Wolves, Welders & the Wicked Problems of AI
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The Peter Dhillon Centre's 10-year birthday bash morphed into a rolling debate on "The Promise & Peril of AI."
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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.
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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.
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.