Most AI coverage is about the models. Nault covers the buildings.

Everyone is covering what AI can do. Far fewer are covering where it physically lives: the data centres arriving in rural municipalities with enormous demands for electricity, water, land, and public infrastructure. These projects often move through technical approval processes long before most residents understand what is being proposed.

Nault wrote a free public-interest handbook to help communities interrogate those processes. His argument is simple: AI becomes a land, energy, and water story in rural communities long before it becomes a workplace tool or consumer product.

The comforting version of the digital economy says that technology companies took while the public merely lost. Nault argues that the reality is harder: companies designed systems around manipulation, opacity, dependency, and unequal power, but the public also continued trading personal information for convenience long after the bargain became visible.

The same society now expressing shock about artificial intelligence continues supplying platforms with data every day. This is not simply a history of something done to us. It is a conversation about the choices we are still making inside systems deliberately built to make refusal difficult.

Nault has made this argument in two forms: in research, and in his novel RePHleXions — set in a 2035 where a network runs daily life because everyone accepted it, one convenience at a time.

Think tanks have funders. Universities have donors and institutional pressures. Pundits often depend on access. Nault works without a university affiliation, corporate sponsor, political client, or privileged relationship to protect, publishing open-licensed civic research from rural Alberta on housing, data infrastructure, privacy, labour, public finance, and accountability.

The conversation is not whether independence automatically makes research better. It is what becomes possible when no institution is paying for the conclusion — and what standards independent work must meet to earn public trust.

Housing, energy development, data centres, privacy, employment, environmental liabilities, and public subsidies are often treated as unrelated policy files. Nault argues that they repeatedly produce the same structural questions: who makes the decision, who receives the benefit, who absorbs the risk, and who is absent from the room?

It is also not a recent framework: Nault's first novel, published in 2009, asked the same question about international debt and resource control.

This is the broad researcher-profile conversation, built through concrete Canadian examples rather than a claim to specialist authority in every field.

Nault drafts detailed civic policy proposals the way other writers draft essays: property-tax models designed to protect long-term homeowners and family farms; restrictions on ghost-job postings; grocery-pricing transparency; clawbacks when corporate subsidies fail to deliver; political compensation linked to the supports received by disabled and low-income citizens; rules governing camera-equipped wearable technology; and proposals addressing housing, labour, privacy, public accountability, and environmental risk.

No party, client, or lobby commissioned them. Together, they form a growing civic sketchbook asking what public policy might look like if it began with the people who bear the consequences.

In a DOI-registered research series, Nault argues that major digital platforms increasingly perform functions once associated with religious institutions: governing visibility, belonging, legitimacy, interpretation, and exclusion.

Algorithms become a kind of inaccessible scripture, while automated systems interpret rules, adjudicate disputes, and determine who remains visible. The claim is not that technology is literally a religion, but that platforms have acquired infrastructural powers over meaning and participation that societies once associated with churches, states, and other public institutions.

Nault often approaches the same underlying problem twice: first through research and policy, then through fiction, myth, or speculative narrative. The research explains how a system operates. The novel asks what it feels like to live inside that system — and carries the question to readers who may never open a policy paper.

The angle offers current-affairs programs a more personal conversation about the limits of evidence, the public role of storytelling, and why institutional machinery sometimes becomes clearer when translated into myth.