As the founder of O'Reilly Media, one of the tech industry's most prolific publishers, Tim O'Reilly popularized the terms open source and Web 2.0. He organizes conferences that both define and advance technology trends. In 2016, while developing one of these conferences--the Next:Economy Summit about the future of work--O'Reilly began to focus on the increasingly anxious discourse concerning allegedly biased algorithms, job-annihilating artificial intelligence, and social media–manipulating bots. In his new book, WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, O'Reilly argues that the invisible hand of the market will not automatically brush these threats aside. He warns that to fend off instability and suffering on a global scale, companies need to give up their addiction to maximizing shareholder value at any cost and get back to building businesses that put customers first.

ELEANOR HALL: Welcome to Techtopia, our segment on the emerging technologies set to disrupt our future; and some of the unexpected questions we may need to ask about them. Joining me in Sydney, as he does every week for Techtopia, is entrepreneur and technology author Steve Sammartino. And also here today in the Sydney studio is AI specialist at the University of Technology Sydney, Professor Mary-Anne Williams. Professor Williams is the director of the Innovation and Enterprise Research Laboratory at UTS, which is also known as The Magic Lab.