… where politics & culture meet
Today I had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael Barker, editor of the Fremantle Shipping News, to chat about technology and the human condition. We went deep! https://fremantleshippingnews.com.au/2024/06/17/interview-with-richard-king-thinker-author-critic-poet
The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we... Continue Reading →
Paywalled, I'm afraid, but consider subscribing! The defence: Chess vs artificial intelligence Nostalgia on demand: Streaming memories in the experience machine
EVERY NOW AND then a sort of morphic resonance overtakes the world of literature. For reasons that are far from obvious, a number of books about (or around) the same broad subject will suddenly materialise in a way that itself transforms public interest and even shapes public sentiment. In 2023, for example, the name of... Continue Reading →
This review was first published in The Weekend Australian * Running to almost half a thousand pages, prodigiously researched and immaculately written, David Marr’s Killing for Country is surely one of the books of the year. Modestly described as a ‘family story’, it is in fact as solid a work of history as one could... Continue Reading →
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018), the British writer Aaron Bastani puts a leftist spin on the Promethean view of technological development. While noting the revolutionary potential of recent genetic innovations, he insists that the latter are no different in kind from the selective breeding practices of the past: they are simply another great leap... Continue Reading →
A month or so out from Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated biopic Oppenheimer, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community is having its own Oppenheimer moment. Like the director of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos Laboratory, who famously came to regret his part in the development of the atomic bomb, the Big Tech Titans are falling over each... Continue Reading →
As philosopher and broadcaster Scott Stephens suggests in his introduction to Justice and Hope, Raimond Gaita’s principal contribution to the practice of moral philosophy is to have opened it up to readers and audiences that wouldn’t usually encounter it. Most notably in his memoir Romulus, My Father (1998), but also in A Common Humanity (2000)... Continue Reading →
A talk to the Economic Society of Australia: Monsters in the Machine, Technology, Growth & Human Flourishing An Author Talk with Goldfields Libraries An appearance on the Breaking the Spell podcast
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