Nadia

This is the explosive inside story of Nadia, the world's first AI powered digital human for service delivery co-created by people with disability, considered one of the world's most advanced projects in Artificial Intelligence.

Told by Marie Johnson, an eminent multi-award winning global digital vanguard, who was the Head of the Technology Authority for Australia's National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) and co-creator of Nadia. This is the first time this story has been told in full: she is the only person globally who can authentically tell the complete arc of the iconoclastic Nadia story.

This first person inside story reveals that the Nadia Artificial Intelligence 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 (NDIS).

Into the vortex of a toxic deskilled government bureaucracy, spun the exploding global competition of the powerful AI platforms of IBM Watson and Microsoft.

Also exposed 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 explosive interplay. This intertwined hidden brutal story is revealed.

This book is not only an inside expert account of this shocking history but delivers with extraordinary evidence, the business case and 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 Artificial Intelligence, and delves into new frontiers of co-design, human rights, machine learning, algorithms, and trust.

The arc of the Nadia story as it unfolds throughout this book is of the extraordinary achievement driven by people with disability, not celebrated by Australia, yet recognised as one of the world's most advanced projects in Artificial Intelligence that helped kick-start digital human industry. So significant is this new revolutionary industry, that China recently declared an Action Plan to dominate the digital human field globally.

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.

The stakes are high.

The creation of Nadia was a defining horizon in the era of Artificial Intelligence, and this first-person inside account by the co-creator of Nadia is intellectually uncompromising.

Notably, this book is being seen as future required reading for academic courses on artificial humans. Is it any wonder that there is almost an insatiable global appetite for and intrigue about the full Nadia story?

Book launched on 16 February 2024, seven years to the day since Nadia was first introduced to the world.