Hey friends,

There is a lot of noise right now.

AI as miracle. AI as monster. AI as pitch deck. AI as weather system. AI as slot machine. AI as policy memo. AI as the thing your boss discovered yesterday and now everyone has to become a wizard by Friday.

I do not think the answer is more certainty.

I think the answer is better questions.

Better conversations. Better experiments. Better gatherings where the people building the future actually have to sit beside the people who will have to live inside it.

That is what we are building with Vancouver AI and BC + AI: a place where builders and skeptics can argue productively, where artists and engineers are not treated as different species, where public interest is not an afterthought, and where nobody has to sand off their questions to participate.

Next Wednesday, we're back at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre for Vancouver AI Meetup #30.

It is World Cup season in Vancouver. The city is awake. The dome is waiting. Rick Glumac, B.C.'s Minister of State for AI & New Technologies, is joining us to talk about what he's seen as research, companies, policy, and ecosystem-building start moving from theory into the marketplace.

It should be a banger, in the technical civic sense.

Also the regular sense.

If you have never been to one of our nights, this is a very good one to start with.

We also just dropped two videos from last month that capture the deeper signal.

Dr. Rachel Horst gave us an anti-slop machine: a way of thinking about AI literacy that keeps humans, learning, agency, and weirdness intact.

Andrea Mills from the Internet Archive talked about saving the open web, and why the fight for public memory is not some dusty librarian side quest. It is central to whatever comes next.

If you have ever wondered what Vancouver AI and BC + AI are actually about, watch those talks.

Curious, critical, grounded, practical, slightly feral, and allergic to bullshit.

And then come next week.

I'm also starting to properly tease Futureproof Festival.

October 28-30 2026. Three days at the Space Centre for the people who still believe nuance matters.

The shape is getting clearer now.

Futureproof is an ideas festival for the people who know this moment is bigger than software.

Not just AI people talking to AI people.

Artists beside engineers. Founders beside skeptics. Educators beside toolmakers. Policy people beside weirdos. Builders beside critics. People trying to ship things beside people asking whether those things should exist.

That is where the good ideas usually hide.

The best gatherings in the world mix these worlds on purpose. Musicians do not only need more musicians. Builders do not only need more builders. AI people absolutely do not only need more AI people.

We need better conversations. We need stranger experiments.

We need a few properly alive parties where the future is not being sold to us, but argued over, tested, remixed, and made more human before it hardens around us.

The speaker submission portal is coming soon, and I want this community's fingerprints all over the program.

The guiding question is simple:

What is the talk you want to hear, or give, that you are not hearing on other stages?

What should we be talking about?
Who needs to be there?
What are the hard questions that keep getting dodged?
What do we need to understand before this future gets poured into concrete?

Next week, I'll share a few hints about the first out-of-town guests we've booked.

Block the dates now.

Futureproof is not landing from orbit. It is growing out of these conversations.

Hope to see you next week,

--
Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Join the non-profit → bc-ai.ca/membership/
Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.