Sounds good, but is there a downside to having our content presented to end users by Google or Facebook or any of the other aggregators?

Well, uh, one major drawback is the loss of branding and the functional dist- differentiation between the different platforms.

So, you know, ABC and Guardian and all of these publishers have made... done a lot of work to make their websites or their apps work really well, and they choose the order, and they choose what stories go where.

Uh, but when a story is taken from, say, ABC News and presented not only out of context but also with ads, it means the reader is less aware of the source of the story.

They may read the story.

I know there are logos there.

But they'll, they'll maybe not notice as much that this actually came from, you know, the ABC, for example.

I mean, they're just an amplifier, aren't they? I mean, they're like a glorified ear trumpet.

Can you tell if you're being recorded?

Well, they do have a little light that comes on when they're recording video, but of course some wags, some users have tried to damage or cover the light.

Meta has taken some steps to prevent this.

The cameras are already quite small, so in a busy social situation, perhaps at night, you may not notice that, you know, the stylish Ray-Bans your interlocutor is wearing actually have a camera that's on.

The cameras will, no doubt, continue to shrink over time.

And, you know, the glasses are getting cheaper.

The Ray-Bans from Meta are quite expensive, but there were some that turned up in Kmart, I think, recently quite cheaply.

What's it all looking like?

What sort of rules might we set?

Well, as I said, there's 28 points in this resolution.

I'll just outline a few.

They say there should be standards for AI, and that's already, they started thinking about that.

Standards that are simple, consistent and mandatory.

This also needs to be the development of large data centres, and we need to make sure they don't impose on land which we need for agriculture or for building houses.

And these standards, they say, should be national.

I mean, I must say, I looked at it and I thought, yeah, well, this is just marketing puff, isn't it? But I mean, maybe this is not right.

Mm.

So, uh, the first possibility chased enthusiastically by Facebook was a virtual reality world we'd all live in, where they called it the Metaverse.

And Mark Zuckerberg was so keen on this idea that he renamed the whole company Meta.

They do seem to have cooled on that a little bit.

Another idea arises out of the incredible uptake of the AI chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

People were able to learn how to use them very fast because they understand our natural language, so maybe that's a clue.

I mean, you even-- Well, even though smartphones are pretty easy to use, you still have a learning curve there.

[chuckles]

Mm

... [chuckles] at using social media.

You'd think that they'd be experts at technology, but interestingly, um, the result of tests run by the Australian Government's Curriculum Agency, an offshoot of NAPLAN, uh, they, they did these tests last May, but just published them this May.

They found that only one in three year 10 students and one in two year 6 students reached proficiency in new, in the new National Technology Literacy Testing.

They tested 10,000 students doing tasks including creating presentation, presentations, searching for information, analyzing data, and online safety.

Now, that report found that digital literacy in Australia has declined to the lowest level since testing began in 2005.

They said they can see that kids are using devices more, but it's not translating into the tested proficiency skills.

Yeah.

So what did they actually ship a year later?

Well, rather than shipping the new AI stuff, they gave us iOS 26 and Mac OS 26.

They've gone to a new year-based naming scheme.

It kind of reminds me of Windows 95 and Windows 2000.

But look, the promised AI features never shipped.

And the head of AI at the time, John G. Andrea, subsequently left Apple, early retirement apparently.

The big feature that did ship was called liquid glass, where user elements like buttons look and behave like realistic pieces of curved glass.

This bubble just gets bigger and bigger, doesn't it?

fix this data? Well,

yeah, it's clunky, but we have these things in the United States that people also hold dear called privacy.

And it's a concept that we want transparency, but we also want individual privacy.

And that's what the system is trying to balance.

We need to figure out how to do it better.

And that's what we offered to do.

But I think Look, this was not about making a better VAERS.

No,

What exactly does this new report claim about AI's potential impact on the Australian economy, and, and how is this being measured and proven? Peter?

Well, they estimate that expanding the use of AI in Australia, as you said, could add $60 billion to our gross domestic product over the next decade.

Now, our, uh, GDP at the moment, I looked it up, is 1.8 trillion, so I make that about 3.5%, which is a pretty impressive jump.

The Reserve Bank's chief economist, Sarah Hunter, doesn't see any impact in the data yet, so this is all speculation.

There's really no way to project.

They're just kind of making a guess.

But looking back, um, I remember the introduction of computers into the workplace, which probably started about the '80s, and at that time, there were typing pools, so there was a huge impact on business, you would think.

How exactly did Gen Z in Nepal use Discord in this way?

What are the, the caveats and limitations that we should keep in mind?

So this is not gonna be able to be applied immediately to every, uh, uh, genetic disease.

There are some challenges which people are working to overcome.

Getting these kind of gene editors into the brain where there are any number of diseases which we'd like to approach, things like Huntingts' disease, uh, et cetera, um, they may be a little bit more difficult, but I think we will get there.

Again, some of the challenges will take a little more time to overcome.

Uh, I think the scale-up, the technology, uh, will be, uh, uh, important, and, but, uh, another piece will be the education that's necessary so that people can have the acceptance of the fact that these are remarkably good technologies which can really, uh, potentially positively benefit human health in a way that we just haven't seen previously.

Are there ethical questions or are there potential questions about, you know, these kind of treatment being available to people who are affluent or people who have good private insurance while others would have to be left to fend for themselves?

Yeah.

What would a forceful response look like?

A forceful response involves going into the various states, working with the states to find the best way to get across the message for vaccination in that particular state because this particular vaccine has benefits that so greatly outweigh the risks.

I need to say it as many times as I can, the, the vaccine doesn't kill children, the vaccine doesn't cause encephalitis, and the vaccine doesn't cause autism.

Okay? The vaccine has some transient s- short-lived, uh, adverse effects in about 15 to 20 per 100,000, but compare that to 100 to 120 deaths per 100,000 children who get measles and this is a remarkably, uh, uh, good vaccine.

But we should remember that-

Marks, your response.

Okay.

So if we wanna go back to a time when we got our drinking water from the same place that we put our sewage, we can go ahead and do that, but we have made tremendous public health advances.

Is that a sufficient endorsement?

So I'm not gonna comment that, but I'm gonna tell you as a public health professional, I'm gonna tell you what an endorsement of the measles vaccine sounds like right now.

If you can hear my voice right now and you have a child that is unvaccinated against measles, we have measles spreading in this country very significantly.

You wouldn't put your child in a backseat of a car without being strapped into their car seat.

You want to get your child vaccinated against measles so that they don't have a one in a thousand chance of dying from measles if they contract it.

There's no reason to put your child at that risk because the vaccine does not cause death.

It does not cause encephalitis, and it does not cause autism.

There's presumed outcomes is what you're saying.

Mm-hmm.

You know, science is the pursuit of objective truth for the benefit of mankind.

And those of us who believe in it, we take it very seriously.

And it hurts us deeply when there are those who would undercut the name of science undercut the very name of science because it's convenient for them to purvey lies.

And that's just, it's not okay, because at the end of the day, I was so strongly affected by what happened last week with the death of a second child that I actually used profanity with a reporter while I was on the record without realizing it, which is something I've never done.

I really, I don't believe that we should be saying, well, these are people who believe that they shouldn't be vaccinated because my experience, the Mennonite community, my experience is that if you meet people on their level, they generally will eventually come around.

Do you know anything about that ongoing research?

I know a minimal amount of effort that's going on to try to re-look at prior autism research, but I'm not aware of what is being discussed there.