AI and Religion – Mind Your Golems

When a Grok-driven autonomous weapon kills a person, so do Elon and his shareholders. When ChatGPT advises your teenager to take her own life, so do Sam Altman, OpenAI, and their employees. And when you train or prompt a network of autonomous agents to hack a bank, you share that responsibility, accountability, and culpability with the humans that run your favourite AI platform. The AI itself is just a number running on a machine. It has no real knowledge of good and evil, other than its human-provided training.

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Leadership in the age of COVID-19

What does great leadership look like in a crisis? Read on for an analysis of Jacinda Ardern’s leadership of Aotearoa / New Zealand’s response to COVID-19, and some lessons for how we can become great leaders ourselves. On Monday 23 March 2020, NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced sweeping new measures to combat the effects…

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Beyond Tolerance

A friend recently reminded me that I’d given this talk at the National Interfaith Forum over 11 years ago. Oddly, the subject has come up a number of times for me over the last few weeks, in the context of how we should develop and celebrate tolerance. But is tolerance enough? Read on… “Beyond Tolerance”…

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Publisher or postman?

On the proposed regulation of social media platforms In the wake of the Christchurch Mosques terror attacks on 15 March 2019, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said that social media platforms must take responsibility for the material that they distribute, that they are the publisher, not the postman. More specifically, We will look…

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A vision for 2070

Today I’m participating in a meeting called Optimistic Futures, organised by the Service Innovation Lab, InternetNZ, and Victoria University – three organisations with which I have an association. Here is my own broad vision for what I’d like the world to look like in 2070. We have solved the big, wicked problems. The environment is…

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