Prime Minister Mark Carney made artificial intelligence a major plank of his keynote address to a buoyant Liberal Party convention in Montréal on April 3. Punctuated by several rounds of rapturous applause, Carney declared that “our goal is AI for all. AI accountable to Canadians; AI that serves Canadians. AI for all can make the jobs of Canadians more interesting and rewarding.”
This rhetoric of technological utopianism coupled with unspecified guardrails provides a major political opening for the NDP under its new leader Avi Lewis. All the more so because Carney’s approach directly contravenes a cornerstone belief of one of his supposed intellectual anchors—Czech dissident intellectual Václav Havel.
Polling shows that a significant majority of Canadians are deeply concerned about the harmful effects of AI and want government to proactively regulate it before it may be too late. Havel provides a vocabulary to ground AI policy in humanist values, providing moral urgency to an issue that governments remain unwilling or incapable to grasp in such terms.
No small part of the triumphalist mood at the Liberal convention derived from Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos back in January. That speech drew plaudits from around the world, significantly boosted Carney’s domestic polling, and contributed to putting the Liberals in a strong position to poach floor crossers en route to a parliamentary majority.
The centrepiece of the speech was an invocation of Havel’s concept of “living within a lie,” used to underscore the futility of any further pretence that the rules-based international order remains intact under the second Trump presidency.
But Carney clearly didn’t read all of Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” the work from which he borrowed the tale of the greengrocer who plays along with the hollow rituals of the “post-totalitarian” communist regime despite not believing in them. Had he read to the end, Carney would have seen that his own big bet on AI would have appalled Havel, who saw technology as the biggest threat to the existential revolution he deemed necessary to save politics in both the communist East and the capitalist West.
This presents a significant political opportunity for the New Democrats. Turning Carney’s now world-famous invocation of Havel against him could grant the NDP ownership of an issue that will give them the offensive initiative going forward.
Simply put, there is moral outrage to be harvested for righteous political gain on the downsides of AI. Elements of this strategy have already shown their value: Lewis’ opening salvo on Parliament Hill, a call to ban the disturbing practice of AI surveillance pricing, garnered significant media attention, including positive reviews from unexpected sources. The key is to frame the broader debate around curbing and regulating AI in humanist terms, fleshing out a populist, values-based cultural argument that has the potential to cross over into working-class communities that are repulsed by or scared of this technology gaining unchecked ground in Canadians’ lives.
Lewis’ leadership campaign included a policy plank on “Dignified Work in a Digital Age.” It took an appropriately jaundiced view of Carney’s AI agenda, correctly identifying that, while there are benefits to using machine-learning tools in limited contexts for science and medical research, AI companies are intractably tethered to an unscrupulous business model premised on the theft of private data, reckless hype-cycle stock speculation (and manipulation), the erosion of labour rights, promised mass layoffs, as well as an indefensible environmental impact.
Now that the leadership has been won and the pitch broadens to all Canadians, Lewis and the NDP must double down and expand upon this point of attack. Carney and his tech-optimist AI Minister, Evan Solomon, have made themselves extremely vulnerable on the issue. The AI backlash is bound to grow, given Canadians’ anxiety about this technology. Lewis’ focus on the cost-of-living emergency dovetails perfectly with a recentring of politics around what is needed for ordinary people to lead lives of meaningful human flourishing.
From my vantage point as a college and university educator, it is clear how the promises of technological democratization and accessibility made by proponents of EdTech have badly crashed to the ground amid the growth of AI. Studies are now showing that habitual and heavy use of LLMs turns cognitive offloading into cognitive surrender, whereby students, in particular, lose their natural skepticism to question and follow up on incorrect information provided by generative AI platforms. Educational theorist and neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath argues that “indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.” Horvath, who recently testified before the US Senate, emphasises that the friction between process and outcome that AI is designed to remove is fundamental to how the brain learns.
Havel offers a humanist vocabulary with which to present these kinds of problems in the political realm. “The Power of the Powerless” concludes with a scorching critique of “the crisis of technological society as a whole.” The vitality of Havel’s essay for the contemporary political moment lies far more in this section than in the tale of the greengrocer that drew Carney so many plaudits.
Havel understood exactly the kind of threat that capitulation to technological determinism posed to a humanist form of political association. “Technology,” he wrote, “is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in our own destruction.” This is far truer now in a world dictated by the speculative whims and libertarianism of Silicon Valley than it was in 1978. Yet Havel was driven to near despondency in assessing where we stood in relation to the empire of technology in his time. “Humanity can find no way out,” he wrote. “We have no idea, no faith, and even less do we have a political conception to help bring things back under human control.”
Today, we must rise to the challenge this passage summons. The left must boldly assert faith in human reason, in democratic principles of equality, representation, and accountability, and carry that torch with unflappable confidence. Otherwise, we acquiesce to our own political and spiritual disempowerment.
Havel said that accepting narratives of technological determinism forces us “to look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our affiliations […] just as it removes us from the experience of ‘Being’ and casts us into the world of ‘existences.’” What is described in this passage is how passivity in the face of the logic of technological expansion has inevitable and deeply harmful effects on the social nature of human beings. Here, “affiliations” refers to the fundamental building blocks of natural human sociability—engagement, connection, and, ultimately, forging collective meaning through associative action.
There is no coming back from a world in which we are passive in the face of this social element of our essence being further stripped away. This much has become abundantly clear from the decades we have granted to Silicon Valley to pilot our economy and culture toward its ends.
In his April 3 speech, Carney claimed that “AI in education can meet every child where they are.” What this actually means is a dystopian project of offloading the cognitive capacity of our youth to large language models that are anything but apolitical. The social and political implications of capitulation to an educational and social environment shaped by the imperatives of tech oligarchs are stark.
Are we ready for a post-literate society? A world where the erstwhile commonly held literary and religious frames of reference are ground into dust, replaced by machine-generated slop laser-focused on the most appetitive elements of human nature? What does politics look like in a world where the abstract reasoning that literacy fosters fades away amid an oral culture of screen addicts? It is hard to disagree with Sam Kriss’ estimation that it will be much more than “a kind of tribal head count or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks.”
Grim.
Those who say we must bow to the inevitability of a future shaped by AI conveniently forget that the forces of oligarchy were on the back foot for much of the latter half of the 20th century. Undeterred, the tribunes of reaction schemed, played the long game, and proceeded to build shadow institutions that reflected their worldview, steadily eroding a common sense based in some version of social democratic values.
Those who wield technological determinism to stultify the horizon of leftist political possibility know all too well that utopian projects of societal transformation are entirely feasible. They achieved such a transformation during the decades of neoliberal orthodoxy and are well on schedule with the latest radical reorganization of society along the lines of technofeudalism.
Rejecting the technological “manifest destiny of capital” should not compel an opposite, technologically determinist socialist alternative. As Jathan Sadowski put it in The Mechanic and the Luddite, “fighting for real utopias is not a matter of declaring our own teleological narratives. Nothing is inevitable.” Indeed, we must embrace the contingency and dynamism that lie at the heart of the human endeavour to live meaningful, dignified lives in community.
This presents an opening to grow the tent of the political left. There is a tranche of conservatism that views the barely restrained and unaccountable growth of this technology as contrary to human flourishing. It is le gros bon sens for the NDP to make alliances on this basis with communitarians of other persuasions. The party can win back working-class voters lost to the right by making AI a vital cultural issue, especially in education, which has always had enormous mobilizing moral force.
Again, Lewis’ leadership campaign policy on AI was superb. Rooting the rejection of unfettered AI growth and any new data centres in protecting Canada’s sovereignty from the tech-infused authoritarianism of the Trump administration is better still. What needs to be added to blast Carney and Solomon’s hurried and feckless AI boosterism is a humanist focus that forces Canadians to reckon with what the world they are ushering in will do to us at a deeper level.
Slinging the true message of “The Power of the Powerless” back at Carney can hoist the prime minister with his own petard, too.
Dónal Gill teaches Political Science at Dawson College and Concordia University.