Veronika Wild

There's quite a lot of snow on the mountain this morning and it's a balmy 8°C here. Running a bit late with my post this week, so here is something to ponder in the meantime. Enjoy! There is a peculiar magic to a Tasmanian winter that mainlanders and other visitors never quite understand until they've lived it. Even if you have managed to cram in a trip around the state, taking in its major cities and maybe Cradle Mountain and Strahan, you may have missed some of the best things of all.     It arrives gently — in the blue-grey light that lingers even at noon, in the woodsmoke curling from chimneys up and down the streets of its quaint C19th villages, in the cold that doesn't so much bite as settle. There’s less traffic and there are even fewer tourists.     Into the Woods There's a lovely campaign by tourism Tasmania right now about Forest Bathing. Here's how it's done. Take yourself down or more likely up to a forest. Mt. Wellington/Kunyani is clos...

  Nobel Prize-winning economist, Robert Shiller, is typical of many techno -optimists in arguing that we've always managed to absorb workers displaced by new technology — the handloom weavers became factory workers, the factory workers became office workers. This time, he says, will be no different.  I want to suggest that this time is profoundly different. Previous technological revolutions unfolded over generations. For example, the transition from wooden sailing ships to diesel-driven steel ones took the best part of a century, the roll-out of electricity from street lights to industrial uses and finally households, took from the 1890s to the 1940s and it took almost 50 years for cars to become an essential part of daily life, thus giving both workers and societies more time to adapt. Today, change is happening within a single generation or less and unlike previous revolutions which disrupted one industry at a time, AI affects multiple sectors of the economy simultaneo...