ZL4631 ADL-MGB

The kindly air steward stewarding the flight I'm on to Mount Gambier this afternoon has just suggested that passengers might like to engage in a little light exercise during the (forty five minute) flight. His name, he tells us, is Dave. The thought of his reaction to a sudden and spontaneous outbreak of stretches, lunges, squats and calisthenics among my fellow passengers - which include our esteemed Chancellor, the Honourable John Hill – brings a smile to my face as I wonder has it ever occurred on a Rex flight to date. These are some of the little pleasures which still present themselves in this role – the occasional flight of fancy escapes which punctuate an otherwise frenetic schedule of matters merger. It’s wonderful to be en route to our beautiful (and expanding) campus in the South East, ahead of a celebration of graduations tomorrow – and the business of tomorrow will be a joy, as graduations always are. But while I’m currently intrigued to discover what exactly the ‘savory’ snack option will be today (I will reveal the answer at the end of the blog for those who want to skip to the end), it’s these specific moments away from just doing that allow one to check-in and perform that interior scan that’s needed to ensure that all is well with the world, or to plan how best to remedy those things that are not. Air travel on a non-wifi enabled plane (boo hiss to you Qantas for finally connecting up your international fleet) also gives me the chance to put pen to paper (or pixel to screen) in the form of these lamentably less than frequent missives.

Engaging in such self-reflection, and perhaps in some way inspired by our steward Dave, I’m minded to share how every now and then (depending on the meeting I happen to be in), in what a professional psychologist could possibly label as a manifestation of a dissociative behaviour, I can almost hear the calm voice of HAL-9000 from Kubrick’s 1968 (boring?) classic (if you have to Google what it is, please don’t admit it) saying: ‘Dave. Dave, my mind is going.’ You know the kind of meeting I mean. There’s another great line from HAL (after he’s done something particularly unpleasant - HAL 9000 is listed as #13 on the American Film Institute's list of the top 50 movie villains from the first 100 years of American cinema (incidentally, Han Solo is #14 on their list of top 50 heroes, (if he’d been higher, I might have delayed writing this to May 4^th) and Indiana Jones is #2. Only one person has 3 entries in the top 50 heroes list. And one dog. The dog is on the heroes list. I’m sure many people have one dog, I don’t know if the person with 3 entries on the list had one dog. One person is on both the heroes list and the villains list, ostensibly playing the same character, but in different movies. Shockingly (for me) there’s no shark on the villain list, despite Bruce reaching the venerable age of 50 this year (Bruce was named for Spielberg’s lawyer, in what was later a happy coincidence for the naming of a distant Australian relative of his in Finding Nemo – although the live action underwater footage of a real white shark from 1975 was filmed off Port Lincoln, so you never know). I digress). (Made you want to Google stuff again)) which runs: ‘Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.’ I get that one sometimes too. You know the kind of meeting I mean here too.

People do get upset about all sorts of things. The trick is probably to not set out to deliberately upset them. HAL-9000 (if you flick each of the letters of his name on by one you get ‘IBM’ – coincidence? You decide) is of course a decidedly upsetting AI ‘entity’ (Mission Impossible 7, anyone?) – and this was filmed back in 1968, adapted from a book written that same year (I’m still not giving the title to those who don’t know it and haven’t yet Googled, but the book was written by Arthur C. Clarke – who once postulated that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’) - long before AI was, you know, well, a thing. Well, it’s very much a thing now. It’s not quite at magic level (yet) but it is rather nifty – when it works properly – don’t trust the answers it doesn’t know fact from fiction! It’s in the ‘knowing how to use it and how to use it properly while understanding its limitations’ camp that I would like to see our students and society land in general. Ethical use of AI. Responsible use of AI. Deliberately non-malicious use of AI. Like any technology, any productivity enhancing tool – it’ll take a bit of getting used to. I think our approach as an institution is appropriate – let’s teach our students about what it is, what it isn’t, and how best to use it, and authentically assess them as they do. The (almost never right) futurist in me thinks that we will eventually end up using AI to assess – as a matter of routine – as TutBots whizz past the Turing Test horizon and are well equipped to properly interrogate understanding and subject matter knowledge, application and expertise. Forever in MOD features some wonderful AI avatars – the first of their kind – and they’ve arrived 7 years after we first dreamt up the idea of having that kind of capability in an exhibition. It was a long road from the ‘head of Josh’ to ‘eterna.life’ (MOD aficionados will get this) – but the thread of AI powered interactivity runs from one to the other – the technology has finally caught up with our creativity. Despite the level of unease it seems to precipitate, and the fact that hitherto no better terms than ‘technophobia’ or ‘AI Anxiety’ have been coined to date, it’s here and here to stay and how it gets presented to us will doubtless further morph and evolve. It’s all still a little garish and new – an add on which likely fuels anxiety in a non-early adoptive world. Who remembers that annoying animated paperclip from the mid 1990’s word processing software? The paperclip’s gone. But we still use the spell checker. Plus ca change….

Dave the steward has just told me to shut off my laptop for landing.

As I close the lid - the snacks were BBQ flavoured bites.

Bring on the grads.