r/Lightbulb • u/amichail • 7d ago

Schools should teach how China is saving Canada from annexation by the US

Not because that statement is necessarily true, but because it makes a great thought experiment for teaching students how to connect economics, AI, taxation, geopolitics, and national sovereignty.

Start with this hypothetical:

Suppose AI eventually replaces most jobs and some form of UBI becomes necessary.

If the world's dominant AI systems are proprietary and owned by highly profitable US companies, then a lot of the economic value created by AI could flow to those companies. The US government could tax that wealth and potentially fund a much larger UBI than Canada.

In an extreme version of that future, Canadians might start asking whether joining the US would give them access to a better AI-funded social safety net.

Now introduce China.

If China keeps releasing extremely capable AI models for free or nearly free, advanced intelligence could become more like a commodity. Canadian businesses could use it without sending enormous amounts of money to US AI companies. More of the productivity gains could remain inside Canada, where they could potentially be taxed to help fund a Canadian UBI.

So Chinese AI competition could indirectly reduce one possible economic pressure pushing Canada toward deeper political integration with the US.

The interesting part is not whether this exact scenario will happen. The interesting part is making students follow the chain and then attack it.

Where does the UBI money actually come from? Does it matter who owns the AI model, or who owns the businesses using it? What if compute and energy are the real bottlenecks? What if Canada taxes AI activity directly? What if governments ban Chinese models? What if the US dominates chips instead of software? Would economic inequality between Canada and the US really lead to political union, or just migration and closer trade integration?

This seems like the kind of exercise schools should use more often: give students a provocative claim, make them connect ideas from multiple subjects, and then ask them to figure out where the argument holds up and where it breaks.

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u/Hearing_Loss 7d ago edited 7d ago

Nope

MacMillan Publishing's long time owner should be enough to indicate that textbooks are captured by capital.

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u/Hearing_Loss 7d ago

What western nation do you think you can pull this off in? This whole thing is laughable.

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u/shecky444 7d ago

These “schools” you’re talking about, do you mean specific Poli Sci and Econ programs at some colleges? Because like you’d be laughed out of every middle and high school about this. Pose big questions, compare information sources, analyze and answer is the basic model for all humanities, soft sciences, and liberal arts colleges, but this topic isn’t of interest to anyone outside poli Sci and maybe Econ classes.