We put the full program up on September 21 and skipped the part where we tell you about it. Fixing that now.
Updated October 7 with the current program times.
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 from Anthony Joseph of the Squamish Nation 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.
2:25 pm. Sev Geraskin on who owns the infrastructure underneath all this. Then Kristen Delphos on how safety science gets translated for the public without being flattened. They come back together for ten minutes of questions about what we build, how we assess it, and how people trust it.
3:35 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.
4:25 pm. Taleeb Noormohamed sits at the federal AI policy table. Kris Krüg sits in this room. They take the last 55 minutes 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. The stage program begins at 9:30 am with Naomi Klein and Catherine Warren, in A FanTrust Conversation with Naomi Klein. Their full hour runs to 10:30, followed by a twenty-minute coffee break. Thursday was where we are. Friday is what we build.
1:20 pm. Alexandra Samuel opens the afternoon with practical ways to work with AI, followed by ten minutes of questions. Sara Blenkhorn follows at 1:50 on life-centred AI and who owns what we build.
2:10 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. Sara, Mayumi and Kevin then share ten minutes of questions.
3:30 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. Peter-Lucas Jones follows at 3:50, before their shared questions at 4:10.
4:20 pm. Ben Shneiderman closes the festival. He wrote the book on human-centered AI, and he gets 55 minutes for designs that hand people more power instead of replacing them.
The closing ceremony runs from 5:25 to 5:40. Then there is free time before the closing party picks up at 7:30.
Everything else, every talk and every Q&A, is on the program page, with all Q&A blocks limited to ten minutes. Huge thanks to every speaker who said yes to this room.
One Festival Pass covers all three days, closing party included. Get yours here.
Understand AI. Shape what comes next.
Auditorium photo: Michelle Diamond.