Report: The Future of Digital Australia in 2025 and what Australians think

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I have been recently working with McAfee, now part of Intel Security, to write a report on Safeguarding the Future of Digital Australia in 2025, being launched this morning in Parliament House in Canberra as part of the Federal Government’s Stay Smart Online Week.

SafeguardingFuture2025_cover_250_shadowThe report consists of my insights into the Future of Home, Social, Work, and GenNext in 2025, together with commentary from McAfee and other experts on how to keep safe in these worlds.
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Click on the report cover image left to download the report.

Accompanying the report, we did a survey of what Australians think about their digital future in 2025. The results of the survey are in the video below. There are some fascinating insights.

For now, please feel free to share the resources. I would love to hear your thoughts on the report.

The opportunities and risks of virtual reality

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Today I was interviewed on the Daily Edition about virtual reality, in the wake of Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift.

You can click on the image below to watch a video of the segment.

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It is staggering that the very old idea of ‘virtual reality’ is finally about to reach its fruition with new technologies such as Oculus Rift, which have low enough latency to fool the brain into believing it is in a new world.
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15 theses about the future of the Internet and how we can shape it positively

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PewResearch Internet Project has just released a report on Digital Life in 2025 based on expert interviews.

One of the interesting aspects of the report is the ‘theses‘ that they have distilled from the interviews, which they have divided into ‘more-hopeful and ‘less-hopeful’, concluding with one very important piece advice. These are:
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Demographics will shape Asia’s future

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Last week I gave the keynote at the Board Strategy Planning offsite of a major Philippino bank at a beautiful location a few hours outside Manila.

The bank’s board and executive team recognize the need to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the future, so themed their strategy offsite around the future, inviting me to presenting on Creating the Future of Business to kick off the session.

My presentation delved into the essence of technological, societal, and economic structural change today, and the leadership required to succeed in the emerging world.

One of the topics I touched on was demographic change. Demographics in the Philippines is a very different issue than it is in most developed countries, where rapidly ageing populations are at the forefront.

The following chart shows the anticipated demographic profiles of Philippines and Japan in 2050.

Age_profile_Philippines_Japan
Source: Nationmaster
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In the Asian century, Australia is becoming Asian too

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Earlier this week I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Chartered Accountants/ Centre for Accounting, Governance and Sustainability Thought Leadership Forum in Adelaide.

The day’s theme was The Australian Accounting Profession and Asia, with a strong emphasis on education given the participation of most of the heads of accounting departments of Australian universities. As such in opening the event I was asked to speak on the broader theme of “Australia’s Engagement with Asia”.

In my keynote I started from the broader context of the ancient and modern history of Asia and Australia, looked at current trends including demographic shifts that are shaping our relationship, the most important intersections between our economies and cultures, and finally the leadership required for Australia and Asia to engage more deeply into the future.

In the course of my research for the keynote I looked at changes in Australia’s population, and generated the following very interesting chart:

Asian-born-Australians
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics
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The age of self-creation: why ethics must be central to how we create the future

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One of my flurry of media appearances over New Year was on the Sunrise show, talking about what to expect in 2014.

Click on the image to see a video of my interview.

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We discussed emerging consumer technology trends, shifts in retail, and the idea of “self-creation”, which was one of my 14 themes in our 2014: Crunch Time report.

As I wrote in the report about the theme:
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Why children (and adults) need to be on social media or get left behind

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Yesterday the West Australian newspaper began a five-part series on children and social media, beginning with a feature article introducing the topic.

The article’s title, Get online or ‘be left behind’ quotes an interview with me. It is very easy for journalists to focus on the negative when covering children and social media, so I’m very glad they took a more balanced stance.

The article began with an introduction to the issue, to the point of mentioning that English secondary school Eton has banned Snapchat. It goes on:

Sydney-based Ross Dawson, founder of think tank Future Exploration Network, said social networking was still in its early days. “We’re still fairly early on into what will become simply communication – life as we know it,” he said.

“Rather than logging on to Facebook and sharing some messages we are going to be in a world where we are sharing vast degrees (of information) with those who are close to us and to the world at large, and this communication will be intrinsic to life, our personal life and our work life.”

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Today Show: What to expect in the year ahead

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Early on January 1st this year, after a great New Year’s party and no sleep, I went into the studio to talk about what we should expect in the year ahead. The video is below

A few notes from what I discussed:
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Awesome video: we are building transparent machines of business exploiting society

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This fabulous video brings together a succinct telling of the privacy story of today with some exceptional 3D graphic animations and great sound. Watch it! (preferably full screen)

Transparent Machines™ from beeple on Vimeo.

In the Privacy section of our 2014: Crunch Time report we wrote:
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The future of human endeavor: humans and computers together far exceed the capabilities of either apart

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In my keynotes I often reference 1997 as the year that a chess grandmaster was first beaten by a computer, with Deep Blue outplaying Garry Kasparov.

Before that happened many believed that chess was the domain of ingenuity, imagination, and human insight that computers could never match. Yet brute processing power plus some improved algorithms did the job.

The power of computers has soared by around 1000-fold since then, and computers are moving deeper and deeper into the domain of what we consider to be fundamental human capabilities.

However, as I wrote in Chapter 11 of Living Networks:
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