Over the New Year, a big birthday, celebrated by a return to my childhood home, Guyana. We spent a week in the rainforest, among the red howler monkeys, screaming pihas and spectacled caiman. Under the canopy, it’s a noisy, hostile environment, mostly populated by wild pigs, giant snakes and spiteful, buzzing insects. The gag about my Sunday-morning job interviewing politicians writes itself.
Television picked the brains of business leaders from advertising, banking and consultancy in this session, learning how they have boosted diversity and inclusion in their industries.
Introducing “Diversity and inclusion: lessons from outside TV”, session chair Trevor Phillips argued that there were areas of agreement on diversity, notably that it is “good for business, as well as good for the soul”.
Having inadvertently found myself in the headlines twice in the past month, I’ve given up trying to understand what makes today’s news media pay attention.
Returning from the summer break, I pitched up at the Big Tent Ideas Festival, held in a field near Cambridge, to debate the future of AI and machine learning. To my nerdy mind, fears of massive job losses and robot control, stoked by people who can barely spell “algorithm”, are misplaced.
