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 […]
Not long ago I was walking over the entrance to Narrabeen Lakes and I saw this fellow swimming against the tide. I had been talking to my friend about getting an endless pool and all of a sudden here was nature’s version. Over the past few posts I have been thinking about the words we […]
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 […]
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 […]
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in the 2016 Sydney Link Festival as part of a panel facilitated by Narelle Clarke, and with Jamie Engel and Angie Abdilla. The topic we focused on was “Our Digital Futures”, as in the future of humanity – nothing like a small challenge to cover […]
Facebook isn’t a charity. The poor will pay by surrendering their data. In these few words Evgeny Morozov gets to heart of the digital transformation that is currently disrupting all value chains within the world as we know it. We are all now “paying” with our data. Scientifically, information is a choice—a yes-or-no choice. In a […]
Thus Tweeted Aron Hausler, one of our core team on the Australian Web Observatory project. Business models are not just being disrupted, they are being totally transformed, and across all sectors. We are only just beginning to come to grips with what this means, but we are doing it very slowly, and I believe that […]
Last week in Adelaide and Sydney we launched our Australian Web Observatory which is now a “node” within the global network of Web Observatories. My presentation can be found here, and Ramine Tinati’s overview of SOCIAM and the Web Observatory can be found here. The Australian Web Observatory is hosted at the University of South […]
This week I went to CeBIT, “Australasia’s largest business technology exhibition“. Apart form the fact that I had to schlep all the way out to Homebush, they didn’t have my registration correct, and the organisation was poor, I was seriously underwhelmed. The last time I went to CeBIT was around five years ago and I […]
