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🇨🇦 Rewiring AI to Reward Human Genius: The attention economy is strip-mining your brain. A Canadian visionary and a national strategy are trying to stop it.
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📖 Read: https://helioxpodcast.substack.com/publish/post/201221767
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't announce itself. It creeps in around the edges — the feeling that you've spent three hours online and learned nothing of consequence, that the tools designed to help you think are, somehow, making thinking harder. You're not imagining it. The machines were never built to make you smarter. They were built to keep you there.
The physical infrastructure of a sovereign digital future.
Fifty percent of Canadians regard AI not as a tool but as a literal threat to humanity. The paradox is almost poetic. A nation of inventors has become a nation of bystanders.
Minister Evan Solomon's 2026 National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, AI for All, is the government's attempt to close this gap — and it deserves credit for the seriousness of its ambition. It was built through 11,000 public submissions from workers, entrepreneurs, First Nations and Métis leaders, arts organizations, labor unions, and environmental groups. It rests on three unified concepts: trust, opportunity, and sovereignty.
None of this, by itself, constructs Bleackley's orthogonal dimension. But it builds the prerequisite: a regulatory and sovereign foundation without which an innovation economy is impossible. You cannot have durable, fair compensation for original thought if your citizens are being actively manipulated by an unregulated attention economy. You secure the foundation first.
As we build these systems to respect intellectual property, he notes, it will become increasingly important to account for natural evolution and the AI themselves as innovators.
Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All
and three other references
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Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.
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