AI agentic overload, Yukon style

AI agentic overload, Yukon style

Published 6:30 am Sunday, September 20, 2026

A data centre used to power artificial intelligence applications is pictured. (BalticServers.com/Wikimedia Commons)

The Yukon is embarking on its first major public policy experiment with artificial intelligence (AI).

The trial isn’t official, and no one is gathering data or documenting the results, but it is a major experiment nonetheless.

I’m talking about the massive Casino mining project and its equally massive submission to YESAB, which APTN News said exceeded 20,000 pages.

Even before TikTok shortened our attention spans, it would have been considered a major challenge for policy analysts across the Yukon’s 16 governments (not counting municipalities) to slog through such a document.

Now your AI agent can read it — whether on your official account or the personal one your boss doesn’t know about — and flag the key points while you make a coffee.

It won’t just be government officials using AI on Casino either. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and their friends are like cheerful, sycophantic arms dealers, happy to offer their services to all sides in a regulatory conflict.

Environmentalists will create AI agents to flag the environmental risks, analyze the data tables and draft comments incorporating the insights from hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of other mining environmental comment letters from around the world.

Miners used to joke sardonically that each piece of data they gave YESAB multiplied into two questions in response. AI now enables even a one-person environmental organization to reply to Casino with a 20,000-page comment of its own.

The Chamber of Mines may use AI to draft letters rebutting the letters AI wrote for environmentalists.

Similar contests will occur inside governments as interdepartmental consultation processes roll out.

Project leads used to come into the office on Monday morning and sigh when their shared policy document had a hundred comments from the stakeholder-verse. How about thousands, each backed up by links to weighty policy reports from around the world?

Does the YESAB server have enough capacity for the gigabytes of comments the Casino application may generate?

AI agents across stakeholders will also be monitoring the media, legislature and social media. AI agents will generate talking points that, after humans have stuttered them onto the internet, other AI agents will rebut. In text, memes and short video.

Some players in the game may even create bot armies — maybe bot battalions is more in line with the Yukon’s size — to dominate social media and the YESAB public comment process.

The participants in the debate over Casino are in a classic prisoner’s dilemma: they might all be better off if AI never happened, but ince an adversary may use it, they are compelled to as well.

Will the deployment of all this AI firepower result in our political leaders making a better decision in the end? You can put me in the skeptic column on that one.

AI will indeed enable faster analysis and document drafting. It can scan across policy and legislation at multiple levels of government faster and more comprehensively than any human expert. It can level the playing field for citizens and small governments to do research and participate in public processes.

But I fear these benefits will be offset by overwhelmed institutions and processes, designed as they are for the human era.

Picture a minister or a chief in their office having to make a decision. Instead of a dozen file folders, memos and emails with conflicting advice, they now have a thousand times more data points. They go to meetings where, instead of talking points drafted by humans, each participant is reading from notes generated by the AI agents who are the only ones who have read the voluminous pre-read.

So everyone might be better off if AI didn’t exist, and someone — let’s call them KayakDude79@gmail.com — didn’t send you a 20,000-page treatise complete with plausible-looking engineering drawings of the tailings pond dam’s stress points that he has posted to Facebook, and which have been liked by thousands of probably fake accounts.

However, if the opponents have weaponed-up with AI agents, then you need to as well. You can’t just let your policy analysts disappear under a bot-avalanche of digital slush.

The Yukon’s Casino AI experiment is unusual in another sense. Whether AI goes well or poorly, we’re going ahead with the system. After Casino, why won’t KayakDude79 also send a 20,000-page comment about the small placer mining application near his cabin? Everyone in that intergovernmental consultation meeting will be sharing their agent’s extensive comments on that application too.

I see three options for government officials, environmental lobbyists or corporate vice presidents.

The first is to retire. Maybe it really is time to paddle the Yukon River with your dog from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait. A few good books, lots of wildlife photography and some reflective journaling instead of ending up under that avalanche of digital slush?

The second is to muddle through. This is what most of your peers will do. There will be some process, people will try to surface the relevant facts and arguments, and a decision will be made. Basically, the same as usual. If the data centres run a bit hotter this time, and there is more confusion in meetings as people figure out how to deal with KayakDude79, so what?

The third option is to point your skis downhill and try to get on top of the AI avalanche. Invest time in building your own AI agents and understanding what they can do. Get your policy analysts to get AI to faster, and redeploy their time to building agents to write slick and persuasive deliverables for humans and their agents to ingest.

You’ll either be promoted, or you can quit and start your own AI consulting firm to help everyone else deal with KayakDude79.

—Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and a winner of the Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. The audiobook version of his most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, has just been released.