Podcasts · The David McWilliams Podcast

The World’s First AI Minister: Can Democracies Make Haste Slowly? with Evan Solomon

· 45 min · S2026 E86

Episode The World’s First AI Minister: Can Democracies Make Haste Slowly? with Evan Solomon

0:00 44:33

Canada has appointed the world’s first minister for AI, and Evan Solomon joins us to explain why. Canada invented modern AI through Hinton, Bengio and Sutton, then watched big tech harvest it. Now Ottawa is subsidising up to 80% of compute for home-grown firms and has put €150 million behind Bengio’s “safe by design” AI. How do slow, deliberate democracies regulate a technology teaching itself at lightning speed? Plus Carney’s coalition of middle powers, why Trump is the best thing to happen to Canadian nationalism, and “ancestral intelligence.”

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