The Frontier Summit interrogates what it means to be human

“The event is dead,” claimed soirée curator Leiti Hsu, host of the Frontier Summit, with a flourish of her hand.

No-one, apparently, told the Vancouver tech community. The week of October 21 marked one of the biggest moments on the yearly calendar for high-profile gatherings. BC Tech’s annual Technology Impact Awards crowned its winners the day after Toronto-based media outlet BetaKit ran its town hall with Clio CEO Jack Newton. The EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards were handed out with much fanfare, and Vancouver Tech Journal, of course, hosted its sold-out event on building a fall fundraising playbook. Each featured various combinations of panels, speakers, applause, and networking. 

And throughout it all ran the Frontier Summit.

This year marked the third time the event held court in Vancouver. Created and hosted by industry group the Frontier Collective, the Summit is a three-day gathering that brings together 150 hand-picked attendees from across the world to talk about advancements in technology, art, and culture. In previous years, the symposium has sailed attendees toward Howe Sound, cable-car’d them up the Sea to Sky Gondola, co-opted rooftop bars for curated dinners, and shuttled guests to 100-year-old artist spaces. It’s a long way from a traditional networking meetup — the kind of cold, stiff-handshake event, Hsu implies, that has gone the way of dial-up internet.

Instead, says CEO Dan Burgar in the conference’s opening remarks, the Frontier Summit’s goal is to bring back humanity to professional settings. Such a non-traditional approach might be explained by the organizing outfit’s mantra. A self-described “coalition of leaders in tech, culture, and community driving forward the development and support of frontier technologies,” the Collective holds up the dual goals of positioning Vancouver as the tech capital of Canada, and as a top-five global leader in bleeding edge advancements by 2030. To do so, it has an uncanny knack for bypassing the bureaucracy that can hinder investment and growth in the city — like, for instance, inviting attendees from 20 countries to see what’s happening in Vancouver for themselves.

Given the organization’s penchant for the avant-garde, it’s almost an expectation that this year’s conference would hold more than a few surprises — and it didn’t disappoint. The Frontier Summit ran programming in the Vancouver Aquarium. It organized 20 people to build terrariums at an East Van art studio. It took guests out on a fishing boat. It curated a pottery class where individuals made clay sculptures of each others’ faces, and hosted afterparties under neon lights and skeleton mannequins where attendees could have a personal audience with the Mayor and civic leaders. With its deliberate programming, the symposium proved that it’s not just the quality of the guests that sets the event apart. The Frontier Summit is, in a word, cool.

Billed as “a confluence of hearts and minds”, the event is perhaps better characterized by the territory it covers. Woven through the discussions at the Summit is an unofficial theme: that of the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. Though its formal panels cover a wide range of topics — sustainability and climate action, creative storytelling and new narratives, health and biotech, and investment in frontier technologies — their speakers each touch on AI. 

And in some ways, the tech’s ubiquity is inevitable. AI, after all, is both a buzzword and a growing reality — the latest frontier to destabilize the mainstream. But the Summit’s approach seemed different. The human mind and machine mind held equal airtime; the focus on bringing one’s whole self to the conference rubbing up against artificial consciousness. The result was a delicate unpicking of how the two can — and will — meld.

Embracing the human

Leiti Hsu is, in short, mad. The host for the Summit carries a little bedazzled treasure chest containing curated questions like, “When did you first develop a crush on nature?” She dresses as a jellyfish at the aquarium. At a long-table dinner in the Polygon gallery, she swoops around with a giant rose sculpture on top of her head. Vancouver is “juicy”, the New York native says, comparing the city to a punnet of blueberries. She cries when thinking of a childhood soup. A quick sweep of her bio reveals that she celebrates the “art of instant beyond small-talk connection”; a parallel to her bold declaration at the Summit that “the event is dead.” If all this sounds pretentious, maybe it is. But that unpredictability — the kind where you just can’t look away — reinforces the aim of the conference: to facilitate deep conversation.

The event launched with a dive into what it means to be human. Under the rustic fir beams and oak casks of the Vancouver Urban Winery, creative director and author Dan Nelkin explored the ability to speak with humour and vulnerability. “Humanese”, as he puts it, is the competitive advantage that all brands and people possess — the ability to connect through personhood and humanity. Instead of your traditional out-of-office reply, he says, add honesty with the truth of why you’re taking time off. Brands that lead with levity build traction through relatability — think Innocent smoothies printing “stop looking at my bottom” on the underside of its packaging.

Eric Solomon, founder and CEO of the Human OS, agreed. In his keynote on how to bring out an individual’s humanity, he established how personal missions, values, personality, and positioning are a kind of operating system: a blueprint to align promises with actions. Don’t focus on return on investment, he says, but rather a return on energy. Burnout, he argues, is an epidemic, and it’s up to us to scaffold a way to combat the sickness. UBC psychology professor and happiness expert Dr. Elizabeth Dunn reinforces the message. Don’t worry, she suggests, if you are unhappy. Emotions are neither good nor bad, but rather act as a compass for self-direction. And if you are currently unhappy, evidence suggests that you will become happy again.

It’s a bold approach to open a conference with soft and squishy ideas — especially one targeted at hard-nosed tech CEOs, investors, and civic leaders. But the Summit has instinctively picked up on the tacit shift of late within tech companies. Perhaps leaders are focusing less on the hustle-culture and “growth at all costs” mentality because less capital is flowing into the ecosystem. Or maybe it’s the introduction of Gen Z into the workforce that has pulled the culture towards their much-fêted authenticity. Either way, tech firms have turned inward, and have found that instead of defining a monolithic set of professional values, the opposite is more useful — that a focus on individuals and their needs, and the experience of being human at work, is providing wins for both businesses and their people.

The idea is performative throughout the Summit. The launch of a moderator-less panel on human connectivity and meaning leads to a true debate between speakers, rewriting the traditional format of steered discussion by forcing each to ask questions to the others. The audience jumps in too, the dissolving barriers between those in the “big chairs” and the aisle-separated seats. 

That intimacy spills over into the workshop on creativity, hosted by Redshift Collective partner Jim Southcott. “Where do you find yourself to be the most creative?” he asks. “On a run,” the attendees shout uninhibitedly. “In nature.” “In the shower.” That nearly all the guests are also speakers at the Summit is a big benefit for the event — a way of levelling hierarchies so attendees can focus on people rather than titles.

Artificial thought

But examining “humanity” feels impossible without exploring its antonym — the artificial. And as the Summit moves on, AI takes a more prominent role in its panels.

It’s hard to reach a consensus on a technology that’s celebrated for its potential. But one person who holds an authority is Gary Marcus — renowned scientist, NYU professor emeritus, and best-selling author. Unlike many in the audience, Marcus is bearish on AI. Very bearish, in fact. Describing himself as a “realist”, his keynote focuses on the limitations of generative AI and artificial general intelligence as we know it. In conversation with Vancouver CEO Handol Kim, Marcus argues for the focus on specific use-cases for the tech — like Kim’s own company, which deploys AI to discover new drugs — rather than the large-language-model trickery of ChatGPT and its equivalents. Generative artificial intelligence, he suggests, isn’t very intelligent at all.

OpenAI’s GPT-5, Marcus says — a software update that will be released imminently — has been a geopolitical point of contention. He proposes how, say, if China got that update or other AI capabilities first, the country could use it to invade Taiwan. Let them try, he says. The tech is so inaccurate that a military strategy would only be “only 80 percent right.” AI that is designed to predict the next word is, unsurprisingly, great at predicting the next word — but it’s not a good basis for what intelligence is, or how we could use it. We need to “climb back down the mountain” of how AI has currently been engineered, he argues, and rebuild it a different way. Trouble is, with startups like Elon Musk’s xAI eyeing a raise with a $40 billion valuation, there’s little appetite to do so.

But today’s generative AI can still prove alluring for the human mind. Suzanne Gildert, CEO of Nirvanic, highlights how building relationships or even friendships with chatbots can be easy. Many in the audience counted themselves as having a closeness with their AI of choice, with Liz Bacelar — executive director of global tech innovation at the Estée Lauder Companies — suggesting that the service can understand you so well that you can accurately ask it to tell you something about yourself that you don’t know. “I find interacting with ChatGPT pleasurable,” says Gildert. “It encourages you and makes you feel good,” like an interactive character. It blurs the line between human and artificial friendship.

The CEO knows what she’s talking about. Her latest venture, Nirvanic, explores whether it’s possible to engineer consciousness. Building on her leadership at Sanctuary AI, which aims to create human-like intelligence in general purpose robots, Gildert now works on understanding consciousness through both biological neural systems and quantum computing simulations of neurons, which will then be applied to AI. Her bold idea is that by understanding consciousness in a practical, experimentally driven way, it’s possible to harness and engineer it for use in both artificial intelligence and human wellness. Nirvanic will have achieved its mission with an AI that is empathetically self-aware.

There’s already been a melding of human and technology, she says. Your phone, for instance, is an extension of your brain. “Try leaving your phone behind when you leave the house,” she suggests. It can be physically distressing to do so. Engineering consciousness in tech goes further, though. Gildert argues that artificial intelligence must be built in a humanlike body in order for us to have a chance at understanding it. Programming AI without a person-like form, her phenomenological argument goes, is terrifying: it would create an artificial consciousness experiencing the world in a way that we are unable to comprehend.

But embracing artificial intelligence comes with its own challenges. “Interacting with AI removes social anxiety,” says Mirjana Prpa, a researcher and product manager at Northeastern University. Toni Thai Sterrett, artist and founder of Bad Grrls Creative Club, agrees. Speaking to AIs or GPTs can be helpful, as it’s possible to rant without conforming to social niceties, she suggests. During a break between panels, standing on the rooftop of the Shipyard’s Wallace and looking back towards the downtown skyline, we talk more about this. The internet is polarizing individuals with its algorithmic echo chambers — but building a relationship with AI might be more insidious. Removing the need to observe social graces erodes skills in disagreement, debate, and compromise that are required in human interaction — and by making ourselves more comfortable with AI, we lose the chance to practice resilience. Contra to big tech’s mantra, perhaps a bit of friction is a good thing. 

Synergy and serendipity

With its explorations of the biggest issues in tech, the Frontier Summit leads with substance as much as style. And it creates a rich atmosphere that reinforces the message that CEO Dan Burgar has promoted since the inception of his Frontier Collective: that something big is going on in Vancouver. On the rooftop patio of the Parker hotel, a New York-style bar with views over the red-gold ocean sunset, Burgar tells me that a number of international attendees have asked him how they could move to Vancouver: a want triggered both by the beauty of the city as well as its technological excitement. It’s a telling statement, and one that seems unsurprising. More than other events held in the province and across North America, the Collective grasps the key to networking and investment that most others miss — that after guests have flown back home, what stays with them is how the experience made them feel. 

The Summit’s key advantage is curation. And luckily, vice president of operations and events for the Frontier Collective, Natasha Jaswal-Orságová, has impeccable taste. The selected locations — art studios, the Shipyards district, the aquarium, the Polygon gallery, a winery, a boat — reflect different aspects of Vancouver’s innovation ecosystem, showcasing the best of the city rather than the inside of a hotel ballroom. Central to the Summit is the idea of “local” — local vendors, local food, local companies — and the kind of in-the-know tourism usually hidden from out-of-towners. 

Armando Matijevich, Croatian CEO and host of SplitX Conference, agrees. “Vancouver, you’ve stolen a piece of my heart,” he says. “The energy, the food — this place has a way of pulling you in. It’s my third time here, and I already can’t wait to come back. But what really made this trip unforgettable? The people. Getting to connect and reconnect with incredible humans who are doing impactful work and building a better future for everyone they touch. I feel grateful, inspired, and more hopeful for what’s to come.”

It all comes back to humanity and AI, in a way. At the wrap party, one attendee says with a smile, “It’s like summer camp for adults.” The Frontier Collective seems to intuitively understand that building genuine connections — the kind that sparks a real relationship — requires people to have fun. Friendships are forged through play — or perhaps in this case, through building terrariums, stroking starfish, moulding clay, or dining on sustainable B.C. seafood. 

At base, the Frontier Summit is an encounter, both with Vancouver and with other leaders. And if anything marks us as different from artificial intelligence, it’s this. The conference held up what the true measure of what being human is — connection, touch, conversation, and food — at the very moment it interrogated it. If the event is truly dead, as Hsu says, something different has emerged in its wake. 

Speaker Jenna Fizel, managing director of emerging technology at Ideo, perhaps summarized it best in their panel. “You can’t experience an experience without experiencing it,” they say. And the Fronter Summit is nothing if not an experience.

Editor’s note: Vancouver Tech Journal managing editor Kate Wilson is a strategic advisor for the Frontier Collective.

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