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.
Latest
The human glitch: An ethics for disrupting the automated age
Only moral progress can save us from being victims of tech billionaires’ fever dreams
By mimicking machines, are workers paving the way for their own obsolescence?
What can we learn from Karl Popper about being a human glitch and disrupting the technologies coming to automate you out of existence?
By mimicking machines, are workers paving the way for their own obsolescence?
Only moral progress can save us from being victims of tech billionaires’ fever dreams
By mimicking machines, are workers paving the way for their own obsolescence?
If you want to protect your job from automation, don't mimic the machines.
Only moral progress can save us from being victims of tech billionaires’ fever dreams
Only moral progress can save us from being victims of tech billionaires’ fever dreams
Only moral progress can save us from being victims of tech billionaires’ fever dreams
A piece for the ABC on what to make of the wild speculations of the tech elite about the future AI could bring. Will it end capitalism but not in a way we want?
How we welcomed the AI wolf into the digital commons
Will the decline of Surveillance Capitalism herald a new era of Human Enhancement Capitalism?
Only moral progress can save us from being victims of tech billionaires’ fever dreams
A piece for the ABC on the now apparent costs of believing in the vision of the internet as a place to share. We welcomed the AI wolf into the digital commons.
Why we enjoy the excruciating miseries of the super-rich
Will the decline of Surveillance Capitalism herald a new era of Human Enhancement Capitalism?
Will the decline of Surveillance Capitalism herald a new era of Human Enhancement Capitalism?
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?
Will the decline of Surveillance Capitalism herald a new era of Human Enhancement Capitalism?
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 Artificial Intelligence make us reconceive what it means to be human?
Should Artificial Intelligence make us reconceive what it means to be human?
Should Artificial Intelligence make us reconceive what it means to be human?
A piece for ABC Ethics and Religion that suggests that the easy fakery of rationality by generative AI should lead us to rethink what makes humans special. Is the imagination and not reason humanity's true superpower?
Should Humanities Professors Be Automated?
Should Artificial Intelligence make us reconceive what it means to be human?
Should Artificial Intelligence make us reconceive what it means to be human?
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!
We need more philosophy to create cognitive herd immunity
Should Artificial Intelligence make us reconceive what it means to be human?
We need more philosophy to create cognitive herd immunity
Achieving herd immunity against COVID-19 requires more than vaccines. It requires cognitive herd immunity.
Confessions of a philosophical shit-stirrer
Confessions of a philosophical shit-stirrer
We need more philosophy to create cognitive herd immunity
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
Confessions of a philosophical shit-stirrer
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.
The Dream Economy
Confessions of a philosophical shit-stirrer
The Inflection Pointillists
A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books written with Stuart Whatley that deflates some of the hype that turns tech visionaries into multibillionaires.