Author: The Conversation

This past Christmas, I helped my parents choose a water filter. The latest “smart” models all came with a smartphone app that promised to monitor filter life, track water quality and automatically request service. Yet my father, age 75, and mother, 67, were quick to reject them in favour of a nondigital model. “Every time it updates or I forget how to use it, we’ll have to call you,” my dad said. As an only child living 8,000 miles (12,875 kilometres) away, I didn’t need convincing. My parents are ageing in place and don’t need traditional caregiving – they cook,…

When most people think about the internet, they likely picture websites and apps. What they rarely see are the invisible services that make those experiences possible: systems that translate names into numbers, verify who you are, deliver messages and block malicious traffic. For example, DNS, the Domain Name System, has quietly become a single point of failure. DNS is the Internet’s phone book. When it fails, large parts of the internet effectively disappear, even if servers are still running. DNS is not alone. Over the past decade, four core internet services – DNS, authentication, email and security infrastructure – have consolidated…

Artificial intelligence (AI) already affects many areas of daily life, including the lives of young children. Many families give screens to children younger than two, and AI-generated content is increasing on the popular YouTube Kids channel – and it plays automatically. Most parents are not able to monitor everything their child sees online. Some AI-generated content can be both frightening and attractive to young children, including violence and sexual content using engaging animals and characters. Early childhood education centres are also using AI to support learning, particularly for children with developmental differences. This includes those who do not learn to speak easily or who have other…

Even with no fur in frame, you can easily see that a photo of a hairless Sphynx cat depicts a cat. You wouldn’t mistake it for an elephant. But many artificial intelligence (AI) vision systems would. Why? Because when AI systems learn to categorise objects, they often rely on visual cues – like surface texture or simple patterns in pixels. This tendency makes them vulnerable to getting confused by small changes that have little effect on human perception. A vision system aligned more closely with human perception – one that perhaps emphasises shape, for instance – might still confuse the cat…

With the internet and its widespread accessibility, many of us have front-row seats to widespread suffering and death across the globe for the first time in history, even when we are not directly affected. We’re living in what scholars describe as a “polycrisis” — a set of interconnected crises that compound and intensify one another. Climate change intensifies displacement and conflict, economic precarity fuels political extremism and public health emergencies expose structural inequality. As a result, the future can feel more uncertain than ever. If you feel overwhelmed by the constant influx of bad news and find it difficult to focus on day-to-day tasks, that response…

With so many artificial intelligence (AI) products on offer now, it’s increasingly tempting to offload difficult thinking tasks to chatbots, agents and other tools. As we chart this new technological terrain, more and more we’re exposed to vast amounts of information and highly sophisticated software that offers to do the thinking for us. In just a few seconds, tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini can draft your emails, generate a caring birthday message for a friend, or even summarise the plot of that novel you haven’t gotten around to reading. Such increased offloading has raised the fear that people will…

Somewhere in the North Atlantic, more than a kilometre beneath its surface, a cold-water coral reef stretches across an unnamed seamount. Despite never appearing on a chart, this underwater forest has existed for centuries, growing a centimetre or two each year. The reef is a home and feeding ground for dozens of species that depend on it the way a woodland creature depends on trees. It has survived ice ages – but whether it will survive increasing pressures from industrial fishing, deep-sea mining and climate change is, in part, a question about data. If we don’t know it exists, how…

Why do you see the results you do when you search for information online? It’s a complex mix of what the source is, its relationships to other sources online, and your own past browsing history and device settings. But this formula is changing. Rather than being passively served content that search engines decide is most relevant (or businesses have paid to have promoted), some big tech platforms have started providing users more control over what they see online. Earlier this year, Google launched the Preferred Sources feature in Australia and New Zealand. Through it, users can select organisations that are “preferred” and whose content…

Globally, nearly 7,000 coal mines, more than 2,400 coal-fired power plants and hundreds of coal rail networks, trucks and port terminals all make up the world’s coal industry. When coal is phased out and green energy phased in, these coal assets can either be abandoned or turned into something that is useful for communities. Sandeep Pai and Jennifer Broadhurst researched how India, South Africa and the US are repurposing their coal assets. South Africa is moving away from burning coal to generate electricity and the research suggests that coal infrastructure could be turned into new agricultural and renewable energy hubs. How important…

Against rising adult concern about child sexual abuse content and children’s mental health, recent calls to follow Australia and ban under-16s from accessing social media in the UK are understandable. It reflects genuine parental anxiety about online harms. These harms are not abstract. Research shows that young people are exposed to violent misogynistic cultures and toxic manospheres online. But despite being consistently critical of the viral and experiential platform business models driving much of today’s social media harm, as an expert in digital communication, I do not support the ban. This is not because I defend the kind of libertarian politics adopted by Silicon Valley. It isn’t because…