Andrew Orlowski speaks!

At the Battle of Ideas Festival at the Barbican last year, Claire Fox chaired a panel titled "Is Technology Limiting Our Humanity?", and invited my friend Andrew Orlowski of The Register to speak. Two short but thought-provoking extracts are now up, which The Register's editors have entitled:

• Terrified robots will take middle class jobs? Look in a mirror, in which Andrew argues that jobs are automated only when they have been drained of all human functions such as judgement.
• Meet the original Big Data, TED Talk, Thought Shower Futurist, in which Andrew discusses the analogies between the work of William Playfair (1759-1823) and today's Big Data enthusiasts.

Playfair in particular is a fascinating character:

an embezzler and a blackmailer, with some unscrupulous data-gathering methods. He would kidnap farmers until they told him how many sheep they had. Today he’s remembered as the father of data visualisation. He was the first to use the pie chart, the line chart, the bar chart.
...
Playfair stressed the confusion of the moment, its historical discontinuity, and advanced himself as a guru with new methods who was able to make sense of it.

Both extracts are worth your time.