The human perspective

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Dave Coplin doesn’t take himself too seriously. A Star Trek fan since the age of eight, he is, nearly 40 years later, “a proper grown-up nerd” complete with pony tail, beard and hipster spectacles. 

Until very recently, he also had an appropriately nerdy moniker – chief envisioning officer at Microsoft. “I always told my mum I’d be a CEO one day, ” he jokes.

But we should take him very seriously indeed. An evangelist for the world-changing potential of technology since his university days, and still “a naive optimist”, he nevertheless has a number of concerns. One, we have become enslaved by technology rather than liberated by it. Two, we have abdicated too much responsibility to technology, expecting it to provide answers without us asking the right questions, and allowing many of our innate cognitive skills to atrophy in the process. Three, workplaces have not kept pace with technological advances, severely compromising our productivity. And four, ...