Full Interview: Tom Armitage
Original Image by Rodrigo.Esper
This afternoon, I interviewed Tom Armitage. He’s a software designer who recently came to our attention because of a talk he gave recently, called “If Gamers Ran the World.” In it, he puts forth the idea that in another 10 years, leaders who are the same age as Barack Obama or British Conservative Party leader David Cameron are now, will be children of the 1970s, and as such, more than likely the first leaders who grew up with video games as a core part of their way of interact with the world around them. What would that mean for how they would behave as leaders?
A shorter version of this interview airs on the Jan 7th and 10th episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3.
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January 7th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
There is a growing body of work and discussion about the concept of complexity. I believe it is a reflection of the move from an industrial age in which we viewed the world as a machine to an information or networked age in which we view ourselves as part of a complex system.
It is also an interesting take on a area of thought that I have recently been exploring called resilience which is explained in depth at the Resilience Alliance website — http://www.resalliance.org. It also reminds me of the work of Thomas Homer-Dixon who delivered the opening keynote at the IGLOO Symposium at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo recently. You can see the video of his keynote at http://new.igloo.org/symkeynote.
I am a boomer so will look forward to the new approaches that gamers will reveal in governance, art and life.
Please keep up the great work!
DS
January 7th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
@Dwight,
I think that’s so interesting! It’s perhaps that idea that made me think about the idea of an ecosystem of information; it’s not that it’s linear, but that it’s interconnected. Thanks for listening!
January 11th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Nora, your interview with Tom alluded to the ease of reset/start again in our current technology culture. Consumer software and IT devices are often very forgiving in that users can learn easily by trial and error, resetting our phone or restarting the game. Thank goodness software engineers know the importance of getting things right and testing before deployment, to keep planes in the air and medical equipment working.
I wonder, though, if the ability to reset/restart in the general population will have a lasting social impact on us and whether or not that will affect how future generations learn to deal with complex systems. Will it invite careless behaviour? Perhaps it will lead to development of more protected or “sandboxed” spaces for learning and better modeling of potential outcomes, so that our future leaders will take better public decisions.
Thanks for your great show and podcast. I always look forward to it.