We’ve had this conversation before — machines changing how we work. What’s different this time isn’t the destination. It’s the clock. Technologists and economists studying artificial intelligence, including entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and guests on his podcast, have floated a sobering timeline: significant labour disruption compressed into roughly two to ten years, rather than the multi-decade span over which the Industrial Revolution reshaped work. Some propose universal basic income as a bridge. Others focus on retraining. Reasonable people disagree on the solutions. Fewer seem to be reckoning with the speed. That gap — between how fast the disruption may arrive and how slowly our institutions adapt — is not an abstract risk for Alberta. We’ve already seen what happens locally when a large group of people experiences a sudden loss of economic agency with no adequate transition in place. The trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa and rattled this province in 2022 wasn’t about artificial intelligence. But it was, in part, a preview of what abrupt disruption to people’s ability to work can produce when the institutions meant to absorb the shock aren’t ready: volatility, distrust, and a rupture between citizens and the systems meant to serve them. I raise it not to relitigate that protest, but because it is local, recent, and instructive. We don’t have to imagine what social strain looks like here. We’ve lived it. If Diamandis and his guests are even directionally right about timeline, the question for Alberta isn’t whether AI transition is good or bad — that debate will run in circles for years and settle nothing. The real question is narrower and more urgent: do we have the governance infrastructure to absorb a fast transition without the kind of rupture we’ve already seen once this decade? Right now, I don’t think we do. And this is where rule of law stops being a courtroom concept and becomes economic infrastructure. Access to justice, retraining pathways, dispute resolution mechanisms, and clear legal frameworks for how AI tools get deployed in workplaces are not side issues to an AI transition — they are the shock absorbers. A worker displaced by automation who can’t get timely legal advice about severance, retraining entitlements, or new employment terms is a worker with fewer off-ramps and more grievance. Multiply that by a compressed timeline, and you have the conditions for exactly the kind of instability Alberta has already experienced. This is why I’ve spent the past year working to build the Rule of Law and AI Institute here in Red Deer — not as an academic exercise, but as ground-level civic infrastructure. The goal isn’t to slow down technological progress or to pick a side in the AI-optimist-versus-AI-pessimist debate. It’s to make sure that when disruption arrives, whatever its pace, the legal and institutional scaffolding exists to catch people before they fall through. Central Alberta has a chance to lead here, precisely because it is not Ottawa or Silicon Valley. We are close enough to the people affected by economic disruption to see it coming, and small enough to build responsive infrastructure before a crisis forces our hand. That is a genuine advantage, if we use it. I don’t know whether Diamandis’s timeline will prove accurate. Forecasts about technological change usually miss the mark in one direction or another. But betting our province’s stability on being wrong seems like a poor wager. The convoy taught us what happens when disruption outruns our institutions. AI may be about to test that lesson again, on a larger scale and a shorter clock. The work now isn’t to argue about whether the future arrives. It’s to make sure Alberta is ready when it does.

----

This article was first published in the Red Deer Advocate https://reddeeradvocate.com/2026/08/13/lady-justice-the-clock-is-the-problem-not-just-the-robot/