AI With a Conscience: Safety, Sanity & the Future of Human-Centered Tech

This Month’s Hawaii AI + XR Meetup: Healthy-Minded Innovation

What does healthy innovation look like in an age of rapid AI acceleration? This month, we’re spotlighting safety, emotional wellness, and thoughtful design in AI and immersive tech. It’s a conversation for builders, thinkers, and dreamers who want tech to help—not harm.

We’ll explore:

• How do we build AI that’s actually good for people?
• What does mental wellness look like in the machine learning era?
• Can AI be powerful and compassionate—and what would that take?

From UX and product design to ethics, policy, accessibility, and personal empowerment, we’re diving into human-first, safety-first AI—designed with intention, not just ambition. If you care about building tools that uplift rather than exploit, and make us more human—not less—this is your room. Mixer to follow.

Our Meetup is in collaboration with Honolulu ChatGPT: https://www.meetup.com/honolulu-chatgpt-meetup-group

Guest Speakers (via Zoom):

Evo Heyning
Award-winning creative technologist and CEO of Realitycraft, Evo specializes in XR, AI, and immersive media for social good. She’s produced 500+ hours of interactive content, led civic and cleantech projects, and authored Promptcraft, a guide to creative AI workflows. Evo teaches XR/AI to Fortune 500s and government agencies, and was honored with the 2022 Poly Award among other immersive media accolades.

Christopher Lafayette
An award-winning emergent technologist, speaker, and humanitarian, Christopher is shaping AI, the metaverse, and healthtech through an ethics-first lens. He founded GatherVerse and global initiatives like HoloPractice and Hyper Policy. A pioneer in humanizing technology, he’s spoken at CES, Stanford, Mayo Clinic, NIST, Microsoft, and UCLA, bridging innovation, inclusion, and safety across applied sciences, spatial computing, and global policy.

Russell Bundy
Russell Bundy is Co-Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Just Verify, dedicated to building the trust layer infrastructure for AI. His core mission is a future where AI can be universally trusted. He believes trust is vital for AI's positive transformation; without it, misuse and disconnect risk grows. Through Just Verify, Russell defines frameworks and protocols to verify AI, focusing on how people and institutions build trust with emerging intelligence. He speaks on trust as the strategic foundation for AI.

Thank you to Hub Coworking Hawaii for sponsoring the venue for the event!

***