Brains, spiders, (were)wolves and slimy eyeballs — a collection of creepy research topics that Dr. Frankenstein would appreciate! But unlike the mad scientist’s work, the research detailed below in ACS journals aims to improve human life by developing an alternative to animal testing, on-demand wound care, an edible protective coating for veggies, and informing future retinal health studies. …
Tiny, lab-grown brains. Researchers report in ACS Sensors [open access] that they grew a brain organoid in a petri dish to advance the study of neural networks without laboratory animals. After 2 years, the team’s cultured human nerve cells divided and self-organized into a 3D “mini-brain” with electrophysiological activity. Further development of this technology could lead to a brain model for researching the organization and communication patterns of human brain tissue, or maybe a lab-grown lunch option for zombies.
A web-slinging glove. By attaching spider-like spinneret devices to a glove, researchers created a “handy” system to deploy thin polymer fibers in the air. The fibers could spin wound dressings on the fly (pun intended) in hospitals, sports arenas and military field operations. Experiments with the glove are detailed in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces [behind a paywall] and do not include bites from radioactive spiders.
Wolf apple coatings.According to a paper published in ACS Food Science & Technology, [open access] a food-safe coating made from wolf apples could be a cost-effective, edible material for extending produce shelf life. Researchers extracted starch from the hearty Brazilian fruit, a staple of the maned wolf’s diet, and then applied it to baby carrots. The coated veggies maintained their bright orange color and were safe to eat after a full moon … or 15 days of room-temperature storage.
Microplastics in eyeballs.A paper in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters behind a paywall] reports a foundational study characterizing microplastics in human retinas. The researchers looked at 12 post-mortem human retinas (no eye of newt here) and found plastic particles of various types and levels in all of them. According to the team, these findings provide a crucial foundation for future studies on the potential risks and impacts of microplastics on eye health.
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Here are citations for the four papers in list order,
In an elegant fusion of art and science, researchers at Rice University have achieved a major milestone in nanomaterials engineering by uncovering how boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) — touted for their strength, thermal stability and insulating properties — can be coaxed into forming ordered liquid crystalline phases in water. Their work, published in Langmuir, the premier American Chemical Society journal in colloid and surface chemistry, was so visually striking it graced the journal’s cover.
That vibrant image, however, represents more than just the beauty of science at the nanoscale. It captures the essence of a new, scalable method to align BNNTs in aqueous solutions using a common bile-salt surfactant — sodium deoxycholate (SDC) — opening the door to next-generation materials for aerospace, electronics and beyond.
“This work is very interesting from the fundamental point of view because it shows that BNNTs can be used as model systems to study novel nanorod liquid crystals,” said Matteo Pasquali, the A.J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, professor of chemistry, materials science and nanoengineering and corresponding author on the study. “The main advantage is that BNNTs are relatively transparent and easily studied via visible light unlike carbon nanotubes, which form dark liquid crystals that are hard to examine via light microscopy.”
For first author Joe Khoury, the study was more than routine science. Trained as an architect in Syria, he transitioned to chemical engineering after moving to the U.S., but his background in visual design may have helped him see something others might have missed. During a routine purification step, he noticed that as water was filtered from the dispersion, the leftover material became thick and glowed under polarized light — a hallmark of liquid crystal formation. Inspired by this observation, the team hypothesized that increasing the SDC concentration would drive BNNTs to self-assemble into ordered nematic phases.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers conducted a meticulous series of experiments, preparing BNNT-SDC dispersions at varying concentrations. They used polarized light microscopy to observe the transition from disordered states to partially ordered and then fully ordered liquid crystalline phases. Cryogenic electron microscopy provided high-resolution confirmation of BNNT alignment.
Crucially, they produced the first comprehensive phase diagram for BNNTs in surfactant solutions — a predictive map that allows scientists to anticipate how BNNTs will behave at different concentration ratios.
“No one had done this before,” Khoury said. “Previous studies either worked at low BNNT concentrations or used too little surfactant. We showed that if you increase both in the right proportion, you can trigger liquid crystalline ordering without using harsh chemicals or complicated procedures.”
In addition to mapping phase behavior, the team followed a simple, reproducible method to turn these dispersions into thin, well-aligned BNNT films. Using a specialized blade to shear the material onto a glass slide, they fabricated transparent, robust films ideal for thermal management and structural reinforcement applications (think lighter, stronger and more heat-tolerant components in tech devices or aircraft). Using X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy, the team confirmed the alignment at the nanoscale level.
“We demonstrated that nematic alignment in solution can be preserved and translated into solid films,” Khoury said. “That makes this a highly scalable platform for next-gen materials.”
The study lays the groundwork for new research into lyotropic liquid crystals formed from nanorods. Its simplicity — no strong acids, no harsh conditions — makes it accessible to labs worldwide. And its implications stretch from theoretical physics to commercial materials engineering.
“This is just the beginning,” Pasquali said. “With this road map, we can now explore how to fine-tune BNNT alignment for specific applications. It’s not just about making films; it’s about understanding a whole new class of functional nanomaterials.”
Pasquali added that the beauty of the images was mesmerizing.
“When Joe sent me candidate images for the cover, I felt like I was looking at paintings by Dali or Van Gogh,” Pasquali said. “The cover image could be the tower of Barad-dur from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ painted by a surrealist artist.”
Khoury added that this research would not have been possible without the guidance and mentorship from his team and co-authors, including Pasquali; Angel Martí, professor and chair of chemistry and professor of bioengineering and materials science and nanoengineering at Rice; Cheol Park of NASA Langley Research Center; Lyndsey Scammell from BNNT LLC; and Yeshayahu Talmon at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, among others.
This research was supported by the Welch Foundation, BNNT LLC, the Technion Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute and Rice’s Electron Microscopy Center and its Shared Equipment Authority.
Caption: Matteo Pasquali, the A.J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, professor of chemistry, materials science and nanoengineering, and first author Joe Khoury. Credit: Rice University.
There’s seems to be a bit of a war (for credit or acknowledgement?) between Texas A&M University and Johns Hopkins University. Both universities have published almost identical news releases with some disturbing news about privacy on the internet.
New research provides first evidence of the use of browser fingerprints for online tracking.
Clearing your cookies is not enough to protect your privacy online.
New research led by Texas A&M University found that websites are covertly using browser fingerprinting — a method to uniquely identify a web browser — to track people across browser sessions and sites.
“Fingerprinting has always been a concern in the privacy community, but until now, we had no hard proof that it was actually being used to track users,” said Dr. Nitesh Saxena, cybersecurity researcher, professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Global Cyber Research Institute at Texas A&M. “Our work helps close that gap.”
When you visit a website, your browser shares a surprising amount of information, like your screen resolution, time zone, device model and more. When combined, these details create a “fingerprint” that’s often unique to your browser. Unlike cookies — which users can delete or block — fingerprinting is much harder to detect or prevent. Most users have no idea it’s happening, and even privacy-focused browsers struggle to fully block it.
“Think of it as a digital signature you didn’t know you were leaving behind,” explained co-author Zengrui Liu, a former doctoral student in Saxena’s lab. “You may look anonymous, but your device or browser gives you away.”
This research marks a turning point in how computer scientists understand the real-world use of browser fingerprinting by connecting it with the use of ads.
“While prior works have studied browser fingerprinting and its usage on different websites, ours is the first to correlate browser fingerprints and ad behaviors, essentially establishing the relationship between web tracking and fingerprinting,” said co-author Dr. Yinzhi Cao, associate professor of computer science and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. [emphasis mine]
To investigate whether websites are using fingerprinting data to track people, the researchers had to go beyond simply scanning websites for the presence of fingerprinting code. They developed a measurement framework called FPTrace, which assesses fingerprinting-based user tracking by analyzing how ad systems respond to changes in browser fingerprints. This approach is based on the insight that if browser fingerprinting influences tracking, altering fingerprints should affect advertiser bidding — where ad space is sold in real time based on the profile of the person viewing the website — and HTTP records — records of communication between a server and a browser.
“This kind of analysis lets us go beyond the surface,” said co-author Jimmy Dani, Saxena’s doctoral student. “We were able to detect not just the presence of fingerprinting, but whether it was being used to identify and target users — which is much harder to prove.”
The researchers found that tracking occurred even when users cleared or deleted cookies. The results showed notable differences in bid values and a decrease in HTTP records and syncing events when fingerprints were changed, suggesting an impact on targeting and tracking.
Additionally, some of these sites linked fingerprinting behavior to backend bidding processes — meaning fingerprint-based profiles were being used in real time, likely to tailor responses to users or pass along identifiers to third parties.
Perhaps more concerning, the researchers found that even users who explicitly opt out of tracking under privacy laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) may still be silently tracked across the web through browser fingerprinting.
Based on the results of this study, the researchers argue that current privacy tools and policies are not doing enough. They call for stronger defenses in browsers and new regulatory attention on fingerprinting practices. They hope that their FPTrace framework can help regulators audit websites and providers who participate in such activities, especially without user consent.
This research was conducted in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and presented at the ACM Web Conference (WWW) 2025.
Funding for this research is administered by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), the official research agency for Texas A&M Engineering.
New research provides first evidence of the use of browser fingerprints for online tracking
Clearing your cookies is not enough to protect your privacy online.
New research conducted by a team at Johns Hopkins and Texas A&M universities [emphasis mine] found that websites are covertly using browser fingerprinting—a method to uniquely identify a web browser—to track people across browser sessions and sites.
It’s not unusual for multiple institutions to publish news releases about the same research but rewriting them to highlight their own researchers’ contributions and almost ignoring the other institution? These examples stand out.
In any event, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
The First Early Evidence of the Use of Browser Fingerprinting for Online Tracking by Zengrui Liu, Jimmy Dani, Yinzhi Cao, Shujiang Wu, Nitesh Saxena. WWW ’25: Proceedings of the ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] on Web Conference 2025 Pages 4980 – 4995 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3696410.3714548 Published: 22 April 2025
Caption: (a) Device schematic. (b) Cross-sectional view of the device for illustrating the generation of standing bulk acoustic waves with a pressure node at the top capillary wall, which can push a cell loaded in the capillary to the top wall. (c) Illustration of the cell movement in a capillary coated with cargo-encapsulated nanoparticles under continuous flow and acoustic waves. The acoustic waves can push cells to the top wall, enabling controllable contact between cells and nanoparticles when the cells flow through the capillary along its top wall. (d) A schematic illustrating the intracellular cargo delivery process. Credit: Zhishang Li et al.
A June 18, 2025 news item on Nanowerk announces a new approach to delivering nanoparticles for therapeutic applications and more, Note: A link as been removed,
Scientists demonstrate an innovative acoustofluidics-based approach for intracellular nanoparticle delivery. This method offers a new way to transport various functional nanomaterials into different cell types, potentially revolutionizing therapeutic applications and biophysical studies.
A recent study published in Engineering (“Acoustofluidics-Based Intracellular Nanoparticle Delivery”) presents an innovative acoustofluidics-based approach for intracellular nanoparticle delivery. This method offers a new way to transport various functional nanomaterials into different cell types, potentially revolutionizing therapeutic applications and biophysical studies.
The efficient delivery of biomolecular cargos into cells is crucial for biomedical research, including gene therapies and drug delivery. However, traditional delivery methods such as endocytosis of nano-vectors, microinjection, and electroporation have limitations. They may require time-consuming processes, complex operations, or expensive equipment. Additionally, issues like low delivery efficiency and potential cell damage still exist.
The newly developed acoustofluidics-based method addresses these challenges. It uses standing acoustic waves generated in a glass capillary coated with cargo-encapsulated nanoparticles. By tuning the frequency of the acoustic waves, cells flowing through the capillary are pushed towards the capillary wall. This enables controllable contact between cells and nanoparticles, facilitating nanoparticle attachment to the cell membrane. The acoustic radiation force also increases membrane stress, which slightly deforms the cells and enhances membrane permeability, helping nanoparticles enter the cells.
In the study, researchers used two types of cargos, doxorubicin (DOX) and fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)-labeled bovine serum albumin (FBSA), to test the method. They loaded these cargos into zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) nanoparticles. The results showed that the method could successfully deliver nanoparticles loaded with different cargos into U937 and HeLa cells. The delivery efficiency was significantly enhanced compared to approaches without using acoustofluidics. What’s more, this method does not need bubbles or special acoustic contrast agents, which are often required in conventional sonoporation methods.
The researchers also investigated the properties of the cargo-encapsulated ZIF-8 nanoparticles and the impact of the delivery process on cell viability. They found that the nanoparticles had suitable characteristics for cargo encapsulation and release, and the acoustic waves and ZIF-8 decomposition had minimal effects on cell viability.
This acoustofluidics-based intracellular delivery approach provides a new option for achieving efficient and controllable intracellular delivery of biomolecular cargos. In the future, the research team plans to explore its application in delivering other types of cargo and in treating different cell types, including primary human cells. The findings of this study have the potential to contribute to the development of gene and cellular therapies, as well as fundamental research in cell mechanics.
The paper “Acoustofluidics-Based Intracellular Nanoparticle Delivery,” authored by Zhishang Li, Zhenhua Tian, Jason N. Belling, Joseph T. Rich, Haodong Zhu, Zhehan Ma, Hunter Bachman, Liang Shen, Yaosi Liang, Xiaolin Qi, Liv K. Heidenreich, Yao Gong, Shujie Yang, Wenfen Zhang, Peiran Zhang, Yingchun Fu, Yibin Ying, Steven J. Jonas, Yanbin Li, Paul S. Weiss, and Tony J. Huang. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2024.11.030. For more information about the Engineering, follow us on X (https://twitter.com/EngineeringJrnl) & like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EngineeringJrnl).
A little repetitive but here’s a link to and a citation for the paper anyway,
Acoustofluidics-Based Intracellular Nanoparticle Delivery by Zhishang Li, Zhenhua Tian, Jason N. Belling, Joseph T. Rich, Haodong Zhu, Zhehan Ma, Hunter Bachman, Liang Shen, Yaosi Liang, Xiaolin Qi, Liv K. Heidenreich, Yao Gong, Shujie Yang, Wenfen Zhang, Peiran Zhang, Yingchun Fu, Yibin Ying, Steven J. Jonas, Yanbin Li, Paul S. Weiss, Tony J. Huang. Engineering Volume 47, April 2025, Pages 130-138 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2024.11.030 Available online 14 December 2024, Version of Record 23 April 2025. Creative Commons Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International
Cellulose-based textile material can make the clothing sector more sustainable. Currently, cellulose-based textiles are mainly made from wood, but a study headed by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology points to the possibility of using agricultural waste from wheat and oat. The method is easier and requires fewer chemicals than manufacturing forest-based cellulose, and can enhance the value of waste products from agriculture.
Making clothing from water-intensive cotton has a major impact on the climate. That’s why cellulose from other raw materials has come into focus in recent years as a more resource-smart method of textile production. Up to now, the efforts have concentrated on wood-based cellulose. But in a recently published study, researchers investigated a different path for cellulose fibre manufacture, by using waste products from agriculture, which Sweden has a lot of.
The researchers tested oat husks, wheat straw, potato pulp and sugar beet pulp. Oat husks and wheat straw turned out to work best to develop a pulp, called dissolving pulp, which is used to make clothing.
“With this method, which we further developed in this study, we show that you can make textile pulp from certain agricultural waste products,” says Diana Bernin, Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers and senior researcher in the study. “This is an important step towards being able to create textiles from waste products instead of using cotton, which isn’t climate-friendly, or wood, a material that we want to use for so many things while also needing to preserve it for the benefit of the climate.”
More sustainable manufacturing with lye
The team used soda pulping as one part of the process. This means that the raw material is boiled in lye, which makes manufacturing more sustainable.
“Lye doesn’t contain any toxins or substances that impact nature,” she explains. “Soda pulping doesn’t work for wood fibres, so making textile pulp from wheat straw and oat husks requires fewer chemicals than making forest-based cellulose. It’s also a simpler procedure, in part because it doesn’t require processing such as chipping and debarking. In addition, it increases the economic value of oats and wheat, when leftovers from their production can be used as raw materials for cellulose extraction.”
Bernin says it is likely that several other agricultural waste products can be used for textile manufacture using the method her team developed. She is currently involved in an international project that has found, using the method in this study, that press-cake from grass from fields works very well to create dissolving pulp.
In continued studies that have yet to be published, the researchers have also taken another step towards practical application of the dissolving pulps, creating textile fibres based on pulp from wheat and the press-cake from grass.
Hope of using existing industries
In the long run, she sees good opportunities to use the pulp-and-paper industry, which already has technology and processes in place, to make dissolving pulp from agricultural waste.
“If we can make use of our existing industry and adjust their processes instead of building new production facilities, we’ve already come a long way,” she says.
The lead author of the study is Joanna Wojtasz, former postdoc at Chalmers and now a researcher at the innovation company Tree To Textile [TreeToTextile], which is one of the partners in the project.
“The study shows that there is a lot of potential in agricultural waste,” Wojtasz says. “We really shouldn’t disregard the opportunity to use this type of cellulose streams for our future clothing.”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Producing dissolving pulp from agricultural waste by Joanna Wojtasz, Niclas Sjöstedt, Benjamin Storm, Manuel Mammen Parayil, Amanda Ulefors, Linnea Nilsson, Maria Alejandra Hernández Leal, Anne Michud, Åsa Östlund, Tomas Rydbergb and Diana Bernin. RSC Sustainability, 2025,3, 2210-2220 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/D4SU00534A First published 21 Mar 2025
Nice to get some good news; this comes from Simon Fraser University (SFU; Vancouver, British Columbia), from an October 22, 2025 news release (also on EurekAlert),
Tens of thousands of B.C. public school students are embarking on new tech-based projects thanks to $150,000 from Simon Fraser University aimed at transforming classroom experience.
The 2025 Cmolik–SFU Grant Program supports classroom, school, and district-based science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) projects. Administered by Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Education through the Cmolik Endowment Fund, the program empowers educators to design initiatives that build critical thinking skills, foster curiosity, and create equitable opportunities for students from kindergarten to Grade 12.
“The Cmolik–SFU Grant Program has the potential to strengthen the educational experiences and learning outcomes for generations of students, and we are excited to see such an enthusiastic response from education communities across B.C.,” says Dan Laitsch, dean of education at SFU. “We deeply appreciate the transformational financial support we have received from Ellen and Russ Cmolik.”
In Coquitlam, the Expanding Equitable Access to Robotics in Middle Schools project received $25,000 to scale a pilot MakeX robotics program to all 14 middle schools, reaching 7,500 students annually and promoting gender equity in STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] education.
“Our goal is to democratize access to robotics education,” said Dave Sands, principal of technology implementation with the Coquitlam school district. “We hope to spark interest in girls—an underrepresented group in robotics—and promote overall equity in STEAM [science, technology, engineering, art + design, mathematics] education to prepare all students for future tech-driven careers.”
North Vancouver also received $25,000 for the Robotics for All: Building STEM Pathways through Teamwork, Coding, and Competition project, which will expand robotics clubs to all 26 elementary schools, pairing students with mentors and culminating in a district-wide robotics competition.
Ten more school districts received $10,000 grants for projects ranging from digital storytelling and Indigenous education to makerspaces and virtual reality:
SD27 – Cariboo-Chilcotin (Tatla Lake Elementary and Junior Secondary) Voices of the Valley: A Rural Youth Digital Newspaper project will engage students as journalists, editors, and designers to collaboratively publish multimedia newspapers using Canva, storytelling, and digital media tools.
SD33 – Chilliwack (Promontory Heights Elementary) Building Future Innovators Through Hands-on, High-tech Learning expands the school’s Makerspace with robotics kits, engineering tools, and STEM challenges.
SD37 – Delta (Hawthorne Elementary) Stories the Land Remembers and Tells Today will create a video-based curriculum that follows Indigenous hunting journeys, blending biology, culture, and reconciliation lessons for use across K–12 classrooms.
SD39 – Vancouver (J.W. Sexsmith Elementary) The Maker Mindset: Empowering Young Designers Through Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies (ADST) will embed design thinking and ADST kits—including robotics, sewing, and cardboard engineering—into K–7 classrooms.
SD41 – Burnaby (South Slope/BC School for the Deaf and Cameron Elementary) Digital Storytelling in the Library Learning Commons will transform libraries into storytelling hubs, where tools like Book Creator and stop-motion animation will be used to create multimodal stories by K-12 students.
SD51 – Boundary (Greenwood Elementary) 3D Printing and Laser Cutting Lab will expand access to modern design tools, enabling students across the district to learn digital modeling, prototyping, and hands-on problem-solving through 3D printer, Tinkercad, Canva, and LightBurn.
SD61 – Greater Victoria (Cedar Hill Middle School) Landing Stories, A Digital Witness will engage 6–8 grade students in creating digital storytelling through film, audio, and photography to document Indigenous land-based learning, guided by Indigenous Education leaders.
SD72 – Campbell River (Penfield Elementary) Our Stories, Our Strength: A Journey of Healing and Reconciliation will give students opportunities to co-create bilingual (English and a local Indigenous language) picture books and a collaborative mural using Book-Creator, Canva and Office 365.
SD81 – Fort Nelson (Fort Nelson Secondary School) VR Learning Lab will introduce Class VR technology to provide immersive experiences across subjects, enabling students in this remote community to virtually explore museums, and historic landmarks.
SD85 – Vancouver Island North (Sea View Elementary) Create Lab: A Student Innovation and Storytelling Studio will establish weekly Innovation Blocks where students design STEAM projects, experiment in a makerspace, and create podcasts, videos, and prototypes that blend technology with literacy.
Caption: Researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa (Italy) and Brown University in Providence (USA) have discovered that people sense the hand of a humanoid robot as part of their body schema, particularly when it comes to carrying out a task together, like slicing a bar of soap. Credit: IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
Researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa (Italy) and Brown University in Providence (USA) have discovered that people sense the hand of a humanoid robot as part of their body schema, particularly when it comes to carrying out a task together, like slicing a bar of soap. The study has been published in the journal iScience and can pave the way for a better design of robots that have to function in close contact with humans, such as those used in rehabilitation.
The project, led by Alessandra Sciutti, IIT Principal Investigator of the CONTACT unit at IIT, in collaboration with Brown University professor Joo-Hyun Song, explored whether unconscious mechanisms that shape interactions between humans also emerge in interactions between a person and a humanoid robot.
Researchers focused on a phenomenon known as the “near-hand effect”, in which the presence of a hand near an object alters visual attention of a person, because the brain is preparing to use the object. Moreover, the study considers the human brain’s ability to create its “body schema” to move more efficiently in the surrounding space, by integrating objects into it as well.
Through an unconscious process shaped by external stimuli, the brain builds a “body schema” that helps us avoid obstacles or grab objects without looking at them. Any tools can become part of this internal map as long as they are useful for a task, like a tennis racket that feels like an arm extension to the player who uses it daily. Since body schema is constantly evolving, the research team led by Sciutti explored whether a robot could also become part of it.
Giulia Scorza Azzarà, PhD student at IIT and first author of the study, designed and analyzed the results of experiments where people carried out a joint task with iCub, the IIT’s child-sized humanoid robot. They sliced a bar of soap together by using a steel wire, alternately pulled by the person and the robotic partner.
After the activity, researchers verified the integration of the robotic hand into the body schema, quantifying the near hand effect with the Posner cueing task. This test challenges participants to press a key as quickly as possible to indicate on which side of the screen an image appears, while an object placed right next to the screen influences their attention. Data from 30 volunteers showed a specific pattern: participants reacted faster when images appeared next to the robot’s hand, showing that their brains had treated it much like a near hand. Thanks to control experiments, researchers proved that this effect appeared only in those who had sliced the soap with the robot.
The strength of the near hand effect also depended on how the humanoid robot moved. When the robot’s gestures were broad, fluid, and well synchronized with the human ones, the effect was stronger, resulting in a better integration of iCub’s hand into the participant’s body schema. Physical closeness between the robotic hand and the person also played a role: the nearer the robot’s hand was to the participant during the slicing task, the greater the effect.
To assess how participants perceived the robot after working together on the task, researchers gathered information through questionnaires. The results show that the more participants saw iCub as competent and pleasant, the more intense the cognitive effect was. Attributing human-like traits or emotions to iCub further boosted the hand’s integration in the body schema; in other words, partnership and empathy enhanced the cognitive bond with the robot.
The team carried out experiments with a humanoid robot under controlled conditions, paving the way for a deeper understanding of human-machine interactions. Psychological factors will be essential to designing robots able to adapt to human stimuli and able to provide a more intuitive and effective robotic experience. These are crucial features for application of robotics in motor rehabilitation, virtual reality, and assistive technologies.
The research is part of the ERC-funded wHiSPER project, coordinated by IIT’s CONTACT (COgNiTive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies) unit.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Collaborating with a robot biases human spatial attention by Giulia Scorza Azzarà, Joshua Zonca, Francesco Rea, Joo-Hyun Song, Alessandra Sciutti. iScience Volume 28, Issue 7, 18 July 2025, 112791 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.112791 Available online 2 June 2025, Version of Record 18 June 2025 Under a Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 Attribution 4.0 International Deed
This paper is open access.
This business of a robot becoming an extension of your body, i.e., becoming part of you, is reminiscent of some issues brought up in my October 21, 2025 posting “Copyright, artificial intelligence, and thoughts about cyborgs,” such as, N. Katherine Hayles’s assemblages and, more specifically, the issues brought up in the section titled, “Symbiosis and your implant.”
Canadian research into relationships with domestic robots
Zhao Zhao’s (assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Guelph) September 11, 2025 essay for The Conversation highlights results from one of her recently published studies, Note: Links have been removed,
Social companion robots are no longer just science fiction. In classrooms, libraries and homes, these small machines are designed to read stories, play games or offer comfort to children. They promise to support learning and companionship, yet their role in family life often extends beyond their original purpose.
In our recent study of families in Canada and the United States, we found that even after a children’s reading robot “retired” or was no longer in active and regular use, most households chose to keep it — treating it less like a gadget and more like a member of the family.
Luka is a small, owl-shaped reading robot, designed to scan and read picture books aloud, making storytime more engaging for young children.
In 2021, my colleague Rhonda McEwen and I set out to explore how 20 families used Luka. We wanted to study not just how families used Luka initially, but how that relationship was built and maintained over time, and what Luka came to mean in the household. Our earlier work laid the foundation for this by showing how families used Luka in daily life and how the bond grew over the first months of use.
When we returned in 2025 to follow up with 19 of those families, we were surprised by what we found. Eighteen households had chosen to keep Luka, even though its reading function was no longer useful to their now-older children. The robot lingered not because it worked better than before, but because it had become meaningful.
A deep, emotional connection
Children often spoke about Luka in affectionate, human-like terms. One called it “my little brother.” Another described it as their “only pet.” These weren’t just throwaway remarks — they reflected the deep emotional place the robot had taken in their everyday lives.
Because Luka had been present during important family rituals like bedtime reading, children remembered it as a companion.
Parents shared similar feelings. Several explained that Luka felt like “part of our history.” For them, the robot had become a symbol of their children’s early years, something they could not imagine discarding. One family even held a small “retirement ceremony” before passing Luka on to a younger cousin, acknowledging its role in their household.
Other families found new, practical uses. Luka was repurposed as a music player, a night light or a display item on a bookshelf next to other keepsakes. Parents admitted they continued to charge it because it felt like “taking care of” the robot.
The device had long outlived its original purpose, yet families found ways to integrate it into daily routines.
…
Luka the robot. Image by Dr Zhao Zhao, University of Guelph
Zhao also wrote an August 8, 2025 essay about her 2025 followup study on families and their Luka robots for Frontiers Media,
What happens to a social robot after it retires?
Four years ago, we placed a small owl-shaped reading robot named Luka into 20 families’ homes. At the time, the children were preschoolers, just learning to read. Luka’s job was clear: scan the pages of physical picture books and read them aloud, helping children build early literacy skills.
That was in 2021. In 2025, we went back — not expecting to find much. The children had grown. The reading level was no longer age-appropriate. Surely, Luka’s work was done.
Instead, we found something extraordinary.
18 of 19 families still had their robot. Many were still charging it. A few used it as a music player. Some simply left it on a shelf—next to baby books and keepsakes—its eyes still glowing gently. Luka had stayed.
…
As more families bring AI-powered companions into their homes, we’ll need to better understand not only how they’re used — but how they’re remembered.
Because sometimes, the robot stays.
For the curious, here’s a link to and a citation for the 2025 followup study,
Trying to distinguish between robots and artificial intelligence (AI) can mean wading into murky waters. Not all robots have (AI) and not all AI is embodied in a robot and cyborgs add more complexity.
N. Katherine Hayles’ 2025 book “Bacteria to AI; Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts” mentioned in my October 21, 2025 posting “Copyright, artificial intelligence, and thoughts about cyborgs” does not make a distinction, which may or may not be important. We just don’t know. It seems we are in the process of redefining our relationships to the life and the objects around us as we redefine what it means to be a person.
I’ve been holding this one for a while and now, it seems like a good followup to yesterday’s, October 20, 2025 posting about “AI and the Art of Being Human,” which touches on co-writing and my October 13, 2025 posting and its mention of “Who’s afraid of AI? Arts, Sciences , and the Futures of Intelligence,” a conference and arts festival at the University of Toronto (scroll down to the “Who’s Afraid of AI …” subhead).
With the advent of some of the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and its use in creative content, the view on copyright (as a form of property) seems to be shifting. In putting this post together I’ve highlighted a blog posting that focuses on copyright and AI as it is commonly viewed. Following that piece, is a look at N. Katherine Hayles’ concept of AI as one of a number of cognitive assemblages and the implications of that concept where AI and copyright are concerned.
Then, it gets more complicated. What happens when your neural implant has an AI component? It’s question asked by members of a Canadian legal firm, McMillan LLP, a business law firm in their investigation of copyright. (The implication of this type of cognitive assemblage is not explicitly considered in Hayles’ work.) Following on the idea of a neural implant enhanced with AI, cyborg bugs (they too can have neural implants) are considered.
Uncomplicated vision of AI and copyright future
Glyn Moody’s May 15, 2025 posting on techdirt.com provides a very brief overview of the last 100 years of copyright and goes on to highlight some of the latest AI comments from tech industry titans, Note: Links have been removed,
For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good [emphasis mine], and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). Despite that fact, recent attempts to halt the constant expansion and strengthening of copyright have all foundered. Part of the problem is that there has never been a constituency with enough political clout to counter the huge power of the copyright industry and its lobbyists.
Until now. The latest iteration of artificial intelligence has captured the attention of politicians around the world [emphasis mine]. It seems that the latter can’t do enough to promote and support it, in the hope of deriving huge economic benefits, both directly, in the form of local AI companies worth trillions, and indirectly, through increased efficiency and improved services. That current favoured status has given AI leaders permission to start saying the unsayable: that copyright is an obstacle to progress [emphasis mine], and should be reined in, or at least muzzled, in order to allow AI to reach its full potential. …
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In its own suggestions for the AI Action Plan, Google spells out what this means:
Balanced copyright rules, such as fair use and text-and-data mining exceptions, have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn from prior knowledge and publicly available data, unlocking scientific and social advances. These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation. Balanced copyright laws that ensure access to publicly available scientific papers, for example, are essential for accelerating AI in science, particularly for applications that sift through scientific literature for insights or new hypotheses.
… some of the biggest personalities in the tech world have gone even further, reported here by TechCrunch:
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner, Elon Musk, quickly replied, “I agree.”
It’s not clear what exactly brought these comments on, but they come at a time when AI companies, including OpenAI (which Musk co-founded, competes with, and is challenging in court), are facing numerous lawsuits alleging that they’ve violated copyright to train their models.
Unsurprisingly, that bold suggestion provoked howls of outrage from various players in the copyright world. That was to be expected. But the fact that big names like Musk and Dorsey were happy to cause such a storm is indicative of the changed atmosphere in the world of copyright and beyond. Indeed, there are signs that the other main intellectual monopolies – patents and trademarks – are also under pressure. Calling into question the old ways of doing things in these fields will also weaken the presumption that copyright must be preserved in its current state.
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Yes, it is interesting to see tech moguls such as Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk take a more ‘enlightened’ approach to copyright. However, there may be a few twists and turns to this story as it continues to develop..
Copyright and cognitive assemblages
I need to set the stage with something coming from N. Katherine Hayles’ 2025 book “Bacteria to AI; Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts.” She suggests that we (humans) will be members in cognitive assemblages including bacteria, plants, cells, AI, and more. She then decouples cognition from consciousness and claims entities such as bacteria, etc. are capable of ‘nonconscious cognition’.
Hayles avoids the words ‘thinking’ and ‘thought’ by using cognition and providing this meaning for the word,
… “cognition is a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning” (Hayles 2017, 22 [in “Unthought: The power of the Cognitive Nonconscious”‘ University of Chicago Press]) Note: Hayles quotes herself on pp. 8-9 in 2025’s “Bacteria to AI ..”
Hayles then develops the notion of a cognitive assemblage made up of conscious (e.g. human) and nonconscious (e.g. AI agent) cognitions. The part that most interests me is where Hayles examines copyright and cognitive assemblages,
.. what happens to the whole idea of intellectual property when an AI has perused copyrighted works during its training and incorporated them into its general sense of how to produce a picture of X or a poem about Y. Already artists and stakeholders are confronting similar issues in the age of remixing and modifying existing content. how much of a picture, or a song, needs to be altered for it not to count as copyright infringement? As legal cases like this work their way through the courts, collective intelligence will doubt continue to spread through the cultures of developed countries, as more and more people come to rely on ChatGPT and similar models for more and more tasks. Thus our cultures edge toward the realization that the very idea of intellectual property as something owned by an individual who has exclusive rights to it may need to be rethought [emphasis mine] and reconceptualized on a basis consistent with the reality of collective intelligence [emphasis mine] and the pervasiveness of cognitive assemblages in producing products of value in the contemporary era. [pp. 226 – 227 in Hayles’ 2025 book, “Bacteria to AI …]
It certainly seems as if the notion of intellectual property as personal property is being seriously challenged (and not by academics alone) but this state of affairs may be temporary. In particular, the tech titans see a benefit to loosening the rules now but what happens if they see an advantage to tightening the rules?
The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and human cognition is no longer a distant sci-fi dream—it’s rapidly becoming reality. At the forefront of this revolution is Neuralink, a neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk in 2016, dedicated to creating brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that seamlessly connect the human brain to machines. With AI advancing at an unprecedented pace, Neuralink aims to bridge the gap between humans and technology, offering transformative possibilities for healthcare, communication, and even human evolution. In this article, we’ll explore how Neuralink and AI are reshaping our future, the science behind this innovation, its potential applications, and the ethical questions it raises.
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Robbie Grant, Yue Fei, and Adelaide Egan (plus Articling Students: Aki Kamoshida and Sara Toufic) have given their April 17, 2025 article for McMillan LLP, a Canadian business law firm, a (I couldn’t resist the wordplay) ‘thought provoking’ title, “Who Owns a Thought? Navigating Legal Issues in Neurotech” for a very interesting read, Note 1: Links have been removed, Note 2: I’ve included the numbers for the footnotes but not the footnotes themselves,
The ongoing expansion of Neurotechnology (or “neurotech”) for consumers is raising questions related to privacy and ownership of one’s thoughts, as well as what will happen when technology can go beyond merely influencing humans and enter the realm of control {emphasis mine}.
Last year, a group of McGill students built a mind-controlled wheelchair in just 30 days.[1] Brain2Qwerty, Meta’s neuroscience project which translates brain activity into text, claims to allow for users to “type” with their minds.[2] Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk {emphasis mine}, is beginning clinical trials in Canada testing a fully wireless, remotely controllable device to be inserted into a user’s brain {emphasis mine}.[3] This comes several years after the company released a video of a monkey playing videogames with its mind using a similar implantable device.
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The authors have included a good description of neurotech, from their April 17, 2025 article,
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Neurotech refers to technology that records, analyzes or modifies the neurons in the human nervous system. Neurotech can be broken down into three subcategories:
Neuroimaging: technology that monitors brain structure and function;
Neuromodulation: technology that influences brain function; and
Brain-Computer Interfaces or “BCIs”: technology that facilitates direct communication between the brain’s electrical activity and an external device, sometimes referred to as brain-machine interfaces.[5]
In the medical and research context, neurotech has been deployed for decades in one form or another. Neuroimaging techniques such as EEG, MRI and PET have been used to study and analyze brain activity.[6] Neuromodulation has also been used for the treatment of various diseases, such as for deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease[7] as well as for cochlear implants.[8] However, the potential for applications of neurotech beyond medical devices is a newer development, accelerated by the arrival of less intrusive neurotech devices, and innovations in artificial intelligence.
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My interests here are not the same as the authors’, the focus in this posting is solely on intellectual property, from their April 17, 2025 article,
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3. Intellectual Property
As neurotech continues to advance, it is possible that it will be able to make sense of complex, subconscious data such as dreams. This will present a host of novel IP challenges, which stem from the unique nature of the data being captured, the potential for the technology to generate new insights, and the fundamental questions about ownership and rights in a realm where personal thoughts become part of the technological process.
Ownership of Summarized Data: When neurotech is able to capture subconscious thoughts, [emphasis mine] it will likely process this data into summaries that reflect aspects of an individual’s mental state. The ownership of such summaries, however, can become contentious. On the one hand, it could be argued that the individual, as the originator of their thoughts, should own the summaries. On the other hand, one could argue that the summaries would not exist but for the processing done by the technology and hence the summaries should not be owned (or exclusively owned) by the individual. The challenge may be in determining whether the summary is a transformation of the data that makes it the product of the technology, or whether it remains simply a condensed version of the individual’s thoughts, in which case it makes sense for the individual to retain ownership.
Ownership of Creative Outputs: The situation becomes more complicated if the neurotech produces creative outputs based on the subconscious thoughts captured by the technology. For example, if the neurotech uses subconscious imagery or emotions to create art, music, or other works, who owns the rights to these works? Is the individual whose thoughts were analyzed the creator of the work, or does the technology, which has facilitated and interpreted those thoughts, hold some ownership? This issue is especially pertinent in a world where AI-generated creations are already challenging traditional ideas of IP ownership. For example, in many jurisdictions, ownership of copyrightable works is tied to the individual who conceived them.[27] Uncertainty can arise in cases where works are created with neurotech, where the individual whose thoughts are captured may not be aware of the process, or their thoughts may have been altered or combined with other information to produce the works. These uncertainties could have significant implications for IP ownership, compensation, and the extent to which individuals can control or profit from the thoughts embedded in their own subconscious minds.
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The reference to capturing data from subconscious thought and how that might be used in creative outputs is fascinating. This sounds like a description of one of Hayles’ cognitive assemblages with the complicating factor of a technology that is owned by a company. (Will Elon Musk be quite so cavalier about copyright when he could potentially own your thoughts and, consequently, your creative output?)
If you have the time (it’s an 11 minute read according to the authors), the whole April 17, 2025 article is worth it as the authors cover more issues (confidentiality, Health Canada oversight, etc.) than I have included here.
Huth [Alexander Huth, assistant professor of Neuroscience and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin] and Tang [Jerry Tang, PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas Austin] concluded that brain data, therefore, should be closely guarded, especially in the realm of consumer products. In an article on Medium from last April, Tang wrote that “decoding technology is continually improving, and the information that could be decoded from a brain scan a year from now may be very different from what can be decoded today. It is crucial that companies are transparent about what they intend to do with brain data and take measures to ensure that brain data is carefully protected.” (Yuste [Rafael Yuste, a Columbia University neuroscientist] said the Neurorights Foundation recently surveyed the user agreements of 30 neurotech companies and found that all of them claim ownership of users’ brain data — and most assert the right to sell that data to third parties. [emphases mine]) Despite these concerns, however, Huth and Tang maintained that the potential benefits of these technologies outweighed their risks, provided the proper guardrails [emphasis mine] were put in place.
UHN is proud to be selected as the first hospital in Canada to perform a pioneering neurosurgical procedure involving the Neuralink implantable device as part of the CAN-PRIME study, marking a significant milestone in the field of medical innovation.
This first procedure in Canada represents an exciting new research direction in neurosurgery and will involve the implantation of a wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) at UHN’s Toronto Western Hospital, the exclusive surgical site in Canada.
“We are incredibly proud to be at the forefront of this research advancement in neurosurgery,” says Dr. Kevin Smith, UHN’s President and CEO. “This progress is a testament to the dedication and expertise of our world-leading medical and research professionals, as well as our commitment to providing the most innovative and effective treatments for patients.
“As the first and exclusive surgical site in Canada to perform this procedure, we will be continuing to shape the future of neurological care and further defining our track record for doing what hasn’t been done.”
Neuralink has received Health Canada approval to begin recruiting for this clinical trial in Canada.
The goal of the CAN-PRIME Study (short for Canadian Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface), according to the study synopsis, is “to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with quadriplegia to control external devices with their thoughts [emphasis mine].”
Patients with limited or no ability to use both hands due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), may be eligible for the CAN-PRIME Study.
“This landmark surgery has the potential to transform and improve outcomes for patients who previously had limited options,” says Dr. Andres Lozano, the Alan and Susan Hudson Cornerstone Chair in Neurosurgery at UHN and lead of the CAN-PRIME study at UHN.
The procedure, which combines state-of-the-art technology and advanced surgical techniques, will be carried out by a multidisciplinary team of neurosurgeons, neuroscientists and medical experts at UHN.
“This is a perfect example of how scientific discovery, technological innovation, and clinical expertise come together to develop new approaches to continuously improve patient care,” says Dr. Brad Wouters, Executive Vice President of Science & Research at UHN. “As Canada’s No. 1 research hospital, we are proud to be leading this important trial in Canada that has the goal to improve the lives of individuals living with quadriplegia or ALS.”
The procedure has already generated significant attention within the medical community and further studies are planned to assess its long-term effectiveness and safety.
UHN is recognized for finding solutions beyond boundaries, achieving firsts and leading the development and implementation of the latest breakthroughs in health care to benefit patients across Canada, and around the world.
Not just human brains: cyborg bugs and other biohybrids
Brain-computer interfaces don’t have to be passively accepting instructions from humans, they could also be giving instructions to humans. I don’t have anything that makes the possibility explicit except by inference. For example, let’s look at cyborg bugs, from a May 13, 2025 article “We can turn bugs into flying, crawling RoboCops. Does that mean we should” by Carlyn Zwarenstein for salon.com, Note: Links have been removed,
Imagine a tiny fly-like drone with delicate translucent wings and multi-lensed eyes, scouting out enemies who won’t even notice it’s there. Or a substantial cockroach-like robot, off on a little trip to check out a nuclear accident, wearing a cute little backpack, fearless, regardless of what the Geiger counter says. These little engineered creatures might engage in search and rescue — surveillance, environmental or otherwise — inspecting dangerous areas you would not want to send a human being into, like a tunnel or building that could collapse at any moment, or a facility where there’s been a gas leak.
These robots are blazing new ethical terrain. That’s because they are not animals performing tasks for humans, nor are they robots that draw inspiration from nature. The drone that looks like a fly is both machine and bug. The Madagascar hissing cockroach robot doesn’t just perfectly mimic the attributes that allow cockroaches to withstand radiation and poisonous air: it is a real life animal, and it is also a mechanical creature controlled remotely. These are tiny cyborgs, though even tinier ones exist, involving microbes like bacteria or even a type of white blood cell. Like fictional police officer Alex Murphy who is remade into RoboCop, these real-life cyborgs act via algorithms rather than free will.
Even as the technology for the creation of biohybrids, of which cyborgs are just the most ethically fraught category, has advanced in leaps and bounds, separate research on animal consciousness has been revealing the basis for considering insects just as we might other animals. (If you look at a tree of life, you will see that insects are indeed animals and therefore share part of our evolutionary history: even our nervous systems are not completely alien to theirs). Do we have the right to turn insects into cyborgs that we can control to do our bidding, including our military bidding, if they feel pain or have preferences or anxieties?
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… the boundaries that keep an insect — a hawkmoth or cockroach, in one such project — under human control can be invisibly and automatically generated from the very backpack it wears, with researchers nudging it with neurostimulation pulses to guide it back within the boundaries of its invisible fence if it tries to stray away.
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As a society, you can’t really say we’ve spent significant time considering the ethics of taking a living creature and using it literally as a machine, although reporter Ariel Yu, reviewing some of the factors to take into account in a 2024 story inspired by the backpack-wearing roaches, framed the ethical dilemma not in terms of the use of an animal as a machine — you could say using an ox to pull a cart is doing that — but specifically the fact that we’re now able to take direct control of an animal’s nervous system. Though as a society we haven’t really talked this through either, within the field of bioengineering, researchers are giving it some attention.
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If it can be done to bugs and other creatures, why not us (ethics???)
The issues raised in Zwarenstein’s article could also be applied to humans. Given how I started this piece, ‘who owns a thought’ could become where did the thought come from? Could a brain-computer interface (BCI) enabled by AI be receiving thoughts from someone other than the person who has it implanted in their brain? And, if you’re the one with the BCI, how would you know? In short, could your BCI or other implant be hacked? That’s definitely a possibility researchers at Rice University (Texas, US) have prepared for according to my March 27, 2025 posting, “New security protocol to protect miniaturized wireless medical implants from cyberthreats.”
Even with no ‘interference’ and begging the question of corporate ownership, if all the thoughts weren’t ‘yours’, would you still be you?
Symbiosis and your implant
I have a striking excerpt from a September 17, 2020 post (Turning brain-controlled wireless electronic prostheses into reality plus some ethical points),
This was the most recent and most directly applicable work that I could find. From a July 24, 2019 article by Liam Drew for Nature Outlook: The brain,
“It becomes part of you,” Patient 6 said, describing the technology that enabled her, after 45 years of severe epilepsy, to halt her disabling seizures. Electrodes had been implanted on the surface of her brain that would send a signal to a hand-held device when they detected signs of impending epileptic activity. On hearing a warning from the device, Patient 6 knew to take a dose of medication to halt the coming seizure.
“You grow gradually into it and get used to it, so it then becomes a part of every day,” she told Frederic Gilbert, an ethicist who studies brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. “It became me,” she said. [emphasis mine]
Gilbert was interviewing six people who had participated in the first clinical trial of a predictive BCI to help understand how living with a computer that monitors brain activity directly affects individuals psychologically1. Patient 6’s experience was extreme: Gilbert describes her relationship with her BCI as a “radical symbiosis”.
Symbiosis is a term, borrowed from ecology, that means an intimate co-existence of two species for mutual advantage. As technologists work towards directly connecting the human brain to computers, it is increasingly being used to describe humans’ potential relationship with artificial intelligence.
Interface technologies are divided into those that ‘read’ the brain to record brain activity and decode its meaning, and those that ‘write’ to the brain to manipulate activity in specific regions and affect their function.
Commercial research is opaque, but scientists at social-media platform Facebook are known to be pursuing brain-reading techniques for use in headsets that would convert users’ brain activity into text. And neurotechnology companies such as Kernel in Los Angeles, California, and Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk in San Francisco, California, predict bidirectional coupling in which computers respond to people’s brain activity and insert information into their neural circuitry. [emphasis mine]
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This isn’t the first time I’ve used that excerpt or the first time I’ve waded into the ethics question regarding implants. For the curious, I mentioned the April 5, 2022 post “Going blind when your neural implant company flirts with bankruptcy (long read)” earlier and there’s a February 23, 2024 post “Neural (brain) implants and hype (long read)” as well as others.
So, who does own a thought?
Hayles’ notion of assemblages puts into question the notion of a ‘self’ or, if you will, an ‘I’. (Segue: Hayles will be in Toronto for the Who’s Afraid of AI? Arts, Sciences, and the Futures of Intelligence conference, October 23 – 24, 2025.) More questions have been raised with some of the older research about our relationships with AI: (1) see my December 3, 2021 posting “True love with AI (artificial intelligence): The Nature of Things explores emotional and creative AI (long read)” and newer research (2) see my upcoming post “A collaborating robot as part of your “extended” body.”
While I seem to have wandered into labyrinthine philosophical questions, I suspect lawyers will work towards more concrete definitions so that any questions that arise such as ‘who owns a thought’ can be argued and resolved in court.
The book “AI and the Art of Being Human” was available for purchase on October 14, 2025. Co-author Andrew Maynard is (in his own words) “a scientist, author, Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions, and founder of Arizona State University’s Future of Being Human community. He studies the future and how our actions influence it.”
This week, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard welcome venture capitalist and AI Salon founder Jeffrey Abbott to launch the new book AI and the Art of Being Human—a practical, hands‑on guide to thriving with AI while rediscovering what matters most. Together, they unpack where the idea came from, why they fast‑tracked the project, and how they co‑created with AI (moving from ChatGPT to Anthropic’s Claude) using a “shared compass,” voice training, and a living “lore book” to keep characters and story arcs consistent. Instead of dry case studies, the book uses vivid, cinematic global vignettes and 21 simple tools (from reflection prompts to the “conductor triangle” of data–context–intuition) to help readers shift away from competing with AI and toward value rooted in relationships, meaning, and personal dharma. The team also explores the four‑posture compass—Curiosity, Clarity, Intentionality, and Care—and how compassion and responsible innovation thread through every chapter (right down to a physical pocket card). Beyond writing, the episode pulls back the curtain on indie publishing (Waymark Works), the realities of e‑book production, and why the book is available via Amazon and mainstream book channels—alongside a call to grow intentional communities through AI Salon’s 70+ chapters worldwide. It’s an honest, practical, and hopeful conversation about building protopian futures with AI—without losing yourself.
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Jeffrey Abbott (book’s co-author) has a profile on Bliztscaling.com website’s About page,
We partner with tech founders to apply the principles of blitzscaling that we developed at Stanford University with Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman.
It all began with a simple question: What is the secret of Silicon Valley? How have startups there grown so quickly to global scale? And what are the most effective ways other startups do the same? …
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Jeff Abbott
Jeff is a Venture Capitalist at Blitzscaling Ventures, focusing on early-stage AI companies at the nexus of AI and Blitzscaling, as well as growth-stage blitzscalers in winner-takes-most markets. He spearheads the fund’s international deal-sourcing efforts and leads the Blitzscaling Ventures Fellows program. As the Managing Partner at Blitzscaling Academy, he supports founders and innovators in amplifying their scale through the Blitzscaling framework, offering tools like the Blitzscaling Toolkit and the BlitzChat bot. Jeff also founded and leads the AiSalon global community, a network for GenAI builders, investors, and partners. Known for his multi lingual abilities, he is an ecosystem builder, facilitating the scaling of companies worldwide.
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So, ‘blitzscaling’ describes a methodology for replicating the Silicon Valley tech experience? Hmm …
I found the answer in the preview, Note: Footnote not included,
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… given our focus on the intersection between AI and who we are, we weren’t content to create and tell our own stories: we wanted to live what we were writing by intentionally co-creating them with AI.
The result is a book that represents a deep and—we believe— unique collaboration with artificial intelligence. Not something churned out by ChatGPT over a weekend, but months of methodical work exploring how we could write with AI, and in the process reveal more about the art of being human than we could otherwise achieve.
As a consequence, the stories you read here, the insights we tease out of them, the tools we construct through them—are all the result of a systematic process of working with artificial intelligence. It was a process that was at times deeply frustrating. But it also led to profound moments of revelation—not because the AI was somehow better than us, or more knowledgeable, but because i was able to mirror our ideas, insights and aspirations back to us in ways that were deeply—and sometimes startlingly—generative. [pp. 8 – 9 print version; pp. 21 – 22 PDF version)
AI, humanity, and creativity
The book is topical, for example, Clea Simon wrote an October 9, 2025 article (What will AI mean for humanity?) for The Harvard Gazette. Given that Andrew and Abbott were ‘co-writing’ with AI, these excerpts are from the parts of the article that concern writing and AI, Note: Links have been removed,
What does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for humanity? That was the question at the core of “How is digital technology shaping the human soul?,” a panel discussion that drew experts from computer science to comparative literature last week.
The Oct. 1 [2025] event was the first from the Public Culture Project, a new initiative based in the office of the dean of arts and humanities. Program Director Ian Marcus Corbin, a philosopher on the neurology faculty of Harvard Medical School, said the project’s goal was putting “humanist and humanist thinking at the center of the big conversations of our age.”
“Are we becoming tech people?” Corbin asked. The answers were varied
“We as humanity are excellent at creating different tools that support our lives,” said Nataliya Kos’myna, a research scientist with the MIT Media Lab. These tools are good at making “our lives longer, but not always making our lives the happiest, the most fulfilling,” she continued, listing examples from the typewriter to the internet.
Generative AI, specifically ChatGPT, is the latest example of a tool that essentially backfires in promoting human happiness, she suggested.
She shared details of a study of 54 students from across Greater Boston whose brain activity was monitored by electroencephalography after being asked to write an essay.
One group of students was allowed to use ChatGPT, another permitted access to the internet and Google, while a third group was restricted to their own intelligence and imagination. The topics — such as “Is there true happiness?” — did not require any previous or specialized knowledge.
The results were striking: The ChatGPT group demonstrated “much less brain activity.” In addition, their essays were very similar, focusing primarily on career choices as the determinants of happiness.
The internet group tended to write about giving, while the third group focused more on the question of true happiness.
Questions illuminated the gap. All the participants were asked whether they could quote a line from their own essays, one minute after turning them in.
“Eighty-three percent of the ChatGPT group couldn’t quote anything,” compared to 11 percent from the second and third groups. ChatGPT users “didn’t feel much ownership,” of their work. They “didn’t remember, didn’t feel it was theirs.”
“Your brain needs struggle,” Kos’myna said. “It doesn’t bloom” when a task is too easy. In order to learn and engage, a task “needs to be just hard enough for you to work for this knowledge.”
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Moira Weigel, an assistant professor in comparative literature at Harvard, took the conversation back before going forward, pointing out that many of the questions discussed have captivated humans since the 19th century.
Weigel, who is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, centered her comments around five questions, which are also at the core of her introductory class, “Literature and/as AI: Humanity, Technology, and Creativity.”
“What is the purpose of work?” she asked, amending her query to add whether a “good” society should try to automate all work. “What does it mean to have, or find, your voice? Do our technologies extend our agency — or do they escape our control and control us? Can we have relationships with things that we or other human beings have created? What does it mean to say that some activity is merely technical, a craft or a skill, and when is it poesis” or art?
Looking at the influence of large language models in education, she said, “I think and hope LLMs are creating an interesting occasion to rethink what is instrumental. They scramble our perception of what education is essential,” she said. LLMs “allow us to ask how different we are from machines — and to claim the space to ask those questions.”
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Also, there’s the upcoming “Who’s afraid of AI? Arts, Sciences, and the Futures of Intelligence,” a conference and arts festival at the University of Toronto (mentioned in my October 13, 2025 posting, scroll down to the “Who’s Afraid of AI …” subhead), which has some content relevant to the points brought up at Harvard and in “”AI and the Art of Being Human.”
This is going to be a jam-packed posting with the AI experts at the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) virtual panel, a look back at a ‘testy’ exchange between Yoshua Bengio (one of Canada’s godfathers of AI) and a former diplomat from China, an update on Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon and his latest AI push, and a missive from the BC artificial intelligence community.
A Canadian Science Policy Centre AI panel on November 11, 2025
The Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) provides an October 9, 2025 update on an upcoming virtual panel being held on Remembrance Day,
[AI-Driven Misinformation Across Sectors Addressing a Cross-Societal Challenge]
Upcoming Virtual Panel[s]: November 11 [2025]
Artificial Intelligence is transforming how information is created and trusted, offering immense benefits across sectors like healthcare, education, finance, and public discourse—yet also amplifying risks such as misinformation, deepfakes, and scams that threaten public trust. This panel brings together experts from diverse fields [emphasis mine] to examine the manifestations and impacts of AI-driven misinformation and to discuss policy, regulatory, and technical solutions [emphasis mine]. The conversation will highlight practical measures—from digital literacy and content verification to platform accountability—aimed at strengthening resilience in Canada and globally.
For more information on the panel and to register, click below.
Odd timing for this event. Moving on, I found more information on the CSPC’s webpage for this event, Note: Unfortunately, links to the moderator’s and speakers’ bios could not be copied here,
Canadian Science Policy Centre Email info@sciencepolicy.ca
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This panel brings together cross-sectoral experts to examine how AI-driven misinformation manifests in their respective domains, its consequences, and how policy, regulation, and technical interventions can help mitigate harm. The discussion will explore practical pathways for action, such as digital literacy, risk audits, content verification technologies, platform responsibility, and regulatory frameworks. Attendees will leave with a nuanced understanding of both the risks and the resilience strategies being explored in Canada and globally.
Canada Research Chair in Internet & E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa See Bio
[Panelists]
Dr. Plinio Morita
Associate Professor / Director, Ubiquitous Health Technology Lab, University of Waterloo …
Dr. Nadia Naffi
Université Laval — Associate Professor of Educational Technology and expert on building human agency against AI-augmented disinformation and deepfakes. See Bio
Dr. Jutta Treviranus
Director, Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD U, Expert on AI misinformation in the Education sector and schools. See Bio
Dr. Fenwick McKelvey
Concordia University — Expert in political bots, information flows, and Canadian tech governance See Bio
Michael Geist has his own blog/website featuring posts on his ares of interest and featuring his podcast, Law Bytes. Jutta Treviranus is mentioned in my October 13, 2025 posting as a participant in “Who’s afraid of AI? Arts, Sciences, and the Futures of Intelligence,” a conference (October 23 – 24, 205) and arts festival at the University of Toronto (scroll down to find it) . She’s scheduled for a session on Thursday, October 23, 2025.
China, Canada, and the AI Action summit in February 2025
Zoe Kleinman’s February 10, 2025 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news online website also notes the encounter,
A former Chinese official poked fun at a major international AI safety report led by “AI Godfather” professor Yoshua Bengio and co-authored by 96 global experts – in front of him.
Fu Ying, former vice minister of foreign affairs and once China’s UK ambassador, is now an academic at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The pair were speaking at a panel discussion ahead of a two-day global AI summit starting in Paris on Monday [February 10, 2025].
The aim of the summit is to unite world leaders, tech executives, and academics to examine AI’s impact on society, governance, and the environment.
Fu Ying began by thanking Canada’s Prof Bengio for the “very, very long” document, adding that the Chinese translation stretched to around 400 pages and she hadn’t finished reading it.
She also had a dig at the title of the AI Safety Institute – of which Prof Bengio is a member.
China now has its own equivalent; but they decided to call it The AI Development and Safety Network, she said, because there are lots of institutes already but this wording emphasised the importance of collaboration.
The AI Action Summit is welcoming guests from 80 countries, with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Microsoft president Brad Smith and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai among the big names in US tech attending.
Elon Musk is not on the guest list but it is currently unknown whether he will decide to join them. [As of February 13, 2025, Mr. Musk did not attend the summit, which ended February 11, 2025.]
A key focus is regulating AI in an increasingly fractured world. The summit comes weeks after a seismic industry shift as China’s DeepSeek unveiled a powerful, low-cost AI model, challenging US dominance.
The pair’s heated exchanges were a symbol of global political jostling in the powerful AI arms race, but Fu Ying also expressed regret about the negative impact of current hostilities between the US and China on the progress of AI safety.
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She gave a carefully-crafted glimpse behind the curtain of China’s AI scene, describing an “explosive period” of innovation since the country first published its AI development plan in 2017, five years before ChatGPT became a viral sensation in the west.
She added that “when the pace [of development] is rapid, risky stuff occurs” but did not elaborate on what might have taken place.
“The Chinese move faster [than the west] but it’s full of problems,” she said.
Fu Ying argued that building AI tools on foundations which are open source, meaning everyone can see how they work and therefore contribute to improving them, was the most effective way to make sure the tech did not cause harm.
Most of the US tech giants do not share the tech which drives their products.
Open source offers humans “better opportunities to detect and solve problems”, she said, adding that “the lack of transparency among the giants makes people nervous”.
But Prof Bengio disagreed.
His view was that open source also left the tech wide open for criminals to misuse.
He did however concede that “from a safety point of view”, it was easier to spot issues with the viral Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek, which was built using open source architecture, than ChatGPT, whose code has not been shared by its creator OpenAI.
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Interesting, non? You can read more about Bengio’s views in an October 1, 2025 article by Rae Witte for Futurism.
In a Policy Forum, Yue Zhu and colleagues provide an overview of China’s emerging regulation for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and its potential contributions to global AI governance. Open-source AI systems from China are rapidly expanding worldwide, even as the country’s regulatory framework remains in flux. In general, AI governance suffers from fragmented approaches, a lack of clarity, and difficulty reconciling innovation with risk management, making global coordination especially hard in the face of rising controversy. Although no official AI law has yet been enacted, experts in China have drafted two influential proposals – the Model AI Law and the AI Law (Scholar’s Proposal) – which serve as key references for ongoing policy discussions. As the nation’s lawmakers prepare to draft a consolidated AI law, Zhu et al. note that the decisions will shape not only China’s innovation, but also global collaboration on AI safety, openness, and risk mitigation. Here, the authors discuss China’s emerging AI regulation as structured around 6 pillars, which, combined, stress exemptive laws, efficient adjudication, and experimentalist requirements, while safeguarding against extreme risks. This framework seeks to balance responsible oversight with pragmatic openness, allowing developers to innovate for the long term and collaborate across the global research community. According to Zhu et al., despite the need for greater clarity, harmonization, and simplification, China’s evolving model is poised to shape future legislation and contribute meaningfully to global AI governance by promoting both safety and innovation at a time when international cooperation on extreme risks is urgently needed.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
China’s emerging regulation toward an open future for AI by Yue Zhu, Bo He, Hongyu Fu, Naying Hu, Shaoqing Wu, Taolue Zhang, Xinyi Liu, Gang Xu, Linghan Zhang, and Hui Zhou. Science 9 Oct 2025Vol 390, Issue 6769 pp. 132-135 DOI: 10.1126/science.ady7922
This paper is behind a paywall.
No mention of Fu Ying or China’s ‘The AI Development and Safety Network’ but perhaps that’s in the paper.
Canada and its Minister of AI and Digital Innovation
Evan Solomon (born April 20, 1968)[citation needed] is a Canadian politician and broadcaster who has been the minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation since May 2025. A member of the Liberal Party, Solomon was elected as the member of Parliament (MP) for Toronto Centre in the April 2025 election.
He was the host of The Evan Solomon Show on Toronto-area talk radio station CFRB,[2] and a writer for Maclean’s magazine. He was the host of CTV’s national political news programs Power Play and Question Period.[3] In October 2022, he moved to New York City to accept a position with the Eurasia Group as publisher of GZERO Media.[4] Solomon continued with CTV News as a “special correspondent” reporting on Canadian politics and global affairs.”[4]
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Had you asked me what background one needs to be a ‘Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation’, media would not have been my first thought. That said, sometimes people can surprise you.
Solomon appears to be an enthusiast if a June 10, 2025 article by Anja Karadeglija for The Canadian Press is to be believed,
Canada’s new minister of artificial intelligence said Tuesday [June 10, 2025] he’ll put less emphasis on AI regulation and more on finding ways to harness the technology’s economic benefits [emphases mine].
In his first speech since becoming Canada’s first-ever AI minister, Evan Solomon said Canada will move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” to make sure the economy benefits from AI.
His regulatory focus will be on data protection and privacy, he told the audience at an event in Ottawa Tuesday morning organized by the think tank Canada 2020.
Solomon said regulation isn’t about finding “a saddle to throw on the bucking bronco called AI innovation. That’s hard. But it is to make sure that the horse doesn’t kick people in the face. And we need to protect people’s data and their privacy.”
The previous government introduced a privacy and AI regulation bill that targeted high-impact AI systems. It did not become law before the election was called.
That bill is “not gone, but we have to re-examine in this new environment where we’re going to be on that,” Solomon said.
He said constraints on AI have not worked at the international level.
“It’s really hard. There’s lots of leakages,” he said. “The United States and China have no desire to buy into any constraint or regulation.”
That doesn’t mean regulation won’t exist, he said, but it will have to be assembled in steps.
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Solomon’s comments follow a global shift among governments to focus on AI adoption and away from AI safety and governance.
The first global summit focusing on AI safety was held in 2023 as experts warned of the technology’s dangers — including the risk that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. At a global meeting in Korea last year, countries agreed to launch a network of publicly backed safety institutes.
But the mood had shifted by the time this year’s AI Action Summit began in Paris. …
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Solomon outlined several priorities for his ministry — scaling up Canada’s AI industry, driving adoption and ensuring Canadians have trust in and sovereignty over the technology.
He said that includes supporting Canadian AI companies like Cohere, which “means using government as essentially an industrial policy to champion our champions.”
The federal government is putting together a task force to guide its next steps on artificial intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon is promising an update to the government’s AI strategy.
Solomon told the All In artificial intelligence conference in Montreal on Wednesday [September 24, 2025] that the “refreshed” strategy will be tabled later this year, “almost two years ahead of schedule.”
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“We need to update and move quickly,” he said in a keynote speech at the start of the conference.
The task force will include about 20 representatives from industry, academia and civil society. The government says it won’t reveal the membership until later this week.
Solomon said task force members are being asked to consult with their networks, suggest “bold, practical” ideas and report back to him in November [2025].
The group will look at various topics related to AI, including research, adoption, commercialization, investment, infrastructure, skills, and safety and security. The government is also planning to solicit input from the public. [emphasis mine]
Canada was the first country to launch a national AI strategy [the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy announced in 2016], which the government updated in 2022. The strategy focuses on commercialization, the development and adoption of AI standards, talent and research.
Solomon also teased a “major quantum initiative” coming in October [2025?] to ensure both quantum computing talent and intellectual property stay in the country.
Solomon called digital sovereignty “the most pressing policy and democratic issue of our time” and stressed the importance of Canada having its own “digital economy that someone else can’t decide to turn off.”
Solomon said the federal government’s recent focus on major projects extends to artificial intelligence. He compared current conversations on Canada’s AI framework to the way earlier generations spoke about a national railroad or highway.
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He said his government will address concerns about AI by focusing on privacy reform and modernizing Canada’s 25-year-old privacy law.
“We’re going to include protections for consumers who are concerned about things like deep fakes and protection for children, because that’s a big, big issue. And we’re going to set clear standards for the use of data so innovators have clarity to unlock investment,” Solomon said.
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The government is consulting with the public? Experience suggests that when all the major decisions will have been made; the public consultation comments will mined so officials can make some minor, unimportant tweaks.
Canada’s AI Task Force and parts of the Empire Club talk are revealed in a September 26, 2025 article by Alex Riehl for BetaKit,
Inovia Capital partner Patrick Pichette, Cohere chief artificial intelligence (AI) officer Joelle Pineau, and Build Canada founder Dan Debow are among 26 members of AI minister Evan Solomon’s AI Strategy Task Force trusted to help the federal government renew its AI strategy.
Solomon revealed the roster, filled with leading Canadian researchers and business figures, while speaking at the Empire Club in Toronto on Friday morning [September 26, 2025]. He teased its formation at the ALL IN conference earlier this week [September 24, 2025], saying the team would include “innovative thinkers from across the country.”
The group will have 30 days to add to a collective consultation process in areas including research, talent, commercialization, safety, education, infrastructure, and security.
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The full AI Strategy Task Force is listed below; each member will consult their network on specific themes.
Research and Talent
Gail Murphy, professor of computer science and vice-president – research and innovation, University of British Columbia and vice-chair at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada
Diane Gutiw, VP – global AI research lead, CGI Canada and co-chair of the Advisory Council on AI
Michael Bowling, professor of computer science and principal investigator – Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Alberta and research fellow, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and Canada CIFAR AI chair
Arvind Gupta, professor of computer science, University of Toronto
Adoption across industry and governments
Olivier Blais, co-founder and VP of AI, Moov and co-chair of the Advisory Council on AI
Cari Covent, technology executive
Dan Debow, chair of the board, Build Canada
Commercialization of AI
Louis Têtu, executive chairman, Coveo
Michael Serbinis, founder and CEO, League and board chair of the Perimeter Institute
Adam Keating, CEO and Founder, CoLab
Scaling our champions and attracting investment
Patrick Pichette, general partner, Inovia Capital
Ajay Agrawal, professor of strategic management, University of Toronto, founder, Next Canada and founder, Creative Destruction Lab
Sonia Sennik, CEO, Creative Destruction Lab
Ben Bergen, president, Council of Canadian Innovators
Building safe AI systems and public trust in AI
Mary Wells, dean of engineering, University of Waterloo
Joelle Pineau, chief AI officer, Cohere
Taylor Owen, founding director, Center [sic] for Media, Technology and Democracy [McGill University]
Education and Skills
Natiea Vinson, CEO, First Nations Technology Council
Alex Laplante, VP – cash management technology Canada, Royal Bank of Canada and board member at Mitacs
David Naylor, professor of medicine – University of Toronto
Infrastructure
Garth Gibson, chief technology and AI officer, VDURA
Ian Rae, president and CEO, Aptum
Marc Etienne Ouimette, chair of the board, Digital Moment and member, OECD One AI Group of Experts, affiliate researcher, sovereign AI, Cambridge University Bennett School of Public Policy
Security
Shelly Bruce, distinguished fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation
James Neufeld, founder and CEO, Samdesk
Sam Ramadori, co-president and executive director, LawZero
With files from Josh Scott
If you have the time, Riehl ‘s September 26, 2025 article offers more depth than may be apparent in the excerpts I’ve chosen.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Arvind Gupta’s name. I’m glad to see he’s part of this Task Force (Research and Talent). The man was treated quite shamefully at the University of British Columbia. (For the curious, this August 18, 2015 article by Ken MacQueen for Maclean’s Magazine presents a somewhat sanitized [in my opinion] review of the situation.)
One final comment, the experts on the virtual panel and members of Solomon’s Task Force are largely from Ontario and Québec. There is minor representation from others parts of the country but it is minor.
British Columbia wants entry into the national AI discussion
Just after I finished writing up this post, I received Kris Krug’s (techartist, quasi-sage, cyberpunk anti-hero from the future) October 14, 2025 communication (received via email) regarding an initiative from the BC + AI community,
Growth vs Guardrails: BC’s Framework for Steering AI
Our open letter to Minister Solomon shares what we’ve learned building community-led AI governance and how BC can help.
Ottawa created a Minister of Artificial Intelligence and just launched a national task force to shape the country’s next AI strategy. The conversation is happening right now about who gets compute, who sets the rules, and whose future this technology will serve.
Our new feature, Growth vs Guardrails [see link to letter below for ‘guardrails’], is already making the rounds in those rooms. The message is simple: if Ottawa’s foot is on the gas, BC is the steering wheel and the brakes. We can model a clean, ethical, community-led path that keeps power with people and place.
This is the time to show up together. Not as scattered voices, but as a connected movement with purpose, vision, and political gravity.
Over the past few months, almost 100 of us have joined as the new BC + AI Ecosystem Association non-profit as Founding Members. Builders. Artists. Researchers. Investors. Educators. Policymakers. People who believe that tech should serve communities, not the other way around.
Now we’re opening the door wider. Join and you’ll be part of the core group that built this from the ground up. Your membership is declaration that British Columbia deserves to shape its own AI future with ethics, creativity, and care.
If you’ve been watching from the sidelines, this is the time to lean in. We don’t do panels. We do portals. And this is the biggest one we’ve opened yet.
See you inside,
Kris Krüg Executive Director BC + AI Ecosystem Association kk@bc-ai.ca | bc-ai.ca
Canada just spun up a 30-day sprint to shape its next AI strategy. Minister Evan Solomon assembled 26 experts (mostly industry and academia) to advise on research, adoption, commercialization, safety, skills, and infrastructure.
On paper, it’s a pivot moment. In practice, it’s already drawing fire. Too much weight on scaling, not enough on governance. Too many boardrooms, not enough frontlines. Too much Ottawa, not enough ground truth.
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This is Canada’s chance to reset the DNA of its AI ecosystem.
But only if we choose regeneration over extraction, sovereign data governance over corporate capture, and community benefit over narrow interests.
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The Problem With The Task Force
Research says: The group’s stacked with expertise. But critics flag the imbalance. Where’s healthcare? Where’s civil society beyond token representation? Where are the people who’ll feel AI’s impact first: frontline workers, artists, community organizers?
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The worry:Commercialization and scaling overshadow public trust, governance, and equitable outcomes. Again.
The numbers back this up: Only 24% of Canadians have AI training. Just 38% feel confident in their knowledge. Nearly two-thirds see potential harm. 71% would trust AI more under public regulation.
We’re building a national strategy on a foundation of low literacy and eroding trust. That’s not a recipe for sovereignty. That’s a recipe for capture.
Principles for a National AI Strategy: What BC + AI Stands For
