Crikey - It's 2025, No One Needs Another Blog

I’ve had a website of my own on and off for since I was 14. All of them scratched a similar itch: to share things that made me laugh, worry, or think. I always found that writing about something forced me to think more deeply, consider different angles, and overall sharpen my thinking.

In recent years, I’ve found myself at the intersection of many disciplines and shifts in our society. Whether it be co-leading one of the mental health reform initiatives, supporting start-ups and non-profits innovate, or researching artificial intelligence and its implementation at the service level. All of these have led to more questions than answers. As I work my way through some of the conundrums and opportunities they raise, I thought I would share some of these open questions along the way.

I don’t intend to necessarily dwell on the answers that I have come to, but rather talk through my process, both in the hope that it will raise questions for others and improve my own thinking along the way.

The other thing that’s driven me to consider starting my own website again has been a reflection on where I think artificial intelligence will take us as a society. As someone who’s used it a fair bit, both in a research and work contexts, it is easy to imagine where these enormous leaps in technology will land us in a couple of years. Among many other changes, I think it will make authenticity one of the last remaining human values, or uniquely human values.

I think we’ll increasingly want not just the answer to a question, but the answer according to a specific person with their own unique life experiences and thought processes. In a world where the consensus view as determined by large language models becomes instantly accessible and potentially quite generic, the value placed on authenticity will be all the more important.