Thank you, and good afternoon.

• Commonality - what remains the same

While recognising the formality of this prestigious occasion, and the honour accorded me by way of the invitation to speak here, I would like to eschew the use of titles and identity in greeting you, because I'd like to focus first on commonality. Rather than attempt to address all the diverse identities and roles present today it is to our shared characteristics that I would prefer to speak. John Fitzgerald Kennedy once observed, "Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." Before we concern ourselves with our differences, which are many and fascinating, I believe we need to recall that we share that basic common link.

Despite the changes that are being facilitated by science and technology, for the forseeable future that link will bind us all. Henry Sumner Maine has said, "heretoforth, the movement of progressive societies has been the movement from status to contract,". To me, this means that increasingly less of your position in the world is derived from family, gender and age, and more from what you make of yourself in the world. That movement from accidents of birth to personal meritocracy is reflected in your diverse backgrounds leading to this singular event, the latest, perhaps the most significant so far, among the many you have taken along the path of your life. The shift from status to contract can also be witnessed in the move from hierarchy to peer to peer relationships, or in computer science terms, the growing significance of peer to peer protocols over client server models.

Our differences are critical, there are many examples of monocultures resulting in disaster. Diversity is the great shield against complexity. Since no-one can have perfect knowledge, we cannot rely on "the chosen" to solve the many challenges that the future will have in store. The improvements in communication may, like the Babel Fish, expose us to more diversity and other modes and styles of thought than we are comfortable with. We must constantly remind ourselves that people, tu tangata, tu tangata, tu tangata, the people, the people, the people are the most important things in the world. Not your people, our people or my people, nothing closed and proprietary separating us into potentially warring factions, but all of the people.

• Change - what will be different

That change is happening faster and faster has become such a commonplace as to be overlooked. But the pace of change in the last few decades puts us in a position that would not be familiar to even our recent ancestors. Our technology allows each of us powers of access to knowledge and visibility of the globe that were once the province of science fiction. This is not, as I have already alluded to, an unalloyed benefit. Technology is legendarily neutral, it is what we do with it that will be the measure of its value.

The general trend that I perceive occurring with technology is the decline in significance of what I call the "center." Once we were guided and led by those who had greater knowledge, learning, access to information. No longer. In the movie "Whalerider," Paikea, another prophecy fulfilling "chosen" (beloved of all our myths), says in her speech, "lets give the knowledge to the people, and let them all be leaders." The "center," government, religion, culture and commerce have had a status in the past that has allowed them to be abusive to their constituents.

That center, with its hierarchical structures and high cost of entry diminishes, never dies, but I can hope for a human civilisation that is based on co-operation and co-ordination without these structures and their potential for damage. One human is a singularly helpless creature by comparison with other species, groups of humans led by fallible human leaders can however be devastating.

When our lives depend on such entities, it behooves them to be infallible, but if your system depends on reliable human beings, it is unreliable.

"Five 9s," a telecommunications term indicating something less than five minutes of unavailability per year is an admirable, if somewhat unachievable goal. Single points of failure, even single systems with redundancy, cannot compare with the reliability of diversity.

If I can leave you with an aphorism it would be, "Reliability (or resilience) Does Not Arise From Perfection, But From Redundancy."

That redundancy needs to be as diverse as possible, which resonates with my observations on the importance of human diversity.

In short what is changing is that the power that used to be available only to governments, religions and large commercial enterprises has been democratised. Look at the Internet - information has been made available to anyone who can reach the Internet, and a continually increasing proportion of the world’s population can do just that. Prometheus brought fire from the Gods to man, technology has brought access to knowledge to us all.

• Consequences - what will result from those changes

The result of the changes technology has wrought can be seen on any web browser, on any street in New Zealand. A small country far from the center, a place Karl Popper described as "half way to the moon." The diversity of human beings I can find in a short walk down Lambton Quay in Wellington, sizes, shapes, colours and language, spoken and otherwise is so much greater now than even half a lifetime ago.

The ability to see and move across the face of the planet means we will have to shed our parochial ideas, the notion that countries and geography define and limit, or if you prefer protect, us from what is occurring in the world. We are now more connected and more dependent than we have ever been before and living in such a world will require skills we already possess, but before now we have not recognised their importance.

We are going to have to be tolerant, something I parochially suggest Kiwi's believe deeply in. The fair go, the egalitarianism, our sometimes blunt honesty, and we are going to have to work. Competition that once existed only far away, is now as close as the Internet, except for plumbers of course. We may have to re-evaluate our notions of what is appropriate for this country. We certainly no longer need to do everything ourselves, there will undoubtedly be professions and pursuits that will no longer occur here. Our expatriots now number approximately 400,000 and they are a force in the world that we should not underestimate. Not to deprecate those, like me, who stay in NZ, or those who eventually return to our shores bringing experience and knowledge to our country.

• Challenge - the world you will live work and play in

Homogeneity is reassuring, but monocultures are vulnerable, thus expect more diversity and a greater reliance on merit than status. We are shedding some of our ideas about how much you can tell from a person's gender, age, ethnicity or religious orientation, and starting to look more closely at what they do.

Am I pessimistic about the future? No. In a world where small is more agile, more adaptable, I think NZ has some great strengths that can come to the fore as the tyranny of distance is diminished and as cost of entry reduces. This will make many previously infeasible activities possible.

Could a movie like Lord of the Rings be made mostly in NZ ten years ago? Could it have been made anywhere 10 years ago? It is the ability to recognise the changes in circumstances, and to adapt to those changes that drive evolution. Survival of the most adaptable is the rule in times of rapid change.

We must be alert to what assumptions change as technology develops, incumbents in many markets in many places in the world are clinging to their privileged status, and we must be ready to examine the justification for their place in the sun.

In closing I'd like to quote George Santayana, "We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible."

But lets be clear, respect, does not mean obey, respect does not mean agree with.

You live in a new present, and you must decide what to make of it, or as Gandalf observed, "All we have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Thank you.