With AI advancing at a staggering pace, being in the same room as the minds building it, studying it and investing in it is a welcome chance to make sense of where things are headed.
Organized by Vancouver’s Frontier Collective, this year’s Frontier Summit brought around 150 global leaders across industries to the city from October 6 to 8. Among them were Olympic gold medallist Jennifer Heil, former NBA star Metta World Peace, former defence minister Harjit Sajjan and Pure Earth’s Drew McCartor, alongside representatives from the World Health Organization’s Innovation Hub.
“Everything is speeding up, and the thing that’s getting scarce isn’t information, it’s trust,” says Dan Burgar, founder and CEO of Frontier Collective. “People are more connected to their devices than to each other, just as the biggest decisions of our generation are being made, about AI, health, and climate,” he added. “Frontier Summit exists to bring the people making those decisions into one room, face to face, to talk honestly about what it means for all of us.”
Here are three things we learned at the summit about the future of AI and tech.
1. AI could help tackle an overlooked global health challenge
More than a billion children and teenagers have blood lead levels above the World Health Organization’s threshold for intervention, according to global public health organization Pure Earth’s president and CEO Drew McCartor. That’s one in three kids facing a threat to their developing brains.
His analogy: a child’s brain is a city under construction, with calcium directing the building of roads and bridges for memory and learning. Lead impersonates calcium, leaving dead ends and bridges to nowhere. “Lead, it turns out, is a shit city planner,” McCartor said.
The good news? “This one is solvable today with the tools that we already have.” Testing children, identifying exposure sources and regulating lead can make a difference. AI could help: McCartor called on technologists to use satellite imagery and machine learning to locate polluting lead-recycling facilities, and predictive analytics to help identify exposure risks.
2. But it could also be coming for our critical thinking and creativity
AI wrote the report, built the presentation and saved you hours. So why are you exhausted?
Former White House senior AI advisor Carmem Domingues, whose work examines AI’s impact on cognition and decision-making, described a hidden cost: “AI brain fry.” Constantly verifying output from multiple AI tools can demand more mental effort than doing the work yourself, she explained, leaving people with mental fog, exhaustion and a greater tendency to make mistakes.
Meanwhile, outsourcing the work can mean skipping the mental exercise that builds judgment and creativity. Wrestling with a blank page forces you to organize your thoughts and spot holes in your argument. “When we use AI to write for us, we forgo that,” she said.
Her advice: pause before reaching for the chatbot. Is AI appropriate for the task—and will using it help you stand out or leave you producing the same thing as everyone else?
3. Robots could help ease the healthcare worker shortage
The WHO projects a global shortage of 11 million health workers by 2030. Hospitals are now embracing “service robots” to handle everyday tasks, from delivering medication to disinfecting rooms.
Niamh Donnelly, co-founder and CTO of Irish healthtech firm Akara Robotics, which builds decontamination robots, sees particular promise for countries like her native Ireland. “We have wait lists for healthcare that are astronomical,” she said, pointing to AI-driven robotics’ potential to “reduce those wait lists and treat more patients and provide care to more people.”
But separate machines for every task are costly and hard to scale, prompting a shift toward “collaborative robots” that might patrol, clean and deliver equipment. Corridors and elevators also need adapting, raising another question for Donnelly: what might futuristic hospitals designed to accommodate robots look like?
