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Judy Illes, a neuroscientist and neuroethicist, discusses the intersection of AI, neuroscience, responsibility, and ethics at a Vancouver AI Community Meetup. Integrating ethics, humility, and human intuition is vital for responsible AI and neuroscience innovation.
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What happens when AI meets your brain? Dr. Judy Illes, Distinguished Professor at UBC and neuroethics pioneer, breaks down the revolution happening at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
The Ethics of Brain-AI Integration: Dr. Judy Illes Reveals What's At Stake at Vancouver AI
Holy shit, folks. Last week at the Space Centre, we witnessed something rare – actual wisdom cutting through tech hype. Dr. Judy Illes, Distinguished Professor of Neurology at UBC and neuroethics pioneer, brought the mental firepower that makes you realize how shallow most AI discourse really is.
While the rest of our lineup explored everything from exponential organizations to latent sculptures, Judy tackled the fundamental question lurking beneath it all: what happens when AI capabilities slam into the neural circuitry that makes us human?
Judy kicked things off with a mind-blowing perspective check – 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of modern neuroscience, but humans have been brain-obsessed for millennia. From Sumerians in 4000 BCE getting high on poppy plants to Hippocrates connecting epilepsy to the brain, we've been trying to crack this neural code forever.
She walked us through Leonardo da Vinci literally robbing graves to draw brains (then politely returning the cadavers afterward), through Ramon y Cajal's Nobel Prize-winning cell drawings, all the way to today's technicolor connectome images that map the brain's internal highway system.
That historical runway matters because it grounds our current AI revolution in a much longer story of humans trying to understand our own wetware.
"The brain is who we are. It is what makes us agents and have identities and personalities and be unique and the same and distinct from one another."
When Judy dropped that line, you could feel the room shift. This isn't abstract tech speculation – we're talking about the physical substrate of identity itself. She laid out two driving forces behind brain research: pure curiosity about human behavior and the urgent need to alleviate neurological and psychiatric suffering.
Those WHO stats she showed were a gut punch – the worldwide burden of neurological disease is staggering, which explains why so many researchers are willing to push boundaries to find solutions.