Paul Wong - Reinventing cybernetics and composing a life

We find ourselves living in a time of great complexity and flux, where the very fabric of our societies is being rewoven by the rise of artificial intelligence and the interplay of complex systems. How do we make sense of a world that is undeniably interconnected, with increasingly porous boundaries between nature and culture, human and machine, science and art? Paul Wong is reshaping that conversation, drawing on science, philosophy, and art.

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Paul is senior lecturer at and one of the visionaries behind the Australian National University's School of Cybernetics, a space for conversation and research among engineers, computer scientists, anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, philosophers, and artists to create a science of complex systems. That phenomenal group considers little outside of their domain, covering systems as diverse as computers, the human body, ecological systems, information systems, government and human cultures.

Amidst his efforts to redefine the world's understanding of complexity, Paul's work, as his life, is about throughlines from scientific research to societal impact, about contending with complexity, and in all things pedagogy to help others follow where he has gone.

In the past decade, has been a Senior Policy Analyst with the Commonwealth Grants Commission, data practitioner covering all aspects of the strategic use of data as an enterprise and national asset, leader  in the establishment of an Australian consortium to support digital research infrastructure, and founder of a data advisory consultancy business.

Paul has a PhD in logic about reasoning with inconsistent information from the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering at the Australian National University, and a BA and an MA in philosophy as well as a student of Fine and Performance Art in Music Composition.