity, Resilience and Human Dignity in the Internet Age

Our systems like our constitution and institutions have become hard and brittle and calcified. In particular I worry about us backsliding and moving inward towards nationalism, and protectionism, at everything from the State to personal-scale. People need to be trained to break through this inertia. We as individual humans, can rewrite our futures - that's resilience. We treat our technology as if it has run away from us, talking about the increasing power of AI and algorithms as if they already have the power yet we can seize the reins.

Ben Thompson has perhaps best summarized the role of the internet in this process:

"the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries. And it wasn’t all good. Like today, the industrial revolution included a period of time that saw many lose their jobs and a massive surge in inequality. It also lifted millions of others out of sustenance farming. Then again, it also propagated slavery, particularly in North America. The industrial revolution led to new monetary systems, and it created robber barons. Modern democracies sprouted from the industrial revolution, and so did fascism and communism. The quality of life of millions and millions was unimaginably improved, and millions and millions died in two unimaginably terrible wars."

We're facing extremes of possibility for the future that Covid-19 has created: 

• Universal Basic Income or a robust safety net (through employment standards laws, mandatory benefits for health, paid sick leave, or minimum / living wage laws) OR increasing efficiencies from privatization and public private partnerships

• valuing in-person interactions, even education, more OR more remote work and online learning 

• greater inequality for disadvantaged populations such people with disabilities or newcomers OR an opportunity to leverage technology and a new economy to leapfrog their economic, social and physical barriers.

To avoid the cataclysmic unrest predicted by leaders like Ray Dalio, the public and private sectors will need a greater focus on human dignity, inclusion and sustainability. We can use human dignity as our north star, as the German legal system does. It can guide us through competing values and extreme futures. This principle can help us apply human centered design, and inclusion, equity and diversity, to human- and technology-enabled systems change. It can even help us navigate our our own lives post-pandemic.

Three ideas for a better recovery: a portal, human dignity and epistemic humility

No three concepts have resonated more during this time than:

1. using human dignity to bring us together and help us navigate rebuilding as discussed above

2. Erik Angner’s argument that leaders, particularly in the face of scientific and economic uncertainty, be humble and hesitant in their recommendations, explaining their uncertainty in addition to making clear policy statements:

"Frequent expressions of supreme confidence might seem odd in light of our obvious and inevitable ignorance about a new threat. The thing about overconfidence, though, is that it afflicts most of us much of the time

[...]

Being a true expert involves not only knowing stuff about the world but also knowing the limits of your knowledge and expertise. It requires, as psychologists say, both cognitive and metacognitive skills...The point is that true experts express themselves with the proper degree of confidence—meaning with a degree of confidence that’s justified given the evidence."

and

3. Arundhati Roy’s hope that ‘the pandemic is a portal’ into a better reality that we must fight to create:

"Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”

Content that I’ve found compelling

Over the past 9 months I've collected a wide variety of links to my favourite content here. Beyond a ton of great articles, there are links to:

• papers on human capital by the World Bank and private equity firm Two Sigma Impact

• this user manual for how to best work with me 

• my partner Elina’s piece on open innovation in the public service

• my piece on The Death of Degrees? A Turning Point in the History of Skills and Certification as Degrees Wane and Skills Wax

Other Reasons to Connect

While they didn’t get enough mention above, I remain passionate about open data and creative commons and supporting disadvantaged groups such as newcomers and refugees, indigenous populations, the formerly incarcerated and people with disabilities.

I’d also be excited to connect in my capacities as:

• Co-founder at Lighthouse Labs, Canada's foremost software development bootcamp

• Director on the Boards of:

  • the Canadian Council for Youth Prosperity

  • the Information and Communications Technology Council

  • and the Canadian Club of Toronto

• Member of the McKinsey & Company Consortium for Learning Innovation and NYC Workforce Business Council

• Advisory Board member of the Hot Docs Cinema, Kids Code Jeunesse

• Executive at the International Council on Badges and Credentials

Thank you to my parents, partner, brother, Claire Veuthey, Sarah McCullough, Graeme Owens, Jay Singh, André Coté, Steven Hoffman and many others for their support and to you for having gotten this far! I promise not to use this list frequently and look forward to hearing from you.

Repost of this interview in advance of my presentation later this week

This year’s Cyber Summit will be hitting “pause” to focus on the inequalities that have arisen during the rapid advance of our digital economy. To shed light on some solutions to these inequalities that are already being implemented here in Canada, Jake Hirsch-Allen, Economic Graph and Lynda.com Higher Education Lead at LinkedIn Canada, will be speaking at the Cyber Summit on November 8–9 in Banff, Alberta.

The theme for this year’s Cyber Summit is focused on the issues surrounding technology disparities, and how they affect different regions and different sectors. Tell us about projects you have worked on that tie in with this theme.

The theme of this conference is very much in line with a central struggle throughout my career, namely the fight against inequality. I grew up as a “diplobrat” in the developing world. I experienced first-hand and at a young age the contrast between a private international school and the shanty towns of New Delhi. In response, I’ve worked to integrate social impact into my work in intellectual property and public international law. I’ve also incorporated this thinking into the founding of hacking health, Lighthouse Labs — a software development bootcamp that teaches how to code in cities across Canada — and other tech endeavors. My teaching experience, work in both the education and healthcare industries, and even my current role at LinkedIn have all involved the fight against inequality.

I fully realized my passion for education when I was invited to chair the Technology Committee of the Global Education Platform, which brought together 70 global organizations — from UNESCO to the Brookings Institute and EdX to LinkedIn — to talk about how to increase access to online learning and make it useful for the least advantaged populations in the world.

Years later, when I started work with LinkedIn, Lynda.com was acquired on my second day on the job. This returned the focus of my career to online learning. It also coincided with the evolution of LinkedIn’s broader vision to be a place that is very in line with my struggle with inequality, namely, to provide economic opportunity to every member of the global workforce. Specifically, I am currently working to bring government, the private sector and post-secondary institutions together to increase access to online learning across Canada, while taking advantage of LinkedIn’s data on career and learning pathways to provide equality to the entire workforce, rather than just to white collar professionals.

What challenges exist in the world today that inspire your work?

As a kid I spent a lot of time on the early versions of the World Wide Web. I was caught up in the widely held aspiration that the internet, by dramatically increasing access to information, would support democracy and decrease inequality. Despite the best intentions of the founders of Google, Facebook and many other large tech companies, I fear that over time technology has actually decreased equality. My recent work is focused on countering that phenomenon by using a global platform like LinkedIn to help those who need it most. In a world that is moving so quickly, rural communities and small schools can’t keep up financially. Simultaneously, larger institutions, like universities, can’t adapt fast enough to changing educational tools like online learning, or the changing realities of a world where the shelf-life of skills is shrinking radically, and, therefore, requires them to embrace more just-in-time curriculum.

LinkedIn is helping educational institutions to better leverage online learning with Lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning. With our data from more than 500 million professionals worldwide, we’re also able to play a pivotal role in helping employers to look at skills and other important signals — apprenticeships, boot camps, etc. — when evaluating potential talent, thereby expanding their potential talent pools beyond only those with prestigious degrees. This shift, also accelerated by technology, has the potential to equalize. I think this is one of the more interesting topics for this conference to address.

Where do you think LinkedIn has the opportunity to have the biggest impact on communities with its data and educational resources?

In Canada, our economy and demographics are changing so fast that very few can keep up on their own. We are in a new era of big data and data science yet, despite massive volumes of data, we have a less accurate picture of our economy now than we did 10–20 years ago, because of the pace of change.

With ~14M members in Canada, and ~500M worldwide, LinkedIn is leveraging that data in a meaningful way to help its members be more productive and successful. We want to show what skills are in demand, where people are coming from, as well as where they are going, and why so that we can reveal learning and migration patterns, close skill gaps and assist workforce development. We want to provide access to real time information to help schools and government in ways that few other organizations can. As I suggested earlier, among the more important trends for higher education is the changing value of credentials. LinkedIn is at the intersection of changes to the value of credentials and how people learn.

Is there a community or industry where you would like to see improved access to technology, connectivity and/or computing resources?

Alberta was once a thought leader in learning technology and changes to pedagogy, not only across Canada, but even worldwide. BCNET and BCCampus were modelled after eCampusAlberta, which was shut down last year. Yet I would argue these are exactly the areas Alberta and its educational institutions need to be funding. These concepts pull together online learning content from colleges and universities across the province, and share best practices across these institutions, creating a learning ecosystem that benefits staff, faculty and students.

Alberta needs to return to being a centre of educational innovation. If it can do so, in not two, but maybe ten years, it could return to being the top economy in Canada and the world. Through public-private partnerships, and with its colleges and universities, government can affect change in a broad way at a low cost, albeit over the medium term.

If you could make one bold statement that describes your goals for 2018, what would it be?

I would like online learning to begin to work for the people with the least access to education and history of education. I think technology should serve the interests of the most disadvantaged communities rather than those with the greatest wealth.

Hear more from Jake Hirsch-Allen at the 2017 Cyber Summit