Intelligent Robots To Power China’s Factories
As a Technocracy, China seeks maximum efficiency and maximum human displacement. The policies, coupled with draconian social engineering, is anti-human as it eliminates human values and dignity. ⁃ TN Editor
Robots powered by artificial intelligence are set to replace Chinese factory workers in a move aimed at boosting the manufacturing industry which has been hit hard by a rise in wages.
The machines which are capable of making, assembling and inspecting goods on production lines have already been rolled out, with one factory laying off 30 workers to make way for the robots. The robots were displayed at China’s Hi-Tech fair in Shenzhen earlier this month, an annual event which showcases new development ideas with the aim of driving growth in a number industries. But the news has annoyed Washington as it is expected to put international competitors at a disadvantage, as the two countries’s bitter trade war continues to escalate. Speaking to the Financial Times, Sabrina Li, a senior manager at IngDan, said: “We incubated this platform so we can meet the (Made in China 2025) policy.
“One noodle factory was able to dismiss 30 people, making it more productive and efficient.”
Giving the suffering manufacturing industry a leg up is a key part of the Chinese government’s Made in China 2025 policy.
Zhangli Xing, deputy manager of Suzhou Govian Technology which sells the quality control robots, said they are more reliable than human labour.
Mr Xing said : “A person looking by eye would take 5-6 seconds for each object, versus 2-3 seconds by machine. And humans will get tired and make more errors.”
This year the US announced three rounds of tariffs on $250bn worth of Chinese products while China retaliated with levies on $50bn of US products.
President Trump is set to meet with President Xi Jinping at the G-20 meeting in Buenos Aires next week and investors expect their relationship to remain frosty behind closed doors, regardless of cordial handshakes and smiles for the cameras.
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Learn Everything That Facebook Knows About You It is worth reading the fine print because Technocrat data harvesters at Facebook accumulate massive amounts of data about you and then make it available to others who will weaponize it to manipulate you. ⁃ TN Editor Facebook stores almost every single interaction you’ve had with the social network since you joined, including every time you’ve logged in, ads you’ve clicked, events you’ve been invited to, a list of the people you follow, your friends, your hometown, every time you’ve sent or received a message, every single status update and more.
It’s basically the history of everything you’ve done on Facebook. It’s also the data that Facebook can use to learn more about you. When others get unauthorized access to this data, they can learn a lot about you as well, as we learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that’s currently unfolding.
Here’s how to see everything Facebook knows about you and how to download your own archive of that information. It might be useful, especially if you’re planning to quit and take some of those memories with you.
What Facebook knows You can download your own archive of this data from Facebook. Here’s how:
Go to Facebook.com/settings Tap “Download a copy of your Facebook data.” Tap “Download Archive.” It might take a few minutes, but Facebook will alert you when your archive is ready. When it is, click “Download Archive” again, and a zip file will download to your computer. Browse through that archive by opening each file inside the folder.
Again, what you’ll find is that this is an entire history of your life on Facebook.
Read full story here… Robots Are Rapidly Replacing Immigrant Farm Workers
The rationale for immigrant workers has always been “we need them for jobs American’s won’t do.” Within 10 years, 90 percent of human labor on farms and will be replaced by robots. So, where are the 30 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. working these days? Certainly not on farms. ⁃ TN Editor As a boy, Abel Montoya remembers his father arriving home from the lettuce fields each evening, the picture of exhaustion, mud caked knee- high on his trousers. “Dad wanted me to stay away from manual labor. He was keen for me to stick to the books,” Mr. Montoya said. So he did, and went to college.
Yet Mr. Montoya, a 28-year-old immigrant’s son, recently took a job at a lettuce-packing facility, where it is wet, loud, freezing — and much of the work is physically taxing, even mind-numbing.
Now, though, he can delegate some of the worst work to robots.
Mr. Montoya is among a new generation of farmworkers here at Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of fresh-cut vegetables, which recently unveiled a fleet of robots designed to replace humans — one of the agriculture industry’s latest answers to a diminishing supply of immigrant labor.
The smart machines can assemble 60 to 80 salad bags a minute, double the output of a worker.
Enlisting robots made sound economic sense, Taylor Farms officials said, for a company seeking to capitalize on Americans’ insatiable appetite for healthy fare at a time when it cannot recruit enough people to work in the fields or the factory.
A decade ago, people lined up by the hundreds for jobs at packing houses in California and Arizona during the lettuce season. No more.
“Our work force is getting older,” said Mark Borman, chief operating officer of Taylor Farms. “We aren’t attracting young people to our industry. We aren’t getting an influx of immigrants. How do we deal with that? Innovation.”
Moving up the technology ladder creates higher-skilled positions that can attract young people like Mr. Montoya, who is finishing a computer science degree, and bolster retention of veteran employees who receive new training to advance their careers.
“We are making better jobs that we hope appeal to a broader range of people,” Mr. Borman said.
In a 2017 survey of farmers by the California Farm Bureau Federation, 55 percent reported labor shortages, and the figure was nearly 70 percent for those who depend on seasonal workers. Wage increases in recent years have not compensated for the shortfall, growers said.
Strawberry operations in California, apple orchards in Washington and dairy farms across the country are struggling with the consequences of a shrinking, aging, foreign-born work force; a crackdown at the border; and the failure of Congress to agree on an immigration overhaul that could provide a more steady source of immigrant labor.
Farmhands who benefited from the last immigration amnesty, in 1986, are now in their 50s and represent just a fraction of today’s field workers. As fewer new immigrants have arrived to work in agriculture, the average age of farmworkers has climbed — to 38 in 2016, according to government data, compared with 31 in 2000.
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Study: China Tech Factory Conditions Fuel Suicides
Technocracy promises Utopia but delivers dystopian despair instead. Several years ago, the head of assembly giant Foxconn retained the head zookeeper from the Beijing zoo to consult on employee management and reducing suicides; it hasn’t worked. ⁃ TN Editor Difficult working conditions including punishment for minor offences and high staff turnover in Chinese factories that feed the global electronics supply chain contribute to employee suicides, a study published on Wednesday (Nov 14) said. The study by the Hong Kong-based Economic Rights Institute, which supports fair economic development, and labour rights group Electronics Watch looked at 167 cases of attempted or completed suicide as well as public displays of suicidal intent in China since at least 2010.
The study found that factors contributing to such cases included supervisors ignoring employee stress, punishment for minor workplace offences, denial of bonuses promised by recruiters, and anxiety over job security in factories with high staff turnover.
“Employee suicide in the Chinese electronics sector reflects the repression of workers? collective voice,” report author Dimitri Kessler of the ERI said.
Researchers arrived at the results after analysing suicide cases, conducting surveys at factories, and interviewing hundreds of workers.
ERI said it has met with members of the Responsible Business Alliance, an industry group that includes tech giant Apple, to discuss improving conditions.
The study took pains not to name and shame, referring to “Supplier F”, a prominent electronics supplier that experienced a “string of suicides” in 2010.
That year, at least 13 Chinese employees of Apple supplier Foxconn died in apparent suicides which activists blamed on tough working conditions and which prompted calls for better treatment of staff.
China’s massive electronics production sector often faces allegations of poor labour conditions and unethical hiring practices.
Workers in many Chinese factories toil for more than 80 hours a week for low salaries, going hours without breaks and are sometimes exposed to carcinogens, Electronics Watch said.
Floor supervisors are also often abusive to employees who have to race to meet ambitious targets, it said.
A report last month by labour rights group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour said an Apple supplier in the southwestern city of Chongqing had forced student employees to work “like robots”.
As the world’s largest contract electronics maker, Foxconn has several plants in China employing more than one million workers and has in the past admitted to labour violations.
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Embattled Facebook Now Exposed For Attacking George Soros Group
Facebook is accused by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation of smearing rivals and ‘threatening democracy’ to distract from its own political problems. Attacks against left and right prove the point that Zuckerberg is a Technocrat. ⁃ TN Editor Facebook has been accused of “threatening the very values underpinning our democracy” by allowing anti-Semitic conspiracies to spread on its social network and commissioning “vile propaganda” about billionaire financier George Soros.
The accusations were made by Open Society Foundations, a non-profit group founded by Mr Soros, following an investigation into Facebook’s alleged use of underhand and aggressive tactics designed to divert attention away from its own scandals.
The tech giant hired Definers Public Affairs, a Washington DC based political consultancy specialising in opposition research, to attack critics of the firm, according to the New York Times.
Definers Public Affairs sent journalists a research document connecting Mr Soros to “a broad anti-Facebook movement”, according to the New York Times. It encouraged journalists to look into links between Mr Soros and groups such as “Freedom from Facebook”, a lobby firm that campaigns against Facebook.
Patrick Gaspard, president of Open Society Foundations, said the strategy was “dangerous.”
“It is disappointing to see how you have failed to monitor hate and misinformation on Facebook’s platform,” he wrote in an open letter. “To now learn that you were active in promoting these distortions is beyond the pale.”
Mr Soros, the Jewish billionaire investor and philanthropist, has long been the target of conspiracy theories spread by far-right outlets.
Mr Gaspard said that there was a “concerted rightwing effort to demonise Mr Soros”, which had led to the delivery of a pipe bomb to his home.
“You are no doubt also aware that much of this hateful and blatantly false and anti-Semitic information is spread via Facebook,” he said. The Open Society denies direct financial funding to “Freedom from Facebook”, although it has supported other organisations that have been critical of Facebook.
The smear story was one of several spread by Definers Public Affairs, the New York Times said. Facebook said on Thursday it had cut its ties to the company.
The Republican-leaning PR group published several negative articles about other rival companies, including Google and Apple, on NTKNetwork.com.
In one, it said Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was hypocritical for criticising Facebook over privacy. Many of NTK’s articles were picked up by conservative sites such as Breitbart.
It added that top Facebook executives were unaware of the details of the attack strategies being waged by Definers against its clients rivals.
The report paints an unflattering picture of Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
“Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view,” it said. “At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.”
“While Mr Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics.”
Facebook’s lobbying efforts to discredit opponents took place as the companyfaced grillings on Capitol Hill in hearings surrounding the company’s efforts to take down Russian disinformation on its social network and in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw tens of millions of users’ data exposed.
Damian Collins, the Conservative MP leading an inquiry into tech companies, said on Twitter the report was “a damning story”. Read full story here…
Oxford Professor On Google: ‘They Are Incapable Of Holding Themselves To Ethical Standards’
Google is one of the most data-hungry Technocrat companies on earth, and is integrating health data and health AI into its company by merging DeepMind. This has broken many promises made by both companies and exposes patient data en mass. ⁃ TN Editor Privacy advocates have raised concerns about patients’ data after Google said it would take control of its subsidiary DeepMind’s healthcare division.
Google, which acquired London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind in 2014, said on Tuesday that the DeepMind Health brand, which uses NHS patient data, will cease to exist and the team behind its medical app Streams will join Google as part of Google Health.
It comes just months after DeepMind promised never to share data with the technology giant and an ethics board raised concerns over its independence.
A separate research team at DeepMind will continue to function independently of Google, but under the umbrella of its parent company Alphabet.
A DeepMind spokesman said: “All patient data remains under our partners’ strict control, and all decisions about its use lie with them.”
DeepMind health has already come under scrutiny from data watchdogs in the past. Last year, the Royal Free hospital in London was found to have breached the Data Protection Act over its handling of NHS patients’ data when using the Streams app, which was developed by DeepMind.
Streams is an application that aims to help doctors spot patients who may develop kidney disease. It was developed using data from the Royal Free Hospital.
In July, an independent ethics board said DeepMind needed to do more to prove its independence from Alphabet. The board was drawn up at the request of DeepMind’s founders when it was purchased by Google for £400m.
The latest report read: “To what extent can DeepMind Health insulate itself against Alphabet instructing them in the future to do something which it has promised not to do today? Or, if DeepMind Health’s current management were to leave DeepMind Health, how much could a new CEO alter what has been agreed today?
“We appreciate that DeepMind Health would continue to be bound by the legal and regulatory framework, but much of our attention is on the steps that DeepMind Health have taken to take a more ethical stance than the law requires; could this all be ended? We encourage DeepMind Health to look at ways of entrenching its separation from Alphabet and DeepMind more robustly, so that it can have enduring force to the commitments it makes,” a report by the ethics board stated.
“The relationship with Google is a constant question that runs through many areas of DeepMind Health’s business.”
DeepMind has come up against accusations from critics who accused the company of selling out. Co-founder Demis Hassabis said that the announcement would “accelerate scientific progress for the benefit of everyone”. Mustafa Suleyman, who created DeepMind with Hassabis while at university, said: “It’s been a phenomenal journey to see Streams go from initial idea to live deployment, and to hear how it’s helped change the lives of patients and the nurses and doctors who treat them.”
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Facial Recognition In Retail Stores: Are Shoppers Ready For It? Retail stores are planning opt-in facial recognition in return for giving you shopping rewards. Thus, your biometric data as well as your buying history will be available for sale to the highest bidder. When combined with data from other stores, the data-hungry Technocrats will know more about you than you know about yourself. ⁃ TN Editor The global market for retail biometrics is by all accounts in its early stages, and is significantly fragmented between regions. Retailers in Asia are testing biometric systems for retail payments and customer interaction, while most trials and deployments in North America so far seem to be focused on security. The range of applications is broad enough for biometrics to be a potentially disruptive force for the retail industry worldwide in the foreseeable future.
Amazon opened its first Go stores, which are partially automated to provide payments without a cashier or self-checkout, to the public at the beginning of 2018. The company plans to roll out up to 3,000 Go stores by 2021, in a unique divergence from the regional split.Pay with a smile was launched with Alipay technology at KPRO by KFC stores last year in China, and facial recognition has more recently been applied to controlled retail settings for trials in Finland and Korea
Other modalities have been tested or trialed for retail payment authentication this year, including Fujitsupalm vein biometrics, and Hitachi finger vein biometrics.
The majority of retail biometrics projects in the U.S. so far, however, are focused on loss prevention and violence prevention, FaceFirst CEO Peter Trepp tells Biometric Update. After more production roll-outs of that application, different ones will eventually follow, he expects, but not right away.
“There is another step though that exists which has more to do with consumer loyalty, and consumer experience, that is not quite as expensive an endeavor, and I think there are lots of folks looking at ways of doing that in a friendly opt-in environment, where privacy is not the cornerstone issue, and consumers are opting into systems that allow them to engage with them,” Trepp says.
SensibleVision CEO George Brostoff also sees a range of possible uses for facial recognition in stores. “When it comes to retail the applications kind of expand out from traditional authentication,” he said in an interview. SensibleVision is in discussions with businesses in Asia about several different retail applications of its facial recognition technology. Like Trepp, Brostoff sees customer loyalty programs, which inherently involve a customer opt-in, as a logical next step in Western markets like the U.S. and Europe.
Goode Intelligence Founder and Managing Director Alan Goode also sees potential for customer loyalty programs in those markets to leverage facial recognition in the near future, but suggests a couple of other applications are also likely to emerge in the near future. Age verification, which in some cases is handled on-device with apps produced by providers like Yoti, is a logical next-step for automated self- check out systems selling age-restricted items like tobacco or alcohol. Likewise, Clear is providing biometric age verification and payments for concessions in Seattle – where the original Amazon Go stores are located – in what Goode identifies as a trend towards hybridization.
“What we’re seeing is immense hybridization going on in terms of payment, ticketing, identity all getting molded into one,” Goode explains to Biometric Update. That hybridization will be one of the drivers of a rapid increase in the adoption of biometric payments, according to a recentGoode Intelligence report, which forecasts 2.6 billion people globally will use biometrics for payments by 2023, when 579 million biometric payment cards will be in use.
Arturo Falck, CEO of startup Whoo.ai, also sees customer loyalty as the next logical step, but he sees privacy concerns coming up even then.
“Once companies are using this type of technology for crime prevention purposes, there’s no reason why they should not be using it for upselling their customers,” Falck told Biometric Update. “In a way you can see the natural progression. If you remember way back when Gmail first started, we didn’t really think through the fact that pretty soon the advertisements that we were seeing when we were browsing the internet were targeted to us based on the emails that we were sending to each other. And you can imagine how that extends to the real world and how people are nervous about it.”
A recent survey from the Brookings Institution indicates that half of American consumers have an unfavorable opinion of the use of facial recognition for retail stores to prevent theft, compared to only 27 percent who are favorable of the application. People are more comfortable with the use of the technology in airports, stadiums, and even schools, according to the report.
There are many different ways that lack of comfort could play out, from legal or regulatory barriers all the way to a reversal of attitude among those who currently have negative views of the technology’s use in retail.
“Retailers need to be very careful to have things be both opt-in and not creepy,” Brostoff cautions.
Goode, Trepp, Brostoff, and Falck all believe that as the technology proves its value, and consumers become comfortable with it, different applications will be more easily accepted. Each of the technology company executives finds a comparison with earlier stages of the internet, when certain behaviors that are normal today were considered risky. Trepp recalls when most consumers were uncomfortable entering their credit card information online.
“Those days are gone,” he says. “We trust these companies to do the right thing with this information, and that’s how these companies, like Amazon and others, anybody you do business with online, become big growing companies. They treat their customers’ information correctly, and respectfully, and they respect their privacy.”
The same process of growing trust must be navigated by retailers if they are going to successfully leverage the power of facial biometrics, but Trepp is confidant they will do so. “Their incentives are very well aligned with their customers,” he notes.
Falck estimates, based on Whoo.ai’s early projects, that roughly 3 percent of the population is vocally opposed to participating in facial recognition systems, but even more are concerned about the potential loss of privacy from its increasing use. In response, Whoo.ai has developed a consumer application to provide people with information about retail facial recognition use, but control over it. The company plans to attract a network of retailers with not just positive public relations, but another way to connect with customers.
“It is a way for the businesses to turn what could potentially be bad public relations into engagement opportunities,” he explains.
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Dubai Police To Launch Flying Bikes By 2020 Dubai aspires to Technocracy by automating everything with technology. They were the first to introduce robocops on patrol. Dubai also leads the Islamic world in Fintech products and implementations. ⁃ TN Editor Dubai Police have started training two officers on flying motorcycles with a view to introducing the vehicles into service by 2020, according to a tweet by the Dubai Media Office on Friday.
The futuristic step forward in policing was confirmed by Brigadier Khalid Nasser Al Razooqi, director of the Artificial Intelligence Department at Dubai Police, who said the hoverbike will be used in policing work across the city.
“We have two crews already training to use the hoverbike and we will increase the number. The vehicle will be used by 2020 in first-responder roles because of its ability to access hard-to-reach locations,” Brigadier Al Razooqi told Gulf News.
The new crime-fighting “hoverbike” was part of the remarkable display of advanced technology unveiled by Dubai Police at the Gitex Technology Week 2018. “It works on electricity and can fly at five metres height and carry a policeman during emergency situations and heavy traffic. The bike can also fly without a passenger and can go up to 96km/h. It can fly for 25 minutes with a pilot and for 40 minutes when controlled by an operator,” Brigadier Al Razooqi said earlier in Gitex week.
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Alarm Bells: Are UK Employees Ready For Microchips?
Employees and labor unions are worried that employers are pressuring them into being microchipped, which could lead to oppressive micro- managment. This is compelling technology to Technocrat managers because it will squeeze even more efficiency from their fleshly robots. ⁃ TN Editor Britain’s biggest employer organisation and main trade union body have sounded the alarm over the prospect of British companies implanting staff with microchips to improve security.
UK firm BioTeq, which offers the implants to businesses and individuals, has already fitted 150 implants in the UK.
The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.
Another company, Biohax of Sweden, also provides human chip implants the size of a grain of rice. It told the Sunday Telegraph (£) that it is in discussions with several British legal and financial firms about fitting their employees with microchips, including one major company with hundreds of thousands of employees.
The CBI, which represents 190,000 UK businesses, voiced concerns about the prospect.
A CBI spokesperson said: “While technology is changing the way we work, this makes for distinctly uncomfortable reading. Firms should be concentrating on rather more immediate priorities and focusing on engaging their employees.”
The TUC is worried that staff could be coerced into being microchipped. Its general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “We know workers are already concerned that some employers are using tech to control and micromanage, whittling away their staff’s right to privacy.
“Microchipping would give bosses even more power and control over their workers. There are obvious risks involved, and employers must not brush them aside, or pressure staff into being chipped.”
Steven Northam, the founder and owner of Hampshire-based BioTeq, told the Guardian that most of its 150 implants have been for individuals, while some financial and engineering firms have also had the chips implanted in their staff. BioTeq has also implanted them in employees of a bank testing the technology, and has shipped them to Spain, France, Germany, Japan and China.
They cost between £70 and £260 per person. Northam himself and all the directors at BioTeq and one of his other companies, IncuHive, have been microchipped.
Jowan Österlund, the founder of Biohax and a former body piercer, told the Telegraph that his microchips, which cost £150 each, could help financial and legal firms improve security. “These companies have sensitive documents they are dealing with. [The chips] would allow them to set restrictions for whoever.”
Österlund said big companies, with 200,000 employees, could offer this as an opt-in. “If you have a 15% uptake that is still a huge number of people that won’t require a physical ID pass.”
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Australia: Festival Of Dangerous Ideas Lights The Fuse Technocrat Toby Walsh spoke on the future of AI: “Society shapes technology and technology can shape society.” Technocracy is all about social engineering, or shaping society, into man’s image. AI is not the solution to the world’s “wicked” problems. ⁃ TN Editor What will happen in the next sexual revolution? When will machines become smarter than humans? The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, presented this year for the first time in conjunction with UNSW, asked some fascinating questions.
The first year of UNSW’s Centre for Ideas co-presenting the Festival of Dangerous Ideas with The Ethics Centre is deemed an overwhelming success.
Over two days, 16,500 curious minds travelled by ferry to Sydney Harbour’s Cockatoo Island to feast on ideas informing our future. Thirty- one sessions interspersed with art installations created space for critical thinking and constructive disagreement on issues facing humanity.
Ann Mossop, Director of the Centre for Ideas and co-curator of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, says the Festival is all about bringing ideas to public audiences in a fresh and engaging way.
“This is very much the mission of the Centre for Ideas and goes to the heart of the University’s strategy of social engagement. The Festival also values freedom of expression, independent thought and open debate, which are core values for the University.”
To help spark that debate, the Festival invited leading thinkers from around the world, including Romanian-American New York Times correspondent Rukmini Callimachi, who delves deeply into ISIS and is well known for her podcast Caliphate; Chuck Klosterman, American author and essayist who focuses on pop culture; and Germaine Greer, who has been expounding dangerous ideas for some decades.
One speaker – Stephen Fry – made a whirlwind trip to Sydney of less than 48 hours to deliver his keynote “The Hitch”, an homage to his friend Christopher Hitchens who delivered the opening address at the first Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney in 2009.
Local leading thinkersdrawn from the UNSW community had the opportunity to reach a wider and different audience at the Festival, and numerous events were aligned with UNSW’s Grand Challenge topic of Living with Technology in the 21st Century.
Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence, for example, predicted 2062 as the date when AI will match human intelligence, and raised the accompanying issues of data manipulation and the ethics of killer robots.
Scientia Professor Rob Brooks, from the School of Biology, Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Evolution & Ecology Centre, suggested sexbots could be the next sexual revolution, making us more relaxed about sex. He also warned us to beware the free sexbot and its implications.
This is the first year the Festival has been held on Cockatoo Island, and Ms Mossop says it makes it into a different kind of event.
“Rather than dipping into the Festival, most people came for an extended session and enjoyed different speakers, as well as the art installations and just being on the island. It made it more lively, because they saw speakers they didn’t already know and immersed themselves in the Festival experience.
“The program of cabaret, art, talks, ethics workshops and unique environment made for very rich experiences. Stephen Fry was amazing at the Town Hall, and our speakers on the island really delivered. [Social media activist and former Westboro Baptist Church member] Megan Phelps-Roper made a huge impression on audiences, [British historian] Niall Ferguson is a truly extraordinary speaker and Toby Walsh unleashed a drone. What more can you ask for?”
The Festival was at capacity, with tickets for the island events and Stephen Fry at the Sydney Town Hall sold out.
The Centre for Ideas team and UNSW Events were supported by 130 UNSW mostly student volunteers over the two days, while the Social Media team extended the Festival reach – the event hashtag #fodi was trending in the top 5 on Twitter throughout the day.
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