Your caution is salient. Whilst I will not claim to be an expert on Darwin, despite having Origin of the Species in my library, it seems that human well-being is not a feature of his science as such – surviving certainly, just not thriving.

Nietzsche has this annoying habit of appearing in corporate boardrooms, unseen and uninvited, yet conspicuously present and persuasive when/in power matters.

You might say Nietzsche is to Darwin as BT is to TCP-IP.

The project you mention sounds quite interesting. I hope you’ll be able to say more about it next month.

To be fair, the tone of the CBI press release is quite balanced in how it portrays the pros and cons of personal web use at work. It’s a shame the 90 minutes and £10.6bn figures are lightly to see the most coverage because other parts of the analysis make a lot of sense:

- “Employers need to decide for themselves what level of non-work surfing is acceptable and then set out clear boundaries”

- “Productivity and morale can increase when firms trust staff to use the web sensibly”

- “many companies understand the importance of the internet to personal and social lives, and see reasonable use of the web at work as a morale booster. Indeed, only 14% of firms restricted web access altogether”

In the drive towards greater use of social media, enterprise 2.0 or whatever you want to call it, there’s a need to help employers catch up so the employee-employer contract can be renegotiated to adapt to new forms of information. It’s clearly not just about morale: a well-connected employee with access to online tools they learned to use outside of work is likely to be much more productive than someone without those skills.

As a starting point, employers need to understand the benefits and risks of employee use of IT facilities, and formalise the rules for how these are used – in the same way that UK government has now started formalising the rules for civil servants’ use of social media.

It’s all rather dehumanising. Just remember: we’re always human persons as part of our basic nature (in philosophical terms, at the ontological level). So no matter what sort of artificial entities we create to help human thriving, if those things ultimately become harmful we must re-humanise them, or failing that, destroy or replace those faulty creations entirely.