On Tech

Revenge of the Nerds: The degradation of technology's promise. Enshittification, crypto and AI. 

The Saturday Paper •

The grassroots battle against big tech

A bespectacled lady stands before the now-infamous broligarchy photo taken at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk appear to flank her in a row. “Omas gegen Rechts” is printed on her apron, meaning Grandmas against the Right, but I’m told “Grandmas against the Nazis” is how they see themselves. She asks the dozen of us in the audience which apps we use. One at a time, she pins coloured squares forming snaking bars below each of tech’s Big Five: offi...
The Saturday Paper •

God AI

God AI: Boom or doom? What to expect when machines outsmart us is the book that Toby Walsh wished never to write. A professor of the loud shirt variety and the head of UNSW Sydney’s AI institute, Walsh is sounding the alarm that superintelligent AI might be closer than we think.Walsh believes artificial general intelligence (AGI), or “artificial godlike intelligence” as he prefers, will be a panacea capable of fixing everything from cancer to climate change. He says it would be immoral not to pu...
The Saturday Paper •

The God We Made

At a journalism conference I attended last week, an editor of a prestigious Canadian journal said they shut down their submissions email after it was flooded with AI-generated pitches. Scammers can now produce pitches and articles so credible that some had been published elsewhere. A sense of anger and disbelief filled the room. Something human was being lost.In the latest Quarterly Essay, The God We Made: The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence, writer, professor and concert pianist A...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Cory Doctorow’s ‘Reverse Centaur’ Book Review: Debunking AI Hype

Each day, a new outrageous claim of AI’s capabilities vaults into the headlines. Even by Silicon Valley standards, they’re becoming unhinged. I’m left asking, who is the audience here? Who shares these megalomaniacal fever dreams of unlimited power and absolute social disintegration?As a software engineer, I am comforted by how AI performs in real life. Output that seems credible cloaks flaws that compound, producing bloated and buggy software. Successive AI releases gussy up and supercharge the...
Australian Book Review •

Kurt Johnson reviews ‘Against the Machine: On the unmaking of humanity’ by Paul Kingsnorth

When climate change was consigned to a distant future there was a formula for writing about it: frame the problem in the direst terms, identify the barriers to its solution, and conclude with a rallying cry. One of the few to buck this trend was Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (2017), which diagnosed climate change not as an environmental problem involving emissions, but as a civilisational flaw. It advocated a return to the wild, the human-scaled, the organic, towards what the author called ‘uncivilization’.
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Chilling stories from inside South-East Asia’s ‘scam factories’

In 2022, living in Laos and searching for an apartment to rent, I came across a Facebook post from a desperate parent trying to locate her daughter. All she knew was that the daughter had arrived from Vietnam with a promise of lucrative but vaguely defined work. Upon landing, she had vanished. Eventually, she escaped after being forced to work in a “scam compound” until she’d paid off a...
The Age •

A deep dive into Bitcoin’s enduring riddle: The identity of its inventor

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.CRYPTOCURRENCYThe Mysterious Mr NakamotoBenjamin WallaceAtlantic, $45In 2008, a white paper was published entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. It explained how existing technologies like proof of work, public key encryption and peer-to-peer network architecture could be assembled into a decentralised digital currency – the Bitcoin. The author, whose name was given only as Sato...
The Age •

In the era of the tech bro, Bill Gates’ memoir is refreshingly human

MEMOIRSource CodeBill GatesAllen Lane $55It was a raw March morning when the first hint came that I might not be as smart as I thought. Through the chalk-dust fog, the lecture’s 200 students were fidgeting on perilously tiered benches. Each seat was occupied by another student who had just finished near the top of their school. Was the chill crawling up my spine the first hint of autumn, a jolt of competitive adrenaline or the beginnings of identity collapse? Each semester the class size halved,...
ABC Religion & Ethics •

When the thrill is gone: What AI is doing to the creative process — and how humans can resist it

In March of this year, a Reddit post titled “I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night” sparked a flurry of sharing and comments across social media — the original garnering some 4,100 upvotes. Before long, it was being picked up (and picked over) by the tech commentariat; the story was confirmed in a WIRED article, for which the author of the Reddit post was interviewed. We’ll call her “Steph”. The post detailed how a recent version update to the image generation
The Saturday Paper •

Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space

The title of British philosopher A. C. Grayling’s new book – Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space – offers a more urgent question than you might think. The race is already on for the moon’s platinum, lithium and titanium, as well as for control of the ice that can be processed into fuel for onward leaps to Mars and beyond. In addition to the ex-Cold War powers, India, China, Japan and the European Union all have space programs. Private companies are also locked i
The Saturday Paper •

The companies monitoring staff using bossware

John Pane, chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia, says it is like the panopticon. “You never know whether the boss is watching you, which is why it’s called bossware. It works in the same way.” Pane has a long history in senior privacy roles in the big banks, Australia Post and Deloitte. Over this time he has witnessed the evolution of the internet and with it workplace surveillance that has evolved into “bossware”. Pane emphasises that surveillance is nothing new. It began as soon as the in
The Sydney Morning Herald •

How AI forces us to look inwards at our own minds

“At the heart of artificial intelligence is a fundamental deceit,” claims AI doyen Toby Walsh, in Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World, his fourth book on the subject. The con starts at the name. AI is not true intelligence. It does not arrive at conclusions (or outputs) through understanding or reason. Instead, these are predictive machines, reared on vast data sets, which simulate coherence based on the probability that one word or pixel will follow another. The difference is cr
The Guardian •

The office returns: are the days of Australians working from home numbered?

“For me an office environment is quite overwhelming and quite difficult,” says Josh, looking out his kitchen window at the suburbs of western Sydney. He works for a major corporation that recently requested staff come back in to offices for half their working week. The in-person workplace is a complex place to navigate for Josh, who lives with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism. “I didn’t realise how much of the energy drain was actually just from being in the office until I di
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Never mind the progress, what about the profit?

TECHNOLOGY Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? Richard King Monash, $32.99 The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World is Costing the Earth Guillaume Pitron Scribe, $35 Faith in technology is a volatile stock. In under a decade we’ve sunk from the Arab Spring boomtimes, when legacy media credited social media with overthrowing dictators, to our present cynical nadir. Two withering critiques of tech’s central promises could drive the price even lower. The first, a rebuke on tec
The Sydney Morning Herald •

‘Time is money’: How can you avoid burnout when we’re all on the clock?

During lockdown time lost its shape. While beards sprouted beneath masks and seasons changed with more swagger against the diminished traffic, the weeks ran together. In response, I engineered a schedule that in sheer cruelty would have made Mark Wahlberg’s 3am starts reasonable. A cacophony of pre-dawn alarms from devices kept beyond reach, push-ups, cold showers, meditation and a creative writing regimen all before the day’s paid labour began. Then one day I could not get up. In Jenny Odell’s
The Saturday Paper •

The costs of becoming a digital nomad

I am speaking with Zackery Bertram from a sound-insulated booth in the co-living co-working space Alt_ChiangMai. Through the padded door is a sleek shared office of flatpack desks and chairs, empty for the weekend but for a few diligent digital nomads affixed to their screens. Outside is a sunny Saturday in Thailand’s second largest city, although seasonal burning in the surrounding mountains placed yesterday’s air quality among the world’s worst 10 cities, between Kathmandu and Krasnoyarsk. De
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Computers never lie? Sadly, we trust too much in the magic of tech

It’s a lot further than you think, but it has already started. The singularity is the moment AI will improve itself at a rate faster than we can. From here it will unleash incomprehensible brilliance that could devastate humankind. Or so the movies say. For the time being, we are living in an ordinary world of ordinary problems that AI has the opportunity to fix or make worse. Firmly in the experimentation phase, innovation is ripe with unintended consequences. Mark Zuckerberg’s former motto, “m

Video game tourism – Features – ABC Technology and Games (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Kurt Johnson likes Azerbaijan's Oil Rocks for political and environmental reasons. It's also where Call of Duty was set... My interest in Azerbaijan stemmed from two completely different sources. The first is my hero, Ryszard Kapuscinski. In Imperium, his collection of reportage about the Soviet Union, his prose moved from the usually concrete and clipped language of a journalist and took on a surreal quality when he described climbing a tower over the Oil Rocks in Azerbaijan's capital Baku.