by Prime Minister Mark Carney
My fellow Canadians, artificial intelligence (AI) is the next great technological transformation, and the time to go all in is now. That is why I am announcing the Government of Canada’s commitment to making an equity investment of up to $1.6 billion in Cohere, so that when the AI investment bubble pops, probably later this year and likely wiping out trillions of dollars of wealth across the planet, Canadians will also lose incalculable sums of money.
What would you rather see, billions of your tax dollars spent on repairing crumbling infrastructure or rebuilding Canada’s struggling healthcare system… or on a tech gizmo that can write high schoolers’ essays for them with mostly correct facts, generate mediocre-quality revenge porn, and streamline the process of AI psychosis in our lonely seniors?
I know where I’m putting my money (and by that I mean, your money).
There are many reasons the AI bubble could and probably will pop within the next few months — mega-IPOs built on transparently empty hype, circular funding schemes that see a handful of companies passing the same $1 million back and forth, or the spectre of any regulation whatsoever from a Democrat-controlled Congress. Perhaps it’s that AI data centres poll slightly worse than rectal cancer. Or maybe it’s just that everyone suddenly sees a chance to kick Elon Musk square in this dick.
The point is that this house of cards is set to implode, and Canada simply will not be a world class country unless we are also crushed under the debris.
While many are quick to point out that I am a world class economist, know that at my heart I am a finance guy. I wear tasteful, expensive suits, and compare stock portfolios with other finance guys in giant glass boardrooms and five star steak houses. That is why every fibre of my being demands that I plow vast sums of public capital into a volatile tech sector that has yet to deliver any significant innovations, productivity benefits, or even turn a basic profit.
Just writing that sentence made my leg hairs twitch against my $500 Armani socks.
It is imperative that Canadians immediately plow just as much, or more, money into the rapidly cratering AI sector than our G20 partners. What if our new friends in the European Union lose their tight fashionable shirts in the AI crash, and then we feel awkward showing off our still-stable economy? Showing off sounds positively un-Canadian to me.
We must act fast. Just this past week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to having an affair with a Chinese spy, possibly leaking American AI GPU chip technology to Beijing. To restate, a company that used to make graphics cards for PC gamers to play Duke Nukem slightly faster somehow fell ass backwards into being the cornerstone of the entire AI tech boom which somehow now represents 45% of the S&P 500’s total market cap… and that has been entirely jeopardized because a Silicon Valley dweeb couldn’t keep it in his pants.
I know this all sounds complicated, but trust me. I’m an economist, and we’ve never been wrong about the global economy, except in 2008, 1999, 1929, and most other years.
So join me in cheering on this week’s Federal budget, which allocates $1.6 billion (for now) into Cohere, a Canadian AI company that will insure that Canadians will be the ones destroying our own economic prosperity in the name of chasing already-failing financial and tech trends.
And hey, at least when the AI bubble pops, we’ll have all these data centres to build a surveillance state to keep all of you from demanding any of your tax dollars back.
