Never Stop Questioning This World … It is Completely Amazing and Completely Flawed!

Never Stop Questioning This World … It is Completely Amazing and Completely Flawed!

You should never stop learning.

You should never stop questioning our world.

You should always listen to other viewpoints, and make up your own mind on things.

For some reason we lose our child-like nature of questioning things. We perhaps lose it because we are taught methodology and get pumped full of knowledge, and which can take away our from simple questioning of things that we had as a child. We often just lose interesting in the beauty of science and technology, through a whole lots of boring talks at school. Our love of our digital world, just becomes the addition of a new feature our iPhone. The years of research and inspiration, just becomes another gadget for us to play with. When was the last time you questioned how Facebook manages to detect your face in a crowded room?

We increasingly take so much of the world around us for granted. For me, I really cannot understand how I can stand in a lift — a Faraday Cage — and still receive text messages from an antenna that is miles from me. I cannot persevere the work involved in linking my phone to three satellites and for my phone to pin-point my location. Unfortunately, in our modern world, Google seems to be taking over in providing our viewpoint of the world. We don’t need to understand how things work anymore because if we want to find out, Google will tell us. But we are only learning a little bit about our world, and we are not really linking it with all the other things that are so important to us.

And in a world where we just turn to Google to understand how things work just sounds like a world where humans are enslaved to computers. We really need to force ourselves to probe things, to understand how things really work.

For example, to talk on cryptocurrency — at any level — requires an understanding of public key encryption, as I wouldn’t trust someone’s opinion in it, if they didn’t actually know what a transaction involved. You can turn to Google all you want, but your brain cells need to cement its knowledge in understanding how money works, and how cryptocurrency is different. Academia has thus grown up on this type of questioning, and where we take differing approaches are merge into critical thinking. Unfortunately we continually industry-focused conferences, where there is virtually no questioning of our world, and no real vision of how we address some of our fundamental issues. The future is bright (full of lots of new products made by company XYZ), or the future is dark (full of cybercriminals coming to steal your identity and your money).

For example, to talk on cryptocurrency — at any level — requires an understanding of public key encryption, as I wouldn’t trust someone’s opinion in it if they didn’t actually know what a transaction involved. You can turn to Google all you want, but your brain cells need to cement its knowledge in understanding how money works, and how cryptocurrency is different. Academia has thus grown up on this type of questioning, and where we take differing approaches are merge into critical thinking. Unfortunately, we continually industry-focused conferences, where there is virtually no questioning of our world, and no real vision of how we address some of our fundamental issues. The future is bright (full of lots of new products made by company XYZ), or the future is dark (full of cybercriminals coming to steal your identity and your money).

And so, it was thus a pleasure and an honour to host both Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Bruce Schneier one a single day, and within a university. Both probed, and nipped, and niggled. The most inspirational for me was Andreas, and you may agree or disagree with his viewpoints, but they, at least, trigger debate and change or strengthen viewpoints. For me, his observations have moved my thinking forward, and I think I see a clearer path for the risks our future will face:

Question everything in our world, especially in its digital form. Let debate thrive. Keep learning, and don’t be a slave to Google.

If want to be part of this debate, we have a conference coming up on 4 September, and in one of the most enlightened cities in the world (Edinburgh):

And finally, go innovate like never before … our digital world is just so imperfect.