Post by Greg Mackie OAM

“I’m not an analogue nostalgist. I don’t prefer getting lost to having Google Maps. I don’t think people were better informed when they had fewer channels or were less vulnerable to superstition when clerical authority was absolute. We are now in the third decade of the first digital century. The revolution is irreversible and of unknowable duration. History has had a number of these explosive profusions of interconnectedness, driven by a radical innovation in communication technology. But not many. The writer Naomi Alderman calls them “information crises”, and argues that the present one is only the third. The printing press was the second. The invention of writing some time around the fourth millennium BC was the first. The comparison doesn’t have to be exact for us to marvel at the scale of what we are experiencing. It is immeasurable because we don’t know how far along the track we have travelled. AI is only getting started. Readers of the Gutenberg Bible in the late 15th century had no means of anticipating the ways that movable type would transform European social, cultural, economic and political organisation. Are we better equipped to imagine the world after another 100 years of digital Reformation?” Raphael Behr, Guardian colunmnist