In June 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced AI for All, Canada’s national artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. It targets an additional $200 billion in economic growth and 250,000 new AI-related jobs over five years, alongside an increase in business adoption of AI from just over 12 percent to 60 percent by 2034.

Harder to measure is what this shift might cost in human autonomy: the capacity to reason through a choice and arrive at a conclusion that is one’s own, rather than one supplied by a system whose workings remain opaque.

Public anxiety about artificial intelligence is not only that machines will acquire capacities that exceed our own. It is that institutions, occupations, and intellectual practices that help us recognise ourselves as autonomous human beings will be reorganised around systems we can neither fully understand nor challenge independently.

Canada’s strategy treats adopting new technology as an economic necessity. That framing fits into a broader global race to diversify supply chains and secure strategic technologies, in which control over AI infrastructure, computing power, and data is becoming a source of geopolitical power. Yet a government can make services more efficient while limiting how much people can decide for themselves.

The contradiction is political. Canada is using technological advancement to bolster national sovereignty while risking deeper dependence on the very systems meant to protect it.

The Industrial Precedent

The Industrial Revolution offers a historical precedent for this contradiction and the public concern it provokes. Artificial intelligence introduces a comparable reorganisation of labour, but the capacities undergoing mechanisation are increasingly intellectual. Humanistic approaches to AI place the “human” above the “non-human,” treating technology as a means to human ends. Political scientist Virginia Eubanks describes this as a “digital poorhouse” where AI produces opaque decisions about people’s lives with little opportunity for them to understand or contest the outcome. Canadian governments face similar risks when deploying such systems.

Where industrial machinery displaced physical exertion, generative AI can replace activities involving interpretation, composition, classification, and judgment. These activities also sustain intellectual independence.

Canada’s national AI strategy calls for making trusted AI agents available to postsecondary students and for AI literacy training for 1 million students and more than 3,000 educators.

These initiatives increase access to useful technologies but also raise a question that technological literacy alone cannot answer: when does assistance become substitution?

A student who uses AI to probe an argument might gain a better understanding, but one who delegates its formulation may produce satisfactory work without having reasoned........

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