Couple proceeds with wedding amid chaos in P.E.I. from post-tropical storm Fiona

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My husband died a while back, and I don’t miss him! He had grown old in a strange and cranky way, and I’m a cheerful person by nature. It was hard to hear him shoot down every idea I had to go out and do things together.

He wasn’t physically ill — just finished with having any fun. He had gotten depressed and wouldn’t take anti-depressants, although he was fine with getting drunk and critical towards me.

He was particularly negative about seeing friends and relatives, and living the active way we used to — always the first to get tickets to concerts and encouraging other friends to go with us for dinners at new restaurants. We also went to a lot of sports games, and visited friends and relatives. We arrive with lots of good food and drink.

So now when people ask me in that pitying voice used for widows, “Poor darling, how are you doing?” I respond, “He was miserable towards the end, and it was a relief when he died.” They look shocked, but it’s the truth, and they know it.

Political trust refers to people’s positive expectations that the political system, the institutions which comprise it and the actors who participate in its operations will do what they have said they will do, that they will act in the public interest and that they will conduct themselves in a manner which does not disrespect the democratic process.

Political scientists use the terms “diffuse” and “specific” to differentiate between trust in the political system as a whole, and trust in individual actors. Asked to rank occupations in terms of trustworthiness, respondents typically place politicians at or near the bottom of the list. Individuals who have first-hand experience dealing with politicians tend to have more positive viewpoints.

Unfortunately, systematic surveys on trust levels in Manitoba are rare, so any discussion must be based on national results.

Beginning in the late 1960s, a slow erosion of trust in Canadian politicians and political institutions began, with only occasional, short-lived upticks. In the summer of 2025, a national Environics survey found that only a minority of Canadians had a lot of trust in political actors and institutions, such as the political parties and Parliament. The survey report also revealed that trust levels had held steady over the past 15 years.

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In 1986, Paul Simon sang of “days of miracle and wonder” in the song The Boy in the Bubble, from his Graceland album. It was hardly a hymn to progress. Scientific ingenuity coexisted with violence and vulnerability. The world was becoming more technologically capable but not necessarily wiser.

Four decades later, I find the sentiment difficult to improve upon. Since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, predictions about AI have arrived in rapid succession. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and others in the tech industry’s so-called “broligarchy” have fuelled recent headlines about approaching “superintelligence” and futures ranging from human flourishing to catastrophe. The advances are real but the predictions often carry more confidence than evidence. The future, it seems, is permanently scheduled for an upgrade.

Yet a more immediate question risks being lost — as AI systems become more capable and we delegate increasingly complex work to them, will our capacity to understand, question and oversee their outputs keep pace?

That question begins with understanding what we are delegating. AI is not a single technology. Specialized systems have helped scientists predict protein structures. ChatGPT relies on general-purpose language models trained on vast datasets. The most advanced systems are often called “frontier models”. They can write, translate, analyze and converse across subjects, but fluency does not guarantee accuracy. Success at one task does not establish competence at another.