Duty of care

She's an amazing Australian academic who was based in Beijing when we recorded that episode.

On the issue of regulation, Yasmin, we've got the digital duty of care currently before Parliament.

That is obviously a piece of legislation that is looking at least at its principal level to be addressing many of the things that you're talking about.

It's saying, you know, if you are a tech company, you owe an obligation to the users of your platform in the same way that an employer owes an obligation to ensure workplaces are safe to their employees, for example.

How do you think about that piece of legislation? Is it something that you welcome? What framing would you have for people who are considering whether that's something that we should be getting in behind to support?

Yeah, well, I think in of itself, digital duty of care is a great step, right? We've got to be leaning into this space.

We've got to make sure that a focus on regulation and controlling technology so that it doesn't harm people is absolutely essential.

I think safety by design as an idea and a concept needs to become far higher in profile and it needs to be integrated into all of the products that are being developed.

And that's unfortunate for a And I don't think the networks and production companies involved really understood that quick enough.

Did they do enough to protect them? There's a topic we're going to get into later in the show about something called duty of care, which is this idea that the networks and production companies making these shows have to look after the people on the shows in all sorts of ways.

It's a concept that is both sort of fundamental, but also has evolved a lot over the couple of decades that reality TV has been evolving into what it is now.

What about the people who've been chewed up and spat out by the reality machine? Would they do it again? I would love to do more reality TV.

So I feel like The race mentality that Andrew talked about on the panel here today, where we're forced to choose, I do feel like we need to be careful about not turning that into then saying we need to choose relationships in ways that limit our right to regulate and govern here, because I think the openness and the need for that are both growing.

When it comes to what does that look like, I think it would be crazy of us to think that we could bind directly as Australia, an open AI or an anthropic And that is why I do really think that what the government's been pushing forward with the Privacy Act reforms, with the proposals for the digital duty of care, for

other areas in governance,

where essentially what you do is you say, rather than just leaving law to wait until the harms emerge and then seek regulators or individual actions under common law to try and find a remedy.

We're actually going to start thinking about a proactive duty of care on organisations who are deploying and benefiting from the way that these systems roll out.

Now, none of this is perfect.

We've seen with the social media ban, how there are holes in this and how particularly anything you apply to young people is almost impossible to enforce.

We have to think very carefully about what it is that we want to protect, what the incentives we need to bring to good use of this.

And I don't think the networks and production companies involved really understood that quick enough.

Did they do enough to protect them? There's a topic we're going to get into later in the show about something called duty of care, which is this idea that the networks and production companies making these shows have to look after the people on the shows in all sorts of ways.

It's a concept that is both sort of fundamental, but also has evolved a lot over the couple of decades that reality TV has been evolving into what it is now.

What about the people who have been chewed up and spat out by the reality machine? Would they do it again? I would love to do more reality TV.

Politicians in Canberra are debating a new law that would make tech companies responsible for any harm they cause to users.

It's called the Digital Duty of Care Law.

Because, as the new version of newshounds currently under development will lean into, knowing about algorithms and AI and something called social cohesion will be an important new skill for kids to have.

I've stuck a link to Blake's majestic poetry effort in today's show notes.