For about two decades Australia funded aged care by counting beds. Not nurses, not meals. Beds. We got exactly what we counted. Robots are now entering the same sector, and the funding question is live. A robot is easier to count than a bed, and the thing we actually want to buy is the hour of human attention it was supposed to free up.
Companion robots are already in Australian aged care and the national AI plan names them. Monitoring supports care. Companionship substitutes for it.
Of today’s 100 largest cities, only 24 will still be growing by 2100. Twelve are in Africa. Morris Misel on the ripple effects of the world’s urban gravity shift, and what it means for Australian organisations.
Kmart put camera glasses on the shelf for eighty-nine dollars and sold out. The signal isn’t the technology, it’s the price. At $469 these were an enthusiast product. At $89 they’re an ambient condition, and that changes what happens in every room your people work in.
We automated entry-level work and eliminated middle management in the same window. In doing so, we deleted the corporate classroom and the teacher. Here’s what arrives next, and why the organisations that feel most efficient right now may be the least prepared for 2029.
In 2016, at a keynote in Perth, I said the real question was never the technology. It was outputs, not inputs. Ten years later, the researchers building the world’s most powerful AI just confirmed it, in a letter to their own governments.
