On Friday 30 October, I went into hospital expecting to have my hip replaced. After a long period of increasing pain and restricted mobility, I had finally reached the point where things were about to change. I’d prepared myself, both practically and psychologically. I’d put my commitments in order, caught up with people, and accepted
The Month I Didn’t Expect Read More »
Artificial intelligence is challenging not only how we create things, but how we recognise and value human creativity. How many good ideas have never seen the light of day because the people who had them couldn’t find the right words? It’s a question worth asking as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of writing, drawing, composing
Whose Words? Whose Ideas? Whose Achievement? Read More »
Someone hands you a phone. You can see the problem almost immediately. You could probably fix it in thirty seconds, hand the phone back and say, “There you go.” Problem solved. But perhaps not much has actually been learned. That small moment captures something I have been thinking about increasingly in my digital inclusion work:
When Helping Means Not Taking Over Read More »
It began, for me, with a book I haven’t even read yet. Robert Harris has written a new novel about Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, and I have the hardback on order. I knew almost nothing about Agrippa beyond the name, so I thought I should learn just enough about his world to appreciate the story without
They Didn’t Know What Was Going to Matter Read More »
Perhaps artificial intelligence does not lack senses. Perhaps we lack the imagination—and the humility—to recognise as sensing anything that does not arrive through a body like ours. For a very long time, humans told themselves that we had five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. It was a tidy little list. It was also
When Human Senses Become the Measure of Intelligence Read More »
Independent enough to challenge. Respectful enough to listen. Grounded enough to serve. More than ten years ago, when I finished my work with Whanganui Computers in Homes in 2013, I was given a beautiful glass sculpture. Engraved underneath it was one word: Maverick. I loved it. I still do. But I have become increasingly
The Respectful Maverick Read More »
Gratitude, anxiety, habits, artificial intelligence—and a practical framework for strengthening the mind Sometimes a new idea does not really introduce something completely new. Instead, it suddenly reveals the connections between things we have already been learning. That happened to me recently when I read Ruth Brown’s Listener article, “Mastering the mind”, featuring the New Zealand
The Roadmap I Didn’t Know I Was Building Read More »
What a cutting-edge distributed AI proposal might tell us about renewable energy, regional prosperity and the next frontier of digital inclusion What if some of the most valuable infrastructure of the artificial intelligence age did not sit only inside enormous overseas data centres, but was also distributed through ordinary homes, businesses and community buildings? And
When Energy Becomes Compute: Who Benefits in Whanganui? Read More »
What The Odyssey can still teach us about life in Whanganui—and anywhere else This Thursday morning, I am going to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey at the Embassy 3 Theatre in Whanganui with a friend. We have both seen The Return, the earlier film starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. That
Finding Our Way Home Read More »
There is a quiet kind of exclusion that happens when the world moves online faster than people can keep up. It does not always look dramatic from the outside. It might be someone sitting at the kitchen table, staring at a phone, unsure whether a message is real or a scam. It might be an
Digital Inclusion Whanganui: Listening First, Then Building What People Actually Need Read More »
