It was Edmund Burke, the Irish Whig (liberal) politician from the 19th century, often called the father of conservatism, that coined the phrase:

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’.

Evil manifests itself through intolerance of people and through prejudice and bigotry against minorities.  It was silence that led to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.  It was a collective turning of a blind eye in the Balkans in the 1990s that drove the genocide in Bosnia and it is silence from good people that will allow evil to again stride the world stage.

We must call out in a very loud voice what is happening in Australia today.  There are senior politicians that have made deliberate statements designed to create discord in our society.  To drive a wedge between communities. To incite hatred against new migrant arrivals in order to pander to a racist base.  It is the same nationalist playbook used by Trump in the US and can be found in populist movements around the world.  

And yet the political leadership in Canberra is silent.  What does that tell us?  That silence is again taking hold as extremism in its many forms starts to flourish.
Ironically, it is the conservative politicians in Australia leading the bigotry charge, ironic given the strong positions that Edmund Burke, as the founder of conservatism, took against all forms of bigotry during his life.

On the back of the powerful #metoo campaign to protect women, let us go forward with a strong social media voice #notsilent to ensure the voices in the world are very loud and clear.  We, as good people, cannot and will not accept what is happening.

I want to talk about an issue that will allow most people’s eyes to be glazed over.  This is AI.  Artificial Intelligence.

The term Artificial Intelligence is itself somewhat misleading.  There is nothing artificial about using data to automate processes more efficiently.  We have been doing it for generations.  The whole construct around the industrial revolution was based on automating manual processes and enabling a subsequent event to occur on a given outcome.  Sure, this was basically one-dimensional, but that was the start of the revolution – whereby we were able to ‘instruct’ processes to do more things on a given outcome: i.e. multi-dimensional.  This led to the information revolution.

So when we now consider AI, what we are really doing is positioning our technology to manage many disparate processes at the same time.  Over time the number of processes become incremental.

We often conflate AI with robotics but that is simply an easy way to explain the processes that are being automated.  What we really need is the overlay of a vision for the future – A(n) I for the future – that will allow us to position our economy at the vanguard of these new technologies.  Australia has the opportunity to take the initiative, deploy our smarts and get this economy onto the next generation footing.  It simply needs our clever people to take the opportunities and reset the economy. An AI economy is one which works incrementally.  It means we can do one thing and the next outcome drives more value into the economy.  It is the true service economy as it means our revenues in the economy are recurring.

To get there requires leadership – to give oxygen to our smart people to believe their dreams.  And ultimately, to get our politicians to dream the dream to make this happen.

We’ve done this before.  Wi-fi was invented by Australians.  CSL is a world leading example of managing healthcare.  There are numerous examples of Australian innovation.  We’ve missed the boat on creating industries driving renewable energy.   Let us get this moving so that our next generation industries are actually Australian industries, generating value to Australia, using AI to create a new set of businesses that create wealth for us all.

It is not hard.

Regards

Rob

My frustration is growing with the political class!

It seems to be easier for those engaged in politics to default to the negative rather than projecting a future vision that requires a longer term view to build on the foundations of our society.  The current participants in our political debate are unwilling to collaborate in building the future and as a consequence we are forced down a path of short-termism to the detriment of us all. Where are the nation building discussions that drive our prosperity? Where are the shared values that ensure all in our society are lifted with the tide? Where are the people that can work together to the benefit of all, with vision, clarity of thought, clear enunciation of purpose?

I think it is time to forge a new political paradigm. To create a new movement that embraces ideas, is forward thinking, socially progressive but economically sound (aka conservative). But above all else we need the politics of the future to be divorced from the corruption of the past. No more vested interests. No more soft donations from people wanting favours. No more policies designed to support those that lobby the hardest. No more ambiguity in our conversations with the people – be up front with us all so that we clearly understand the road we are going down.

Perhaps the best position is one where we all know there are challenges ahead but by virtue of the integrity of the leadership we end up trusting the process going forward. 

When that occurs it will mean that politics is back to where it should be.

I met with a visionary today. Someone that is at the forefront of managing the crisis with homeless people in Melbourne.

This person tells me that up to 60% of homeless people in Melbourne are women and children as a result of family violence. Can you believe that?  Why, in this day and age, do we have such an extraordinary failure of our systems that allows this to happen? 

Why do we not fix this issue of domestic violence? 

Why do we still find it acceptable to beat women and children and then allow them to become homeless?

If we could find a solution to this issue then we are halfway there to fixing the problem of homelessness. So why don’t we simply do the right thing and put the money towards getting this right instead of pouring our taxpayers money into a rail line to ship coal from a mine in Queensland to a port in the Great Barrier Reef? Why? 

So, a lot has been happening recently and I must say, there seems to be some vindication for those that were more positive than those that are of the negative persuasion.

Emmanuel Macron is the president of France.  His party has secured a majority in the National Assembly. All is good in the world of France.

Theresa May got a black eye for calling an election that treated the voters as idiots. Whilst her opponent is undoubtedly a bit too far left, the electorate in the UK at least put in place some markers that will ensure a sensible future around Brexit is now possible.  However, some upheaval will certainly continue.

The USA is a black hole for common sense. Say no more. Just watch this 25 year project for the break up of the United States. It has already started.

In Australia, the climate wars seem to be coming to a close but we still have some serious crazies in the government. The prospect of a continuing ‘freeze’ in the common sense required to get the country onto a growth footing in energy is enough to be a drag on the future of Australia.

So what does this mean? 

Very simply,  we need to lift the vision across the world.

Why can’t we get our collective act together and start to push new horizons for this country. We are Australian. We are innovators and yet we cannot work out how to fix this problem!  Let us just do it! 

I was at a conference in London the other day run by the Economist Group. There was a fascinating presentation by a futurist that suggested any person born today would be expected to live until the age of 150.

Most people take a step back and think – no way!  And yet the idea is not so bizarre.  The reality is that with advances in Artificial Intelligence, robotics and genome technology, there is a general expectation that all diseases as we know them will be eliminated in next 20 years.  No cancers, no viruses, no age impacted diseases related to mental health, etc. The only challenge therefore will be to manage the skeletal structures in old age and other physical breakdowns in bodily parts.  3D printers will fix most of those issues!

It is an interesting development and certainly not without precedence, given the acceleration in life expectancy that has occurred in recent times.  The implications run beyond simple life expectancy through to taxation and pension policies.

So the challenge will be on communities that rely on managing people through their life cycles to ensure this extends into extreme old age and not just the horizons we have expected in the past.

For all of us, though, there is a deeper issue.  How do we plan, contemplate and indeed adapt to these changing horizons?  Do we put our heads in the collective sands and say this won’t happen to us?  Or do we take an active approach towards exploring the future and manage these outcomes?

I think we all have a responsibility to step up to the plate.  Regardless of whether we think change will happen sooner or later, change will happen.  This applies to healthcare in our communities or the broader perspective of climate change and in the interests of future generations we must take control of these issues NOW.

The purpose of this blog is to start a conversation on issues that are important to us all.  It is not designed to be political, but by its nature will certainly drive political responses. Having said that I want all people of any political persuasion to step out of the current cesspit of global politics and to start engaging in conversations on issues that are important to us all.

I live in Melbourne, Australia and I am a social progressive but I was encouraged by the work of a Sydney based conservative MP, John Alexander @JohnAlexanderMP, who has advocated the use of high speed rail to address the problems of housing affordability.  This is simply a perfect solution to a major problem. It addresses the social issue of mobility in large cities. But it also casts the conversation around enabling people in far flung communities to access the major cities for employment.

All too often, critics try to shoot down high speed rail on the back of a business case that doesn’t quite work out as it is near on impossible to prove the numbers because we can never understand the future.  It is what one futurist, Roy Amara, best summed up as this dilemma:  “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. In other words, our understanding of change is only related to our knowledge of the present.  It is fundamentally difficult for anyone to gauge the future without knowing the scale of change that will occur over time.  So when we consider technology changes such as high speed rail, automated (driverless) transport, etc, we can only realistically do so in the context of our knowledge of today.

So what I will suggest is that we let the future take hold.  Manage our conversations based on what might be … rather than what we can currently see.

In this context, can you imagine a time when a train will leave Geelong, stop at Avalon,   loop into Tullamarine and then run into Ballarat before heading to Bendigo.  All the while taking people on the high speed (and I mean really fast) journey to their destinations.  Will this let people live in remote locations while at the same to enjoying low cost housing but being able to work in the city?  Too right it will!

How cool is that?

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I have always been a ‘glass half full’ sort of person but even I have struggled in recent times to remain confident about our future.

As bombast and bigotry become the norm in the political conversation, I am sure many will have witnessed the despair that seems to have become all pervasive. The default position in today’s politics seems to be ‘offend and destroy’ rather than ‘defend and build’.  The new political psychology seems to be based on a conviction that the world must smash the current systems in order to survive and yet that assumes the role of the world institutions has no relevance in our future. Surely it is better to build on what we have rather than destroy the foundations of our society? 

I think it is time to reset the conversation and focus on the opportunities before us. In other words, give the politics of hope a go. I hope that this blog will discuss the successes in our world, will address how we move forward instead of driving down the road fixated on the rear view mirror. In the absence of political leadership it is our collective responsibility to provide that leadership. For we should never lose hope.