The space for privacy has been rapidly shrinking in the last decade worldwide. In 2013 American whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information on a massive global surveillance campaign being conducted by the US government in partnership with the Australian, British and Canadian governments. Facebook and Google are capturing and storing ever more detailed information about users Expand
Month: November 2020
Cellular Agriculture and Global Meat Production
Meat has for thousands of years been an aspirational and rare meal for most of the world’s population. But as the world has rapidly modernized and industrial agriculture has taken off in the last 100 years meat consumption has soared globally. Industrial meat production however is a highly carbon-intensive activity. As the world begins to Expand
The End of University Inc
Universities have long been critical components of public life and deeply formative institutions in the lives of many. Unlike in most nations, US universities also play a very active role in economic activity nationally thanks to their high tuition fees, extensive real estate holdings and the base of consumers and renters they bring to many Expand
The Antitrust Hammer
The technology industry has seen almost two decades of explosive growth after many observers predicted the industry had died after the Dotcom Bubble of 2001. In the last 20 years a generation of superstar startups have scaled and revolutionised how we communicate, transact, find information and what devices we own and use. A lot of Expand
A COVID-19 Endgame
The historic COVID-19 pandemic ravaging the modern world has continued to rage for a year now, after it first started in Wuhan in November and December of 2019. Today, 56 million cases have been confirmed globally (a guaranteed understimate of the true case numbers) with over 1.3 million people having lost their lives to COVID-19. Global economies Expand
Can AI Create?
In recent years artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies have developed at breakneck speed. Today you find them across the economy doing everything from underwriting risk for new loans to language translation and helping diagnose cancer. Not only can machine learning systems do these tasks successfully, they usually do them orders of magnitude better than Expand
Global Money Laundering Part I
The NY Times story shedding light on the mystery of US President Donald Trump’s tax returns has brought the issue of tax evasion and money laundering back into the limelight in recent weeks. According the NY Times, the President has avoided paying Federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years preceding his election. Perhaps more politically Expand
Deglobalization
One of the largest and most significant aftershocks of the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 will be felt in the manufacturing sector globally. The pandemic is set to accelerate the global trend towards deglobalization. A range of factors had begun to change the pattern of global production and global supply-chains ahead of 2020, such as rising wages in Expand
The Access Act of 2019
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” – John Barlow, founding member of Electronic Expand
B2B Rental Models
The rise of the “rental economy” has been a topic of extensive conversation in the press recently. A range of startups that allow consumers to rent instead of own assets have matured and consumers are increasingly choosing to rent things instead of buy – from furniture to ice cream machines. What’s been lost in the coverage is Expand