Nicholas Stuart | New ways of thinking will solve tomorrow's problems

The fog that impedes our understanding of this future is that our ideas remain rooted in the present, even as we attempt to extrapolate out from where we are today. We obsess about the wrong technologies. Elon Musk, for example, might seem like a hero but he's attempting to solve today's problem - manufacturing self-driving cars. These will be great but they're a solution to a current difficulty, not the issues of the future. The car will remain useful but, by the time they arrive, we will be using vehicles differently. We won't need them for a long daily commute through streams of traffic because "work" will be different. The expansion of cities into metropolises will reverse as remote and dispersed work radically reshapes society.

In Australia, 1954 was the date of the last big switch. Before then a majority of Australians lived in the countryside - since that date our cities have expanded dramatically and rural areas began shrinking in proportion. New agricultural technologies allowed production to boom as rural industries replaced manpower - and it was men who did the work back then - with machinery. Today, thanks to AI, a similar revolution is coming for the cities and this means the problems we face will be changing in new ways.

It's vital to understand the new answers won't be the same as the old ones. Ideas like "infrastructure" and "growth" are no longer solutions for the future. If we want to understand and embrace what's coming, we need to jettison these old modes of thought.

Critical to this is the idea that people are somehow vital to humanising bureaucracy. The continuing revelations of the robodebt royal commission demonstrates people can be just as mechanical, unfeeling, and insensitive as machines. The requirement is to spend time thinking about the processes that are being implemented and ensuring they are designed intelligently, rather than to arbitrarily enforce rules.

Although this remains a town dominated by processes (following rules and procedures), Canberra's also become a nurturing environment for a remarkable group of individuals who are managing to challenge our old ways. People like the dynamic Rachael Greaves of the cyber security company Castlepoint, who is just back from yet another trip to sell world-leading product in the US market. Or Alexi Paschalidis, who in just over a decade has moved from a routine job managing Navy internet to become a founder of Oxide Interactive, another dynamic IT company with a different way of accomplishing tasks. Or Yash Varma, a Canberra boy who began working in London attempting to find new ways of using the internet to find solutions for other peoples' international communications problems. This required him to be open to new ways of thinking which has led today to his current position as an entrepreneur prepared to assist others to flourish. Today he's with Empress Capital, a venture capital firm channelling investment into emerging technology companies.

What makes people like this stand out is their enormous enthusiasm.

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Although statements like "the person who has the most energy wins" pepper Varma's conversation, what marks him out is a determination to see beyond "what is" to envisage "what might be". What has enabled these people to flourish is a bigger change in the nature of work. The old way to measure a company's success required nothing more than looking at how many people were sitting at desks and processing paper in large office blocks. These same structures that previously marked success are actually working to prevent the dynamism that's required today. Generative design demands a willingness to explode the old boundaries that have regulated our ways of accomplishing tasks and will continue to transform industries. Someone like Varma sees his contribution as helping others take their ideas, polish them up, and take them to market.

The only thing that limits us is our reluctance to jettison old ways. In this regard, the Houston/Smith team reviewing Australia's defences appear to have come up with a clever way of finding a solution to the submarine issue. By retaining the Collins class in service, they solve the immediate problem and offer a path to the future with the prospect of leasing an older US nuclear attack boat. This accommodates the demands of the politicians and the services but, far more importantly, leaves open the question of what form of underwater force the Navy will eventually graduate to.

Instead of a submarine fleet, it now appears far more likely that we will move to an uncrewed, autonomous solution for underwater combat. It's a new way of thinking that immediately solves all the problems that come with the human body and that's exactly what's required if we are to meet the future successfully.

The availability of ChatGPT has demonstrated for everybody not too lazy to try it out how this revolution will transform the information industries. This is exactly why it was released early and for free: to help it make a splash and gain first-mover advantage. But this application is about to be challenged by rivals. Other programs in development include Bloom (open-source, multi-lingual language model), Gopher and Chinchilla (developed by DeepMind) GLaM and PaLM (Google), OPT (Meta), AlexaTM (Amazon) and Megatron-Turing NLG (Microsoft). We don't know which will dominate - will OPT, for example, prevail in social interactions while PaLM dominates search and NLG the work environment? Or will one app rule them all?

But these big players won't solve tomorrow's solutions because the answers keep changing and big companies can't keep up. Life is dynamic. Just as AOL and Netscape have already vanished and Tesla and Twitter are on their way out; new answers will soon be required. To keep up, we will need to continue to find new ways of accomplishing tasks. Our minds will need to be open to different ways of getting things done and the answers will come from new ways of thinking. We need to divorce ourselves from our current reliance on growth. Coping with the future will require flexibility, not mass.