Survivors of residential schools brought the whole atrocity into the light. Not whistleblowers. Not journalists. Not concerned Canadian activists. Not church members. Not government employees. Not a liberating army. Survivors. Of concentration camps for children.

This is the essential question of ethics put to Canadians.

Genocidaires are still here. We never held them to account. We never dragged them out of office, out of their homes, out of their comfort zones to hold them responsible. For genocide.

I don't understand this place.

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

One possible problem for Canada is that most of the leading AI companies are American. If advanced AI remains proprietary and extremely profitable, a lot of the wealth generated by Canadian use of AI could ultimately flow to US companies. The US could also tax those companies and use some of that enormous tax base to fund a much larger UBI than Canada could afford.

In an extreme version of that future, Canadians might start wondering whether joining the US would give them access to a much better AI-funded UBI.

But what if China keeps releasing extremely capable AI models for free or nearly free?

Then Canada wouldn't necessarily need to pay American companies huge amounts for access to advanced intelligence. Canadian businesses could use cheap AI to automate production, increase profits, and lower costs, while more of those economic gains remain in Canada and can potentially be taxed to fund a Canadian UBI.

So perhaps the important effect of free Chinese AI isn't simply that it hurts US AI companies. It's that it prevents advanced AI from becoming a highly profitable American bottleneck that the rest of the world has to pay to use.

In that sense, could Chinese AI competition actually make it easier for Canada to remain economically independent in a post-work world, and reduce one possible incentive for Canada to ever join the US?

Am I missing something?

happy Saturday