At the premiere of the movie Machine, which is a documentary film about artificial intelligence, one of the featured experts was Professor Toby Walsh. Professor Walsh is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence who has held research positions all over Europe and also in Australia, including the University of New South Wales. He was named by a newspaper as a rock star of Australian Digital Revolution (but that was The Australian).

The movie touches on autonomous driving and there is an item from an interview with Audi’s Head of Predevelopment specifically about autonomous driving later in this newsletter.

But I also interviewed Prof Walsh. Too often we approach a subject from our special interest area and fail to look at the broader context that will be driven by politics, business and even crime. Transport implications could be outweighed but many other factors.

The key approach that Prof Walsh says we need to take is how we give time and effort to what we feed into these artificial machines and time and effort to analyse the nature of the outcomes.