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Featured image: To serve and protect? Strategies for an artificially super-intelligent future

To serve and protect? Strategies for an artificially super-intelligent future

Guest Work • May 11, 2017

Guest post from David Miller, Vantage Consulting We need to be thinking about the long-term risks of super-intelligence. Next week I’ll be giving a talk on this as part of the Hutt STEMM Festival.  It’s an area I’ve had a keen interest in for several years. Despite not having any domain expertise in the technical disciplines associated with artificial … Read More

Featured image: Why we need to go back to the future (and give it a name)

Why we need to go back to the future (and give it a name)

Peter Kerr • Feb 01, 2017

Here’s a counter-intuitive notion, that if we’re smart, could allow our ‘analogue’ agricultural systems to thrive in a digital world. But to do so we MUST own our story. My contention is, the more society connects to the cloud, the more we will want to connect to the land. That is, as virtual and artificial becomes ubiquitous and cheaper, the … Read More

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Featured image: Why we should give some serious thought to a Science and Innovation Council

Why we should give some serious thought to a Science and Innovation Council

Peter Kerr • Jan 10, 2017

It’s that time of year when we fly  kites, give voice to possibilities. So, given we have a new Science and Innovation minister, namely Paul Goldsmith, how about exploring whether now is a good time to put seriously explore forming a Science and Innovation Council. New Science and Innovation Minister Paul Goldsmith should look at the advantages of forming a … Read More

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Featured image: Perhaps the TIN100 deserves an ex gratia payment?

Perhaps the TIN100 deserves an ex gratia payment?

Peter Kerr • Oct 27, 2016

Perhaps Greg Shanahan and his TIN100 team and reports are deserving of an NZ Inc ex gratia payment – because arguably they’ve been most responsible for bringing hi tech out of the closet, making it cool(er)*. Of course we can never tell what would’ve happened without this report coming into being 12 years ago, but purely as an ‘aspirational … Read More

Featured image: Does open source equal open society?

Does open source equal open society?

Peter Kerr • Aug 08, 2016

Every party needs a grumpy uncle…so let me be that curmudgeonly guy for the upcoming Open Source//Open Society conference. (Early spoiler alert – I’m going to some of OS//OS. There’s too many thought provoking speakers, too much opportunity to touch base with clever people not to) The second such OS//OS event is talking (was originally a typo, but it … Read More

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Featured image: Fishing for a complementary use of fire reservoir ponds

Fishing for a complementary use of fire reservoir ponds

Peter Kerr • Jan 28, 2016

Years ago for a farm management report at Lincoln University, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek plan around the integration of goldfish in troughs on dairy farms (we’d spotted the use of such technology to help keep the troughs clean). Koura (native freshwater crayfish). Picture by J Clayton, NIWA Well here’s a huge expansion on this idea, … Read More

Featured image: ‘We don’t have enough developers’ – a homebaked remedy

‘We don’t have enough developers’ – a homebaked remedy

Peter Kerr • Nov 23, 2015

There’s more than one way to bake the cake of “we don’t have enough developers”. Universities produce some, polytechs some others. Many are self-taught. Enspiral in Wellington through its Dev Academy has a fulltime nine week course that turns non-coders into people with digital development skills, ready for employment, open to much more learning. Industry Connect in Auckland has taken … Read More