Genevieve Bell: The future is already here (Breaking the Data Silos keynote speech)

The future is already here, and governments and individuals need to learn how to deal with the loss of privacy, the rising power of data and algorithms and the growth in robots, says Professor Genevieve Bell.

Professor Bell delivered the keynote address at ANZSOG and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s Breaking the data silos conference in Canberra on March 27.

She warned that that the rise of data would not necessarily make society more democratic or more equitable unless we consciously redesign social structures, and governments work to ensure people are treated as citizens as well as consumers.

“Every new technology cleaves to the same lines of inequity as the previous one did and often reinforces them unless you choose to intervene,” she said.

Professor Bell quoted science fiction writer William Gibson, as saying: “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”.

“This is a wonderful provocation. The future is not some other country that you can just land in, there are bits of the future all around, we just need to look for them,” Professor Bell said.

She said the future would be messy, and the rise in data, robots and decisions made by algorithms without human intervention would create new challenges and require governments to make conscious choices about the kind of future we wanted.

Read more here: https://www.anzsog.edu.au/resource-li...