Heaps Normal with Nicholas Davis

The co-founder of the Human Technology Institute, Nick has been thinking deeply about technology and change since his decade at DAVOS where he co-wrote the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ with founder Klaus Schwab. To call this a wide-ranging discussion wouldn’t really do justice to the concepts of length and breadth. Bouncing off Nick’s ‘megapixel’ provocation, the idea that when technology reaches a certain level incremental improvements are no longer the story, we delve into the idea of ‘AI as Normal technology, before asking ourselves whether ‘AI’ is a useful term at all.

• Here is a link to the iconic 2025 essay ‘AI as Normal Technology’ by Princeton researchers Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. To quote them: The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it.

• This 2016 piece ‘The Fourth industrial Revolution – what is means, how to respond’ from the World Economic Forum, which I suspect Nick had a hand in writing, is a good time capsule of what was foreseen before it arrived.

• This essay from Gary Marcus is a scathing takedown of the latest piece of Amodei exceptionalism

In this week’s show we also dig into:

Can Automated Decision Making work for the people? Lizzie provides an overview of the urgent work in getting government to set the framework for how it should use technology to interact with citizens, particular around service delivery.

• Coverage on algorithmic appraisal in aged care form this week’s Four Corners

• Nick’s HTI colleague Ed Santow raises the alarm on ADM in the NDIS This (paywalled) piece in the Saturday Paper from June

• This is a great overview of the broader issue Lizzie wrote for Cheek Media -

Is the Social Media Ban making things worse? Cam expanded on his excellent ABC feature spotlighting the first evidence of the low impact and perverse consequences of the ban and questioning the opportunity cost of seeing this as the silver bullet.

• Here’s a reminder of the warnings child safety experts issued that were duly ignored in the development of the law.

• And this gem from Guardian Australia suggests the actual evaluation report was infected with AI hallucination.

Is surveillance-busting ‘adversarial fashion’ the new black? Finally, I try on the new fashion trend of clothes designed specifically to scramble Facial Recognition Technology systems. A wonderful act of neo-luddism,

• this Guardian piece takes us on a whirlwind of ‘adversarial fashion that has me reappraising my wardrobe.

• this piece from Cyber News looks at the technology behind the fashion trends.

• and this is a link to the only glasses a true neo-luddite would wear, the currently out of stock ‘reflectacles’.

Enjoy the show and feel welcome to share any reflections on the discussions here.