Vancouver AI Meetup: February 2026

The February 25 Vancouver AI Community Meetup was a Mind, AI & Consciousness takeover, moving from an opening on land, language, and AI into talks about consciousness, artificial intimacy, self-recognition, and panpsychism. The program at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre is preserved in eight public videos and a Michelle Diamond photo archive.

The full event recording is the most complete route through the night. A shorter event recap provides the quick version. Together they show how the takeover examined consciousness from several positions without merging them into one conclusion.

Four approaches to consciousness and AI

The public record begins with an opening segment on land, language, and AI. The event archive uses those terms for the segment and provides the recording as its public context.

Loki Jorgensen asked what consciousness means in a world where AI systems are increasingly present. His session established the broad question for the program: which qualities people associate with awareness, and what changes when those qualities are discussed alongside large language models and robots.

Tanya Slingsby turned toward love, identity, and artificial intimacy. The public video describes human-machine relationships becoming more common and examines what that shift could mean for attachment. The recording presents her argument in full, allowing viewers to distinguish the questions she raises from conclusions they may draw themselves.

Fiann O’Hagan presented The Mirror Test. Michel Leblond connected panpsychism, consciousness, and AI. Placed beside the earlier talks, those sessions gave the room distinct ways to discuss minds: observable tests, relationships, philosophical models, and the language used to describe awareness.

A public record of the room

The archive also includes the meetup’s community announcements, documenting the updates that sat alongside the talks.

The event page shows 20 photographs credited to Michelle Diamond. Those images are a selection from a public index of 306 photographs. The manifest credits Michelle Diamond for all 20 selected images.

For someone arriving after the fact, the archive supports two useful reading orders. Watch the short recap first and choose a speaker session to follow, or start with the full recording to keep the opening, talks, and announcements in sequence. Both routes preserve the differences between the speakers instead of compressing the night into one position on machine consciousness.