Thus grew the tale of Taviland: Thus slowly, one by one, Its quaint events were hammered out – And now the tale is done. (Tavistock Lecture Dr Eliat Aram, 2018). The Tavistock Institute was founded in 1947 as an organisation dedicated to the study of human relations for the purpose of bettering working life and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
(Image source Flikr) Fortune favours the prepared mind. (Louis Pasteur) They say it also favours the brave. I have never been what I consider a risk-taker, nor considered myself particularly brave. But I do know that when my spider-sense tells me something I should listen. This is what has guided me in all that […]
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 […]
www.braveconversations.org Web Science is becoming increasingly important. As JP Rangaswami writes in one of his recent blog posts We need to get better at studying the impact of change over time. Proper, longitudinal study, collecting and preserving the right data sets, with the relevant discipline and safeguards in place. That’s why I have been fascinated […]
