From Prevention to Preparedness: AI, Families and Toronto's Future.
I want to begin by thanking Paul Tonello for circulating his email and paper, The Future of the Canadian Household in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and for challenging candidates and community leaders to confront this reality head-on.
Throughout my career in technology integrations and municipal leadership, one truth has proven consistent time and again: the public always understands these issues best. Long before policy circles and legislative committees catch up, everyday citizens are already living with the real-world friction, vulnerabilities, and practical questions that new technologies introduce into their daily lives. Paul’s call to action is exactly the kind of grassroots civic insight that should drive public policy, and it's echoed in the data centre conversations.
I grew up in an IBM household. Long before computing became ambient, invisible, and carried around in our pockets, technology was a tangible, daily presence at our kitchen table. I fell in love with it early. I learned to program, jumped at every early-adoption curve I could find, wrote extensively about the physical realities of data centres on this blog, and co-founded JaneApp to solve complex operational problems by making digital workflows serve people in their everyday practices for complementary practitioners.
Having spent decades working across software, operations, data infrastructure, healthcare, and municipal government, I am the last person to advocate for fear-driven slowdowns or reactionary red tape. I believe deeply in technology and its power to improve human systems. Especially in diagnostics and imaging for the patients I see in my manual therapy practice.
Yet when I look at how our policymakers are approaching artificial intelligence today, I see a dangerous blind spot. Most policy discourse remains trapped in boardroom debates: intellectual property disputes, macroeconomic growth metrics, and high-level enterprise compliance.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has quietly left the research laboratory and the enterprise server rack. It is moving directly into the places where Canadians live.
We cannot afford to think about our households after AI arrives through our children or our appliances. We need to think about it now.
Moving Past "Predict and Prohibit"
Recent events involving autonomous AI agents and repository-level vulnerabilities, such as the breach incidents that shook the developer community at Hugging Face, show how quickly both the capabilities and the attack surfaces of modern software are compounding.
I recently attended a Steven Pinker lecture last week, where the evolutionary biologist discussed his broader belief that reason and useful technology can improve human life. He argues that intelligence does not automatically produce a drive for power or self-preservation, but does argue for rigorous testing before AI controls consequential systems.
When digital tools shift from passive interfaces into autonomous agents that act on our behalf, the pace of change outstrips traditional legislative cycles entirely. The capabilities of AI will advance far beyond what today’s futurists can reliably predict. Government cannot realistically legislate the future into a predetermined shape using yesterday’s assumptions.
The only durable public-policy principle is this: From Prevention to Preparedness.
We must stop approaching the future of AI primarily by asking how we stop what is coming, and start asking how we prepare Toronto families, institutions, and communities to live with what is already here.
Grounding Policy at the Kitchen Table
I became interested in data centres through land use: where they go, what infrastructure they need, and how those decisions affect communities. My experience building systems that help businesses run has taught me that resilience starts with the way a system is designed. The same is true for a country. If we want Canada to be better prepared, we need to start at the household level.
1. Domestic Data Sovereignty & Edge Privacy
AI tools may soon help families manage calendars, sort messages and run connected devices at home. That could be useful, but it also gives companies access to details of daily family life.
We should encourage technology that handles personal information on a device in your home whenever possible, instead of sending it to a company’s servers. And if an AI tool makes a purchase you did not authorize or exposes your information, families need clear ways to get help and hold the company responsible.
2. Practical Digital Literacy for Families
My early experiences with technology have shown me that digital literacy includes not just button-clicking but a deep understanding of underlying systems. As AI increasingly emulates human empathy and authority, communities need accessible resources to identify threats such as voice-cloning scams and synthetic media.
Public education must move beyond basic coding, which AI now handles, to embrace probabilistic thinking, algorithmic literacy, and data sovereignty. Through this initiative, we inspire the next generation to confidently navigate and lead the evolution of these tools. Young people should be able to make informed choices, equipped with insight and skills.
3. Kitchen-Table Economic Resilience
Building software to take repetitive work off people’s desks taught me how quickly a job can change, even when the job title stays the same. AI’s impact may reach the kitchen table long before it shows up in national economic figures. A bookkeeper, designer or office manager could see the work they rely on shrink while still having bills to pay.
Preparedness means more than telling people to “learn new skills.” Mid-career Canadians need short, useful training they can fit around work and family, and income support that gives them room to make the transition.
4. Municipal & Civic Fail-Safes
At the local level, municipal systems are where technology directly meets daily life. As cities integrate smarter operational tools, transit networks, emergency dispatch, and local utilities must retain robust, human-operated fail-safes.
We cannot design communities that freeze the moment a third-party model fails or cloud infrastructure goes dark. We must ensure equitable access so that secure, private AI tools aren't a luxury reserved only for affluent households while everyone else is left using ad-supported systems that harvest their domestic data.
Preparing for What Comes Next
The age of AI is not something to run from, but it is not something to sleepwalk into either.
For Ward 14, this is already a land use question. Data centres need electricity, water and space. If we give up employment lands to meet those demands, where will local businesses, trades and new industries go? As work changes, will residents have places to learn new skills close to home? And are we teaching our kids to question what AI tells them, protect their privacy and use these tools with judgment and care for other people?
City Council cannot decide the future of AI. It can protect land for jobs, plan the infrastructure we will need and make room in our communities for learning at every age. We should prepare children for a changing world without losing sight of the skills that make us human: curiosity, creativity, empathy and the ability to think for ourselves.
Thank you to Paul, and to everyone who has sent thoughtful questions to our inboxes. You are asking us to think beyond the next election and explain how the decisions we make now will shape the lives of our children and neighbours. That is exactly the conversation a campaign should make room for.
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