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 […]
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 […]
There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin) I will say at the outset that I had no say in BrExit. I am neither a UK citizen nor resident, but I am a proud member of the British diaspora, and have benefited from being […]
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 […]
Douglas Adams gave this wise counsel to Hitchhikers as they travelled around the Galaxy, and I would give the same advice to all those who are waking up to the need for “digital skills” in the modern economy and wondering what to do about it. Over the last few weeks I have attended a number […]
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 […]
Last week I participated in the “Digital Enlightenment Forum” in Kilkenny, Ireland. The Forum believes that “people should enjoy the kinds of autonomy and freedom online that they do offline. The first priority of our mission is to establish and support the position and rights of the individual in relation to the rest of society. […]
Yesterday I sat and observed an old man as he waited at a bus stop in London. He stood with his trolley for almost twenty minutes, and watched expectantly, totally focused on his quarry. The right bus just wouldn’t come. Eventually some taxis drove around the corner and he tried to hail one, but none […]
Almost immediately upon my return to Australia I travelled to Brisbane to record and deliver the 2014 Solomon Lecture, “Government in the Age of the ‘Social Machine’”. Being asked to deliver the Solomon Lecture is a huge compliment, and I would like to thank Queensland Information Commissioner Rachael Rangihaeata, Acting First Assistant Information Commissioner Steve […]
In the past month I have participated in a number of events which have highlighted the juxtaposition between “remembering” and “forgetting”. And 2014 is a rather important year on both fronts. Firstly, 2014 is the tercentenary of the Longitude Act (1714) when the British Government established a prize to solve the “Longitude Problem”. As a […]
