About Me
I am Professor of Ethics at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.
I've been busy over the past almost thirty years exploring the ethical implications of technological change, and the ways in which genetic and cybernetic technologies may alter us.
The exponential imagination of Elon Musk: It’s his future, we’re all just living in anticipation of it
A piece written for ABC Religion & Ethics on our collective Elon Musk addiction. Why do we insist on making almost every question about progress a question about him?
What can Australians and Brazilians learn from each other in their battles with Elon Musk and X?
A piece in Portuguese co-written with the excellent Murilo Vilaça for the Brazilian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique about the impact of X on democratic institutions in Australia and Brazil.
The Gifts Pasifika People can Give to New Zealand, If we Let them
A piece in the Christchurch Press co-written with Professor Leilani Tuala-Warren about what New Zealanders can learn from Pasifika people if we welcome them to live among us. They could hold the solution to our loneliness crisis.
What can be done to challenge the rent-seeking behaviour of the academic publishing industry?
At a time when many academic programmes are failing, this piece offers a philosophical thought experiment to focus on the high and increasing profits Big Academic Publishing charges to publish our research. Does imagining a world in which there's no (journal) Nature expose rent-seeking behaviour on the part of presses? Written for the ABC Religion and Ethics.
When Socrates meets Silicon: A cross-cultural conversation on human enhancement
Plato's Dialogues are just so much fun to read. I had a go at writing a modern version of one on the debate about human enhancement Here is another Dialogue on enhancement co-written with the Brazilian philosopher Murilo Vilaça. We very much enjoyed writing latter day versions of the "great and good" of Athens who were Socrates' victims. This was expertly edited by Scott Stephens for the ABC Religion and Ethics.
On the moral obligation to stop shit-stirring
A piece written in December 2020 for Psyche on the phenomenon of moral shit-stirring. I oscillate on whether the world needs more or less moral shit-stirring. Also I was curious to see how Dall-e would illustrate the concept.
Beyond the reaches of Big Academia, there could a bright future for the humanities in pamphleteering
Can we save the humanities by avoiding the destructive profit engines of Big Academic Publishing?
Back to the future: Here’s how we could automate the role of CEO and make it more moral
Instead of just watching as the gap widens between what CEOs earn and what the rest us us take home, why not automate the C suite. Letting corporations automate their own CEOs could turbocharge inequality. We could instead insist that they automate the 1970s CEO.
The need for brave experiments in higher education
A piece written for the Christchurch Press on the need for experiments in higher education. We don't have to envy Big Tech's billions to learn from their attitude toward innovation.
Owning the future: How Big Tech coopted our imaginations, and how we can take them back
A piece for ABC Religion and Ethics on how charismatic tech dudes literally own the future. We can fight back by freeing our imaginations.
Imagine a world without death
I very much enjoyed participating in this discussion with the writer Omar El Akkad on the Apple Podcast Without. It addresses the promise and expected disappointments of radical life extension.
The best books to encourage big thinking about how technology could change humanity
A list of exciting books about the future from outside of philosophy that inspired my writing of Dialogues on Human Enhancement (Routledge, 2023).
The human glitch: An ethics for disrupting the automated age
What can we learn from Karl Popper about being a human glitch and disrupting the technologies coming to automate you out of existence?
Why we enjoy the excruciating miseries of the super-rich
A piece for Newsroom that probes our schadenfreude about the occasional miseries of the super-rich
Will the decline of Surveillance Capitalism herald a new era of Human Enhancement Capitalism?
A piece for ABC Ethics and Religion that speculates about the money that could soon flow into technologies of human enhancement
Should Humanities Professors Be Automated?
A piece for Project Syndicate on how recent advances in AI suggest an urgent need to rethink how humanities academics write. It's too easy to automate!
Confessions of a philosophical shit-stirrer
A follow up to this piece on the vice of philosophical shit-stirring. And a bit of a mea culpa for past shit-stirring.
The Inflection Pointillists
A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books written with Stuart Whatley that challenges popular beliefs about exponential improvement as the solution to pretty much everything.