Episode artwork courtesy of Canada Now.
Two people from Surrey came to one of our AI gatherings in Vancouver. They wanted to bring their friends. They also told me what it cost to get in and how long it took them to cross the region. Could they do something like it in Surrey?
That’s the story I told Ashley Smith on Canada Now when she asked how somebody outside the AI industry could get involved. Their question was more useful than anything I could have put in a survey. We’d made a room people wanted to be in. They showed us who could get there.
“The future does need places to sit and think.” I said that on the show. I keep thinking about who can get to those places, who can afford to stay in the room, and whether they can walk in without having made up their mind.
Meet Ashley Smith and Canada Now
Ashley and I had been in the same Vancouver technology circles since the Northern Voice days, when a conference about blogging and personal publishing could put a bunch of people in the same room who had mostly known one another online. Ashley says in the opening that she’d been following my work since early in her career. This was our first real chance to sit down one-on-one.
Ashley is an advisor, strategist and board director whose work crosses real estate, emerging technology and creative industries. She previously hosted From The Blockchain. On Canada Now she brings that curiosity to the people building things across this country. In her conversation with Cynthia Jagger on why housing gets stuck, she gets into the decisions and money behind getting a building up. When she talks to Dennis Pilarinos about Vancouver tech, she asks what stays in a city when experienced builders go on to start something else. Ashley’s introduction to Canada Now explains how the show started.
What I liked about sitting across from Ashley was how long she stayed with a question. When I said I wanted more young people in the room, she came at it as a parent. She’d seen some of the protests online and asked who I was actually seeing there. We ended up talking about what young people are already saying in the rooms they’ve made for themselves. Hear Ashley’s follow-up.
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Canada Now, season 2, episode 23. Released October 27, 2026. 54 minutes, 10 seconds.
What Surrey and a roomful of teachers taught me
The Vancouver meetup started in my studio. We outgrew it and moved to the Space Centre. A bigger room gave us more seats, and the people from Surrey showed us what a bigger room couldn’t fix. Their idea became our first regional chapter. Today Fraser Valley AI carries that Surrey work forward. I wrote up the early years in Zero to One, from meetup to movement.
Then teachers asked for a room of their own. They wanted to sit in a circle and compare where they were using AI in their classrooms and where they’d decided to leave it out. That became Ed + AI with Ethọ́s Lab. A teacher can walk in with an assignment that stopped working, a student can say how it feels to be on the receiving end of a policy, and a parent can ask what information a tool collects. The same question looks different from those three chairs.
If a tech meetup feels like the wrong door, start with a group you already trust. I told Ashley I thought professional associations and community nonprofits had a part to play here. A group of working photographers or a teachers’ association knows enough about the work to ask what a demo leaves out. That’s a good place to put a real decision on the table. Find a BC + AI community near you.
Who gets to refuse?
When Ashley asked who was showing up, I talked about my mom worrying about deepfakes and students wondering what work will be there for them. “Everybody has a valid perspective” is how I put it. Builders know what a tool can do. Students, artists and the people being asked to change how they work know where it pinches.
Ashley pressed on what happens when somebody wants to refuse AI altogether. Later I told her about seeing young people at protests and wanting to hear more from them in the spaces we host. They have good reasons to be skeptical. Imagine starting out as an illustrator and watching the people you learned from struggle to make a living. What would you want to hear from someone inviting you to an AI workshop? I wrote about the people I met and photographed at one of those protests in You Can’t Drink Data.
Watch the exchange on enthusiasm and refusal at 12:40.
SFU’s Dialogue on Technology Project reported that half of British Columbians surveyed thought AI use at work would have a more negative impact on B.C. workers, up ten percentage points from 2024. That’s worth sitting with before we run another adoption workshop. In a workplace, I’d ask who can raise an objection, what happens after they raise it, and who has the authority to change the decision. I took those questions into my AI Day talk on governance at Robson Square.
A photograph can carry more than one permission
Ashley brought us back to my photography. I told her I’d found about 1,800 of my photographs in one dataset when I looked up my work. What stayed with me was the person on the other side of the camera. They might have agreed to the portrait and to my putting it online. I never got to ask that person how they felt about a system learning from their face. The fact that I put the photo online made it possible to collect. It didn’t answer the question I would have owed the person in the frame. Hear the exchange about permission.
When Ashley asked how I make decisions about using these tools, I suggested writing a disclosure a client could actually read. For a photographer, that might mean saying when a tool touches an image, what happens to the originals, and what stays between the photographer and the person who booked the shoot. Put it where they’ll see it before they say yes. Give them time to ask about the parts that matter to them. For teams making decisions about personal information, Canada’s privacy regulators have published principles for generative AI. A short client disclosure can make a particular choice visible. The question of what the tool itself does with the material still needs an answer.
“I’m walking with both hands full.” I still want to try things with these tools. I still get angry when I think about how some of the work got there. I’ve written about that tension in Both Hands Full and in the talk I gave at Vancouver AI about training data and creative work.
Watch the exchange on holding enthusiasm and concern together at 41:40.
The question Ashley left me with
Before Futureproof, Ashley asked what I hoped I’d feel we’d accomplished the day after the festival. I’d spent years photographing events. You see who’s still talking when the stage goes dark, and who has somewhere to go together after the room clears. I wanted people to meet others they could keep learning with. There’s more on how the festival grew out of the monthly Vancouver rooms and what I took from Year One.
Near the end Ashley asked what she should leave listeners with. I’d start here. Think of one AI decision being made around you. It could be about an assignment, a contract, or something at work that used to be a conversation. Find out who’s making it and who has to live with it. If those are different people, ask when they’ll get a chance to talk to each other.
If you came here through my work, follow Ashley and Canada Now and give another episode a listen. This one is part of a much bigger conversation she’s having about how things get built in Canada.
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Drafted with AI assistance from the official Canada Now video transcript, with short excerpts reviewed against the audio.
