Few Australian companies have a clear view of what their company’s increasing reliance on digital technologies is doing to create carbon emissions. This is not a trivial issue. It has significant implications for regulators, policy makers, company boards, and the rest of us, who increasingly compete with IT companies and data centres for electricity.

AI applications are revolutionising the way we create. But these creations rely on ideas conceived by humans who are not always given appropriate credit. It is likely that generative AI systems will soon only be allowed to be trained on work in the public domain or under licences, which will affect everyone who integrates generative AI into their work.

Whether “intelligence” can be created within hardware is a fascinating question, and one that remains unanswered despite significant efforts. In contrast, biological intelligence from a neural source offers a “ground truth” of opportunity. As such, the question becomes not ‘if’ general intelligence can arise from something artificial, but ‘how’.

With technology becoming more compact, smarter (with artificial intelligence) and having greater computing power, robots can now make decisions at fast speeds. The future of robotics is rapidly evolving. Elizabeth believes that robots are becoming more human-like and that we therefore need better, smoother human-robot interactions. Professor Elizabeth Croft wants to make sure that people are considered in the design of robots. In all of her designs, she starts by first observing people. “We need to think about how we’re going to get along with the robots,” she says, after all, they are already increasingly coming into our homes.

Everyone’s reality is slightly different. We all experience the world around us in different ways. Our world is sensed as numbers and electrical impulses that our brains then turn into something meaningful. At Extrasensory, everyone was challenged to make sense of the world of the senses and find the limits to their own. There were many incredible sights, tastes and sensations to behold while exploring the magnificent spaces of the Parliament of Victoria!