AI Ethical Futures Lab #3 · Luma
Wednesday, May 6, 2026 · 6:30 PM doors / 7:00 PM startParker Street Studios · Vancouver
Four months ago, AEFL was a WhatsApp group and an idea. Now it's 30+ people having real conversations about where AI is taking us, and what we're going to do about it.
February 4: First gathering. 25 people in a room at Parker Street Studios. No agenda beyond "let's see who shows up." Turns out a lot of people had been waiting for this conversation.
March 4: Jesi Carson, design researcher with 15 years facilitating democratic processes, ran a People's AI Consultation workshop. Background: 160+ civil society organizations had signed an open letter calling out Canada's federal AI consultation as a "mad rush to a largely predetermined conclusion." Task force was industry-weighted. Survey questions were biased. Government used four LLMs to analyze 11,000+ submissions with zero transparency. Civil society responded. We did BC's part that night, small groups, clipboards, sharpies. Jesi's reasoning: "AI is very techy, but we need to be here in this space together. Let's do this with our hands, looking each other in the eye."
April 1: Second gathering. Jesi ran an open space session using prompts drawn from both the People’s AI Consultation and ongoing community discussions. Participants moved between self-organized groups exploring tensions like ethics vs rules, governance vs speed, and global consensus vs local control. In the share back, a few threads stood out: skepticism that global AI values are possible, with more interest in plural, locally grounded approaches; concern about power, inequality, and disproportionate impacts on marginalized communities; and a strong pull toward local action—especially education, community capacity, and building smaller, context-specific AI systems. The group also began asking what this lab should do—with energy building around becoming a more action-oriented, collaborative space for shared projects, resources, and collective voice.
May 6: This one. Bring your laptop.
This is a working session. Three things, in this order:
Not everyone's on all the channels. We'll get you set up: