What happens when you cross an idealist with a national AI conference? A messy speech and a message to builders in this space.
Spoken at CUCAI 2026:
Hello everyone,
I’m going to start with a land acknowledgement, but I want to use it as more than a formality. It connects directly to the purpose of this conference.
This land was the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Before this land was divided and sold, it had no single owner. Then it was taken. The transfer was done unfairly. The terms of the treaty were flawed, and the government doesn’t try to hide it. It’s widely accepted, and was only partially rectified through a settlement in 2010.
The cause of that injustice, and why it persists to this day, comes down to the uneven balance of power. The Settler economic, political, and military forces were completely alien, and utterly overwhelming in scale to the Indigenous nations living here. In that imbalance, the outcome was never in doubt.
This nature of power asymmetry is not only in the domain of history, but very present. We simply use its precedent, and the example of this land beneath our feet, as a lens by which we can reflect on today.
Just as the power asymmetries of the past cause the injustices of today, so too will the interplays between present balances of power dictate our future.
The next imbalance is already being built. Only a small number of institutions have the capacity to scrape all of the internet, the budget for sufficient compute, and the expertise in physical and digital infrastructure to train and deploy models. The structure of power in the AI industry is inherently concentrated.
Aside from the industry, we can also look at the models themselves. They are digital machines that have been fed every ounce of behavioural information we have about humans, possess structural mechanisms mirroring biological neurons, and have more capital poured into them than any other software to date. This is far from a simple recipe for prosperity. It is, however, an undeniably powerful concoction. The future land acknowledgment writes itself.
You already know the tremendous upside of raw intelligence that flows through wires. Since you’re building with it, you’ve seen it first-hand. I also won’t detail the many risks. Regardless of the direction of impact, the magnitude, which follows from power, will surely be large.
The last instance of such an impactful dual-use technology was nuclear. The difference with nuclear technology is that a year after the first nuclear weapon trial in 1945, laws were passed to keep nuclear tech strictly under government control. Only later was regulation lifted for power generation and medical isotopes, maintaining high safety standards.
The pace of AI development is too quick to rely on governments to fully regulate, and geopolitical incentives actively push against it. Companies lack economic incentives to slow development or implement safety standards. The latter has been on full public display this past week with the topic of guardrails on military use. For AI, there is also not the same cultural regard for safety as other high-impact technology industries like aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and nuclear.
This places the responsibility of development directly in the hands of the developers. And this room is populated with the AI developers of tomorrow.
No other room in Canada carries the same leverage for the future of this technology as the one you’re sitting in right now. Given this privilege, we invite you to use the weekend to talk to each other, because in the seats next to you are those who are pondering these same problems. The theme of this year’s conference is “Humans and AI.” That tension is not abstract to any of you.
This conference may mark the completion of your year-long AI project. It may also be the beginning of when you consciously decide what kind of AI future you want to see, and what role you’re going to play in building it.
We have seen what happens to those who had no say in the power that reshaped their world. Now that we are building such a power, we have the responsibility to consciously steer development toward a fair future. We are reminded of their story, and choose to write our own.
Thank you.