The federal government really wants you to believe in artificial intelligence.

According to Canada’s national AI strategy, you should be using AI at work, you should be learning about AI at school, and you should be supporting new AI data centres in your community. It is a vision we must pursue “with urgency” lest we fall behind in the AI era. The future of Canadian prosperity depends on it.

But is that really true?

The staggering global investment in the AI industry — US$2 trillion this year alone — is predicated on unlocking massive gains in economic productivity. Technology companies may be burning through billions of dollars to train and operate AI models right now, but their investors are betting that they will one day be immensely profitable.

Canadian governments at all levels want a slice of that pie. They are falling over themselves to attract data centre investment. They are grafting AI tools onto the public service in hopes of finding ever-elusive efficiencies. And they are encouraging the indiscriminate adoption of AI by every sector of the public and private economy.

There are two problems here. The first is that there is........

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