World leaders attending the G7 Summit June 15-17 in Kananaskis, Alta., are expected to contemplate how to navigate the line between unleashing the manifest potential of artificial intelligence and instituting proper governance standards.

Jason Dean, an assistant professor of economics at King’s University College, a Catholic institution affiliated with Western University in London, Ont., expects the “trade-off” will be a focal point. He also believes leaders will focus on “how fast it is moving” and the advances and disruption that could be generated by this swiftness of innovation.

“It has the opportunity to be much more impactful than the Industrial Revolution, and there you had significant productivity gains,” said Dean, an empirical labour economics specialist who has written commentaries about AI. “Productivity increases are strongly correlated with increases in the standard of living, but it is not like everyone will benefit and no one will be hurt. A lot of people will be disrupted. I know that one of the themes of the Canadian government will be the equity issues surrounding this.”

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Dean suggested the government might be inclined to use some of the extra income generated by this new level of productivity to fund training programs and other initiatives to help individuals who are professionally dislodged.

Leading up to the G7 meeting in Alberta, subject-focused engagement groups have held their own meetings and have prepared value statements and specific proposals to help shape well-informed discussions at the summit. These various non-governmental bodies focused on business, civil society, science, labour, youth and women-related matters, along with AI proposals in their respective memorandums.

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For example, the Business 7 group (B7) wants G7 Leaders to train a skilled AI workforce and “advance interoperability of AI and digital regulation to foster innovation and trust,” while the Science 7 (S7) group outlined 11 recommendations related to advanced technologies in data security, including establishing a comprehensive watermark or another signifier to inform Internet users that they are seeing AI-generated content and establishing an educational push to effectuate security/privacy “literacy.” 

Attaining consensus about an issue as indeterminate will undoubtedly be a difficult proposition for the attending AI delegates. Dean said it is already hard to achieve agreement about contending with artificial intelligence in the postsecondary realm.

“A lot of people don't use it that much, especially people who are maybe a bit older, so they don't know its capabilities,” said Dean. “Others are more strict — they just want to ban it. And then me: I realize that this is a significant tool, and students need to be able to leverage it because it's not going anywhere. If they don't know how to use it properly, it's only going to hurt them when they get into the work force, right?”

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Dean expects in-person examinations or assignments will be increasingly utilized by teachers to attain a more accurate appraisal of a student’s comprehension of course material as “you really can’t expect students not to use (these platforms) when they are given a take-home assignment.”

He is also leaning into the tide by giving his pupils assignments to engage with the AI, and they will be graded on the quality of the prompts they enter into ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, etc. The professor is also adapting his grading scheme to put a higher weight on the intellectual depth of a written piece because the text generated by AI, at this time, is “very superficial.”