Kris Krüg
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Everyone got reset

Everyone got reset

Nobody's behind. The floor shifted under everyone's feet. Here's what we're building together.

Kris Krüg
January 19, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Hey friends, here's what we're talking about in BC + AI Ecosystem right now:

What do I tell my teenager about jobs? This came up in our last BC + AI Office Hours. Multiple parents with kids aged 14-20, and none of them know what career advice makes sense anymore. Entry-level positions are disappearing… but those are how people become seniors. Trades? Philosophy? Gap year? Nobody has answers, but at least we're asking the question out loud.

When your best friend is a robot: That's Alexandra Samuel's talk on January 28. She spent a year building a relationship with a custom AI named Viv and turned it into a podcast (Me + Viv).

Me + Viv

How does a smart, capable woman handle a midlife crisis in today's world? She hatches her own Al coach.

podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/me-viv/id1847891375

The documentation is honest. The questions are uncomfortable. She's keynoting our 25th monthly meetup at the Planetarium. ~30 tickets left.

What does it actually mean to go full cyborg? Not the chrome-plated fantasy, not the LinkedIn productivity cosplay, but as a daily practice, with all the mess that implies?

The soft violence of AI discourse: Erica Lapadat-Janzen works with SFU's Metacreation Lab on artist-led model training. She's asking about extraction, consent, and who gets to set the terms. Not the usual AI event fare.

AI discourse is full of soft violence: extraction dressed up as innovation, and fear dressed up as morality. Erica cuts through it with craft, showing what happens when you train on your work and own the weird outcomes.

Design thinking for vibe coders: Maya Bruck is bridging the gap between "ship fast" and "ship well." UX fundamentals for the rapid prototyping era.

Maya Bruck brings UX fundamentals to the vibe coding era, showing how to prototype rapidly with AI without sacrificing usability, accessibility, or user research.

All three are speaking January 28 at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. All-women lineup.

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 01/28

If you’ve been quietly building something, bring it. If you’re wrestling with how AI is changing you, bring that too.

luma.com/liftoff

The reset is real. I said something in BC + AI coworking last week that I keep coming back to: "Anyone learning Claude Code now has as much advantage as anyone else. Everyone kind of got reset."

That's what it feels like. Nobody's behind. The floor shifted under everyone's feet.

250 members. 35% women. Weekly coworking running. AI Film Club launched. The community is asking real questions. Interconnecting. Doing the work.

Building a Responsible & Inclusive AI Future for British Columbia

Discover BC + AI: a multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing AI ecosystem built on ethics, creativity, and community.

bc-ai.ca

All of this…. the office hours, the coworking, AI Film Club, Mind, AI & Consciousness, the meetups, the Braintrust Groupchat… runs on membership. 250 people have joined so far. $340/year for individuals, $115 for students.

What you get: members-only WhatsApp, 25% off meetup tickets, coworking invites, weekly calls with me and the team, and early access to whatever we're building next.

What we get: the ability to keep doing this without chasing sponsors or selling your attention.

If this community is useful to you, membership is how it stays alive: bc-ai.ca/membership

Come through if that sounds like your people.

This week:

Jan 22: AI + Education at Ethos Lab (free)

The ED + AI initiative inside BC + AI brings people together to slow down, compare notes, and design with care: consent‑first, equity‑minded, place‑rooted.

Jan 22: Mind, AI & Consciousness (MAC) Deepdive #9

Today’s LLMs (like GPT) spit out human-like prose, but do they mean anything by it? Or are they just statistical puppets mimicking patterns without a shred of comprehension?

Coming up:

Feb 12: AI Film Club #2 (sound & audio)

We combine film screenings with technical deep-dives, creative experiments, and real talk about how AI is changing production, post, distribution, and storytelling itself.

Feb 25: Vancouver AI: Mind, AI & Consciousness (MAC)

This month is hosted by MAC our Mind, AI, and Consciousness crew. They’re the people in the BC + AI ecosystem philosophy special interest group where people have been grappling with questions that don't have clean answers.

See you in the chat, at coworking, or at the Planetarium!

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

P.S. Recent videos worth your time:

The Squatchie Awards: Six awards for the people who made this ecosystem more real in 2025. Not for followers. For showing up and building.

AI Film Club: Launch Night: The first meetup for filmmakers, animators, and creative technologists exploring how AI is transforming film, video, and work itself. Monthly. In-person. Vancouver.

Sev Geraskin: Community Spotlight: A founder's journey from hackathon prompt to nonprofit AI work. What happens when you build with soul instead of scale.

Gabriel George Sr. Welcome & Peace Song: Elder Gabriel George Sr. of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation opened Meetup #24 with teachings on land, water, and relatives. This is how we start.

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