The AI Race Is Charged by the Fear of Being Left Behind

NEARLY 300 participants descended on the Banff Centre for the National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture in March. Co-hosted by the federal government, and set among the surreally beautiful Rockies, it was the first gathering of its kind in Canada, convening a who’s who of cultural heavyweights—from the CBC to the National Film Board, from the Royal Ontario Museum to the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec—with artists, journalists, policymakers, technologists, coders, parliamentarians, and entrepreneurs. Organizers even found room for a circus troupe. The dining hall, that first night, had the feel of a cruise ship leaving port—crowded decks, everyone settling in for a long voyage.

The question before us was as big as they come: How to shape AI before it reshapes us? My own curiosity was more procedural. For years, my team and I have debated what to do about the technology. Do we trust it? Do we resist it? I wanted to know what everyone else was up to.

The answer, it turned out, was: quite a bit. In conversation after conversation, I was struck by the extent to which colleagues, both national and local, had embedded AI in their day-to-day operations. They used it to plan event calendars, streamline financial reporting, manage budgets. The ingenuity was, at times, undeniable. One production house had devised software to map out film shoots: where trucks should park, which streets to close, how many shooting days were required, and staffing needed. An agentic feature then instantly filled out municipal paperwork (like permit applications) that would otherwise take humans days to complete.

I didn’t walk among skeptics, in other words. But I did not always meet true believers either. Many attendees seemed to inhabit an uncomfortable third state, one where AI uptake was driven not by necessity but by a kind of collective acquiescence. A fear of being left behind. A sense that if everyone else is moving in this direction, opting out wasn’t a real option.

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Some provincial reps admitted, during coffee breaks, that pressure from officials to adapt, integrate, and experiment was intense, even in the absence of a clear rationale. Over lunch, arts administrators spoke about the stress of being expected to use AI to carry out core dutie—allocating resources, writing grant applications—and damn the hallucinated details, flawed translations, and confident errors. “My boss brags it will 10X me,” one woman said.

The same questions surfaced repeatedly: What do we do about the job losses that will surely follow that 10X-ing? How do we protect the intellectual windfall unleashed by our anticipated productivity? What does data sovereignty even mean when all that exponential output will sit on American servers? And who is picking up the tab for this transformative adoption?

These questions might be manageable if there were a strong sense of direction—that someone, somewhere, was judiciously setting the terms of the transition. But if the onstage remarks from AI czar Evan Solomon were any indication, the conversation at the federal level seemed on an entirely different track. The obsession was over scale: more data centres, more “compute.” AI was framed primarily as an industrial challenge, a race for capacity.

The misalignment was jarring. The panels and breakaway sessions were dominated by the anxiety of surviving in a hostile, AI-saturated environment, not winning a global technology race. The sense of powerlessness was, at times, palpable. Here were some of the country’s most influential cultural institutions submitting themselves to a force they didn’t fully understand, something that promised to reorder how they work, relate to one another, and make art. No one—not even Solomon, strutting in too-tight suit jackets and aggressively insisting he was “here to listen!”—seemed to have a clue what came next, only that whatever lay ahead might become visible only when it was far too late to change course.