Nadia, the Future

Impatient for a Future 'Nadia' Experience via Apple Vision Pro.

I have been involved in and leading digital transformation for decades: from the earliest days of the Internet to current times working in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and augmented service delivery.

And so with this historical perspective, I am truly blown away and excited by the Apple Vision Pro, and the new dimensions of experiential computing that this can bring to healthcare, learning, and engagement.

But there is so much more. It reminds me of some of the incredible futures that we had planned in the Nadia project: Nadia was to be omni-channel with a presence in immersive environments to help people in settings of their choosing in their own context. I share these stories and similar images throughout the Nadia book.

Nadia has been described as one of the world’s most advanced projects in Artificial Intelligence, that helped kick start the new massive global industry in digital humans.

Global luminaries have spoken about the game changing application of the Nadia innovation in healthcare and access to justice, and we get to meet some of these extraordinary people.

Nadia changed the trajectory in how people and systems might interact, in complex service delivery settings.

This was an historic event horizon. Yes, we are still caught in the decaying death grip and vested interests of legacy servicing systems, but Nadia broke the decades-long unfathomable god-awful website doctrine (including ineffective and confusing chatbots) and shone a light into a future that people with disability created. There is no going back, and nothing will be the same.

The Apple Vision Pro is another such event horizon, and I look forward to the day when people can choose to experience and interact contextually with a ‘Nadia’ in this immersive environment, as imagined and planned more than seven years ago. The Apple Vision Pro has its naysayers, as did Nadia. Naysayers who couldn’t and still can’t see the importance of these innovations to the disability and health sectors and would decry them from positions of ignorance and bigotry. But their voices are increasingly lost in the groundswell of interest in and support for a human and humane collaboration between empathy and technology.

The story of Nadia is at once magnificent, yet deeply disturbing. The ‘what happened’ question exposes a vile episode.

Nadia was not created by bureaucrats, but by people with disability. And it is somewhat ironic that at Senate Estimates today – seven years later - we will hear about hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on defective, inaccessible, and harmful disability systems. The product of the continuing ignorance and arrogance of bureaucrats and their consulting minions (or is that masters?)

The inside story reveals that the Nadia AI innovation was at the epicentre of a blistering politico-techno-human rights fight and the bigoted ugly politics engulfing Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Into the vortex of a toxic deskilled government bureaucracy, spun the almighty global competition of the powerful AI platforms of IBM (Watson) and Microsoft. The bureaucrats didn’t understand AI then (and still don’t) and there is no hint in any government AI strategy of what immersive environments (such as the Apple Vision Pro) mean for today and into the future, as a service delivery interface. I explore this in considerable detail in the book.

Also told for the first time, is the coincidence and timing of the Nadia project and the unlawful and deadly RoboDebt program which would become a politically ferocious interplay.

The writing of the Nadia book was largely completed before the RoboDebt Royal Commission commenced, and I was not at all surprised to see the same toxic culture revealed in its final report. The Royal Commission provided evidence not previously available: documents and dates which triangulate events are included in the book’s Timeline Forensics. The Nadia story and what happened, cannot be understood without the interwoven RoboDebt thread which would eventually destroy Nadia. This tangled brutal story is revealed.

The book has intentionally taken me years to write, during which time I have made numerous submissions to Parliamentary Inquiries for the very purpose of putting matters on the public record, and securing Parliamentary Privilege over my evidence. These submissions now form part of the book’s extensive reference base, together with other Parliamentary material and other public domain commentary, that only an expert insider would know to seek out, examine and triangulate.

To accompany the publication of the Nadia book, I have curated almost three decades of innovations and fractures in egovernment/digital government/complex servicing systems. This arc, reaching back to the earliest days of the Internet, is intended to show the life journey that got me to the flashpoint of Nadia. This material is available on my website: marie-johnson.com.

This book is not only an inside expert account of this momentous history-making project, but it also delivers the business case; the methodology; describing in detail the actual work that was done in creating Nadia. The book peels through the sinewy layers of politics, bigotry, and the rise of ArtificialIntelligence, and delves into new frontiers of Co-Design, Human Rights, Machine Learning, Large Language Models (LLMs), Algorithms, simulated environments, and the foundations of Trust and its destruction.

I hope that the extensive evidence now revealed and the firsthand narrative throughout the Nadia book, helps support academic research, independent commentary, and the commercialisation of concepts described, so that these exponential servicing innovations can be accelerated to rapidly become mainstream, for the benefit of people with disability and their families. Indeed, for the benefit of all society.

So why is it important for this story to be told?

Fundamentally, this is history. A shameful history of politics and bigotry, that exposes the brutal experience of people with disability in driving a global innovation which the bureaucracy resisted and shut down. And it is a cautionary tale for the bureaucracy and society going forward, that you can no longer rely on time to diminish the sins of the past. We do not forget; we do not forgive; and we are coming for you in a Class Action.

But the Nadia story survives. This book serves to honour the momentous achievement of people with disability in creating Nadia.

‘Nadia: Politics | Bigotry | Artificial Intelligence’ is being launched on 16 February 2024, seven years to the day since Nadia was first introduced to the world.

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