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Kāpiti AI Circle
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Kāpiti AI Circle
Kāpiti Coast · Aotearoa New Zealand
A welcoming space for concerned and curious citizens to understand the arrival of artificial intelligence — and to co-imagine wise, humane, and hopeful ways forward.
Join the circleSomething vast is arriving. Let's meet it together.
In just a few short years, artificial intelligence has moved from science fiction to the centre of everyday life. It now writes our emails, marks our children's essays, screens our job applications, paints pictures, holds conversations, and quietly shapes what we see, buy, believe, and feel. Whatever you make of it, one thing is certain: this is one of the largest transformations our species has ever set in motion — and it is happening faster than any of us can comfortably absorb.
Most of us were never asked whether we wanted this. It simply began to wash in, like a tide. And like any tide, it carries both gifts and dangers: new tools for learning, creating, and caring for one another — alongside real risks to our work, our privacy, our democracy, our relationships, and our sense of what it means to be human.
The Kāpiti AI Circle exists because a rising tide is best met not alone, but in good company. We are not engineers or experts — we are concerned and curious citizens of the Kāpiti Coast who believe that understanding this wave is too important to leave to technologists, corporations, or governments alone. It belongs to all of us.
Here, you don't need to be technical, optimistic, or afraid. You only need to be curious. Together we ask the human questions: What is this technology, really? What is it doing to our lives, our children, our work, our communities? And how might we, here in our own place, help shape wiser, kinder, more hopeful ways forward?
Pull up a chair. The conversation has already begun.
What we explore
Nine conversations, one circle
Nine gatherings, nine strands. We take up one at a time and rotate through them over the seasons — no prior reading required, only your presence and your questions.
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AI & Work
What changes for jobs, trades, and small business on the Coast — who gains, who's exposed, and how we adapt together.
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AI & Our Children
Education, screens, homework, and growing up alongside synthetic tutors and companions.
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AI & Creativity
Does a machine that paints and writes diminish human art — or extend it?
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AI & Truth & Democracy
Deepfakes, misinformation, and trusting what we see in an age of synthetic media.
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AI & Connection
Chatbots, loneliness, and what we owe one another when company can be manufactured.
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AI & the Living Planet
The energy, water, and minerals behind “the cloud” — AI's real footprint on Earth.
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AI in Aotearoa
The local and national picture — and Māori data sovereignty as a model of community-held technology.
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Practical AI Literacy
Hands-on evenings: trying the tools together, spotting a fake, protecting your data.
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Wise Ways Forward
Meaning, dignity, and the hopeful question we keep returning to: what would humane AI look like, and what can we do here?
How we gather
A few simple principles
- Welcoming to everyone — no technical background required.
- Curious before certain — we ask questions more than we take sides.
- Honest about the risks, but never surrendering to despair.
- Non-partisan — this belongs to citizens, not to any party or company.
- Plain language — no unexplained jargon, ever.
To go further
A living library
Doorways into the conversation — from the most hopeful guides to the sharpest critics. You don't need to read them all; pick one that calls to you, and bring what you find to the next circle.
Books
Start here
- Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans A clear, hype-free tour of what AI can and can't actually do.
- Co-Intelligence A practical, hopeful guide to working well with everyday AI.
- The Coming Wave Why AI and biotech are arriving together — and the challenge of keeping them in hand.
- Nexus The long human story of information — and what changes when machines join the network.
Histories & the race to build it
- A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence A friendly one-stop history of AI — its dead ends and its breakthroughs.
- Genius Makers The small band of researchers whose stubborn bet sparked today's boom.
- Supremacy The race between OpenAI's Altman and DeepMind's Hassabis to build it first.
- Empire of AI A critical, deeply reported look at OpenAI and the real costs of the race.
- AI Superpowers How China became an AI power, and what the contest means for jobs.
- The Big Nine The nine giant firms steering AI — and why their incentives matter to us all.
- The Innovators The deeper backstory of computing, from Ada Lovelace to the internet.
The lives behind the machines
- A Mind at Play Claude Shannon — the playful genius who made “information” something we could measure.
- The Optimist Sam Altman — the first full life of OpenAI's chief: his rise, firing, and return.
- Alan Turing: The Enigma The codebreaker who first asked whether machines could think.
- The Man from the Future John von Neumann — the polymath who designed the modern computer and foresaw thinking machines.
Safety, alignment & deep risk
- Human Compatible Why safe AI means machines that stay unsure of what we want — and keep asking.
- The Alignment Problem Real stories of AI learning the wrong lesson, and the people working to fix it.
- Life 3.0 A physicist maps the full range of possible AI futures, hopeful to dire.
- Superintelligence The book that launched the debate on controlling smarter-than-human AI.
- Our Final Invention An early warning that self-improving machines could outrun our control.
- The Intelligence Explosion Barrat's update for the ChatGPT era — powerful, error-prone, racing ahead.
- If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies A blunt worst-case case for not building superhuman AI yet.
- The Precipice A philosopher weighs AI among the few things that could end our story.
- The AI Does Not Hate You A friendly tour of the thinkers who first sounded the alarm.
- Deep Utopia If AI solved all our problems, what would still give life meaning?
Ethics, justice & power
- Weapons of Math Destruction How hidden scoring formulas quietly punish the poor.
- Atlas of AI The mines, water, energy and hidden labour behind “the cloud.”
- Unmasking AI The researcher who caught face recognition failing on darker faces.
- Race After Technology How “neutral” tools can quietly bake in racial discrimination.
- Algorithms of Oppression How search results reinforce racism and sexism.
- Automating Inequality How automated systems profile, police and punish poor people.
- More than a Glitch Why tech bias is built in, not an occasional accident.
- Power and Progress A thousand-year history: technology spreads prosperity only when people hold power.
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The business of harvesting our behaviour to predict and nudge us.
- Resisting AI A pointed case that mass AI amplifies bias — and a call for alternatives.
Hype, ideology & the TESCREAL critique
- The AI Con A toolkit for spotting AI hype and asking who really benefits.
- The TESCREAL bundle The paper naming the tangle of Silicon Valley beliefs behind the AGI dream. Free to read.
- TESCREALism (essay) The readable, plain-language way into the TESCREAL idea.
- On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots The famous warning that big language models predict words without understanding.
Watch — films & documentaries
- We Need to Talk About A.I. Leading experts argue over AI's promise and its dangers.
- The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist A soon-to-be father interviews 40+ experts and lands on cautious “apocaloptimism.”
- Coded Bias An MIT researcher exposes bias baked into facial recognition.
- The Social Dilemma The people who built social media warn about its design.
- AlphaGo The historic match where a machine beat a Go grandmaster.
- The Thinking Game DeepMind cracks protein folding on the road to human-level AI. Free on YouTube.
- iHuman How AI is reshaping power, surveillance and society.
- In the Age of AI AI, jobs, privacy and the US–China race. Free to stream.
Listen — podcasts
- Your Undivided Attention Steering powerful tech toward human wellbeing.
- Hard Fork Two journalists make weekly sense of AI — often funny.
- Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 A linguist and a sociologist puncture AI hype.
- Last Week in AI A weekly plain-language roundup of the big news.
- The TED AI Show Conversations on how AI is reshaping everyday life.
- Better Offline A sharp, critical take on tech's growth-at-all-costs promises.
Follow — organisations
- Center for Humane Technology Campaigning for technology that serves human wellbeing.
- Ada Lovelace Institute Research so data and AI work for people and society.
- DAIR Institute Timnit Gebru's community-rooted institute on AI's harms.
- AI Now Institute Studies how AI concentrates power — and what policy can do.
- Mozilla Foundation The nonprofit behind Firefox, campaigning for trustworthy AI.
- AlgorithmWatch A watchdog on how automated systems affect rights and democracy.
- Future of Life Institute Reducing large-scale risks from powerful technologies.
- Partnership on AI A coalition building shared best practices for responsible AI.
Here in Aotearoa
- Te Mana Raraunga The Māori Data Sovereignty Network — championing Māori rights in data.
- Te Hiku Media The iwi team that built te reo Māori speech AI — on Māori terms.
- AI Forum New Zealand Connecting business, academia and citizens on AI here.
- Brainbox Institute NZ research on tech, law and policy; runs an AI policy tracker.
- Privacy Commissioner — AI guidance How NZ privacy law applies when you use AI tools.
- NZ AI Strategy (2025) The government's national plan, “Investing with Confidence.”
From GLOBAÏA
- Timeline of Artificial Intelligence The whole arc on one interactive timeline — from antiquity to 2100, with the curves that drove it.
- AI Risks Observatory A measured map of the race: capability acceleration, failure modes, the incident record, and governance gaps.
- Existential Risks Humanity's gravest threats visualised together — climate tipping points, nuclear danger, and AI.
- A Bestiary of AI The strange new creatures of machine intelligence, drawn as a field guide.
- The machine-intelligence supply chain What it takes to build AI — the chips, data, energy and labour behind it.
- The Anthropocene Traps The self-reinforcing patterns locking societies into planetary crisis — the bigger predicament AI now enters.
Come to the first circle
Gatherings are beginning soon on the Kāpiti Coast — informal, warm, and open to all. No expertise needed, no cost to attend. Just bring your curiosity and your questions.
Want to be there for the first circle, or help shape what it becomes?
Get in touch