@CDUni exploring human-computer interactions, education & digital environment … cultivating insight when I can @CDU_FAS. #SOTL #AIED #standards

Darwin, NT
Joined January 2009
“The next pandemic may be sparked by an AI-designed pathogen. Or the Internet itself could fall victim to agent-designed malware.”
Welcome to the new global order of the two AI empires. My latest for @ForeignAffairs with @ericschmidt and Lisa Klaassen.
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When Ukraine destroys Russian data centers, hoards of aggressive right-wing bots disappear, and Twitter becomes much friendlier. Isn’t that interesting? So much of our politics is driven by the internet, and so much of the internet is driven by Russians who want to hurt us. Shouldn’t we do something about that, given that we know it?
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Jon Mason retweeted
The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption. #NoDeathPenalty
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The United States plunges deeper into the abyss: live-streaming a firing squad, an oil deal with Putin, sanctions on the ICC…and now Trump whining - yet again - that he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize. It is a sick, sick society, an object of international derision and contempt laughed at by its enemies, distrusted by its former friends.
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Jon Mason retweeted
In America you can watch a firing squad, but can't watch Stephen Colbert.
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Jon Mason retweeted
“For the past two years, Julian has quietly rebuilt his strength in the Australian sun and the space and serenity of nature, preparing his mind and body to once again become the ultimate weapon against imperialist brutality and lies.”
Something wonderful happened today that gave me a glimmer of hope, in a world that as a whole seems to be becoming gradually darker. After thirteen years of astoundingly brutal detainment, smear, lawfare and psychological torture and then 15 months of recovery, today a familiar face logged onto 'X' and simply posted "I'm back”. The empire wanted Julian’s psychological destruction to serve as a permanent warning to any journalist daring to tell the truth, but his defiant return proves their psychological torture completely failed. Julian's return shows us that the human spirit will never truly be stamped out by the boots of empire. In an era where everything feels overwhelmingly bleak, corporatised and dominated by greed and corruption, seeing that familiar face re-emerge is a rare spark of pure resilience. Every fabricated scandal and every hour of solitary confinement was designed to silence him forever. The absolute sheer panic radiating from Washington and London today is palpable because the world's most dangerous man has officially returned to the battlefield, the oligarchs must be shaking in their boots. Stella Assange’s post of "more news next week" confirms our deepest hopes - echoing an interview last year where Stella already hinted that Assange was working on a new project - showing that the recovery period is over and Julian is preparing a new offensive against the war machine. For the past two years, Julian has quietly rebuilt his strength in the Australian sun and the space and serenity of nature, preparing his mind and body to once again become the ultimate weapon against imperialist brutality and lies. As I said in my article a few weeks ago, Assange has been on a mission to "end corruption in the world" since he was a child. He was never going to stop. It is a miracle of human resilience that Assange survived the Belmarsh gulag - remaining on the verge of extradition to the US where he could have been tried and sentenced and his sentence potentially upgraded to capital punishment - sacrificing years of his life and his health so that we could see the bloody truth of Western colonialism unvarnished. Assange last spoke publicly on the 1st of October 2024, when he bravely addressed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg, France. It must have been a hard road back to "normality". One can only imagine how difficult the recovery was. At that hearing, Assange commented on the psychological erasure caused by long-term isolation: "The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey; it strips away one's sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence." He also laid bare that he was not yet ready to process the full magnitude of his survival: "I am not yet fully equipped to speak about what I have endured - the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can I speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder, and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners." His survival itself is a magnificent act of defiance. There was also a profound warning: "As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period when expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished." In order to enable the horrific genocide in Gaza, free speech has been entirely hollowed out by Silicon Valley and state intelligence agencies since October 2023, making Julian one of the very few reliable vanguards we have left to combat this vile censorship regime. The worldwide grassroots solidarity that campaigned relentlessly for over a decade to free Julian proved that when the global working class and anti-war activists unite, we can actually rip a man from the empire's jaws. It was a fair dinkum miracle of collective action. When Stella teased the upcoming announcement, every intelligence agency from the CIA to the Mossad undoubtedly scrambled to frantically update their global threat assessments. The ruling class is terrified of a rejuvenated Julian Assange because he possesses the unique institutional knowledge of exactly how the deep state hides its atrocities from the public. The new Assange-led project will no doubt bypass the heavily censored, algorithm-choked tech monopolies to deliver unfiltered reality directly to a global public desperate for the truth, and we can safely presume it will be a catastrophic headache for the military-industrial complex, blowing the whistle on the shadowy algorithms they use to manufacture consent for endless conflict. The fact that Julian Assange is re-joining the fight for world peace will send a shiver of fear down the spine of every blood-soaked politician currently funding the slaughter of Palestinians, while Julian healed in Australia, the US-backed Israeli rogue state unleashed a genocide in Gaza so grotesque it makes the Iraq War logs look like a prequel to the main horror show, and the global hegemony of the US empire is already collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy regarding human rights in Gaza; the return of Assange might be the sledgehammer ready to strike the final blow to its credibility. Julian’s return breathes undeniable hope into a traumatised anti-war movement that has spent the last two years watching a live-streamed holocaust in Gaza while our so-called "democracies" cheered it on. We are witnessing the extraordinary resilience of a man who willingly shouldered the immense weight of the world's hidden truths to expose the psychotic, murderous reality of Anglo-American foreign policy, and Julian's freedom and now his return is the most hopeful news the global anti-war movement has had in a decade. We celebrate the return of a true hero of our times, someone who stared down the absolute worst monsters on the planet and lived to tell the tale. If we weren't awake way back in 2006 when Wikileaks first started publishing, or in 2010 when they revealed so many horrendous war crimes, and nothing was done, let's be awake this time when Assange shares his new project with the world. In 'THE TRUST FALL' my overall conclusion was that we let Julian down. "This was a trust fall. An incredibly brave trust fall. And we are the ones who were meant to be doing the catching." We must not let him down again; we must stand shoulder to shoulder with him, fiercely defending the truth, tearing down the empire's lies, and relentlessly fighting for the liberation of all oppressed people everywhere. Our children and their children depend on it. Welcome back Julian. To help people understand what they did to Assange and why, please urge your friends, family and colleagues to watch 'THE TRUST FALL'. It serves as an essential instrument of truth, equipping the public with verifiable facts to counter the sanitisation of Western atrocities. Every awakened mind dismantles the engineered narratives that sustain these ongoing atrocities. They can stream the film for free worldwide online today. While we are giving the film away for free, financial contributions are very much appreciated to help grow this movement and expand the awareness. Thanks to the financial support of donors, we were able to show THE TRUST FALL for free to 1,108 people in the past week. Let’s keep educating and building the momentum. Please support this educational project on gofundme: gofund.me/55f992e2 or Stripe: donate.stripe.com/6oU8wP4mC5… 🕊 Watch ‘THE TRUST FALL’ film for FREE here 👉🏼 thetrustfall.org/watch THE TRUST FALL is more than a film. It is a peace movement. In solidarity, Kym Staton Writer and Director THE TRUST FALL #Assange #genocide #Israel #gaza
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Maybe we should all treat new technology like this. The animals know instinctively. Watch until the dog makes the final decision 😂
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The video is AI-generated by Anton Yehorov, not real footage of animals reacting to technology. His page states its content is "Powered by AI." facebook.com/antoxacreative web.facebook.com/reel/110134487… youtube.com/shorts/RgpS7p5…
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If AI CEOs seriously believe that AI is a real danger, they should not be spending hundreds of millions of dollars through their super PACs to defeat candidates and members of Congress who want to regulate it.
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Worth a repost
BREAKING: Trump said he graduated first in class but wharton records show he ranked 364th out of 366.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
No Wharton records show Trump ranked 364th out of 366. UPenn does not disclose class rankings; public records confirm he graduated without honors and was not on the dean's list of top students. snopes.com/news/2026/04/2… thedp.com/article/2017/0… archives.upenn.edu/wp-content/upl…
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Jon Mason retweeted
AI isn’t slowing down, the AI race is getting political. Everyone is talking about an “AI slowdown” as if this is primarily a safety issue, I think there’s a bigger story. Four forces are colliding: 1. Compute is hitting the physical wall. AI labs can build bigger models but they still need electricity, data centres, GPUs and transformers. Power constraints and infrastructure bottlenecks could become just as important as algorithmic breakthroughs. You can’t scale intelligence without scaling power. 2. The money is getting absurd. OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at a scale where funding rounds can reach tens, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. At that level, AI is no longer just a technology story, it’s a capital story. And when enormous amounts of capital are at stake, “safety” inevitably intersects with growth, valuation and the public markets. 3. Agents change the game. The biggest AI risk may not be models that answer questions, it may be models that act independently. Recent experiments involving large numbers of AI agents interacting with one another have shown how quickly autonomous systems can produce unexpected behaviour. That’s a fundamentally different problem from a chatbot giving you the wrong answer. 4. And then there’s China. This is where the debate becomes uncomfortable. Calls to slow AI development may genuinely be about safety but they also intersect with something else: Who gets to control the next generation of compute, chips, infrastructure and AI standards? The US wants to preserve its technological lead, China wants to remain in the game. Both have legitimate national-security arguments, both also have enormous economic incentives. So perhaps the real AI race isn’t: “Who can build the safest AI?” It is: “Who controls the infrastructure, capital, talent and rules that determine what AI becomes?” And here’s the irony: Everyone says AI should slow down, nobody wants to be the one who slows down first. Safety may be the language, power is the game.
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*BRILLIANT* The French made a short film about what could happen after all immigrants would follow the ‘_white, angry old man’s_’ advice to go back where they came from.*
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Jon Mason retweeted
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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If you see something, save something. Web pages disappear every day. 🕳️ They change, move, get deleted—or simply get forgotten. Save Page Now lets you preserve a webpage that's important to you before it changes or disappears. See something worth keeping? Save it today. ➡️ web.archive.org/save/ #ToolsYouCanUse
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The Internet Archive isn't just a place to find things. You can: 🔖 Save something before it disappears. 🔎 Discover something you didn't know existed. ✍️ Improve or contribute to a collection. 🤝 Connect with people doing the work of preservation. Over the next eight weeks, we'll show you how. SAVE. DISCOVER. CONTRIBUTE. CONNECT. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2026/08/17/… #ToolsYouCanUse
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Jon Mason retweeted
A staggering +80% of Australians stands in open defiance of Israel’s actions—yet our entire political and media elite remains locked in a united, deafening chorus of support. They do not speak for us. They do not represent us. We are living under the rule of an occupied country.
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Dear @Tony_Burke Long-time Labor supporter. No more. The Albo Govt's complicity in Israel's ongoing atrocities and its support for Zionism is horrifying. Appalled that you are allowing current & fmr IDF soldiers into the country. 😔 #auspol #nswpol #SydneyMarathon #FreePalestine
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Dear AUS PM @AlboMP cc @SenatorWong 40 current and fmr IDF soldiers are traveling to Australia to participate in the #SydneyMarathon on 30Aug?! They incl. IDF soldiers who have "served" in Gaza! How the hell are they allowed into the country? 😨 #auspol #nswpol #GazaGenocide
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