Steve Saretsky

In Canada right now, we may see over the next few weeks a new online harms bill that much of the talk is social media bans for kids and AI chatbot bans for kids, which has on one level sort of the attractiveness of saying, well, this is popular with some people.

But at the same time, the effect of some of those bans would be basically to require all Canadians to verify their age to be able to use AI or a social media service.

Because if you're saying you want to ensure that you exclude people who are 16 and under, by definition, you've got to know how old everyone is to be able to identify what their age is.

And so suddenly we've got tens of millions of people

either uploading IDs in order to be able to do general sorts of things, often to services that aren't based in Canada, subject to Canadian privacy laws, or you get into the game of age estimation, where they take a picture, essentially, or look at the person's image and try to guess how old they are, which we know doesn't work if you're trying to distinguish between a 16- and a 17-year-old.

So what the system then does is say, okay, well, we're going to track now who are your friends,

What kind of language do you use when you talk online to try to get a better guess?

Well, we're trading surveillance for more surveillance, if that's the case.

Is that true?

Professor Geis?

That I don't know.

Back for the sky.

Get him out of here.

But I heard it on this podcast, so it must be true.

Well, there's a lot there.

I guess I would start by saying I certainly agree that the replacement of the mainstream media by a far more disparate collection of different sources has made sort of the singular message and the singular communal experience that might have been

you know, typical of a prior generation, that is now lost.

And that does create a sense of loss of control for certainly some that were in positions of power that previously were able to rely on certain channels to get a message out to a very large percentage of the population.

And that's now gone.

And so that...