What is migration for?

High levels of immigration in Western countries have provoked a backlash, not least in Australia where One Nation is riding high in the polls, so what is migration for?

The new space race

After decades of little progress, a new ‘space race’ is underway propelled by a new rivalry between the USA and China and the efforts of private space programmes run by tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Count to three

Everyone means something different when they talk of free speech but understanding it in terms of reason, ‘carnival’ and honour may help prevent it being weaponised against others.

Do we live too long?

Edmund Burke described society as a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born, so are older people in Australia breaking that covenant by living too long?

Awkward questions and divisive debates

When the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion holds its final public hearings between late June and the end of August, they are likely to trigger some awkward questions and divisive debates.

Healing the regional-metropolitan divide

Can we please mend the growing rift between regional and metropolitan Australia? Australian politics shouldn’t pit city against country and the language designed to divide us doesn’t help anyone.

Why you have to prove you’re human

CAPTCHA tests are everywhere on the internet to protect sites from AI bots and as AI-generated traffic continues to grow, proving we are human online may become an even more common part of everyday life.

The concrete cloud

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a software tool. It has become the world’s most demanding construction client with some concerning environmental implications.

AI in the dock

Our courts are overburdened, and so the use of generative AI promises consistency and efficiency but it risks undermining a fundamental principle of justice: the right to be judged by a human being.

The age of the apostles

The “12” apostles are a famous tourist attraction on the Great Ocean Road, but they’re also younger and more fragile than one might expect.

Australia’s most expensive illusion

Why have Australians, otherwise alert to unfairness and quick to condemn political failure, accepted a settlement around work and housing that now punishes so many of them?

Can AI do science?

As in many information-rich tasks, researchers are looking to artificial intelligence systems to speed up their work, but the complexity of the natural world means that AI “scientists” will only be truly effective when they can go beyond connecting words together, to modelling the full complexity of the systems those words describe.