Humanizing technology
Track: Keynote
As a species, humanity is incredibly lazy! We love making things easier for ourselves. We have built tools, and computers and the internet. We have can openers, calculators and cream-in-a-can. We have all the world’s information at our fingertips, 24/7. Any individual on the planet has the ability to contact literally billions of people. We have created a glorious digital world with unprecedented scale and reach!
So how do we retain our identity and agency, when our environment is overstuffed with data and communicating is trying to drink from a firehose? Attempting to make life manageable, we categorise and filter and automatically process. With the advent of AI, we even have machines creating content for other machines. Machines make decisions for us, and, autonomously, about us. We are just cogs.
What does it take to reverse this effect? How do we humanize technology again, both on a local and a global scale?
So how do we retain our identity and agency, when our environment is overstuffed with data and communicating is trying to drink from a firehose? Attempting to make life manageable, we categorise and filter and automatically process. With the advent of AI, we even have machines creating content for other machines. Machines make decisions for us, and, autonomously, about us. We are just cogs.
What does it take to reverse this effect? How do we humanize technology again, both on a local and a global scale?
Speakers
Nicola Nye
Nicola is an executive leadership coach with Blackmill Consulting. She’s worked in tech her entire career, from the world’s first WYSIWYG HTML editor, to a curated search ‘engine;’, through internet enabled vending machines, to a leading independent (Australian) email company.
She is weirdly excited about words. A voracious reader and literacy advocate, she serves on the board of her council’s library, and worked as a library tech in a primary school. She has written technical documentation for commercial and open source projects. She helped organise the first Write The Docs conference in Australia. Splendiforous! Shenanigans!
She is passionate about data protection and privacy. She tries to maintain a pragmatic view, but often gets distracted about the state of surveillance capitalism and why we can’t have nice things.
She is weirdly excited about words. A voracious reader and literacy advocate, she serves on the board of her council’s library, and worked as a library tech in a primary school. She has written technical documentation for commercial and open source projects. She helped organise the first Write The Docs conference in Australia. Splendiforous! Shenanigans!
She is passionate about data protection and privacy. She tries to maintain a pragmatic view, but often gets distracted about the state of surveillance capitalism and why we can’t have nice things.