If we know that alternative futures are possible then we can start thinking about better ones. (Cory Doctorow, What should we do about democracy?) In my last post I referred to Psychohistory, Isaac Azimov’s fictional science which combines history, sociology and the mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behaviour of very large […]
Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments where we are influencing the future. (Steve Jobs) Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. (Peter Drucker) Professor Dame Wendy […]
On 1st March Ariana Huffington posted an article entitled “The Great Awakening” which stated that For most of the internet’s young life, the assumption of virtue was built in — it was largely taken for granted that the increased access to data and information, and the increased connection to everything and everybody could only […]
A quinessentially Australian summer Philosophising about the future of humanity is a very popular activity at the moment as is the current rhetoric around the future of work, AI domination and what humans could potentially become. But amongst all of this there has been very little real debate about what we, as humans, actually want […]
When everyone agrees on where the future is headed – especially when that destination is so far from our current reality – that’s not a sign of inevitability; it’s a sign that people have stopped thinking. A good time, perhaps, to hike out to some awkward, sideways headland where we can look things over from […]
Douglas Adams, that doyen of so much wisdom, once said I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between […]
A version of this was written for NPC’s “State of the Sector” report. What do we mean by “digital”? In his book The Code Economy [1] Philip E. Auerswald talks about the long history of humans developing code as a mechanism by which to create and regulate activities and markets. We have Codes of […]
Last week in an article in the Financial Review renown businessman David Gonski talked about the commoditisation of the professions. Let’s be professional and fight artificial intelligence. (David Gonski) Gonski is right on a number of fronts, but very wrong on others. He is totally right in that the humans in the workplace need […]
Our focus is to help people develop analogue leadership in a digital world Context Over the past three years our Intersticia Foundation has been slowly identifying and supporting a diverse group of people as they pursue their chosen endeavours, whether this be through formal academic study, play-writing at Bell Shakespeare, leadership courses or film-making. We […]
This week the Web Science Institute hosted it’s first Ethics Symposium. The event drew together a wonderfully diverse audience who were treated to with two excellent presentations from Woodrow Hartzog and Mireille Hildebrandt plus a vigorous panel discussion moderated by Thanassis Tirpoanis. Over the past six months Thanassis, Caroline Wilson, Leanne Fry and I have […]
