A little while ago I gave a keynote titled Powerful Ideas Shaping Our Future at the highly inspiring Supply Nation Conference, which had the theme The Power of an Idea.
The five powerful ideas I shared in my keynote covered some of the most important themes that will shape this decade. Ideas ripple out to create action and in turn change. Here are brief snapshots of these five deeply interrelated ideas.
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We have now entered the very-long-awaited year of 2020, and an entirely new decade.
I truly think that everything we have experienced so far has just been prelude to the craziness of the 2020s. This will be an absolutely pivotal decade in human history, as we almost literally choose who we become and what direction we go as the human race.
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I was pleased to discover I am on the cover of the new issue of Venture magazine!
The cover feature, titled Transformation Without End, is based on an extended interview with me. It covers many facets of how we should be thinking about the future, but begins on a very important point:
“It is intrinsically human to want to create, to invent, to make things beyond what we’ve had before, and there will be no end to this.” So says futurist, author, and strategist Ross Dawson, who advises global companies on make-or-break issues that ultimately shape the course of human progress.
This human desire for progress, wanting more, of course can and does often go too far. At this point, having manifested extraordinary technological advances, we need to temper that desire. The article goes on to quote me:
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Last week I spoke at a very interesting event ‘Should We Turn Over Decision-Making To Robots?‘. It was the first of a series of discussion organised by WWF‘s Panda Labs, delving into the ethics and positive potential of emerging technologies.
ABC News published an article Relinquishing more power to robots up for debate at futurist talks based on pre-event interviews with fellow panelist Theresa Anderson, Director of the Master of Data Science and Innovation at UTS and myself.
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A few weeks ago I gave the keynote at the Asian Forum on Enterprise for Society in Manila, Philippines. The conference began as Asian Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility in 2002, this year celebrating the anniversaries of the convenors, 50 years for Asian Institute of Management (AIM) and 60 years for Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF).
I was honored to give the opening address on How Different Will the Future Be?, immediately preceding the keynote by the Vice-President of Philippines, Leni Robredo, who drew on her background as a social activist lawyer to present a powerful view of possibilities, in fact echoing many of my themes of platforms and cross-boundary collaboration.
One of the themes of my keynote was the massive trend of the shift in power to individuals.
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My company Advanced Human Technologies launched the web publication FutureofSex.net in 2011, seeing it develop into one of the most prominent publications globally in the space today.
At the time I wrote about the reasons for launching the publication, including simply that it is a very important topic for us all to explore, given the technologies we develop are shaping who we are in a multitude of fundamental ways.
As the publication has progressed I have realized even more how critical this issue is. We published a summary Future of Sex Report to distill the key ideas and their implications.
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Yesterday I was interviewed live on the ABC National News on the case of Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow, who had just been convicted for paying for his bus ride using an implanted chip instead of a standard bus card.
Below is the segment, running through the court case and conviction, followed by a 4 minute interview with me on the implications.
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While recently re-reading some of my personal journals from my late teens and early twenties, I found a list of thoughts distilled from my writings over several years, categorized into the primary themes I was thinking about, such as ‘Experiencing’, ‘Independence’ and ‘Creation’.
One of these phrases was ‘The only thing you can change… is the future’.
It struck me as immensely apt to my work today, so I put it in a shareable image, shown below.
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A recent article The revolution that will change how Australians live within 30 years dug into the future of homes, based on interviews with some of “Australia’s top futurists” including myself.
Here are some of the quotes they took from me:
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Yesterday I gave a briefing on Technology Trends and the Future of Work to a group of Non Executive Directors of major corporations, organized by a large professional services firm for its clients.
The group was the first to get a run-through of my new concept framework Vectors of Disruption, shown below, which I used to introduce and frame the rest of my presentation.
Click on the image for the full-size pdf
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