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.
Could Leonid Brezhnev’s shaking hand save humanity from a Third World War?
There are so many businesses trying to make war more efficient. Here is some nostalgia for the days when Leonid Brezhnev's finger might be called upon to press the button. What happens when the efficiencies of Ukraine's drones come to WMDs?
The Immortality Gladiators
A piece written for Aporia on the possibly heroic, possibly crazy risks that may be required to expedite progress in anti-aging science. Are they prepared to die for our social media likes?
Clausewitz in the Pacific: Tariffs are war by other means — there’s a way for Australia to respond in kind
Something on what to do if you are collateral damage in a trade war.
New Zealand will innovate again when education doesn’t begin with a No
A piece published with Stuff that explores a reason New Zealanders aren't innovating with the facility we once did. It's to do with our Safety Culture.
As Silicon Valley pivots from amplifying consumerism to supplying military tech, how should Australia respond?
A piece on the new business model of war emerging from Silicon Valley. It we lack the moral courage to prevent World War Three who should fight in it? Not the generation we will need to build back afterwards.
If war is the next big disruption, what’s to stop the titans of Big Tech from breaking the world?
Are the business interests of the tech elite more aligned with peace or war? This piece with the ABC explores circumstances under which war could be very good for business.
Create a third medical school for the sake of Aotearoa’s future
New technologies are bringing change to medicine. Medical education must change too. This piece with New Zealand's Stuff proposes that a new medical school in Aotearoa will have this effect.
A lesson in playing chicken with Big Tech
A piece with New Zealand's Newsroom suggesting that if we want to get better at playing chicken with Meta and Google we should learn from Brazil's experiences with X and Musk.
Nicholas Agar says More
An interview with Project Syndicate about my thoughts on the biases we bring to technological progress.
The Techno-Realist Manifesto
A piece written co-written with Stuart Whatley for Project Syndicate on the Horizon Bias - why we are so keen to believe in imminent Martian colonies. Perhaps billionaire largesse is mainly about hacking this glitch in human psychology.
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?
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.
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.
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.