Safety in Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Governance in Canada

This essay explores the idea of “safety” in artificial intelligence (AI) and robot governance in Canada. Regulating robotic and AI-based systems through a lens of safety is a vital, but elusive, task. In Canada, much governance of robotic and AI systems occurs through public bodies and structures. While various laws and policies aim to ensure that AI and robotic systems are used “safely,” the meaning and scope of “safety” are seldom, if ever, explicitly considered. Safety is not a neutral concept and determining what kinds of technologies and applications are “safe” requires normative choices that often go unexpressed in the law and policy-making process. Broad appeals to the policy goal of “safety” can bring conduct or regulation into conflict with the actual safety of individuals and communities. Expanded thinking about “safety” and governance in relation to automated technologies is needed, along with greater precision in law and policy goals. Scholars and activists, particularly those advocating for the abolition of state policing and the prison industrial complex, have robustly critiqued and re-theorized the concept of “safety” in law and policy, particularly in ways that are cognizant of equitable and collectively beneficial outcomes. To imagine a society without policing and prisons, abolitionist thinkers engage in a systemic critique of how society, communities, and the state understand and seek to attain “public safety.” Thus, abolitionist writers engage in a deep rethinking of the concept of “safety” and methods for creating safety, generating a richness that would benefit current discussions about AI and robotics governance. This paper explores some of this scholarship and relates it back to how we might understand and critique the use of “safety” in AI and robotics governance in Canada.