Summary
Notes
Transcript
Hi, I'm Antonia, and I'm currently based in a subway right now, so sorry for all the looting here in the background. I am the founder executive director of the Institutional Society, and we run an innovation program in Los Angeles, California. Trying to increase representation. I can see that. Simon? Hi guys. I think I'm turning to anyone who doesn't know my input. Basically, a life sciences, AI discovery company based in the UK without posts in China and here.
Just for the context of all of you, I am deeply pissed off at the moment because we've just entered into a massive fight with one of our shareholders. And that's because the AI company is just really getting going. And hey, presto, your shareholders then pop up and say, yeah, I want a bit of that. Nice. And they've denied our options.
So the film club just wrapped our fourth meetup last week. We get anywhere from 100 to 150 people showing up, and it's centered around total noobs who have never done filmmaking before. of animation and VFX professionals just trying to see what the heck is up next.
It's worth mentioning that due to the new kind of subgroup pricing and vis-a-vis the membership and stuff, his meetup also brought in a thousand bucks at the door and people are starting to like buy memberships from coming to the thing. And so it's kind of been a cool feeder to the whole thing and is starting to be sustaining.
Absolutely. And, you know, one of the big parts of it is the prompt challenge where we've had three of these now where we put out a suggestion for a prompt to do an AI film. And we get anywhere from eight to 15 submissions every month. Wildly creative little short films. We have a showcase. We showcase the artists as well up on stage to talk about their motivations and their practice. And we really go into the ethical portions of it, too.
Awesome sauce. I'm the CTO for a funding agency that funds tech, SMEs, life sciences, cybersecurity, robotics, etc. That's my day job. At nighttime, I have a hobby doing things related to mind, AI, and consciousness. So about 240 people on the list. We're into our 12th deep dive that comes up this Thursday. Interestingly, we only allow 20 people at a time and it's high touch, high participation, but we're starting to get the interest of researchers and fairly serious folk coming out. We'll even have a local biotech company who will be doing the opening and giving us the whole rundown on organoids. So this has been pretty substantial and going in some interesting directions.
I really appreciate those intros and it shows the breadth of what we got going on here. Not represented is Jesse Carson, who's helping to lead up the AI Ethical Futures Lab. We've had three. We have participated in some national formal dialogues, and it's off to a strong start as well. So, pardon me while I bend your ear. Uncle KK story time. I have long dreamt of having an avant-garde conference of the future, next generation kind of TED Talks-y kind of thing, a mix of culture and business and science and art, et cetera. In fact, that's very much where our whole thing comes from right here.
I didn't start these meetups to start a meetup. I wanted to have this big event, and I didn't have any money or any track record, and I wanted to bootstrap it into it, and we didn't have any community. So I was like, well, we'll start hosting meetups, and we'll get some flow happening. Well, meetups took on a mind of their own, as we all know. It led to the nonprofit, which has brought us here, and it's all expanded, which brought you all into the fold.
So that's kind of one piece of context. Another is everyone keeps asking us, yo, when are you going to do an event, like a bigger event, like a full day long thing or a few days long thing or something like that, They asked us that when we were just Vancouver AI, and they're definitely asking us that now that we're BCI, especially with all sorts of other things kind of popping up around, you know, the one global AI summit and then the other Vancouver AI summit and then all in West and Web Summit.
There's all these activities in this space. And, you know, we have a really strong voice and a strong perspective and people are asking, begging, inviting us to step into this space in some way. And so I've tried to kind of like align that idea kind of with this original idea I had. doing something kind of big and interesting and unique. That's led me to the idea of doing a BCAI festival week or something like that in the fall. And I think I've maybe briefly mentioned it to each of you in some way along the evolution. The idea might be that each of us in our subgroups kind of take a day and plan a day of programming. Maybe it bounces around. Maybe one day is at Ethos. One day is at Parker Street. One day is at the Space Center for the film festival.
One day is at the life sciences thing and Loki pulls something together, SFU or something like that. Maybe that's how it goes. that we rotate things through. I imagine some, not just like five days of conferencing necessarily or something like that, but I imagine some evening events type thing that represent the unique perspective we bring to even like the meetups and stuff with performance or demo night or, oh, I forgot to mention one thing. Andrew Reed is already in from Rival. He wants to do another data storytelling hackathon, $5,000 prize one day during the festival week type thing.
Hey, Jesse Carson, I introduced Jesse a second ago, AI Ethical Futures Lab. Jesse, I'm on a roll and gonna keep going, but what you see represented here is you from Futures Lab, Loki from Mind AI and Consciousness, Kevin from AI Film, Simon from AI Life Sciences, and Antonia from Education AI. representing most of the strong arms, tentacles we got on our octopus here or whatever. And I'm spinning the tale of doing a larger festival week or conference in the fall or sometime in the future in which we all kind of take a day and program it from our subgroup and it comes together. And people can buy a ticket for one day or buy a ticket for the whole week. And we have an opening and closing party.
The closing is actually going to be anchored by the second annual AI Film Festival run by Kevin. We had a film festival last year. Just one evening, but we've got an idea now. We've even sold one ticket on Luma. But to do on October 31st, the wrap party for this thing and the closing of the AI Film Festival. So anyway, that's where I was at, Jesse. And I was saying to you all that... That was how I've been envisioning it and that's why I called this meeting. But another thing has happened that I want to add context here too, which is I'm like, I'm just really doing some soul searching here, you know? And I'm like, what is our unique voice and what is our role? And does the world just need another Vancouver downtown conference, even if it's unique festival style and bounces around to five different locations or something like, is that...
What we should be doing is the best we can do, you know, and stuff. And so I also maybe would like to do something that's a twist on this idea that might actually be like an AI retreat in nature on one of the Gulf Islands for three or five days. And it might be a medium price tag or something like that, you know, and have it be for 120 people. And just for shits and giggles, something like Hollyhock or Galliano Island or Vancouver Island somewhere down by Loki.
So, like... I come to you all with these ideas saying, should we do something big? Should we do something big in the fall that looks like this five-day festival? Should we pause that idea, even though maybe it's good, and instead focus on doing this? Because no one's doing an AI retreat like this in nature where we get together with laptops half the time and are outside the other half the time. I mean, I just know that a lot of you had a chance to experience those types of hybrid-y kind of conference-y things, and they're special.
And if you don't, you get some nice photographs. A few speeches and you go away again. And that was the last AI one this week, last week, what it's called.
That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I accept. One thing is that I want to bubble up all the awesome shit that's happening in all these subgroups. So I do believe we already have a unique perspective that we're trying to get out there into the world. I'm going to call it just this both hands full thing for the moment that, you know, we got critique in one hand, curiosity in the other, future together, that we're building resiliency through community. And I mean, that is really the heart of the message, I think, of all the stuff that we're here doing. So yeah, chance to bubble this stuff up on one hand. I also want this to be something of consequence that other people want to come in for.
It's because I'm American. I got half my network still in San Francisco. And I think we've built something here that's special. You know, Anna Serrano said in front of everybody, I think Antonia was in the room, she called BCAI an emergent hybrid grassroots organization influencing national policy. And when she says things like that, people perk up. And so I want folks to come in and cross-pollinate with us too and stuff.
Yeah. Does that sort of get there, Simon? I want a genre smashing silo. I want a genre smashing silo busting Critical and curious exploration into AI from education, life sciences, philosophy, film, and ethics. Only.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff there. But as I say, it's the criticism for me of all these events is always that you don't know But they don't wed themselves to the idea that the attendees are going to get something out of it and what that is. I agree with you.
And that's because they're also skirting a different corporate interest than we are, too. We have a different personality. Antonia.
I think there's something about making it a festival league. What comes to my mind is youth engagement and like that, while it's the AI in education, there might be something really great about actually bringing these ETFs. and like teachers to the table and engaged. in this kind of space. So that's just like, how do we all... you kind of, crunchy systems that haven't had the space to really mull it over. I feel like a festival welcomes it in versus like a conference because often teachers don't get the opportunity to go to conferences.
The superintendent, the administrators, something that involves in the average classroom teacher to be able to explore the curiosity and critique. So that's what comes to my mind. And then just also again, the temporal cycle of AI, like the strategy likely would have come out, you know, by that time, there would probably be some new evolutions. So I think October actually is a sweet spot because that's when like funding and projects and like other big political things are going to start moving.
So there might be an opportunity to respond to the policy and politics of vaccine through the creation of them.
I'm making a note too, Antonia. The first thing you said was super valid and hit me pretty hard, the youth engagement thing. We have a youth group within our org. We have a youth scholarship fund. I got to bring them in this and get them to do something too, even if it's just the Robot Club winners plus plus or something like that, maybe Blackathon plus Robot Club or something like that. But note to self, I will just directly explicitly bring in a youth component to this.
And more than curiosity, I think there's a latent need I need to understand I need to be part of and have a voice in what's happening to us. And I think governments are going to need for that conversation to take place. Companies as well who are representing AI will have that need. What I can imagine a festival addressing, to Simon's point, What the objective might be is to draw in those to a level of participation that they can't meet us in all of our groups here. It's just not their day-to-day, but they would want to. They would want to understand what's happening there. And this becomes their annual touchpoint.
This becomes where the teachers do come out, hear from the experts, hear from the AI and education group, and Not only just satisfy curiosity, but prepare themselves for change, for the future. And find grounding, find common community, find insights that they're going to need in order to deal with what's coming in the next year, two years. The thing with a lot of festivals is that there might be some information, there might be some networking, there might be just, it's a good time hanging out with people who understand what I do.
between large sections of society And those of us who are pushing the forefront here, trying to understand what the hell is going on and how quickly it's changing. So part of what we could be configuring ourselves to do is identify what the needs are in a particular part of society, particular part of the ecosystem, and really try to meet that need. I think teachers and education just sort of jumps out pretty clearly.
It could be doctors in pharma, not my pharma researcher teams. You're on the front line of that. Yeah, so I think if each of us asked who would that audience be and how would we configure ourselves to meet them in that need, Because I think it is a need, not just a curiosity.
I think not only the recipients of this, but also there are those who need the recipients to have their needs met. So I'm just pointing government as one example where they know that social license is important for their programs, for their strategy. And who's going to have that conversation? Who's going to help the public or aspects of society understand their role? And this needs to be worked out quickly, right?
There's an urgency around this. So I can see not only could we position for this, We turn around and go, who will support us, sponsor us, help make this happen because they need this to happen. And we are the ones who are able to deliver it to them.
Like they need insight from their constituents on what people think and feel about AI and how it's affecting them day to day. If there's a kind of feedback loop from the conference to those higher level policy spaces, that could be a really interesting outcome. If they're invited into the space to kind of connect directly with the people who are impacted through kind of like a participatory process within these kind of themes that we have in the conference, that could be really cool.
I still think the experts are part of this. It would be like the audience wants to be in the room when they listen to a group of experts figure out what's coming out coming next and be able to speak into it, ask questions. So it's not just educate the public.
I think that this is all speaking to, you know, we're going to hit a phase by October that those of us in the know can kind of predict. It's going to be an unfathomable new reality by that time. And people are going to, you know, who knows, we may have a COVID situation where four day work weeks are enforced. If the, you know, if the policymakers and the tech pros kind of put their stamp on it, it's done really hastily.
And people are just like, what is going on? Where is the human centric like, you know, fork in this, you know, where can I go to to make sense of this as it relates to my life? And I think we're going to have a lot of organic attrition from the general public just being like, okay, these folks have had what seemingly looks like a human-centric approach to it all this time. I'm going to check this out and see how this applies to my life. And I think that's going to be a bigger lightning rod that we need.
And a lot of the folks that are in the trenches of the VFX and animation studios, you know, blinders and not seeing the new tech coming and being able to approach it until they go to SIGGRAPH. They really hold SIGGRAPH as the lightning rod of like, okay, this is my time to cross pollinate and learn what's going on outside of my scope. If we take that example and broaden that out to like the everything that we're already tackling, I think that's the recipe for success.
I want to pause for a sec. What a blessing you all are to this community. I mean, like you embody everything we're talking about. Like you're sitting here predicting bloodbath, bloodshed, crazy change, unprecedented. And you're also like sitting here building a lifeboat, positively putting forward a response to it. You know, like freaking I want to cry. You know, it's like, yeah, anyway. And the things that are emerging are kind of the same from all of you. It's like human centric students, futures, you know, coming together, common ground, you know, resiliency. It's a lot of which helps me think a lot about the framing.
It was super niche, special interest. Nobody wants to talk about this stuff except certain people you know. What we're seeing now is the word consciousness, the question about what is AI and mind. People are wondering if they should have rights. What is being ethical? And it's not the usual people asking these questions. consideration to being something that underpins an awful lot of what the public is asking questions about. And so we don't necessarily need to go full Monty if we're going to talk about consciousness theories or any of the rest of it. But I think helping people think through questions like, what does it mean to have a mind? Why wouldn't AI have consciousness? Why shouldn't I be considering the rights of AI from a social standpoint?
These are all, I think, very topics that touch people directly but have underpinnings they may have never considered. And I think We're going to see that all across all of our interests here. But figuring out how to bring the experts in contact with or the frontrunners in contact with the public or with a segment of the public or segments of ecosystem, maybe like education, teachers as a very special segment. Yeah, figuring that out. What is the good dynamic?
I can throw it out there, but I think there really does need to be some careful, thought about how to structure this. Antonio? Antonio?
Yeah, I'm just going to, I was only available to 2.30, so I'm going to leave my point here. I just want to reemphasize that the federal government, for all intents and purposes, would have already kind of made a decision on the direction that they want to go with AI by this time. So when we think about that need and what this can be, you know, I don't know if you have space and time for, about a month or so right now, Chris, to like think about it, but there is either an orientation, there is, or it's a response, or it's kind of like, we're going to do our own thing, you know, like let's make something relevant.
Anthony, will you please text me in the next couple days with your thoughts on also doing something like a spring retreat, if that's interesting or not, or if I should like, should I also do something on the Gulf Island or on Hollyhock or something like that that is different than this?
No, I think I agree with what folks are saying and that it's an interesting point that Antonia makes about like good policy is kind of being decided. I don't know if that's, I mean, I think it's going to be decided, but there's always going to be room for like citizens to have a voice in those spaces. So I don't think we want to like write it off as having some kind of influence. I think that we can probably have an influence with what comes out of the conference.
Yeah, for the ethics group. And I was thinking something like, I don't know, it would be, I really think something like a people's consultation can be replicated like at a smaller scale. It's like, what can we do? Who's, who are the policymakers that we need to have in the room that are like, that can actually take it somewhere, you know, up the chain. I think that'd be good homework to do in advance.
This is absolutely what we should do. 'Cause like one day now is a design jam, one day is a hackathon, you know, one day looks more like a conference, one day is a film festival. Like that's a pretty cool diverse lineup of like, types of ways of engaging with the moment and the material. Like they're all kind of different. Not just topically, but like in practice. That's so cool. I love it. Okay, I will make...
I mean, ah, fuck. I guess we have to do this now. So thank you for weighing in. I'll get back to you on some ideas. What do you guys think about the... like a smaller islandy thing, you know. Oh, I guess one thing I want to say before we close this out. I look at these things as iterative. We just gotta do something this year. It's gonna be awesome no matter what we do. Like by bringing together, just offering So it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be everything we've ever dreamt of. We just have to like do it and listen and iterate. And, you know, maybe by year two, it'll be fricking knock it out of the park or whatever.
But, uh, uh, just wanted to say that too, because, you know, I push and have high standards and I'm driven and I move fast, but also, um, It's okay. Whatever happens is going to be okay. And we've got a great community to... When all those other folks that are doing those events, they don't have a community they're launching into. But in some cases, we're able to partner with them like Christine and they can come into our community and invite us all in. But we get to launch whatever we choose to do into a willing, receiving, hungry group of people that are supportive and will help make it happen. So that part's cool.
I just use that as an example. But I think there are a number of points of contact with AI and general society where social license is one thing. But I think If we agreed that we have to come along, all of us, and there isn't going to be a lot of time for every late adopters to figure it out. There is a role, I think, for Driving a conversation to include as many people as possible in order to address what comes next, which, you know, we can talk about what we think that is.
So, um... I'm going to leave it there. I will drop that one of the things that Mac has been looking at is to bring in someone very high profile that could do a very public event, several hundred people paid, and that that might be... You know, maybe there's a couple-there's a workshop I had before, that sort of thing, that is public.
public accessible but that's the kind of public outreach uh we're thinking about already as uh and it could be connected to the festival you know um so i hope that it is yeah that would be sweet if we can make it like if you want to use that time to bring in the heavy hitter and focus that energy that'd be great and i would fully support that and it may be that everyone does actually like it might be that kevin is able but by us coming together this is another one of those more than the sum of our parts thing now you're not just inviting someone in for a But a part of a bigger thing, it might be worth flying in and staying for.
I think it's 26 through 31, something like that.
Okay, of October.
See, Philippe is just, one of the other things that also came up, Philippe and SFU asked me to help do a defrag creative AI event the week before this. And I'm like, I wanted to, that came in after we booked this meeting. But I want to get back to him and say, yes, and let's do it, but move it three days later and attach it to the front of this festival week. Yeah, that'd be powerful. It would be powerful, yeah.
It's a big thing. He's already gotten some Canada Arts Council funding, and I think Internet Archive wants to host it at the Permanent. So it'd be just another sweet venue in a week of awesome shit.
I'm going to say you should do that. One dovetails into the other. The spring retreat.
The spring retreat would build the framework to make the festival even more cohesive.
I just thought of it on the drive over here, who works at Hollyhock and is Leonel Ringinbox's partner. She had a AI festival for our AI retreat at Hollyhock planned for the fall that she canceled and she bumped it to the spring and I'm realizing now the spring is almost over and that didn't happen either and so maybe they're stalled out for some reason and like maybe I can partner with Hollyhock and help them bring their thing to life but have it be our thing too or something like that.
Yeah. Though I will say, Kevin also started probably six months later than he could have, but by doing so, he had already coalesced a film community. He held the first film festival before he had the first subgroup film meetup, so he launched his film meetup into 150 people at the first one because he had already brought that community together inside our bigger community. Yeah.
So, so what I'm saying is Simon, if you use this time strategically between now and when you actually launch it through, like you're doing, keep it showing up, inviting people into a conversation, chatting up those channels. You'll, when you do finally pull the trigger, uh, you have the momentum. Yeah. Yeah. If Variational could quit sucking all the air out of your room, though.