Long after the release of the Ford Pinto, and subsequent book by Ralph Nader “Unsafe at Any Speed”, the auto industry became accustomed to regulations at almost every corner. In the digital age, we need to consider automotive cybersecurity and privacy to be just as important as other safety features we've learned to depend on.
Uber is planning to launch a flying taxi service in Melbourne - but with a human pilot! Flying taxis are quickly moving from science fiction to reality.
Spotting pedestrians is one of the smart city’s most difficult and important problems. To keep people safe in a world of autonomous cars and robots, systems must be able to tell the difference between “Bruce” and a vertical post.
Home assistants and voice activated interfaces can be so convenient - but what you may not realize is that in order to do these things, the software is always on and is always listening.
In order to make cities liveable with so many people, we need to use smart technologies like sensors to help us plan and maintain them.
Australia passed its disastrous "Access and Assistance" legislation - a political farce with terrible consequences for society and the technology industry - and I firmly believe that this legislation is attempting the impossible.
Ask a search engine what the world has to say about AI ethics, and you're guaranteed a plethora of scholarly articles, blog posts, magazine features, and images—some animated, illustrating the ‘trolley problem’.
Transparency and consent are necessary components of ethical data handling, but what about respect? On Monday morning, Australia's Digital Health Agency began defending the security of the Government's MyHealth Record system, but by midday the agency was concerned with more immediate matters: users inundating its online and telephone systems.
We’ve all heard the saying, ‘safety standards are written in blood’, in reference to a reactive, rather than proactive approach to safety regulations. So, why is the world so determined to see the same fix-as-we-go attitude towards the safety standards of self-driving cars?
We’re already at risk of having our personal information used against us, while the collection and cross-indexing of our data expands year-on-year. We need to elevate privacy and data protection to the political sphere and keep it there. Since 2018 began, the IT industry has watched, in horror, the slow-motion train wreck of Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. Why? Because these are hardware bugs and they’re harder to deal with than a slip in a C++ library. What does this mean for driverless cars?
