Editor’s Note: Fish ‘n’ chips

All anyone seems to be talking about these days is artificial intelligence—both the potential dangers of the technology and the impossible-to-deny gains in productivity it can create.

It’s the former I’m somewhat stuck on, to be honest. My trepidation around AI probably started around the same time I watched Terminator for the first time back in the 1980s. But it grew substantially about a year ago, when I had a conversation with Geoffrey Hinton that, frankly, scared the daylights out of me. “These digital intelligences,” the father of modern AI told me, “are millions or billions of times better than us at sharing information. And it’s very scary that we’re creating a better form of intelligence, because what’s to stop it from taking over?” Hinton (now happily retired and spending much of his time on good old-fashioned woodworking) went on to talk about the potential unintended consequences of setting AI agents loose to do seemingly benign tasks (and this was way before the Hugging Face hack freaked out even the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created the rogue agents in the first place). Hinton’s warnings sounded uncomfortably close to the plot of Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which the titular AI, charged with protecting Earth, decides that the best way to do so is by eradicating humanity.

Watch that kind of thing unfold on the big screen and it’s good fun. Hear it directly from a Nobel-winning AI researcher and it’s chilling.

So it was refreshing to read Gordon Pitts’s delightful road-trip of a tale, “After the Codfathers.” Gord has spent the past few decades writing about some of the biggest characters in corporate Canada, both for The Globe and Mail and in book form. One of those books is The Codfathers, published in 2005, which attempted to pin down exactly what made so many Atlantic Canadian families—with names like Irving, Sobey and McCain—so successful in global business.

Most of these companies deal in tangible goods: wild blueberries and fish, oil and toilet paper, helicopters and French fries—so many French fries. In other words, these are businesses that can’t be replaced by AI (and, as far as I can tell, pose no existential threat to humanity, either). But they are under threat from tariffs and trade turmoil, and from the steady march of time, as many of the founders and their chosen heirs die or pass the baton to the next generation (though some of the young’uns can expect a long wait—Ken Rowe is still executive chair of IMP Group at 91, and blueberry king John Bragg is going strong at 86).

Two decades after The Codfathers, Gord travelled out east to discover how this generational transfer is playing out and what it means to the economic health of the Atlantic region.

This issue isn’t totally AI-less, however, from “The doom scroll” to Jason Kirby’s cover story, “Heavy hitter” to the Technology Fast 50 package—which, I’m happy to report, is loaded with companies using AI to achieve world domination of the corporate sort, not the sinister.