On the TechTO & TechVancouver stages ×2
Geordie Rose of Kindred AI presents Super-intelligent Aliens Are Coming to Earth
Watch on YouTube ↗
Geordie Rose Founder and Former CTO of D-Wave presents Super intelligent Aliens Are Coming to Earth
Watch on YouTube ↗First seen on the TechTO & TechVancouver stages in 2017. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Geordie ↗
In their words
I've been trying to build the tech community in Vancouver for 25 years and I find it super depressing that it seems to be so hard to generate world-changing zero to one companies around here.
What Kindred is trying to do is build real AI. So what you've heard about AI is not what we mean by AI. What we mean by AI is a software system that can do literally anything that a human can do.
Entrepreneurship isn't about roses and fun. It's about getting your soul crushed over and over and over again, and the people who succeed are the ones who keep getting up.
These things that we're building are not going to be people they might be really smart they might be really good at all sorts of different things but they're not going to be like us they're going to be aliens.
They're not demons they're not evil but they're more like the lovecraftian great old ones there are entities that are not necessarily going to be aligned with what we want.
If you want to have a say in how all this goes down you can't sit on the sidelines.
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Quick answers
What is Geordie Rose known for?
Co-founding D-Wave in 1999, the first company to sell quantum computers commercially, with buyers including NASA and Google. He was then founding CEO of Kindred, the piece-picking robotics company Ocado bought for US$262M in 2020, and of Sanctuary AI, the humanoid robotics company Kindred spun out in 2018.
What does Geordie Rose do now?
He stepped down as CEO of Sanctuary AI in November 2024. He runs Snowdrop Quantum Applications, a quantum research project he started in his last months at Sanctuary and has said he intends to keep as a one-person company, and since December 2025 he has been founding advisor at Ineffable Intelligence. He set out to walk across Canada in April 2025.
What did Geordie Rose talk about on the TechVancouver stage?
'Super-intelligent Aliens Are Coming to Earth' in July 2017, when he was CEO of Kindred. He argued that AI able to do anything a person can do is coming, that it will be genuinely alien rather than human-like, and that Vancouver founders don't think big enough. TechTO's YouTube channel re-published the same recording in 2023.