Students brought pots and pans to the Nest. Canada’s AI ambitions need something harder to buy: a social licence, earned with the people expected to live with the rollout.
Writing.
AI, culture, community, and the work of making things.
-
-
Three days at the first Futureproof Festival of AI in Vancouver. Old friends, new builders, difficult questions, and what I’m taking into year two.
-
i gave my data center protest sign a lullaby.
-
Sarah Blyth, Simon Haworth, a backyard full of scientists, and whether all this clever software can make itself useful on East Hastings.
-
I went to Vancouver’s AI protest. Cedar brought the land. Stephanie brought the public-power questions. Both hands full. Now show me the deal.
-
Kris Krüg recaps Brands for Better’s Vancouver pitch night: five nonprofits, practical funding ideas, community connections and photos by Peter Holst.
-
At Capilano University’s World Tourism Day panel, a kayak guide asked what to do when AI itineraries promise glowing jellyfish that aren’t there. My answer: keep the human judgment, and build from real trips.
-
Four sessions, a hand mixed palette, and one rule: brushes and clicking only. No scripting the canvas. The failures taught me more than the finished picture did.
-
Fifteen minutes at AI Day 2.0 in Robson Square, one working mic, one bar of wifi. Both hands full, what really came out of ALL IN Montreal, and the chalk line that says no slogan gets…
-
On the last morning of ALL IN Montreal, I crossed Moment Factory, Mila and the SAT, following AI out of the conference and into games, archives, GPUs, haptic floors and a 3D map of the data…
-
Day two at ALL IN Montreal: a bomb squad for my backpack, five minutes with Justine Gauthier, two minutes with Minister Evan Solomon, and BC + AI’s transparency work in front of the people who need…
-
Ministers and mergers upstairs, chalk and wanted posters on the sidewalk. Day one at ALL IN Montréal, between the announcements and the street.
-
Canada started making its case before I even boarded: a voice model waiting on its benchmark, a room learning to play, and a plane full of strange machinery headed for Montréal.
-
Bob Mackin asked if AI would sway B.C.’s civic elections. Council had already answered by punting the data centre past the October 17 vote. Two days later, every party in town had a position.
-
Joel Hansen put me in front of the League of Innovators and North House founder cohorts for an hour. I skipped the panel and showed them the thing I actually do every day, then the room…
-
Futureproof Festival of AI is the room Vancouver has been rehearsing for, three days of art, technology, argument, and better questions at the Space Centre.
-
Neil Postman did not predict AI. He left us something more useful: a discipline for refusing to treat any technology as the weather. Here is what technological resistance looks like in 2026.
-
I marched through Vancouver in a crowd chanting ‘Fuck AI.’ Then I went home and used AI to organize my notes. That contradiction is the work.
-
Business in Vancouver got the thesis right: AI lands inside every profession. Here is the connective infrastructure B.C. still has to build and what BC + AI is already doing.