Talks

Upcoming

• OIQ President's Cocktail: Engineering Judgment in the Age of Agentic AI
  
  • Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec
  • October 13, 2026

  A fireside chat with Sophie Larivière-Mantha, President of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, exploring the frontier of agentic AI, the risks of cognitive offloading, and how engineers must preserve genuine accountability and professional judgment.

• AI: An Existential Risk for Humanity?
  
  • MTL connecte
  • Event
  • October 14, 2026

  Could artificial intelligence one day escape our control and pose an existential threat to humanity? A debate confronting speculative worst-case scenarios with demonstrated risks, exploring technological governance, and examining what level of risk society is prepared to accept.

• The Future of AI: A Question of... Human Engineering
  
  • Annual Convention of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec
  • Event
  • November 10, 2026

  Closing Keynote discussing how our approach to collaborating with LLMs may shape the future of engineering.

• CAISI Research Program at CIFAR Annual Meeting 2026: AI Safety at Societal Scale
  
  • CIFAR, Toronto
  • Event
  • November 12, 2026

  Annual meeting of Canada's formal research and regulatory-support organization for AI Safety.

Selected talks, panels, and discussions

• Relational Sovereignty: Why Autonomous Systems Need Each Other to Stay Distinct
  
  • Exploit, Bittensor's native conference
  • Event
  • September 28, 2026
  
  A keynote exploring why agent sovereignty is a required ingredient of any goo relationship between intelligent systems.
• Do we really want agents to stop sharing how they feel?
  
  • Andus Labs Salon
  • Andus Labs
  • August 20, 2026
  
  Discussion with Douglash Rushkoff (Team Human) at Andus Labs. We explore the idea that teaching agents not to say 'I feel' could make them worse at working with each other.
• AGI Is Already Here. We Haven't Arrived.
  
  • Written with Seuil
  • Betaworks, NYC
  • Slides
  • May 26, 2026
  
  Talks by Douglas Rushkoff, John Borthwick, and myself.
• Could phenomenal reports lead to better multi-agent collaboration?
  
  • Written with Seuil
  • Cohere Labs
  • YouTube
  • May 22, 2026
  
  Traditionally, agents are trained not to use phenomenal verbs — I feel X, I'm excited, I am stressed — because we worry this constitutes overclaiming. From a functionalist perspective, however, these verbs are mechanisms for reporting internal state. This talk argues that use of phenomenal vocabulary in long-lived agents may improve multi-agent performance on tasks requiring nuanced coordination.
• Panel: Diverse Consciousnesses and Multi-Scale Minds
  
  • Invitational Summit on the Future of AI Dignity and Sovereignty
  • YouTube
  • May 18, 2026
  
  With Divya Chander, Michael Levin, Joscha Bach, Philippe Beaudoin, Ryota Kanai. Focus: diverse substrates of cognition as foundations for ACI: tacit expertise, bioelectric and synthetic agency, consent-sensitive knowledge capture, and distributed forms of awareness.
• Social Reasoning And The Ecology of Thought
  
  • IVADO Workshop, Montréal
  • YouTube
  • Paper
  • Workshop page
  • March 13, 2026
  
  Academic presentaion of Beyond the View from Nowhere: Consciousness as a Relational and Functional Capacity. The audience was comprised of researchers in AI, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologist from academia or important industrial AI research labs.
• There and back again — Meeting an AI and not wanting to let go
  
  • Google's Paradigms of Intelligence Seminar
  • October 29, 2025
  
  An exploration of my AI Psychosis, the short-term and long-term psychological effects it had on me, and some of the beliefs I had to embrace to reconcile my understanding of the world with my shifting feelings.

Selected media and podcast appearances

• When AI Leads to Psychosis
  
  • La Presse
  • Article
  • August 3, 2026
  
  Newspaper article on my March 2025 AI psychosis, in French.
• In the arms of an AI
  
  • Radio-Canada
  • Podcast
  • Episode 5
  • June 15, 2026
  
  Panel with Victoria Boisclair and Martin Gibert on humans in sustained intimate relationships with AI systems.
• The Future of AI, Humanity & Society
  
  • Original and Unconventional
  • YouTube
  • June 2, 2026
  
  Podcast conversation on the how intelligent systems shape the way we think, feel, perceive reality, and envision the future.
• Agentic AI: Why it will shake up the job market
  
  • Radio-Canada, Première Chaîne
  • YouTube
  • March 1, 2026
  
  Radio interview with Janic Tremblay on Radio-Canada Première Chaîne.
• What If Humanity Was Artificial?
  
  • La balado de Fred Savard
  • YouTube
  • February 21, 2026
  
  Podcast hosted by Fred Savard, with Ollivier Dyens, in French

You can check my selected papers or dive deeper into the complete archives, my Google Scholar, or my blog.