Eric Basham & Liz Howard

Leveraging AI to create communities and facilitate human connection.

There is a real fear that AI is new class of industrialization that will be used to enslave humanity and accelerate the harm done to the biosphere we live in ultimately making our existence unsustainable.

This is one possible future. Another possible future is that we take this opportunity to act as citizens of the world we want to live in. We can do this by seizing the opportunities AI can provide us as citizen activists to create community and forge deeper, more meaningful connections. Heinlein famously said "think globally, act locally".

In the first half of the talk we'll share the state of the art, what is already available (focusing on free and open source), and the results of pilot programs. In the second half of the talk we will break into workgroups to solution, showing real time how you can leverage this technology to fulfill your mission and vision for a better world. Bring tablets and laptops, some will be supplied, and you don't need them to participate and collaborate.

We will wrap up sharing work from each workgroup, because that's why we are all here. To create connection and community. Let's leverage technology to do just that.

Liz Howard is a revolutionary educator who has focused on breaking down barriers to cutting edge technology, and has launched the careers of 1 in 200 software engineers worldwide, with the majority of their impact being underrepresented, underserved communities.

They founded The Multiverse School to further support those efforts at themultiverse.school. They make electronic music as Lizard the Wizard and Luck Surface Area, and have a festival fashion project at ArtMonster.dev.

Eric Basham is a professor, engineer, scientist, and builder by nature. His colleagues characterize him as a developer of "ecosystems of success." Examples include developing a framework that trained over 2000 chip designers in Silicon Valley, organizing college-wide participation in Maker Faires to demonstrate ethical and responsible engineering solutions, developing a portable COVID testing instrument, and developing a house printing robot. Striving to act as the citizen of the world that can be, he lives the 12 principles and the ravers manifesto, resulting in activities that include the co-founding of Peace, Love and Lightwhips and the development of fiber optic whip technologies, notably the FiberFlies Megahead.