Crowd-pleasing classic requires no baking

What is it we should fear about AI? That it will take our jobs? Overload our electricity networks and make our own energy needs more expensive? Put scarce freshwater resources at risk? Or is it that it will be unregulated, breach privacy laws and be used for a wide range of perverse purposes?

If Canadians are among the most distrustful of the AI revolution, it isn’t because they are uninformed or technologically regressive. Their reluctance is because there is no plan for Canadian AI guided by an overarching public interest.

To the contrary, the hundreds of AI data centre proposals in Canada are driven by an investor frenzy completely disconnected from Canadian needs or economic and social goals.

A Canadian Press freedom of information request from the federal government revealed that power demands from current proposals total more than 20 GW, a massive capacity comparable to the total power needs of all Canadian households, and 25 times greater than the roughly 850 MW the federal government has projected that known sovereign AI proposals will reach by 2030.

The last time oil-tankers were being shot up in the Persian Gulf, back in the 1980s, it was Saddam Hussein’s brutal tyranny in Iraq versus Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Islamist regime in Iran.

The United States backed Saddam because he was just another murderous thug, whereas the new regime in Tehran was an actual threat to American interests. It had overthrown Iran’s American-backed puppet king and wanted to spread its Islamist ideology across the region.

So, of course, Ronald Reagan’s administration chose Saddam’s side. It sent Iraq arms by clandestine means (because Congress wouldn’t authorize it) and even provided targeting information for Iraqi poison gas attacks on Iran. The Americans chose the “lesser evil,” but at least they knew it was evil.

Once in a while they would even say it out loud, quoting U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger: “It’s a shame that both sides can’t lose.” But they never did anything about it, and after eight years of slaughter, the war ended in a no-score draw.