These are the slides from my keynote today (or, in my land, yesterday) at Confluence 2023, hosted by Amity University in India. It was a cloud computing conference, so quite a way outside my area of greatest expertise, but it gave me a chance to apply the theory of technology developed in my forthcoming book to a different context. The illustrations for the slides are the result of a conversation between me and MidJourney (more of an argument that MidJourney tended to win) which is quite a nice illustration of the interplay of hard and soft technologies, the adjacent possible, soft technique, and so on.
Unsurprisingly, because education is a fundamentally technological phenomenon, much the same principles that apply to education also apply to cloud computing, such as: build from small, hard pieces; valorize openness, diversity and connection; seek the adjacent possible; the whole assembly is the only thing that matters and so the central principle that how you do it matters far more than what you do.
