We put the full program up on September 21 and skipped the part where we tell you about it. Fixing that now.
Futureproof Festival runs three days at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, October 28-30. Here is how the days go, in order, and a handful of the sessions we would tell a friend not to miss.
Wednesday, October 28: Opening night
Badges from noon, the party from five, and a welcome to Squamish territory at 6:30 before anything else is said from the stage. Then Amber Case, who wrote the book on calm technology, gives the first talk of the festival: Calm Technology in the Age of Loud Machines. After the AI Builders Fellows show their work, Brewster Kahle, who built the Internet Archive, takes the stage with What a Library Owes the People Who Aren't Born Yet. A creative AI live set hands the night to the party. Opening night, hour by hour.
Thursday, October 29: Making sense of it together
Breakfast at eight, the room starts at nine.
2:35 pm. Sarah Downey on governance for real people: nonprofits adopting AI without losing the values they run on. Then Kristen Delphos on how safety science gets translated for the public without being flattened. Both of them do this for a living, and both come back up together for questions from the room.
4:00 pm. A filmmaker and a historian, back to back. Brett Gaylor on synthetic media, surveillance, and what the documentary can still do about it. Then Stephanie Dick on where our ideas about machine intelligence came from, and who got to decide what counts as knowledge.
4:55 pm. Taleeb Noormohamed sits at the federal AI policy table. Kris Krüg sits in this room. They take the last hour of the day for one conversation about Canada's AI strategy and the people who have to live in it, with questions from the floor.
Friday, October 30: What we build next
Breakfast at eight again, then five minutes from Kris at nine to turn the corner. Thursday was where we are. Friday is what we build.
2:35 pm. Mayumi Rollings runs an animation studio that uses AI everywhere and refuses to lose the artists. Right after her, Kevin Friel, who founded the BC + AI Film Club, gives Stop Waiting for Permission: what happens when filmmakers make the thing and screen it.
4:00 pm. Michael Running Wolf builds machine learning for Indigenous language reclamation, and asks who owns the data, the systems and the future those tools make.
4:55 pm. Ben Shneiderman closes the festival. He wrote the book on human-centered AI, and he gets the whole hour for designs that hand people more power instead of replacing them.
The closing ceremony follows at six, and the closing party picks up at 7:30.
Everything else, every talk and every Q&A, is on the program page, and times can still move before October. Huge thanks to every speaker who said yes to this room.
One Festival Pass covers all three days, closing party included. Get yours here.
Come curious. Leave with your people.
Auditorium photo: Michelle Diamond.