World's Most Boring Government Formally Announces New Office of AI to Develop Standards and Guidelines For Australia's AI Future

Anthony Albanese Keynote on AI in Australia as interpreted by Gemini AI

Australian PM, Anthony Albanese.

Amidst growing concerns by Australian artists, specifically musicians most recently, about AI being trained on their work, on July 15 the world's most boring PM, Anthony Albanese delivered a keynote address from the University of Sydney on AI in Australia.

I'm not going to pick apart the entire speech. Generally, it focused on the opportunities AI and its continued development in this country could bring to Australians, while assuring everyone the Government will be looking at (and possibly regulating) the negative aspects of the technology, such AI being trained with copyrighted data, and the environmental nightmare that data centres present with their excessive need for water and power.

To that end the PM is setting up The Office of AI, within his own department and cabinet, that will spend, the rest of this year looking into all the issues and likely working towards building a framework for how we can benefit from AI technologies moving forward and minimize the risks. It encompasses all areas where AI technologies are making inroads from education to defence, health, finance, media, the arts, and even in government itself.

For some reason the media that I saw, reporting on the speech, seemed to narrow the whole presentation down to regulating the building and management of data centers - since there is already development happening around those in Australia.

In general, I thought the PM's keynote speech was a good thing. AI technology has kind of broken through the 'what is this even useful for' stage with mainstream adoption in many areas. It is time to rein it in and start addressing the negative issues, particularly the environmental ones presented by data centers.

As the PM mentioned in his speech, water is at more of a premium in this country. Perhaps Australian innovation can create better systems that maybe don't even require water? Like everywhere, the cost of power is particularly problematic. Data centres should definitely not be allowed to cause the price to increase simply through their existence.

Personally (based on pure observation and no actual facts) I feel the tech giants have just been throwing money at data centres without any consideration for making them more efficient, or even downsizing them. They just want the compute power at any cost - and are just starting to realize that cost is unsustainable.

While The Office of AI isn't the most inspiring thing to come out of the PM's speech it's good to see the world's most boring government is taking the initiative on AI in Australia. It may not be the most exciting announcement ever but boring is preferable to the grievance politics of the right leaning political parties in Australia. They're not even trying to win my vote.

Comments

Software Stylus for Tablet Drawing

I own an Android Tablet that has available to it many great drawing applications. The trouble is, drawing on a touchscreen with your finger is like trying to sketch with jumbo crayons. As is trying to draw with most stylus pens which are only a marginal improvement over using your finger. Precision drawing on your average touchscreen seems like wishful thinking. However I've had this idea for a software stylus that acts like an extension of your finger and allows drawing with greater precision. See my rough diagram below. Essentially it's a pointer that follows your finger around the screen. Its angle can be adjusted so that from your vantage point it looks like the tip of your finger is coming to a point. Softnib concept sketch. You simply move the pointer around and the line is drawn from the point of the stylus instead of somewhere under your finger, where you can't see it. Obviously I haven't worked out a...

Who Even Reads This?

W riting this blog is largely both a labor of love and a discipline. Since about 2006 (the blog started in 2004) I have written a minimum of two posts per month. Sometimes I've posted more, particularly in the last 4-5 years, where I've tried to write and post at least one article a week without fail. Unfortunately it's not a niche blog, unless the niche is things that interest me. Which means my blog is either too broad to have regular readers or too niche to have anyone other than my mum reading it. Which she does (hi Mum) as we established back in January of 2014 in the post Ya Mum Reads it... That said, this blog overall regularly gets 6-7k views every month, mostly through people finding various articles through search engines. By far the largest traffic source is 'Other' which is basically unknown sources. I'm willing to bet a large percentage of that is the dead internet. Bots testing my comments to see if they're spamable or Illuminati spammers. Whil...

Occupy Wall Street - Movement for Change of... Something?

I've been kind of following the Occupy Wall Street 'movement' from my position of apathetic denial of what's actually happening in the real world - that you can see if you pull back the curtain or disconnect from the Matrix. In particular I've watched vlogs of the Melbourne, Australia, Occupy Movement through the eyes and camera of You-tuber Sean Beadlam . Sean is quite a hard hitting comedian whose humor is topical, political and often based on the injustices faced by the oppressed. He also focuses on the media and how they'll beat up a story to get their 'angle' rather than provide balanced reporting of the whole story. Although not one of his comedy routines this video below from Occupy Melbourne is a good example of Sean's work with several juxtaposes of the Occupy movement with media and Sean's use of technology. Although Sean isn't the only source of my information, you would think that a guy like him would have...

Pt5. Three Cat Tails Painting by TET

Finished: Three Cat Tails Acrylic on Canvas panels. Day five of my video diary (embeded below) following the creation of my latest series of paintings, Three Cat Tails. View Part one , Part two , Part 3 and Part 4 if you haven't seen them yet. In the final episode of this series I get to paint the black and white layers that I thought I'd be painting on day 4 but delayed in exchange for adding more purple and green shadow. The black and white layers take the artworks through to completion. Then I finish each panel off with a dark blue border around the edge (to cover up the paint marks on the sides). Whilst I do continue to talk about what I'm doing as I paint this episode does contain a few quite moments of just me painting away because there isn't really a lot to say about the white and black layer. However I hope you'll stick with it to the end just the same. The series of artworks are available to buy so if you're interested contact m...

Pt3. Three Cat Tails Painting by TET

WIP: Three Cat Tails Darker shading and cream fur added. Day three of my video diary (embeded below) following the creation of my latest series of paintings, Three Cat Tails. View Part one and Part two if you haven't seen them yet. In this video I mix a dark brown colour to add some shadow and stripes to my cats. You'll see how the brown tones the orange down quite a bit to make the colouring of the cats a little more believable. I also mix a light cream colour to fill in the transitions between the orange and white area of the cats fur. You'll see in a later episode more clearly what I mean once I add the white back in. Note how, when I add the cream, it initially goes on too thick and I have to wipe it back with a cloth and water it down to make it more translucent. The perils of mixing colours with white paint! Finally I finish up by adding in a few small details like paw pads and noses. It doesn't actually seem like I did that much today. O...

Pt4. Three Cat Tails Painting by TET

WIP: Three Cat Tails Darker purple and green shading added. Day four of my video diary (embeded below) following the creation of my latest series of paintings, Three Cat Tails. View Part one , Part two and Part 3 if you haven't seen them yet. Yesterday I said that I would begin on adding my black and white final layers today. However after looking at the paintings a few times over night I decided the cats could really use more shadow to give them just a little more three dimensional form. I had a strong feeling that adding purple and green shadows was what the images really needed. Especially the two larger images needed the purple shading on the background behind the cats to connect them with it - since those two particular images actually make more sense if you get the feeling that you're looking at the cats, laying on a blue floor, from above. At this point I pretty certain I'm ready for my final black and white detail layers - which I'll get onto...

Pt2. Three Cat Tails Painting by TET

WIP: Three Cat Tails background and base colours. Day two and part two of my video diary (embeded below) following the creation of my latest series of paintings, Three Cat Tails. View Part one if you haven't seen it yet. After painting my initial base painting using the three primary colours, in this episode I demonstrate blocking in my backgrounds and the base colour for the three cats. This episode is a little longer than the last but hopefully is still interesting to watch. All the painting you see is in real time but obviously edited down quite a lot to show the 'highlights' and I explain what I'm doing as I go. I realize these videos aren't as exciting to watch as the more common 'speed painting' style videos but if your the kind of person that likes to watch over the shoulder of a real live artist at work then these might just be up your alley. Continue to Part 3 .

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog