Dr Oliver Hartwich: New Zealand ignores the Kiwi who saw the future coming

In 1987, on a school trip to the German countryside, my maths teacher made a prediction. Dr Müller had worked at IBM before turning to teaching in our industrial city, Essen. One day, he mused, fast data connections would let him live in a place like this without giving anything up.

I was twelve and had just unpacked my first computer, an Amiga 500 with 512 kilobytes of memory. I found Dr Müller’s idea so fascinating, I still remember that conversation.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: Will a Kiwi Make us all Unemployed

Will a Kiwi Make us all Unemployed & Hasten the End of Humanity or be Our Saviour (and I'm being Serious)?

As our Mainstream Media are so busy reporting drivel these days, the most important stories affecting our lives are being overlooked. Oddly its left to obscure Blogs to write about them. Take, for example, the Boy from Rotorua, Shane Legg, that we've commented on from time to time before, who I met up with briefly in London many years ago at Google Headquarters after he had sold his company, DeepMind, to them. He is now Google DeepMind Chief AGI Scientist. Shane coined the phrase "Artificial General Intelligence" and is trying to achieve it. His DeepMind co-founder, Sir Demi Hassabis, has been knighted in the UK. Shane was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by the British a few years ago. Of course, Shane has not been knighted or recognized by the NZ government, since our honors list is political & comprises a large number of nobodies, at least compared to the likes of a scientist who is on the way to changing humanity and has become one of the world's most influential people.