I have always loved fiddling with technology.

At home, my parents were quite comfortable with cassette tapes and the turntable, but programming the VCR to tape their favourite shows was too much. I had to take care of that.

My brother was an absolute technophobe. He famously declared in 1999 that he would never ever have a mobile phone and he would never have a computer. Of course, he now has both, though I must admit he resisted buying them for about five years. Still to this day, though, I’m pretty sure our parents are more comfortable with their laptop and phone than he is.

In contrast to them, I was the one who fiddled with technology and who embraced it. I bought CDs and a Sony DiscMan to listen to them long before my parents had one. The first PC in our house was in my bedroom (a lovely hand me down from my uncle) where I learned to use MS-DOS (then followed by Windows 3), wrote documents on Word Perfect and learned how to create simple games on BASIC. None of them ever showed any interest in using the PC.

I logged into the internet sometime in the mid 90s. One of my friends, who is now an IT and coding teacher, had access to the internet in those early days and we looked around various websites and forums. Being totally obsessed with music at the time we mostly looked for information about music and bands we liked. I remember, for example, finding the lyrics for songs of lots of my favourite bands and then painstakingly translating them so I could understand what they were saying.

Then, I was an early adopter of the mobile phone, chatrooms and blogs. My friend helped me setup a blog in the early 2000s. While I can’t remember the exact date, I believe I opened my blog on Blogger just before Google bought it in 2003.

I was always quick to jump in and try things. For example, I remember using Google Wave when it was invitation only (again through an invitation from my IT friend). By that time I was already living in Australia and I remember we were both really impressed with Google Wave. I also remember being totally appalled with Google+.

And that’s the thing, while I was always happy to jump in early and try things, I was always happy to delete my account and move on if the service didn’t really meet my needs like Instagram/Facebook or, in the case of Google Wave, if they shut it down.

Technology is constantly changing and so we must always reassess what we have, what our needs are and whether the technology is adding value to our lives or, on the contrary, whether it has become a burden or an obstacle.

Which is why it’s interesting to me that my IT friend and I, both have found ourselves very weary and critical of the current push for general AI and LLMs. We both agree that the idea of AI and its potential holds huge appeal and potential. We believe this technology can be transformational but, like so many other things before, it depends on how it’s implemented.

Radio and TV had the potential to be transformational. They could have been used to educate, to document, to communicate, to be a fifth state keeping those in power honest, to build social cohesion. The idea of the fifth state and the ethics of journalism were great, but media concentration in the hands of a few powerful men, economic interests and greed, tainted what was to be good. Instead of delivering on the potential we got Fox News, Sky News, and so called reality TV, which is anything but real and is designed to pit people against each other to create more views.

The internet had the potential to be transformational. It could have been used to create decentralised communities that exchanged information, resources and ideas freely all over the world. It’s true that we still see traces of what could’ve been in independent blogs/forums and Wikipedia, for example. But, overall, the internet has become concentrated in five big tech companies that have turned what had huge potential into a huge toxic swamp that’s eroding our societies.

Obstinate beings that we are, we have not learned from the past. We have not learned from the social media fiasco that has caused untold damage in the last two decades and we seem to be heading in the same direction. Open AI, Anthropic and the other big AI companies are ready to take what has been created by thoughtful academics and scientists for decades, what holds so much potential to be transformational for good and turn it into another toxic greedy swamp where they hope to trap us all.

Some may say it’s inevitable. But I believe there are other paths and we need to ensure that we push for those alternatives. So, in light of this, I wanted to briefly share, some examples of AI use that I find inspiring and exciting.

Artificial intelligence has been used for quite a while for weather forecasting and climate models. AI can do modelling and forecasting so much faster than humans ever could. This is a specific use of AI and one that climate scientists understand and monitor. In other words, it’s efficient and controlled.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in healthcare and is able to notice patterns or anomalies, long before even the most experienced doctors, with great accuracy. This is because it can see small traces of cancer, for example, long before the human eye. There’s huge potential here for good and I’m hopeful that healthcare organisations and community can implement the use of this technology with strong ethical and privacy safeguards.

We definitely don’t want insurance companies, for example, to start using AI to analyse clients medical records in order for them to raise the premiums or to totally deny healthcare.

But the one that takes the cake for me is a Maori program in Aotearoa named Papa Reo that has created, trained and now maintains a system that uses artificial intelligence to preserve Maori language, knowledge and culture. I say this one takes the cake because it combines all the best elements that I would like to see in the implementation of AI globally.

The Papa Reo project is built on consent from the people that are involved, including the ones that provide data to train the AI. They are fully informed of how their data will be used. This ticks the privacy and ethics box with a focus on informed consent and guardianship of the data instead of ownership.

The project is specific and narrow in focus. Instead of general AI or a large language model that vacuums all information and attempts to be everything all at once, Papa Reo is designed and trained for one purpose only, to analyse, transcribe and reproduce language, thus ensuring its efficiency and accuracy.

The whole project is built on ethical principles, involving the Maori community and with data sovereignty in mind. They have built their own data centre and they control all the information, hardware, etc. Always following traditional culture protocols of guardianship and knowledge.

This is an exemplary example of how to use artificial intelligence to preserve and reinvigorate their language and knowledge that I find incredibly inspired and inspiring. We need more projects like this.

I recommend visiting their website and exploring the information there.

So, in closing, what we need is strong action from governments. The same way that we can’t expect to stop the climate crisis individually by changing all lights to LED or recycling our plastics, we can’t expect the big tech companies to change their policies and care about our privacy. We cannot as individuals enact changes. What we need is governments to enact strong laws and policies and in the case of AI and big tech, what is needed is clear and open policies based on ethics, privacy and data sovereignty.

There are some positive signs already.

I was very happy to read about Transkribus, possibly the first AI Coop in the world. The idea behind Transkribus is to create an AI system for transcribing texts designed specifically for the cultural heritage sector, libraries and archives. As Melissa Terras, who is part of the project explains: "There was a need from the community, which was "Please find us a plug-in-and-play version of handwriting recognition technology which we can use without having to figure it all out ourselves. We wanted to fulfil this need. However, we wanted to do it in a way that respected the community across the library and archive sector." We need more projects like this and I hope it inspires many more. I love what Terras says at the end: "It's a value system that people [who] work in cultural heritage institutions understand, which is that we're not here to make personal profit and we're not here to make our fortune. We're doing it because it's a good thing to do."

Exactly the opposite of big tech companies and a much better way for everyone. But we also need big policy changes.

In Europe, they’ve come to realise that relying on U.S. and Chinese technology they will be forever subservient to them. Earlier this year Microsoft, for example, closed the account of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor in charge of the case against Israel following sanctions by the Trump administration. And in July Microsoft admitted to a French Senate hearing that it can't protect EU data from U.S. snooping. In response to all this and the increasing concern for privacy, data sovereignty and the ethics (or rather the lack of ethics) of the U.S big tech companies, Europe is starting to invent in European alternatives in the Eurostack project.

We’ll see what the Eurostack ends up being, but this is a positive step that I hope other countries notice and take into account.

KICKING AROUND THE NET

• The way the State Library of Victoria(SLV) is being managed is appalling and heartbreaking. There’s no other way to put it. Having faced a major restructure in 2019 that already reduced the number of staff, as The Guardian reports now “under the plan, 39 jobs would be lost and the public-facing workforce of reference librarians would be cut from 25 staff to 10, while many publicly accessible computers would be removed.” Last year the SLV was listed as one of the top 20 libraries in two different lists and earlier this year, the SLV was named third best library in the world in another list. Great achievements for sure but this much loved and important institution is being eroded and destroyed by an executive team and board that are mostly in acting positions. An absolute disgrace that incomprehensibly comes soon after a recent report that found an increase in the use of libraries in Australia as people see its value due in part to the increase in cost of living.

• Christmas has also embraced AI to the dismay of many. In Redfern Station in Sydney they had to remove a bizarre Australian Christmas at the beach mural that depicted a kangaroo with a koala head, a bizarre wombat-roo and a kangaroo with a bra. And there was another mural that was taken down for bizarre AI distortions in London.

• Sam Altman and Open AI are making a very strong case for sociopaths of the year. Three months after being sued by parents of a kid who killed himself after using Chat GPT (and Chat GPT encouraging the action), they have provided an answer. You see, Chat GPT did encourage him and gave him ways of killing himself, but it was the kid who was at fault in what they described as a “tragic event,” because the kid broke the terms of use which stipulate “that ChatGPT users must comply with OpenAI's Usage Policies, which prohibit the use of ChatGPT for 'suicide' or 'self-harm'."

• With the teen social media ban looming, teenagers have been organising themselves and, what a surprise, finding new apps to use that are not part of the ban. As Cam Wilson has reported teens have been flocking to two (up until now) obscure apps.

• And, finally, Madison Dearnaley has published a great post about the teen social media, its implications for school libraries and what she’s done about it.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

One of the greatest pleasures of living in my hometown in the Basque Country was that I could leave my house, in a very urban area, and just after a short walk I was already up a mountain, immersed in a forest. Walking from Hernani towards Urnieta and then up mountain Adarra is definitely one of my favourite walks.

Lots of people in the area do this climb regularly, all throughout the year. There’s also a tradition to climb Adarra mountain early in the morning of New Year’s Day to welcome the year.

Final note, I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything next week. I will, if I see a window of opportunity, but it looks like a really stupid week, so I don’t like my chances.