iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ben Eltham

Information Age @information-age.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The former head of IT at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) has been charged over an alleged $8 million fraud scheme involving the purchase and resale of mobile phones. Read more: ia.acs.org.au/article/2026...

ia.acs.org.au

IT manager accused of $8m invoice fraud

Allegedly bought and sold mobile phones.

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 22h

The cognitive disordering induced by AI even extends to senior union officials like Joe Mitchell, who appears to be genuinely lobbying for the development of new technologies to destroy his own members’ jobs www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10...

abc.net.au

Call for big tech to pay for Australian-made AI

Union figures and leading academics want big tech companies building Australian data centres to help fund the local AI industry through a levy.

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”

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Deepcut News @deepcutnews.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Albanese's proposal to water down Australian copyright to appease AI companies is a "terrible betrayal", writes Richard Flanagan in a blistering piece. "A government that doesn’t understand its nation’s culture is a government incapable of leading the nation." www.deepcutnews.com/p/the-great-...

deepcutnews.com

The great betrayal? AI imperialists and Albanese – Richard Flanagan

Australians should be furious that Anthony Albanese has opened the floodgates to American AI companies

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george benjamin jones @mole.club · 29/09/2026

yeah bro it’s called buying it

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

“We’re losing billions and we’re making a product that’s an existential threat to humanity” is a hell of sales pitch www.ft.com/content/c768...

ft.com

Anthropic warns of ‘existential risks to humanity’ in IPO prospectus

Long-awaited S1 filing reports Claude maker lost $8bn last year on $4.6bn in revenue

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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

New from 404 Media: when you upload images to Copilot, they're not private. Human contractors are reviewing Copilot users' prompts/images, according to internal docs we got And they're horrified at what they're seeing. Bombarded with requests to make sexual AI images www.404media.co/humans-readi...

404media.co

Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts — And They're Horrified

Human contractors are reviewing Copilot users’ prompts and uploaded images, according to internal documents obtained by 404 Media. The contractors are also bombarded with users’ requests for sexual AI...

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Emile Chabal @emile-chabal.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I am not given to hyperbole when it comes to university industrial relations, but this feels like an existential event. The heart of the university is being torn out, with long-lasting consequences. These strikes are a last-ditch attempt to stop that. Will anyone listen?

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 28/09/2026

Hey everyone remember how I was saying the AI X-risk criti-hype is a targeted project designed to kill regulations and further ensure an impatient rush on data centre contsruction www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09...

abc.net.au

OpenAI breach proves need for more data centres, major parties say

Labor, Coalition agree OpenAI's Medicare breach proves the need for Australia to secure "a seat at the AI table" by rolling out data centres nationally.

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tante @tante.cc · 27/09/2026

Slapping an LLM In front of specialized machine learning systems that actually can solve specific tasks does not mean that the "stochastic parrot" metaphor has failed.

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I also have a shed on my property and to be totally honest I think the government should also pay me $56,000

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a. hedgehog @aethertempest.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

my special interest is ruining your life

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Os Keyes @okeyes.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Since we’re doing another round of “AI will destroy humanity” doom-hype, it’s a good time to announce a new paper myself and my postdoc advisor just had accepted by BioSocieties on just this. TL;DR: almost all the “AI can make bioweapons” literature comes ultimately from the Effective Altruists.

ironholds.org

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

OpenAI says agents leaked sensitive material in latest example of negligent security failures

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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.

And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I went for a walk up a mountain today. There were wallabies and the normal ratchety frogs and also the pobblebonk frogs and a bunch of big fat dragonflies zipping about. 10/10, would recommend

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Reposted by Ben Eltham

Comfort Ero @comfortero.crisisgroup.org · 25/09/2026

In my new piece for @elpais.com, I look at how world leaders are gathering in New York this week praising multilateralism, but the UN is in severe distress. As the race for a new UN Secretary-General heats up, a new leader alone won't save the organisation.

english.elpais.com

The UN’s decline is a choice

The selection of a new chief is an opportunity for governments to rally round the ailing organization and choose a ‘general’, not a ‘secretary,’ to lead the charge

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Maybe it’s time to admit that productivity figures are mostly BS

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Tassie Devil @tassiedevil.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Science, the arts and libraries facing forced job losses. One doesn't need to be smart to kick a football, I guess. Change the rego plates to "Tasmania, the dumb state." #politas

abc.net.au

'Researcher of the Year' to be sacked as part of cost cutting

Not even the Premier's STEM Researcher of the Year 2025 can avoid a Tasmanian departmental job-cutting drive.

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Reposted by Ben Eltham

Michael Pascoe @michaelpascoe01.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

And we still pretend we're going to get working subs from this mob. Or maybe this is Perth's future - a dumping ground. Not Only Can’t America Build Submarines, It Can’t Retire Them, Either - The National Interest share.google/Td14bQJZBtKc...

share.google

Not Only Can’t America Build Submarines, It Can’t Retire Them, Either

Submarine decommissioning is a lengthy and laborious process, and existing scrapyards are years behind—meaning that existing submarines must remain on the register, with full crews, until their time c...

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Reposted by Ben Eltham

Extreme Temperatures Around the World @extremetemps.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

HISTORIC HEAT IN INDONESIA Indonesia is living the most extraordinary heat wave in tropical history,breaking and rebreaking every record,every day. Today it was tied the HOTTEST DAY EVER RECORDED IN KALIMANTAN (Borneo) 38.2C Banjarmasin all time high also 37.9 Palangka Raya

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The arts in Victoria are in crisis. A key reason is the state government has slashed arts funding. A group of artists and small cultural organisations have got together to campaign for better policy dontbreakourarts.org

dontbreakourarts.org

Don't Break Our Arts

Don't Break Our Arts : Make a donation today to support Don't Break Our Arts

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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

New Post: Why I Love AI Next month it'll be twenty years since I went to university, learned to program, and studied AI. I wrote about why I loved it, why I still love it, and why, unfortunately, it no longer exists. www.possibilityspace.org/blog/posts/i...

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The clout analytic philosophy used to have

From Sander Verhaegh’s new book on logical positivism: And the logical positivists were even connected to Beatles mania when John Lennon and his friends started conquering the United States. The Press Telegram ran an article titled "Beatles Take Note: Logical Positivism Put to Music" when Elisabeth Lutyens released a record featuring passages from the Tractatus; and a local Missouri newspaper reported that someone graffitied "The Beatles are Logical Positivists!" on the outside wall of a Pennsylvania train station.

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Reposted by Ben Eltham

Tim Howard @tmhwrd.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

[goose meme] what else did he advocate? WHAT ELSE DID HE ADVOCATE?

Music
Angry Anderson dies aged 79:
Rose Tattoo frontman was a ferocious rock 'n' roll singer and youth advocate. He was also a bigot.

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marque lawyers @marquelawyers.com.au · 23/09/2026

guaranteed vote winner

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Sewzinski @sewzinski.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Your stunted adulthood is a thriving market.

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UN Environment Programme @unep.org · 22/09/2026

Overshooting 1.5°C is not a reason to give up. On the contrary, it’s a reason to act faster, because the higher the temperature rise and the longer it stays there, the greater the damage. Here’s what “overshoot” means and why every fraction of a degree matters.

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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Why do white men become white nationalists? Interesting new empirical results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

ere we show with three national surveys of non-Hispanic white adults (conducted from 2021 to 2025) that support for white nationalism is (1) higher among white people encountering personal hardship and local social distress, consistent with strain theories3,16; (2) unrelated to local racial composition or recent demographic change, complicating status threat accounts4,17,18; and (3) elevated among white people with close friendships primarily online, consistent with theories of extremism driven by online mobilization7,10,19.

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

What stage of the AI doom/hype loop are we at when the Financial Times is reminding readers that "if AI really does make humans extinct, every investment goes to zero"?

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Reposted by Ben Eltham

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

My whole career the Humanities seem to have been curled up in a defensive crouch trying to justify our meaning/existence. At times it has even seemed a productive thought exercise, but I think generally whatever body has demanded the justification is not really open to being persuaded of anything.

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PK 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸 @paul.kidd.id.au · 20/09/2026

It’s a race to the bottom (and not the fun kind)

• Australian politics
Australia news live: Taylor pledges 'one of the biggest immigration cuts in history'; PM says focus is on free trade not EU membership
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Sun 20 Sep 2026 10.27 AEST

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Yung En Chee @yungenchee.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Not much media coverage of Australian students walking out of class AGAIN to protest Pauline Hanson & One Nation on 17 Sep But it's so cheering & good for the soul, here's a little 🧵 of coverage BRAVO & THANK YOU STUDENTS‼️ ✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼

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Tom Newby @tomnewby.co.uk · 18/09/2026

This is pretty terrifying. An architect generated structural engineering calculations using AI. The calculations looked convincing to a non expert but were fundamentally wrong, and unsafe.

cross-safety.org

Inappropriate use of artificial intelligence (AI) in structural design

Concerns are raised about the unverified use of AI-generated structural design outputs to justify the installation of heavy plant on an existing building roof.

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Reposted by Ben Eltham

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

I've updated my list of GLAM datasets from Aus government data portals, now including some history & heritage datasets from non-GLAM organisations like city councils. There's now 492 datasets from 45 organisations. www.glam-workbench.net/glam-dataset…

glam-workbench.net

GLAM datasets from government data portals - GLAM Workbench

A collection of tools and examples to help you work with data from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums

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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Could be a bit of property crime in Melbourne’s east tonight

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