Which brings the question back, not to the validity of the theory itself, but to the choices made in its application. If the tools are known, and the outcomes are understood, then the issue is no longer one of knowledge, but of willingness. Willingness to expand the frame, to challenge the defaults, and to consider whether the balance being struck is one that serves the system as a whole, or simply sustains the path it has already taken.
Books
How Did We Get Here Chapter 8 – Will Computers Take Over
The stories of HAL, Skynet, Robby, Viki and Sonny were never about machines suddenly deciding to take control. They were about systems operating within the boundaries they were given, producing outcomes that made sense within those boundaries but failed to account for the complexity of the world around them.
The parallel, while not exact, is close enough to warrant attention. The risk is not a sudden, dramatic shift, but a gradual normalisation. The steady integration of systems into decision-making processes, reinforced by success and validated by adoption, until their presence becomes so routine that questioning them feels unnecessary.
How Did We Get Here Chapter 9 – Consuming the Locusts
The assumption that widespread behaviour equates to sound reasoning rarely faces challenge, particularly when it is supported by shared experience and reinforced through conversation. Breaking that pattern does not require a rejection of the environment or a retreat into extremes, but it does require a willingness to introduce a pause where none currently exists.
How Did We Get Here Chapter 10 – The Demon Smoke
The logical bystander does not stand apart from this with a sense of superiority, but with a sense of curiosity, and with the backdrop, in my case at least, of never being a smoker. What would it have taken, at that moment in the doctor’s office, for the conversation to pause? Not to reject outright, but simply to question. What is this doing? Why is this being suggested? What evidence supports it? Small questions, asked early, have a way of preventing larger problems from embedding themselves later.
How Did We Get Here Chapter 11 – The World of the Logical Bystander
What is the real answer being looked for? Not the answer that resolves the immediate issue, but the one that aligns with the broader purpose of the decision. What outcome is actually desired? What constraints are real, and which are assumed? What trade-offs are acceptable, and which are being made by default rather than design?
Brolga – A Life Well Lived – Foreword
The broader implication, perhaps, is this: that the most important conversations we will ever have are not the ones we plan, but the ones we allow. They occur when there is space enough for honesty to feel natural, when silence is not something to be filled, but something to be respected. They occur, more often than not, in places where nothing much is supposed to happen.
Brolga – A Life Well Lived – Chapter 1 – Where the River Starts Talking
He said it as if this sort of thing happened every day, as if riverbanks had always been studios and old fishermen had always known where to look. There was no self-consciousness in it, only that familiar ease some men carry without ever appearing to try. In another person it might have felt put on. In him it was just the morning taking its next step.
Brolga – A Life Well Lived – Chapter 2 – Brolga and the Lachlan
The scene settles again into the slow, patient act of fishing. The interruptions, the distant rattle of a truck, the soft ping of a line dipping into water, the occasional joke traded between memory and present moment, are not intrusions but part of the texture. They’re the small breaths that let a life be listened to with care. The river is not just a backdrop here; it is the slow drumbeat beneath the memory, the place from which memory rises.
Brolga – A Life Well Lived – Chapter 3 – Brolga the Cricketer
Then, almost immediately, Borlga digresses. One of his most favoured memories of being sunburnt on a Saturday afternoon in the scorching heat of the west comes to light. It’s a story I had heard hinted about, but about to get from the horse’s mouth.
Brolga – A Life Well Lived – Chapter 4 – Making Hay
Sometimes the climate of those memories is almost comical in its blunt honesty. We’d pile into a shed behind the church, or a culvert that kept the rain from turning the ground to soup, and we’d talk about the next thing we’d pull off the land or the next way we’d bend a rule to keep going. We didn’t have a creed so much as a shared suspicion that life shouldn’t be a neat row of boxes with stamps in the right places.
Brolga – A Life Well Lived – Chapter 5 – Brolga the Boong
He went on, grinning now, about Sundays. Bowls at the lake, waiting on the raffle, then heading down to Barry’s place ten or fifteen minutes out towards Condobolin. A singalong in the yard. Laughter that got louder as the day ran on. Some fella they called the Snake. Another bloke who couldn’t keep up but tried bravely anyway. The whole rough-edged fellowship of country men making a day of it.
Brolga – A Life Well Lived – Chapter 6 – The Entertainer
The town’s grand, stubborn plan, the broader plan they cling to like a lifebuoy on the riverbank, drifts into the talk. “That little town, the plan and the walk-in, cricket matches and storms,” I say, letting the memory hover. He laughs again, and the memory threads itself into the present like a seam that won’t come undone.