Our People: Edge AI, Harm Reduction, and a Woman in a Wheelchair
- John E. Carr
- Mar 2
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 17
March 22, 2020. Vancouver, British Columbia.
The SkyTrain should have been packed. At seven in the morning on a weekday, downtown-bound cars are normally shoulder-to-shoulder; commuters are braced against each other, headphones in, eyes down. Instead, I was nearly alone.
The silence was not pleasant at all.
It was the kind that makes you aware of every breath behind a mask. COVID had arrived. Not just speculation, but fact. Essential workers were still needed, and I was one of them; an IT consultant who enjoyed the work, loved the clients, loved the daily puzzle of printers and email servers and panicked calls about Outlook refusing to sync. That job was my way of learning Canada from the inside out.
But something else had already pulled at me.
For months I had been walking around the Downtown Eastside after work, introducing myself to overdose prevention tents, trying to find a way in. I had been in long-term recovery from a severe substance use disorder for years, and I had come to believe, the way many people in recovery do, that part of sustaining your own survival is helping others, whilestill standing at the edge. I was also one semester into seminary. I had no institutional footing yet. No established ministry. No clear path. So I looked elsewhere.
And that is how I met Diana.
Every afternoon, she sat outside the local Tim Hortons in her wheelchair. She was funny, sharp, suspicious, and utterly woven into that block. People greeted her. They checked in with her. She knew who was struggling, who had disappeared, who was drifting. Her attention was not trained or theoretical; it came from repetition, love, and proximity.
One day she stopped me cold.
“Who are you? I see you around here all the time, but you’re not getting high.”
She looked at me like she had already decided I was either a cop, a religious nuisance, or both.
I offered to explain over coffee and doughnuts. She agreed.
So I told her my story: recovery, IT, seminary, the strange collision of all those worlds inside one person. She listened the way only certain older women listen, with one eye on you and the other on the whole street.
Then she said something that rearranged me.
“You can’t talk about Jesus with the folks down here. They’ve heard it already.”
She was right. Faith language did not automatically provide comfort in these spaces. For many people, Jesus was a trauma. The Church was a trauma. The 12-step slogans that once sounded like survival could be perceived as intrusion, or judgement.
I asked what I should do instead.
She waved toward a young man across the street who was holding a glass pipe in his fingers, slowly rolling it against a lighter flame, as he exhaled the vaports she said plainingly and compassionately, “You need to help our people like that.”
Our people.
Diana had never struggled with substance use herself. But the consequences surrounded her, and she refused to let anyone in her neighborhood become invisible. She did not speak about “those people," she spoke about our people. That phrase broke something open in me. It was also, though I did not yet know it, the design principle that would shape every technical decision I made in the months ahead.
A few weeks later, COVID shut down my consultancy. The job I loved vanished. But the loss created unexpected space, and I committed to a year of service in the SROs, the single-room occupancy hotels lining the Downtown Eastside.
I wasn't prepared.
From the outside, SROs read as bare-bones but manageable; old hotels repurposed into last-chance housing. Fifty dollars a month. A sink. A lock. Shared facilities. The photos online showed cleaned-up exteriors. The truth inside was fluorescent bulbs flickering in the stairwells, hallways full of sounds I had never heard collected in one place: moaning sounds of agony, sudden impacts, doors slamming; and people openly using substances in ways that, even after my own history, still caught me short.
What surprised me was not temptation. It was recognition. A sobering awareness that without the support systems I had: treatment, recovery rooms, people willing to answer the phone; I might have been in one of those rooms myself.
No one believed me when I told them.
They could not fathom that the person in front of them had ever been in the grip of substances. I looked too put together. Too educated. It took my best friend JR’s old photos and videos, me skeletal, hollow-eyed, slurring into a camera, to make me legible. Those images were not heroic. They were proof. And in a place where people are constantly lied to by outsiders, proof was the only currency that bought trust.
Naloxone training came on my first shift. At that time we still used intramuscular injections rather than nasal kits. I had always been afraid of needles, which was darkly humorous about the situation.
Two people needed Naloxone that first day: the first was unresponsive. Their body was blue, they werent breathing, I found myself consumed with panic, and worse I found myself hesitating for a moment.
"It's your discomfort or their life!" A small voice inside me screamed. I steadied myself, remembered my training and jumped into action. I plunged the needle into a thigh, and a few seconds later they drew in a ragged breath.
Nothing sharpens the soul quite like the moment you realize your own discomfort is no longer the central fact of the room.
Over the following weeks, I learned something that well-intentioned people often miss about frontline care: when life is fractured enough, disorder is not a moral failure It is evidence of trauma, scarcity, dislocation, survival, and the fragile architecture people build when nothing else holds.
We performed room checks throughout the day. Sometimes the silence itself is a warning.
And I kept thinking about Diana’s phrase. 'Our people'. Not as a sentiment, but as an operational question: what does it actually look like to protect people without surveilling them? To help without extracting?
That question became a technical problem.
A few months before COVID, I had written a grant proposal for edge AI equipment. The original idea was modest, a system to simply read and count church goers, and when the equipment arrived, I repurposed it.
Using a MIT project I built a NVIDIA powered AI edge device with a FLAIR infrared sensor and some custom code. It's purpose was to check people for elevated temperatures and mask compliance before they enter the building.
Not a grand vision. Not a polished startup pitch. Just a need.
The system architecture was deliberately simple. I used a hidden access point to create a small local server, then connected a second device in the staff office as a desktop interface. When someone approached the entrance, the infrared sensor checked temperature while the AI model assessed mask presence. If both readings were normal, a green indicator appeared on the office screen and the staff member buzzed them in.
Ugly. Gloriously ugly. Functional in the way frontline technology is when it is built under pressure by people who care more about whether it works than whether it looks elegant.
But the design choice that mattered most was not the hardware. It was the privacy architecture.
The system operates entirely in the present tense. No facial recognition. No image archive. No passive accumulation of personal data. No surveillance trail.
It checked, signaled, and moved on. Nothing was stored. Nothing was extracted. The residents were not rendered legible by some remote authority; they remained exactly as visible as they chose to be.
This was not accidental. People on the margins have been studied, monitored, managed, and scrutinized by systems that claim to have helped them for generations. In the harm reduction world, I learned trust is not demanded. It is built slowly, respectfully, and collaboratively.
Diana’s phrase echos: our people.
You do not build surveillance systems for your own people. You build tools that serve them without capturing them. I worked through privacy questions directly with residents before deployment. Their consent was not a formality, it was the foundation. Several respondents expressed sharp, specific concerns about data retention and system access. Those conversations were among the most critical design reviews the project received.
The device turned out to be remarkably reliable. When one fails, a simple power cycle brought it back. There was something almost poetic in that: not glamorous technology, but a humble, practical, frontier technologies press into service exactly where vulnerability and ingenuity met.
By the time we took the system down in 2022, our building had one of the lowest COVID infection rates among SROs. Only a small number of hospitalizations, which in that context felt remarkable.
I had done far more impressive technical work in Hollywood. More expensive systems, more elegant interfaces, more complex deployments. But this was the first project where my old technology life and my new life in service truly fused. Not 'technology for good' as a conference slogan, but as a lived reality. No product launches. No roadmap. Just a humanneed and a tool built in a way that can meet it.
The lesson that stayed was this: The most consequential technical decisions I made were not about sensors or code. They were about what the system was unwilling to do. It refused to store. It declined to identify. It refused to treat vulnerable people as data points. Those refusals, those deliberate absences, were the architecture that earned trust. And trust was the only reason the system worked at all.
After COVID passed, I never saw Diana again. I did not have her number. In a neighborhood like that, people vanish from your daily life suddenly as they enter it, carried elsewhere by illness, housing, family, crisis, or grace.
The rumor was that she had relocated to live with her family. I hope that is true.
She was retirement age, roughly the age of the average Presbyterian congregant, and she undid every quiet cynicism I carried about older church people. She once reminded me, half laughing and half proud, that her generation had been “burning bras in Berkeley and protesting the Vietnam War.” There was history in her; not nostalgia, but memory that had ripened into conviction.
I build something that kept people safe. I am grateful for that. But the deeper work of that season was done by people like Diana. These are people whose names will never make headlines, whose ministries will never be professionalized, whose theology was lived before spoken.
Sometimes the saints sit in wheelchairs outside coffee shops and call the neighborhood to order. Sometimes they hide their holiness in ordinary conversation, street-level compassion, and the simple refusal to let others become invisible.
Our people.
A phrase that became a design principle. A theology. A life.
Comments