Beyond WEIRD

​Today's AI systems default to a narrow set of values: efficiency, cost-benefit, individual optimization, drawn from WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). Those defaults get expensive in fields like climate policy, land governance, and community health.

​Beyond WEIRD, a one-day virtual conference on September 16, 2026 (10:30am–2:45pm PT), asks what it would take to build AI that reasons through Indigenous logics instead of Western defaults. The conference brings AI researchers and Indigenous knowledge-holders together across three interdisciplinary panels and a keynote, an hour each, to explore how Indigenous logics of relationality, land kinship, and responsibility seven generations out, differ from AI's current architecture of thought. Before arriving at a vision for the future, the conference discusses what sovereignty, consent, and ethical representation demand of any system that draws on Indigenous knowledge.

​Speakers include Dr. Maui Hudson, co-author of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and director of the Te Kotahi Research Institute at the University of Waikato; Belén Páez, president of Fundación Pachamama and general secretary of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, with nearly 30 years of work in the Ecuadorian Amazon; and Nava Haghighi, a Stanford doctoral candidate studying the assumptions built into large language models. The keynote is delivered by Prof. Jason Edward Lewis, University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary at Concordia University and editor of the Indigenous Protocol and AI position paper.

​More at beyondweird.org.