Explore the people and programs in the BC + AI ecosystem.
Wolves, Welders & the Wicked Problems of AI
Onstage mashup: Tsleil-Waututh First Nation councillor Dennis Thomas-Whonoak grounding the room in Indigenous futurism; Finance Minister-entrepreneur Brenda Bailey riffing on ethics, jobs, and power grids; KPMG's Mark Low pushing for Monday-morning pragmatism; UBC brass saluting values-driven research.
Audience: students in crisp name-tags, founders and funders, policy wonks, resource execs, and the many friendly faces from the mycelial BC + AI Ecosystem.
Recap—Thread by Thread
Indigenous Knowledge × AI
Dennis Thomas opened in his traditional langugage and laid down the "take only what you need" algorithm: mini-robots teaching kids sustainable berry-picking; Inuit elders + AI sonar mapping fish runs lost to climate chaos.
His bigger frame: tech that mirrors the wolf—"Takaya"—adaptive, roaming, always returning home to protect the pack." Five years of eco-restoration plus sensor data lured a wolf pack back to Indian Arm after a century. Proof-of-concept for two-eyed seeing: Western science and Indigenous law running in parallel threads.
Ethics: From Bias to Black Boxes
Minister Brenda Bailey dragged ethics out of sci-fi doom loops and into "the here-and-now mess of racism, misogyny, labour rights, and data consent."
She shouted-out the Algorithmic Justice League and reminded us that Amazon's résumé-ranker tanked any CV mentioning the "Women's Chess Club."
Facial-rec bias stats sliced the room: 95% accuracy for white faces, <70% for Black women—and the real-world arrest that followed.
Core thesis: representation is a safety feature, not a DEI slogan.
Fast Lanes / Slow Lanes
Bailey's speed matrix:
Fast → internal government ops (AI permitting triage, wildfire prediction, biodiversity lidar).
Slow-and-careful → any AI that touches citizens directly, especially "the most vulnerable walking into Service BC."
Patchwork worry → Ottawa's split tech portfolios (Industry + AI) both anchored in ON/QC, leaving B.C. stuck "across the mountains."
Jobs:The Welder Parable
Bailey's dad taught welding. Fifty years later Seaspan still can't hire enough spark-throwers.
Now one welder commands ten AI-guided rigs. Net result? More ships finished, more people hired upstream—fewer backs wrecked.
Translation: job discourse must ditch the zero-sum mindset. Roles mutate; the labour pie can still rise.
Climate & Compute
The summit finally named the elephant: AI's power-hunger.
BC Hydro just green-lit nine new renewable builds; province already nixed Bitcoin mines for being "all juice, no jobs."
Open question: do we grant similar wattage to GPU farms—if they're training wildfire models, not Doge-coins?
Voices that Popped
“They have these little mini robots … that talk to these kids about only take what you need … and it actually gave you a little warning if you took too much.” — Dennis Thomas (Wanaak)
“I hear a lot about what happens when the robots take over… That’s not where I go. I think about the racism at scale, I think about misogyny.” — Brenda Bailey
“Had there been people of colour, particularly Black women, on that team, that sure as heck wouldn’t have happened.” — Brenda Bailey
“The core question is whether we’re going to use these tools to grow the pie or fight over the same pie.”
— Mark Low
What's on the Table Right Now
Provincial Moves
- Efficiency Review + AI Lens inside Finance: every workflow is a candidate for a co-pilot.
- Digital Supercluster permitting pilot launching this summer—watch housing approvals first.
- Forestry & wildfire AI partnerships ramping (satellite+drone+edge compute).
Federal Levers
- Federal AI Funding Election Pledge—but risk of Ottawa bandwidth concentrating east of the Rockies.
- Bill C-27's AI regs died on the order paper; reboot uncertain.
Grassroots Momentum
- BC + AI Ecosystem is blooming. What started as a scrappy Vancouver AI Meetup has mushroom‑networked into the BC + AI Community: humans jamming who believe in the intrinsic value of community and organizing to build something bigger than the sum of its parts.
- Cascadia Compute‑Punk labs. Indie builders are rescuing ex‑bitcoin GPU rigs, juicing them on clean hydro, and fine‑tuning open‑source LLMs for wildfire mapping, salmon‑run forecasting, and Coast Salish language preservation. Call it Compute Punk or call it BC’s answer to Bay‑Area GPU hoarding—either way it’s turning recycled silicon into community cloud.
- BC + AI Industry Association lift‑off. The brand‑new non‑profit is channeling that street‑level charge into policy briefs, micro‑grants, and the ecosystem development—proof that the province’s AI muscle isn’t corporate trickle‑down; it’s grassroots updraft.
BC + AI Ecosystem Targets for 2025-2028
#1 Launch the Shared Compute Commons
Hydro-powered, province-backed GPU cluster with sliding-scale access for startups, labs, and First Nations data trusts.
Goal: 10 PFLOPS online by Q4-2026; 200 BC firms/research groups onboard by year two.
#2 Seed an Indigenous-Owned Land & Climate Data Trust
Built on OCAP principles—First Nations control, province guarantees sustained funding.
Use-cases: climate adaptation models, cultural heritage mapping, carbon-credit verification.
Target: first pilot datasets (Fraser watershed, old-growth biodiversity) live by Earth Day 2026.
#3 Stand-up a Provincial AI Skills Transition Fund
Bursaries + employer wage-top-ups for mid-career workers in VFX, forestry, health admin, logistics.
5,000 learners by 2027; 40% from rural or under-represented communities.
#4 Create a ServiceBC AI Sandbox
Public-facing experiments (chatbot triage, plain-language intent classification) with mandatory red-team reports published quarterly.
Metric: cut average permit turnaround 30% while maintaining zero-complaint privacy record.
#5 Turbo-charge Community Micro-grants
$4M over three years routed through AInBC & local partners; max $25k per meetup, hackathon, or rural pilot.
KPI: 50 new AI community nodes outside Metro by 2028.
#6 Forge the BC-EU Responsible AI Pact
Leverage Europe's AI Act momentum; align on model cards, audits, green compute standards; open export channels for BC climate-AI startups.
Deliverables: joint white-paper + trade mission by late 2025.
How We Get There—Operating Code
Community-First: Policy is co-created in open channels, not whispered by lobbyists.
Open-Source-Bias: Default to permissive licences unless sovereignty requires a lock-box.
Two-Eyed Seeing: Every provincial AI pilot program pairs Western engineering with Indigenous governance from day one.
Regenerative Metrics: Success ≠ GDP alone—track biodiversity restored, carbon sliced, skills uplifted.
DIY to DPI: Grassroots prototypes can and should graduate into Digital Public Infrastructure if they prove values-aligned.
Calls-to-Action for the Pack
Founders—pitch ideas that fuse creative tech, resource stewardship, and Indigenous wisdom; B.C. is the only jurisdiction brand-ready for that triangulation.
Policy shapers—join the forthcoming AI Commons design sprints (dates to be posted on the Vancouver AI Community Slack).
Researchers—plug into the Compute Commons task-force; spec out the node architecture before Ottawa reroutes the funding eastward.
Meet-up hosts—apply for micro-grants; replicate the Vancouver vibe in your town, add your regional flavour, and tell the story back.
Journalists—spotlight failures as loudly as wins; public trust is a non-renewable resource unless sunlight regenerates it.
Final Word
The summit opened with KPMG's Mark Low asking whether we'll "grow the pie or fight over the same pie." The wolf metaphor gives us the answer: roam wide, adapt fast, but always circle back to protect kin and territory.
B.C.'s AI playbook isn't Silicon Valley Lite; it's Coastal, Cultural, and Carbon-smart. The table is set—compute, skills, data sovereignty, grassroots energy, and a provincial finance minister who codes her own GPTs after midnight.
Time to eat.