With the New Democratic Party in a desperately weak state following the 2025 election, the correct path to renewal will be hotly contested as the party moves to select a new leader in the spring.

Big-picture ideological questions of principle over pragmatism will rage, with illustrative examples from centrist provincial counterparts in western Canada played off against the unabashedly socialist success story of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to clinch the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor.

In charting its path forward, the NDP should place a bold, unequivocal opposition to artificial intelligence at the heart of its political agenda. This stance must go beyond tepid calls for regulation or ethical oversight. It should reject the prevailing centrist narrative: that governments must embrace AI uncritically or risk being left behind in the presumed march of technological progress.

This fatalistic framing ignores a crucial truth: technology is never neutral. As historian Melvin Kranzberg famously put it, “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Philosopher Shannon Vallor builds on this, arguing that technologies are polypotent and polyvalent—they can take on many forms and meanings depending on the social and political context in which they are embedded.

The NDP must be willing to contest not just how AI is used, but whether and why it is being pursued at all.

There is a clear opening for the NDP to get ahead of the curve and oppose—or at the very least demand extensive regulation of—the unchecked growth and encroachment of AI into our lives.

While there may be a narrowly defensible role for tightly controlled AI in specific domains like medical diagnostics or scientific modeling, the party should make it unmistakably clear that the AI slop increasingly polluting public discourse and eroding individual intellectual capacity is an intolerable affront to human dignity.

Opposing AI is a critical component of a broader strategy the NDP can use to carve out a clear and compelling progressive identity in Canadian politics—a challenge the party has wrestled with for decades. By opposing AI, the NDP can anchor itself in a renewed politics of humanism, rejecting the hollow promises of techno-solutionism and reclaiming a communitarian ethic that has been gutted by the isolating, market-driven logic of the digital age.

Opposing AI is perfectly in line with the values of leftism. The energy demands and environmental effects of AI are devastating. Electricity guzzling supercomputers of staggering size are already sapping communities of water. The grotesque demands of data and computational centres are driving an unprecedented surge in energy consumption, one that is increasingly being fed by fossil fuels and accelerating the climate crisis under the guise of technological progress.

Generative AI is wreaking havoc on the education system. As a parent of a young child, I am deeply alarmed by the prospect of him coming of age in a post-literate society where the fundamental human acts of reading and writing are outsourced to machines, and intellectual development is hollowed out by automation.

Workers in the service industry are already unwittingly training the chatbots to replace them. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s drive to bring a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy will almost certainly involve a DOGE-like infiltration of public services with AI.

These changes will be couched in the language of “optimization,” “rationalization,” “efficiency,” and the necessary creative destruction of progress. The NDP must offer a coherent and articulated alternative vision for a future that upholds the essential humanist values of solidarity, equality, and liberty.

As Oscar Wilde noted in The Soul of Man under Socialism, an exploitative economic system will never use the capacity of machinery to free workers from repetitive and soul-crushing work to empower a life of nourishing leisure. Instead, machines—the energy sapping behemoth computer servers gulping down tsunamis of data—are means to render working people surplus to requirements.

The artificial intelligence we now face is a technology boosted and controlled by the increasingly unaccountable techno-feudalists of Silicon Valley. The largely unfettered and unregulated deluge of social media and ‘appification’ of our lives over the past 20 years has been a net negative for community solidarity, mental health, and workers’ rights. These tech companies proudly moved fast and broke things; they could care less but to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. We all bear the scars of the world they were allowed to remake in their image.

The current Silicon Valley ethos to “scale at all costs” means that AI companies have only a few sources of the kind of capital that can maintain their geometric growth. The ongoing incorporation of AI into the already titanic military-industrial complex and its use as a tool of surveillance capitalism must not be allowed to become irreversible facets of modern life.

AI represents an ever more dystopian frontier for Silicon Valley’s nightmarish visions of a new feudalism. It is no wonder that the journalist Karen Hao argues in a recent book that AI companies most closely resemble the old European imperialist regimes.

Bizarre stories of people in love with chatbots and others using AI to animate videos of their dead relatives must horrify anyone who believes that real connection and finitude are intrinsic to the human condition.

Accepting all of this as a fait accompli leads to nothing but the politics of despair.

In one of its darkest hours, the NDP has an opportunity to seize the initiative on an issue that is only becoming more urgent. Taking a principled stand on AI could offer the party not just relevance, but purpose. Crafting the precise regulatory or prohibitive framework will be difficult—and frankly, as a political theorist, that task lies beyond my expertise. But what is clear is this: the tech oligarchs driving the AI agenda have no commitment to democratic values like equality, transparency, or accountability. They seek to remake the world in their own image—efficient, extractive, and entirely post-human.

I, for one, refuse to give up on a society grounded in self-government and devoted to upholding human dignity as its central value. And I believe an increasing number of people are beginning to recognize the existential threat AI poses to that democratic project. Through a mix of inertia, cowardice, and complicity, the political centre and right have largely accepted this trajectory. The left must reject it, forcefully and unapologetically.

How, then, should the NDP advance a critique of AI? Am I calling for a Butlerian Jihad—the war against thinking machines imagined in Frank Herbert’s Dune? Of course not. That’s an exaggerated and unserious comparison. But we do need to confront the reality that Canada is being ushered down a path where creativity, truth, and the deeply social nature of human life risk being obliterated beyond recognition.

The NDP must become the political home of a renewed humanist movement. Its next leader should speak with clarity and conviction against systems designed to automate labour and erase future livelihoods. They should push for robust regulation, a default ban on the exploitation of private data, and a moratorium on the unchecked environmental destruction caused by massive data centres. Artists must be protected from the theft and degradation of their work by slop-producing generative AI systems.

We need guardrails—not after the damage is done, but now, while we still have the agency to act. The unchecked power of AI’s architects must not be allowed to outpace the capacity of democratic politics to respond.

Humanist resistance to AI can serve as the moral and strategic foundation for something broader: a revitalized left-populist movement grounded in economic justice, cultural integrity, and principled foreign policy. Around this, a renewed electoral coalition can begin to take shape, one that gives Canadians a reason to believe in politics again.

Yes, the self-appointed defenders of “common sense” will inevitably dismiss this position as Luddite alarmism. Let them. Public unease—ranging from skepticism to outright fear—toward the flood of generative AI is already widespread and only growing. The public’s trust in the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley is eroding fast. Meanwhile, the Carney government seems poised to abandon its election promise of a tougher, more independent posture toward the United States, continuing the tradition of subordination to American corporate interests.

In this context, a strong stance against AI offers the NDP more than just moral clarity—it offers political opportunity. It can root the party in a bold humanist vision, one that is ethically grounded, strategically smart, and capable of anchoring a renewed economic nationalism. At a moment when Canada’s sovereignty is once again under threat, this message will resonate. It carries the potential to cut across class and regional lines with a patriotic appeal rooted not in exclusion, but in shared dignity and democratic control.

Hope, in short, is not lost. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, like so many cautionary tales in the science fiction canon, warns of the devastation AI could unleash, but it also reminds us that “there is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” That remains true. And the time to choose our fate is now.

Dónal Gill is an assistant professor of Canadian politics at Concordia University.