Man and Machine, on Stage with Kasparov

Some invitations you do not turn down. Commonwealth Bank asked me to present and then debate the future of business for a room of their most important clients, under the title Man and Machine. My fellow guest on stage was Garry Kasparov, the world chess grandmaster who had famously played, and lost to, IBM's Deep Blue. Media personality Adam Spencer moderated.

Kasparov is a fascinating person to share a stage with on this topic, because he has lived the argument. He knows better than almost anyone what it feels like to be outplayed by a machine, and he came out of that experience not as a pessimist but as an advocate for humans and machines working together.

My part of the conversation was about where technology was actually heading and what it would mean for work, industry and livelihoods, the questions that sit under all the headlines about artificial intelligence. The debate that followed was the real event: two people who care about the same future, arriving at it from very different lives.

I have given a lot of keynotes over the years, and the ones I remember are never the ones where I simply delivered information. They are the ones where I got to think out loud, on stage, next to someone who made me sharper. This was one of those.