Contact

I’m easiest to connect with over at LinkedIn - Ben’s profile. It’s the only platform I use (any profiles on other platforms are either dormant ones that I’ve set up for API access or, more recently, fakes).

Professional History

I was a data scientist before it was cool, and when you still needed mathematical training and a post-grad degree. Dark days, but I enjoyed them - just not enough to make a career out of actual data science, so I went into consulting. Now, I write.

The Point of My Articles

I want to know how much control I have over my own life. I suspect not much - technological progress pulls us along and shapes us into versions of ourselves that we didn’t choose. That’s been happening since your ancestors discovered the shovel, worked the land with it, and denied their children a natural pre-shovel lifestyle. Which was ultimately a wise decision.

I don’t have to hunt through the cold of an English winter, burn dung when I can’t find firewood, or kill strangers before they kill me because thousands of years of post-shovel innovation have made my life easy. But I’m not entirely sure it’s made life fulfilling. At least, the most fulfilling parts of my life have nothing shovely about them - love, fatherhood, friendships, etc. I could have them all without garden tools.

But I wouldn’t be able to receive them as me because the “me” I’d be would likely be harder, violent and more nihilistic - the kind of chap who understands that beneath the prisoner’s dilemma, game theory comes down to hitting the other guy really hard with a really big stick. I like the me that innovation has allowed to exist.

There are questions that play on my mind, however. Isn’t it a bit weird to be happy that hot running water, central heating and food deliveries have made me soft, when I didn’t make any of those things happen? Could I become a fundamentally different “me” in a few years due to some technological paradigm shift? Did that already happen when Web-2.0 made me part of a social web instead of a mere user of an information-based one?

And underneath it all is a lurking and almost self-evident truth - just because thousands of years of post-shovel innovation worked out well (I think), doesn’t guarantee that the next few dozen years (or less!) won’t be a catastrophe.

The only thing I’m certain of is that none of us, not even that guy with the space company and the bird-app megaphone, are really in the driving seat. You should totally subscribe.