The Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer: AI, VR, and the Trade Wars

This summer, following my return to full-time work after my six-month, half-time sick leave for job burnout, has been interesting, in both positive and negative ways (remember the ancient Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times.”) I’ve already written at length about our unprecedented, climate-change-fuelled wildfire season here in Manitoba, but there have been other things on my mind as well: AI, VR, and the ongoing trade war with the United States.

I have been learning a lot more about artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular, over the past few months. I am doing this to prepare myself for a couple of events this coming Fall term at my university.

Well, I have somehow talked myself into giving a 15-minute presentation on artificial intelligence and generative AI (GenAI) to the professors at an upcoming Faculty Council meeting in the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences (as I am the liaison librarian serving the faculty). This all came out of a recent addition to my PowerPoint slides last year, where I was warning the students I spoke to about the dangers of relying on GenAI tools like ChatGPT as search engines. I had been telling members of the Agriculture Library Committee about this work, at one of our face-to-face meetings. By the end of the discussion, I had agreed to give a presentation to Faculty Council. (Me and my big mouth!)

However, to my horror, I realized that the field of GenAI was now evolving so quickly, that pretty much everything I had talked about last year was already way out of date! So this necessitated a lot of reading (yes, actual books from the university’s collection), and a lot of web browsing, including taking some online courses, in order to work my way up the learning curve. It turns out that being asked to give an accessible presentation on a topic, to an audience of professors (who are pretty smart people overall), is a very powerful motivator to learn new things!

So I have been spending much of the past couple months learning more about AI. I had already had a subscription to ChatGPT, by OpenAI, being among the first million people to set up an account in 2022. To that, I have added a second subscription to a service called Claude AI, by a company called Anthropic, which was founded by some ex-OpenAI employees who had some ethical concerns about the direction in which their former company was going with its GenAI products.

I’m getting closer to the point that I now feel more comfortable attempting to pull together this 15-minute talk. In addition, I have agreed to team-teach a course to graduate students and student advisors on GenAI this Fall term, along with a lawyer. The lawyer will discuss the legal and copyright issues associated with GenAI, and I will focus on the technical and practical aspects of GenAI tools (leaning heavily on the same content as my talk to the agriculture professors). I am slowly but surely becoming the in-house AI expert at the University of Manitoba Libraries, as well as the virtual reality expert!

Speaking of virtual reality, now that I am no longer officially involved with the ongoing virtual/augmented reality lab project at my university library system, all the VR equipment I had donated to the lab has been returned to me (the people working on the project have decided to purchase brand-new equipment).

I have had to drag a second desk into my open-office cubicle area to re-setup my Windows desktop PC and Vive Pro VR headset, and I’ve had to find space to stash away my Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3 wireless headsets when I am not using them! Between work and home, I have no less than five different headsets to deal with (my Valve Index at home sits unused because I need to reinstall its software after the recent hard drive crash of my personal computer, and, of course, my Apple Vision Pro, about which I have written several blog posts over the past twelve months).

However, I must confess that I haven’t really used any of the Windows VR/AR headsets very much since I bought my Apple Vision Pro, which I still use a couple of hours a day at work in the large, clear (and now, ultra widescreen!) Virtual Display, with my MacBook Pro. Often, I lug my Apple Vision Pro home in my backpack, using it there to watch TV and movies, to browse Reddit news posted to the AVP subreddits, and to hang out and chat with folks from all over the world in InSpaze (still one of the killer apps, in my opinion). This device is worth every penny I paid for it, despite its high price tag, and I will be first in line for whatever Apple comes out with next in its line of spatial computing devices. I’m all in.

As many of you already know, I have already completely given up on most corporate-run, algorithm-driven social media platforms, most of which have become toxic cesspools. I left Meta’s Facebook several years ago, and I quit Twitter/X when Apartheid Clyde took over. While I still have nominal accounts on Mastodon (from which I watched the Twitter dumpster fire from afar), and Bluesky (to follow public health experts and, more recently, AI experts), I find that I can now go weeks at a time without bothering to check either site. I have found that my mental and emotional health has greatly improved since I have essentially discarded most social media, and I can recommend it highly.

I have also been going through the long, slow, arduous process of disengaging from Google as well, replacing the Chrome web browser with Firefox, Google search with Qwant, YouTube Music with Apple Music*, and Gmail with the Swiss-owned, privacy-oriented Proton service. In particular, the switch from Gmail to Proton email has been lengthy and ongoing.

I don’t think that most Americans (as disinterested as they tend to be about anything that goes on outside their borders) really understand just how royally pissed off Canadians are at the United States right now. As I write this, the latest word from Donald Trump is that he is planning to impose a 35% tarriff on Canadian imports, which of course is going to kick off another round of tit-for-tat trade war, which is going to piss Canadians off even more than they are already. Elbows up!

I read an article last week in Maclean’s (the Canadian version of Time or Newsweek) that made that point quite well, so I am quoting it at length below:

Canadians define themselves in opposition to the United States because the country was founded by people who rejected the bloody American Revolution. We’ve kept rejecting it for almost three centuries.

The United States is an unpredictable and increasingly dysfunctional empire, an extended experiment in pushing everything to the extreme. Canadians, on the other hand, have a long but imperfect history of muddling along peaceably. We are not bound together by some intrinsic identity—by language, race, religion or a shared and glorious history of revolution or conquest. We become nationalistic only when it is necessary to protect ourselves against the aggression of the United States.

That negative, defensive definition has always been enough. It is kind of the point of Canada.

…

As Canada settled deeper into the winter of 2025, and Trump kept boorishly insisting that Canadians would be happier in his clutches, we got mad.

Canadians yanked U.S. liquor from store shelves, cancelled trips and hoisted flags, even in downtown Montreal. Pallets of U.S. produce spoiled in the supermarket aisles. Normally bustling American border towns that depended on shopping day trips were suddenly silent. The U.S. departure lounges at Pearson and Trudeau were empty.

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston removed interprovincial trade barriers for any province that would reciprocate and, post-election, Mark Carney went a step further and pledged to dismantle all interprovincial trade barriers by Canada Day. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew announced he was planning to let some electricity contracts with the States lapse and use much of that excess power to boost his own province’s energy economy. Quebec Premier François Legault said Quebecers would consider east-west oil pipelines they had previously opposed.

People were soon speculating about a guerrilla war of resistance. The Americans might be able to take Canada, but could they hold it? How could they justify the casualties they would take? At the end of January, one of the most capable men I know texted me, out of the blue, that he had told his wife, the mother of his infant child, that he’d be “willing to die on the end of a rifle to make sure” the Americans could not take Canada.

It became clear how deep the feeling ran on February 1 at Ottawa’s Canadian Tire Centre, where the Senators played the Minnesota Wild. Because Ottawa is a government town, and there are often as many Leafs or Habs fans in attendance as Sens supporters, it can be a dull place to watch a game. But there was nothing sedate about the booing as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. Fans booed it heartily from start to finish, drowning out the unfortunate singer.

—Stephen Maher, “Never for sale.” Maclean’s, July 2025.

I honestly don’t know how all this is going to play out over the next four years, but I have slowly learned to tune out whatever batshit craziness is happening in the United States and its trade war with Canada (and the rest of the world), and to focus on what I can control. So I have been voting both with my feet and my wallet.

In particular, like many of my fellow Canadians, I refuse to visit the United States until Trump is out of office. No conferences, no vacations. Nothing. And I have already cancelled my subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon Prime, and most recently I added both Disney+ and Hayu (Bravo/Peacock reality TV) to that list. I’m probably not done yet. I am pissed.

During the pandemic, I got into the habit of ordering my groceries online through the Walmart website, and then using their Pickup service early Saturday morning. Not any more! I have used my librarian skill set to extensively research Canadian-made alternatives to American brands (Buh-bye, Campbell’s Chunky Soup! Hello, Tim Horton’s Soup!). I have swapped the Walmart website for the Real Canadian Superstore, still picking up my online-ordered (but now overwhelmingly Canadian-produced) groceries bright and early Sunday morning. Works just as well for me!

Finally, I have gone and joined the Red River Co-Op, a locally-owned co-operative grocery store and gas station that has been active here in Winnipeg since the 1930s. And I do plan to regularly shop at the St. Norbert farmers’ market, just south of where I live in Winnipeg, to support locale farmers and artisans (it’s quite literally across the street from the Red River Co-Op store I now shop at!).

So, that’s my report from my lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer! Stay cool and stay sane in these trying times.

*I fully realize that Apple is an American company, but I associate Apple with California, and I am not averse to supporting liberal-leaning, Democratic-voting California! 😜

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