In 2018, while working for the government of Finland, I developed a model of network literacies. Today our Prime Minister says that Canadians need to develop AI literacy and he even has a Minister of AI to implement it.
Let’s look back at network literacies —
They could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People can learn though their various communities and develop social literacy. Information literacy is improved by connecting to a diversity of networks. But control of networks by any single source — such as Generative AI platforms — destroys the ability for people and communities to develop real network era fluency, which is not good for society in the long run and may kill innovation and our collective ability to adapt.
Mass network era fluency can ensure that networks remain open, transparent, and diverse — therefore reflecting many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, is necessary to deal with the many complex issues facing humanity. We cannot deal with complex issues and networked forces unless we can knowledgeably talk about them. This requires fluency.
Eight years later and these network literacies are not widespread or highly developed across a large spectrum of our society. Paris Marx shows quite clearly that the money machines behind generative AI are the problem, not people’s lack of AI literacy. Our politicians have been drinking too much silicon valley kool-aid.
We’re now playing catch-up on social media safety because we believed the companies’ narratives for far longer than we ought to have, and now our society is paying the price. Instead of being proactive on generative AI, the government is failing us all over again — all in the name of trying to attract some of the many billions flooding into AI investment to Canada.
If anyone needs better literacy on AI, it is not the public, but [Prime Minister] Carney himself.
Canadians may not know exactly how a large language model functions, but they can see how the chatbots and image generators they’ve made possible have changed society for the worse in just a few years. At this point, I’d put far more trust in the data centre protesters and the concerned parents to craft a real AI strategy than in the prime minister. —Paris Marx
So dear politicians and educators, get to work on those network literacies before even thinking about AI literacy. As Paris Marx states, “AI opposition isn’t the product of a lack of ‘literacy’”
