In the piece, where she mourns the cultural-annihilation San Francisco has faced since the birth of Big Tech, she quotes PayPal founder Peter Thiel who wrote in 2009, “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of death of every individual.” 

Thiel recently demonstrated his libertarian agendas by signing on as an investor in the privately funded drug-friendly sports contest, The Enchanted Games.

The competition, which describes itself as “the modern reinvention of the Olympic Games that does not have drug testing,” is headed by Aron D’Souza, Thiel’s former lawyer. The backers of The Enchanted Games believe athletes should be allowed, encouraged even, to use every advantage they can to secure success: they should take as much performance enhancement drugs as they want — all in the name of becoming better, stronger, faster. They believe that banning performance enhancements is stifling scientific innovation. 

The Games will not test athletes for drugs or any performance enhancers at its events, because it “embra[ces] ways science and technology can enhance human performance,” D’Souza, president of the Enhanced Games, said in the statement. 

“The Enhanced Movement believes in the medical and scientific process of elevating humanity to its full potential, through community of committed athletes.”

“[We] see the vision of a new model of sports, that openly celebrates scientific innovation and honestly represents the use of performance enhancements in sports today.” 

The Games will focus on individual sports across athletics, aquatics, combat, gymnastics and strength. 

“By focusing on world records in popular sports such as track and field, swimming, gymnastics, weight lifting and combat sports, we can eliminate wasteful infrastructure spending and reinvest to fairly pay all athletes,” D’Souza said. 

“In the era of accelerating technological and scientific change, the world needs a sporting event that embraces the future, particularly advances in medical science.” 

But what’s really going on here? Who are the people behind this contest? And what are they really trying to do? 

It’s a men’s club

The Enchanted Games is backed by the world’s richest venture capitalists. We have Peter Thiel, the conservative tech billionaire and founder of companies such as Palantir, which monitors immigrants for the Department of Homeland Security in the US. Thiel has had a long history of defying public safety and policy regulations. He was also one of the early investors of Facebook. 

There’s Christian Angermayer, founder of Apeiron Investment Group — a private investment company with a biotech portfolio that includes Atai Life Science, who are currently developing a rapid-acting anti-depressant for home use. Atai has backing from Thiel. 

Angermayer is a big name in the psychedelic industry — he’s been open about how taking mushrooms since 2015 has changed the course of his life. 

He described The Enhanced Games as having “forward-thinking ethos”, and one that “…improves the safety and fairness of competition but also stimulates scientific breakthroughs and nurtures human advancement.”

“The Enhanced games will undoubtedly inspire the public’s imagination and reinforce the profound impact of science on human progress,” he said in a statement. 

Then we have Balaji Srinivasan, a cryptocurrency investor and former CTO of Coinbase, who has been described as a polymath and angel investor who believes that tech has the power to eventually initiate a nation-free world. 

Out of the eleven individuals on the leadership team, there’s one woman — Jodhi Ramsden-Mavric, who is listed as a creative assistant, and who has a background in the film industry. The six people on the company’s Scientific and Medical Advisory Commission come from various backgrounds, including a Harvard professor, a co-founder of OxWash (sustainable commercial laundry service-providers) and a naturopathic doctor. Two are women.

Thomas Rex Dolan, the 19-year old Victorian and Gen Z Party founder and president, is listed as head of executive operations. According to his LinkedIn page, Dolan is D’Souza’s godson. 

The Athletes Advisory Commission consists of five men and just one woman. On the games website, it explains that they “embrace[s] the inclusion of science in sports” and is “unencumbered by anachronistic legacy systems.”

I wonder how they can do this with an organisation that clearly lacks the most basic form of diversity?

Sketchy on the details 

Since the games started making headlines last month, many people have been left scratching their heads. The organisation hasn’t been clear about some details. 

For one, it has declared that it will pay the athletes who compete in the games, but it hasn’t said exactly how much. 

Athletes will be paid a base salary and will compete for additional prize money. According to the website, a prize pool and compensation model will be announced later this year. 

Who gets to compete?

Calling themselves the “most inclusive sports league in history,” the organisers said all adults are eligible to compete in the games regardless of whether they are “natural, adaptive, or enhanced, an amateur or a former Olympian.” 

Registration is set to open later this year, though the actual dates for the contest have not been announced. 

It’s dangerous for the athletes 

The Games insist they will be the “safest international sporting event in history” and will ensure every athlete undergoes full medical screenings to monitor any risks.

But critics believe the competition’s agenda will risk both athletes’ health and sport itself. Two experts from the University of Canberra feared that athletes will turn into “injectable avatars” who will endanger their health by taking medicines that have been approved for human use.

“There’s no shortage of evidence demonstrating the dangers of pharmaceutical abuse for performance enhancement, let alone what might happen when used in experimental combinations and dosages,” Professor Catherine Ordway said last week.

“Elite sport is not conducted on a level playing field. Access to money, knowledge, power and technology already gives some athletes an edge over others, and the Enhanced Games would exacerbate these inequalities.”

Travis Tygart, CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), called the games “farcical,” and that it would be “a dangerous clown show, not real sport.” 

Jamie Crain, CEO of Sports Medicine Australia, took aim at the games’ PR material, which runs on the “anything is possible with science” ideology, pitting “science” as the gateway towards human progress and excellence.

“Science is the process of experimenting and observing and recording results and adjusting accordingly to get a certain outcome or just to understand a topic,” Crain told the ABC.

“And in this context that means they’re going to be giving otherwise fit people experimental substances to see what the outcomes is in the hope it might make them faster or stronger. Is that good science? If it produces a fast athlete who ends up with medical complications down the line, you would argue, no, it is not good science.”

Former Olympic swimmer Kieren Perkins said he could not see “any responsible and ethical person thinking the Enhance Games is even remotely sensible”.

“As soon as you start to go down the murky slope of allowing these sorts of drugs to be involved in the system you are completely setting aside the athlete’s physical and mental wellbeing and prioritising commercial gains and that’s not a place we want to be,” Perkins, now the CEO of the Australian Sports Commission, said.

Last week, retired Olympic swimming medalist James Magnussen announced he would compete in The Enhanced Games to try to break the 50m record for a reported $1.6 million. 

His reason? Money. 

“To be completely transparent, the money is a huge part,” he told News Corp. “A $1.6 million Australian dollar prize is hard to ignore.”

They’re out to make money

The carefully worded PR materials from the games’ website spruce their mission to enhance the “the medical and scientific process of elevating humanity to its full potential.”

But clearly, when you’ve got the world’s richest men backing this, it’s clear the end game is generating money. According to some media reports, D’Souza has plans to hold the games annually and stream it on platforms like YouTube to garner revenue. 

The post Drug-friendly competition Enhanced Games is the latest bro-invention by tech men appeared first on Women's Agenda.

The Members Connect Series will provide a platform for women to engage in discussions concerning industry trends and pioneering programs, offering them unique insights and opportunities. The aim is to advance the careers of women and increase female participation in the sector.

Founder and Director of Franklin Women, Dr Melina Georgousakis says that members of Franklin Women bring diverse experiences and skills to the sector, so bringing them together through the Members Connect Series is a special opportunity. 

“By connecting these women outside of their day-to-day and linking them with innovative ecosystem partners, we are facilitating opportunities for them to thrive,” she said. 

Franklin Womn is a leading social enterprise championing women in the health and medical research fields.

The inaugural Members Connect event will be hosted by Organon, a the only global healthcare company of its size focused primarily on the health and wellbeing of women, at their Sydney office.

Managing Director of Organon ANZ, Nirelle Tolstoshev, says that the global healthcare company believes in this series’ ability to “drive real change” by investing in women in the sector. 

“Just 34 per cent of CEO and Head of Organisation roles in our biopharmaceutical sector are held by women – and whilst women tend to be well represented in middle management, they seem to be passed over for more senior opportunities,” says Tolstoshev. 

“At Organon, we believe that by investing in the bright pipeline of innovators and empowering these women through collaborations such as these, we can drive real change in this area.”

Following the Federal Government’s Senate Inquiry into Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and the recent announcement of an Australian-first inquiry into women’s pain in Victoria, the initiative’s goal to support women in the health and medical research sector is particularly critical. 

The Members Connect meetups are free to attend, and those who participate will be able to contribute to emerging women’s health priorities. Franklin Women and Organon say the events will “be instrumental in breaking down silos between different stakeholders and contributing to the improvement of health outcomes in communities”.

Interested members can register for Members Connect meetups here. 

The post Franklin Women and Organon launch meet up series for women in health and science appeared first on Women's Agenda.

In the midst of hype around AI increasing productivity or stealing jobs , there is one role that many women would be more than happy for it to take on: the mental load of managing a family. 

The need for innovation in coping with the mental load of family admin is never more apparent than at the beginning of the school year. The sheer volume of work required to keep our lives in check is utterly overwhelming. It is no wonder parents are burning out.

It is baffling that when it comes to the multitude of apps, emails, WhatsApps and group chats for our home lives, many parents have no help beyond a shared calendar on the fridge.

I even commonly hear that parents just switch off all notifications on WhatsApp and push school emails to a different inbox folder just to try and ease the mental load by not reading it at all.

In my professional life, the prospect of AI to increase our personal productivity, that of our teams, and even our products was intriguing and exciting.

Faced with stark differences between what was available professionally and the lack of options at home, my co-founder and husband, Mike Fraser, and I knew that needed to change.

Technology is creating overwhelm

In my household, Mike and I share the “doing” work of parenting quite evenly, but when it comes to things like Book Week, what’s happening when, and joining all the dots, that’s on me. 

Statistics prove I’m not alone. It is disproportionately women who hold 70% of the household mental load and are burning out from the sheer volume of life admin required to manage kids. Almost 50 per cent say there isn’t enough time to get everything done.

In 2021, the AIFS survey asked 2920 people, “who in your household plans and coordinates activities relating to your children?”. It found almost no instances of the male taking this on – being the one who usually or always does it, while only 1 in 5 households shared the mental load.

Innovating to solve this, even at least partly, is important. It is why CEOs have personal assistants, and why Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought is still relevant 10 years after she wrote it.

Starting and then exiting same-day flower delivery business LVLY, and now launching Goldee, the AI assistant for parents, I can say with conviction that the work of managing a family is akin to running a business.

If we can innovate for even small productivity gains in the workplace, we need to do the same to give back time and headspace to the parents who are simply struggling to keep up with technology that was supposed to help them. Parents need personal assistants, too – and that’s where AI presents exciting opportunities.

How AI can give parents back time

Solutions are thin on the ground. A simple internet search on easing the mental load provides vague help such as “practice self-care” (with what free time?) and “physically writing down everything in your head and delegating” (again, with that free time?!).

As AI becomes mainstream, there is a global focus on governance and risks including gender bias within AI, noting that the technology will hold the same bias as its programmers. The kind of products being developed using AI often reflect the dominance of men in the technology space. I believe it is important that the huge gains to be had using AI are also focused on reducing inequalities.

We don’t claim that the AI we’re developing at Goldee will make the mental load completely vanish (sorry!). But AI tools can and should be created so that  any parent can easily take the lead and start forwarding kid-related activities to an AI personal assistant for busy families. This is the kind of innovation that will help  shift the weight and make the invisible load visible.

As with productivity tools in the workplace the hidden volume of work, appointments and organisation, and all those tiny to-dos that normally get carried around in the woman’s head will be extracted and put into an action list, ready for anyone to help with.

Importantly, AI created by women to solve our unique problems means we will have tools to stop us from feeling like it’s easier to just keep doing everything ourselves.

That means more time for doing things we enjoy, more time to connect with our partners (rather than fight over who did what), and more time to spend with our kids rather than on your phone trying to find that piece of info. And that’s an AI-driven future all parents can get on board with.

Goldee is currently in limited release and available to parents with an invite code – parents that would like to be invited can head to Goldee.ai to get their invite.

The post How a new AI assistant for parents can help carry women’s mental load appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Public debate on Artifical Intelligence has escalated in the past six months, with an outpouring of opinion pieces on the risks and ethics of a science that is undergoing an exponential period of advance.

One of the key figures in this, as a contributor to both the science and the debate, is Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and co-director of AI4All, a non-profit organisation promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.

Review: The Worlds I See – Fei-Fei Li (Flatiron Books)

Aside from one controversy during her tenure as Chief Scientist for Google Cloud, involving a proposed partnership between Google and the Pentagon, Li has been something of a role model, not least because of her prominence in an area dominated by alpha-male personalities.

Free of the influence of stylists and image-makers, she comes across in interviews with the fluency of someone who wants to think their way through ideas as they arise, rather than deliver platform statements.

Li describes The Worlds I See as “a double helix memoir”. One thread is the coming-of-age of the science of AI; the other is an account of her own coming-of-age as a scientist. The personal dimension came to the fore, she says, after what was initially a “very nerdy book” was given the thumbs-down by a colleague.

Matter becomes mind

The story begins in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province. As the only child of a family “in a state of quiet upheaval”, Li had a sense that her elders had been through more than they could tell. Her academically trained maternal grandparents found themselves on the wrong side of history during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother’s intellectual energies were thwarted.

As if there were some braided version of Yin and Yang in her heritage, her father’s free-spirited personality provided a complementary, if antithetical, form of influence. He was, says Li, the kind of parent a child might design for themselves if left to their own devices. He was impulse-driven, possessed of miscellaneous fascinations, which took him on excursions through the rice fields looking for butterflies, stick insects, wild rodents.

Her mother, meanwhile, was determined to escape. This ambition was realised in 1992, when the family moved to the United States. They settled in Parsippany, New Jersey, where 15-year-old Li, grappling with the demands of high school in a foreign language, demonstrated a capacity for long hours of work directed towards the academic goals her mother valued.

Her father’s fascination with natural life forms transferred to the object world of garage sales. He continued to involve Li in the practice of “studying everything in sight”.

Throughout The Worlds I See, Li reflects on the influence of this parental binary on her advancing career as a scientist. Without the fierce intellectual determination of her mother, she could not have persevered with her high school studies, given the family’s ongoing struggle for economic survival. Without her father’s childlike capacity to pay total attention to random phenomena, her research might never have found its innovative path.

The braid of fascination and intellectual drive twists in unexpected ways. It eventually fuses into an almost visionary faith in what Li terms the North Star of her life: a vocation to shift the parameters of understanding by asking “audacious questions” of the kind pursued by the great physicists who inspire her: Albert Einstein, Roger Penrose, Erwin Schrödinger.

Her own audacious question – “what is vision about?” – came into focus by degrees. For someone given to describing her enterprise in terms of revelation and revolution, her actual research on vision seems anything but visionary.

Undergraduate study in physics and computational mathematics at Princeton yielded an opportunity for vacation work as an assistant to a neuroscience team at UC Berkeley. They were attempting to capture the neuronal responses of a cat to visual stimuli. The targeted area of the brain was probed by hairline electrodes to pick up signals.

These signals were translated first into to sound waves, then back to visual patterns from which the team were able to recompose something approximating the original image shown to the animal.

Hardly the stuff of romance, yet Li comments: “Something transcendent happens. Matter somehow becomes mind.”

What is data?

This insight sustains Li through her protracted labours. She becomes convinced that the principle can be applied to machine learning.

Following evidence that visual recognition in the human brain moves from the general to the increasingly specific (bird, water bird, duck, mallard), Li and her postgraduate collaborator set out to feed the computer with a comprehensive range of examples in a limited set of categories.

New image technologies in other domains came to their assistance. Google Street View identified 2,657 models of car on the road in 2014. Amazon Mechanical Turk escalated the scale and speed of their research as categories multiplied, from the original ten to thirty, a hundred, a thousand.

But the project had all the burdens that faced Charles Darwin as he attempted a comprehensive taxonomy of pigeons, or James Murray compiling the Oxford English Dictionary.

For Li, the apparently humdrum conviction that learning should be driven by data rather than algorithms arrives as “a moment of epiphany”. The audacious questions “what is vision?” and “what is intelligence?” merge. They become associated with a third question: “what is data?”

A rapid thaw in the “AI winter” of the first decade of the 21st century commenced in 2012, when research into machine learning made a breakthrough in the direction of “big data”. It was all about scaling up, increasing the retention capacities of AI to incorporate the range and complexity of phenomena in the world itself.

Li found her approach converging with that of Geoffrey Hinton, the Toronto-based cognitive psychologist often credited with spearheading the AI paradigm shift. Data can be exponentially multiplied, Hinton proposed, when machines talk among themselves. Digital agents scan diverse areas of data and exchange what they have learned to generate more sophisticated modes of correlation.

Intelligence comes to be seen not as an inherent property of a machine or a human brain, but as something out there. It arises from interactions between objects, events, beings and environments. There is more of the gatherer than the hunter in its development.

Distributed intelligence

Distributed intelligence means distributed opportunities to participate in the co-evolution of human and machine intelligence. Big science and high technology cease to be the exclusive preserve of specialists whose modes of knowledge are beyond the understanding of ordinary people. Anyone who has had an exchange with Chat GPT on Open AI is contributing.

Li insists, however, that effective human learning requires education. The most important figure in her own education was her high-school maths teacher, Bob Sabella, who kept her on track as she struggled with the English language curriculum. He remained a friend and mentor through every stage of her academic advancement.

It is the dedicated school teacher, Li says, who is the real emblem of the future in human technology. She co-founded AI4All in 2017 with the aim of providing hands-on training for high-school students, especially girls, students of colour and those from immigrant families or low income communities. Li herself fits most of these categories.

The experiences Li recounts in The Worlds I See display an extraordinary capacity for persistence in the face of obstacles. She completed high school while supplementing the family income with a $2 an hour job in a Chinese restaurant. As a graduate student, she was running the family dry-cleaning business.

Her exams at Princeton were done by special arrangement at the hospital clinic where her mother was undergoing surgery for a deteriorating cardiovascular condition.

But it is as if everything she experiences is turned to account in the pursuit of the North Star. Recurring crises in her mother’s health gave her a familiarity with hospitals, which led her to explore how AI might be deployed, not to replace the vital role of human nurses and health workers, but to support them.

If Li’s efforts can be seen as a feminist enterprise, it is perhaps because the field in which she works is dominated by male celebrities, who persist in seeing the future as a Darwinian struggle between human and machine intelligence.

“Which is smarter?” is less an audacious question than one that needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Speaking in 2018 to a Congressional hearing on Power and Responsibility in the application of advanced technologies, Li said:

There’s nothing artificial about AI. It’s inspired by people, created by people, and most importantly it has an impact on people.

Explicitly distancing herself from those, like Hinton, who are seeing the current breakthrough in AI potential as an existential crisis, Li is concerned with tangible social risks, and specific ways to address them.

In a recent discussion with former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, now Head of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, Li expressed her belief that policy intervention can install the important safeguards in areas where the impact of AI is likely to be greatest.

These include its benign potential in health and education, as well as the dangers opening up through disinformation, the loss of privacy and the replacement of human work.

If there is an overriding theme in The Worlds I See, it is that human and artificial intelligence form a double helix. How this evolves, and with what consequences, will depend, Li says, on whether we create “a healthy ecosystem” in which talent, technology and public sector participation are co-ordinated.

Jane Goodall, Emeritus Professor, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post How Fei-Fei Li helped shape the AI revolution in a field dominated by alpha males appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Nearly 3000 people, including some of the most powerful business and political leaders in the world, gathered at the forum this year. Hamblin Wang, the Chief Operating Officer of MCi Carbon, was there on a mission to impress upon world leaders what needs to be done in this decade to reach net zero. 

Speaking to Women’s Agenda upon her return to Australia, Hamblin Wang said it was a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to be in attendance at the forum. 

“I’m not a world leader or a head of state or business tycoon or a spiritual leader,” Hamblin Wang said. “It’s not lost on me what a significant opportunity this was.”

“The challenge and the urgency of climate and climate technology development is extremely important right now. And I felt like my contribution was definitely important in the dialogue of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2024.”

Hamblin Wang explained that she had meetings and engagement from 7am to 2am every day for the five days she was at the World Economic Forum, which was a significant opportunity to network and influence key decision-makers.

“The people who get stuff done are all there. There’s not only policymakers but also the key decision makers of the world are networking and making decisions while they’re there,” she said.

“I definitely felt like there was an opportunity to really call the world leaders to action and make them aware of what can be done and what should be done in this very, very crucial decade to reach Net Zero.”

Hamblin Wang was at the World Economic Forum in her capacity as Chief Operating Officer of MCi Carbon, a forward-thinking clean tech company transforming carbon dioxide into building materials and other valuable products for the circular economy. It’s providing a decarbonisation pathway for hard-to abate sectors including steel, cement, mining, chemicals, and manufacturing.

MCi Carbon received a $14.6 million grant from the federal government in 2021 to build a decarbonisation plant demonstrator. It’s currently being built in Kooragang Island in Newcastle and will lock away more than 1000 tonnes of carbon dioxide permanently and safely into building materials.

Debunking myths on carbon pricing

At the World Economic Forum, Hamblin Wang spoke on a panel called Debunking Myths on Carbon Pricing alongside Lord Nicholas Stern, Chair of Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Maros Sefcovic, Executive Vice-President for European Green Deal and Pierre Fitzgibbon, Minister of the Economy, Innovation and Energy of Québec, Canada.

Hamblin Wang used her time to talk about three key things: intention, integrity and courage.

“For me, my life purpose is around ensuring that we keep our world at a 1.5 degree target,” she explained. “We need to remediate climate change and intention is really important in that.”

“I talked about my daughter, which I think is sometimes like a ‘no no’ in a professional setting but I was saying that when we talk about net zero by 2050, it’s kind of obscure, but the reason why we decided on net zero by 2050 was because we want to keep 1.5 degrees alive for the year 2100.

“And that although that is really far away in the future, my daughter is still going to be alive in the year 2100. It is a real time in the future and we want to still have the Great Barrier Reef then.”

Hamblin Wang said that any new technologies that are invested in need to have integrity.

“We need to be able to measure, report and validate what actions we’re taking to make sure that the technologies that we invest in and we spend our finite time and resources behind, don’t give license to companies to emit more. It’s important that they actually work and they don’t just make promises and then under deliver. The integrity behind technologies is of crucial importance,” she explained.

It’s not just that we don’t want to spend money on things that don’t work, according to Hamblin Wang, it’s also that the public needs to have trust in what the technology is doing.

“It needs to be beyond politics. We need to urgently reduce emissions and remove emissions from the atmosphere,” she said. “We need to be doing that whilst having integrity behind what we’re doing so that the public is along for the ride. At the end of the day, it’s communities that are actually going to be adopting the technologies. It’s not just companies operating in obscurity.”

Hamblin Wang also wants to see more courage from those who have the power to invest.

“There is not enough climate capital being unleashed in the world. We need to be unlocking orders of magnitude more investment into climate capital but the global investment community hasn’t quite stepped up,” she said.. 

“We’re almost seeing a breakthrough there but we need patient capital that’s investing in things that both have a return on investment but also an emissions reduction outcome.”

What about climate hope?

While Hamblin Wang still wants to see more investment into climate technology, she said she is filled with hope that the word will rise to the challenge that climate change presents.

“I’m definitely a strong believer in climate hope. Because we’re actually doing it right now in Australia and the technology works and the business model works. 

“My true feeling is that the world will get there, and we will get climate change under control. It’s just about how late we leave it and how much it’s going to cost. If we act with the urgency that is required right now, that we know that the climate science has told us, it will be less costly and less painful.

“If we leave it too late and we dilly dally, or we don’t act with conviction, and with the investment and adoption that’s needed. It’ll be a lot more expensive and costly in many other ways.”

Feature Image credit: World Economic Forum.

The post We need ‘intention, integrity, courage’ on climate: Sophia Hamblin Wang at the World Economic Forum appeared first on Women's Agenda.

On Tuesday, the Victorian MP from the Animal Justice Party called out the Australian media outlet for editing an image that enlarged her breasts and made her outfit more revealing.

Nine News director Hugh Nailon claimed there was no staff member involved in editing the image and it was artificial intelligence (AI) that altered the picture whilst they were re-sizing the photo.

However, as reported by Guardian Australia, Adobe, creator of Photoshop, has confirmed the incident could not have occurred without “human intervention”.

“Any changes to this image would have required human intervention and approval,” the statement read.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Georgie Purcell (@georgie.purcell.ajp)

AI-edited images and deepfakes

AI-edited media content, such as images and videos, disproportionately targets and affects women, particularly high-profile women. This week alone, Georgie Purcell is not the first woman to have an image of herself altered in a sexist way.

Over the weekend, sexually explicit deepfake images of Taylor Swift were circulated on the social media platform X. Formerly known as Twitter, X Corp. responded to the incident on Sunday night by removing the images and the account that first published the deepfakes, as well as temporarily blocking users’ ability to search “Taylor Swift” on the platform.

According to a report from The New York Times, one of the several images that were in circulation was viewed 47 million times before the deepfake, along with the account that published it, was removed from X.

On Wednesday morning, Georgie Purcell spoke on ABC’s RN Breakfast about the rise in AI technologies targeting women and girls.

“This has happened to me this week, it also actually happened to Taylor Swift this week with deep fake [images] using AI, happening to her all over Twitter on a much larger scale,” Purcell said.

“I think we need to seriously consider that our laws are probably not keeping pace with emerging technologies like AI and the risks they pose not just women in public life, but everyday women as well.

“I’ve heard stories from young women who have had just enough photos on their Instagram profiles for them to be taken and altered to appear naked without their consent. and it’s deeply deeply concerning.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Women's Agenda (@womensagenda)

Earlier this month, the government released its interim response to the Safe and Responsible AI in Australia consultation, outlining its short-term action plan for the growing technology.

Although the interim response paper mentions general “bias and discriminatory outputs” that currently exist in AI, there is no specific mention of women or considering AI with a gender lens.

‘No way to represent a woman.’

On Tuesday, Premier Jacinta Allan told reporters there’s still “a long way to go” in the representation of women in the media, including in social media, after Purcell called out Nine News’ distorted image.

“That’s no way to represent any woman, let alone a woman who holds a position in public office, represents a community and is in the public discourse every single day,” Allan told reporters.

“It’s another reminder that everyone who has the opportunity to be part of the public debate to consider how men and women, but in this instance particularly women, are represented.”

In 2022, Raise Our Voice Australia released a report on the impact of the media on young women and gender diverse people’s aspirations to enter politics.

In that report, 87 per cent of respondents felt that representation of women in politics by the media was mostly negative.

Nearly half (47 per cent) were less likely to pursue a career in politics given the events of the last 12 months, which at the time of the report’s release, included the allegations of Bruce Lehrmann raping Brittany Higgins in parliament house, the allegations against former Attorney-General Christian Porter, the ABC’s program Ms Represented and much more.

The Victorian Premier said the incident involving Georgie Purcell sends another discouraging message to young women wanting to enter politics, something that needs urgent attention.

“We know it can, young women tell us that themselves and that’s why again, it’s important to both call it out, which I think is what’s happening here this morning,” Allan said.

“It’s important to call it out, to identify, to do better and to understand that we have come a long way, but we’ve still got a way to go.”

The post Adobe confirms edited image of Georgie Purcell would have required ‘human intervention’ appeared first on Women's Agenda.

The AI-based sewerage system maintenance business was backed by Dutch water technology specialist VC PureTerra Ventures, supported by US engineering and construction software giant Autodesk.

“As a women-led start-up, we understand the unique hurdles women face in leadership and funding, and we’re thrilled for VAPAR to be part of the positive change,” the company tells Women’s Agenda.

“We hope that we can inspire other women and the start-up support network to continue backing women and providing a diversified space for all entrepreneurs to drive change.”

Co-founded in 2018 by two engineers, Amanda Siqueira and Michelle Aguilar, the innovative startup was inspired by Siquiera’s experience as an engineering intern. She would manually review sewer inspection videos for 8-hours a day, an error-prone and subjective process that ignited the idea for a streamlined, tech-driven, AI-based solution.

“VAPAR’s technology unlocks the necessary efficiencies in pipeline investment decision-making,” Siqueira said. 

“Billions are spent every year by global water utilities on fixing their pipes, over half of which is spent in North America. Despite the massive investment, there isn’t enough data and dollars available – utilities must commit to doing things differently.” 

“Artificial intelligence can unlock unprecedented efficiencies. Our vision is to create a world where critical infrastructure investment meets the needs of our communities.”

Over 3 billion feet of sewer pipes are inspected globally each year, according to VAPAR, with sewer overflows and flooding becoming more common as a result of aging pipes, climate change and growing populations. 

VAPAR currently serves water authorities in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, with a multi-regional team of 17 members. 

With this new $5 million investment, the company plans to build on its established customer base in these regions as well as fuel further expansion across North America to transform aging infrastructure. 

“The face of AI is changing rapidly, and we’re proud to be pioneering this deep learning technology in such an impactful way for the water industry,” said Aguilar.

“With our increasing customer base, we now support a wide range of industry standards, time zones and languages. Investing funds to double our team, add new verticals and start our North American office will ramp the number of customers that can benefit from this technology.”

For the past four years, VAPAR’s revenue and product usage has doubled annually. 

Alex Crowell, Partner at PureTerra Ventures, praised the startup’s performance, calling it a “standout in the evolving water management technology space”. 

“Showcasing their strong customer advocacy, a quick-to-adopt product and an impact-driven team made our decision an easy one,” he said, referring to their backing of the company.

“This investment will not only expand VAPAR’s customer reach but also substantially reduce pipe failures, which reflects our shared commitment to sustainable water infrastructure development globally.”

The post AI-based sewerage maintenance: Women-led startup from Sydney raises $5 million appeared first on Women's Agenda.

X Corp. (formerly known as Twitter) responded to the incident on Sunday night by removing the images and the account that first published the deepfakes, as well as temporarily blocking users’ ability to search “Taylor Swift” on the platform.

“This is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritise safety on this issue,” said Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X.

The pop star’s name is still blocked on X, resulting in an error when trying to search her name.

According to a report from The New York Times, one of the several images that were in circulation was viewed 47 million times before the deepfake, along with the account that published it, was removed from X.

In a news briefing on Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called on Congress to take legislative action against the abuse and misuse of AI technologies online, but also urged social media platforms to take greater measures to regulate content.

“This is very alarming. And so, we’re going to do what we can to deal with this issue,” Jean-Pierre said.

“We know that lax enforcement disproportionately impacts women and they also impact girls, sadly, who are the overwhelming targets.

“We believe they (the platforms) have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation and non-consensual, intimate imagery of real people.”

The creation and distribution of deepfake AI images has been widely regarded as a form of gender-based violence, as it disproportionately targets women and girls online.

In 2019, a study by Deeptrace, a cyber security company, found 96 per cent of deepfake videos online were of an intimate or sexual nature. The people depicted in the AI-generated content were primarily women actors, musicians and media professionals.

‘Extremely harmful content’

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant spoke to Women’s Agenda, explaining how easy it is to create deepfakes and how devastating it can be for people.

“Deepfakes, especially deepfake pornography, can be devastating to the person whose image is hijacked and altered without their knowledge or consent, no matter who they are,” Commissioner Inman Grant said.

“Image-based abuse, including deepfake porn, is persistent online harm which also represents one of the most egregious invasions of privacy.”

Generative AI is user-friendly and widely accessible to people. Inman Grant said something that would previously have taken large software and computing power to generate now can be generated with a click of a button.

“As a result, it’s becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake. And it’s much easier to inflict great harm,” Inman Grant said.

Australia’s online safety regulatory body, eSafety, lists the use of AI to create sexually explicit deepfake images as “image-based abuse”. Online users can report image-based abuse on eSafety’s website.

While eSafety has a 90 per cent success rate in getting deepfakes and other abusive material down from online sites, including social media platform X, Commissioner Inman Grant called on the “purveyors and profiteers of AI” to do more.

“We’re not going to regulate or litigate our way out of this – the primary digital safeguards must be embedded at the design phase and throughout the model development and deployment process,” she said.

“And platforms need to be doing much to detect, remove and prevent the spread of this extremely harmful content.”

Earlier this month, the eSafety Commission released a transparency report, revealing massive staff cuts at X Corp around the world.

According to the report, the global Trust and Safety staff was reduced by 30 per cent, while the Trust and Safety staff in the Asia Pacific region, including Australia, had a 45 per cent reduction.

Between November 2022 and May 2023, there were 6,103 previously banned accounts on Twitter that were reinstated on X.

At the time of the report’s release, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant said Elon Musk’s staff cuts at X Corp. had created a “perfect storm” for the platform.

eSafety urges those concerned about the non-consensual sharing of images to report to eSafety at www.esafety.gov.au/Report.

The post ‘Egregious invasion of privacy’: Taylor Swift’s name blocked on X after sexually explicit deepfakes go viral appeared first on Women's Agenda.

The Melbourne plant-based leather business has received the backing from Startmate, The Austin Group, Robyn Denholm’s family office Wollemi Capital Group, and LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund along with strategic angel investors.

‘It’s exciting to see the appetite for climate-tech from Australian investors – the impact of climate change is the most pressing issue of our time, and our world-class tech provides a commercial opportunity for investors wanting to make a positive environmental impact,” Alt. Leather’s founder, Tina Funder tells Women’s Agenda.

Alt. Leather is Australia’s first 100 per cent bio based leather alternative that turns waste and regenerative plants into textiles for use across fashion, footwear, furniture, automotive interiors, etc.

Identifying a gap in the market, Funder first launched a vegan handbag label LOM Australia in 2022 using cactus and apple leather. Now, she’s working to step into the carbon-instensive and petroleum based synthetic leather market with Alt. Leather. 

“I tested many of the bio based alternatives on the market and coudn’t find a suitable material that was petrochemical-free,” says Funder. “Given the current climate, it felt like a significant commercial opportunity with the benefit of a positive environmental outcome.”

Chief Scientific Officer of Alt. Leather, Dr. Tuan Nguyen said Alt. Leather’s use of globally abundant regenerative plant derivatives as well as waste streams makes it a reliable and sustainable material.

“By adopting green chemistry innovation, we have developed patentable material composition technology to produce a leather alternative that is both durable and commercially stable,” said Dr. Nguyen.

During 2023, Alt. Leather’s research team grew from one to four, and made progress on achieving a base material that looks and feels like leather. The team is aiming to become the default choice to traditional leather and eliminate the need for petroleum-based synthetic leathers.

Exceeding their initial target of $750,000, Alt. Leather secured the upper limit investment of $1.1 million at the seed round running from October until around Christmas last year, with intense interest from investors.

Alt. Leather will use the funds to file its provisional patent, kick off small-scale sample production with a range of Australian brands and gain access to university-housed advanced equipment and student researchers.

The fashion industry accounts for about 8-10 per cent of global carbon emissions, and nearly 20 per cent wastewater. One of the biggest material culprits towards environmental destruction is leather. 

According to the Material Innovation Initiative, the global synthetic leather wholesale market is estimated at around US$70 billion with 3 per cent of that attributed to next-gen alternatives, and almost the entire industry still relying on petroleum-based plastics in production.

“That’s millions of tonnes of fossil-fuel derived plastic that we can eliminate from the world, the impact we can have is enormous,” says Funder.

Among the Alt. Leather’s seed round investors, Wollemi Capital Group CEO, Victoria Denholm says creative entrepreneurs like Funder help us “reimagine a world where we can enjoy beautifully crafted goods in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way.”

The post Female-founded startup Alt. Leather secures $1.1 million backing from investors appeared first on Women's Agenda.

As the former chief operating officer of Meta, Sandberg has announced she’s now leaving the company’s board of directors, saying “this feels like the right time to step away”.

Writing in a Facebook post that she won’t stand for reelection in May, she said that Meta is “well-positioned for the future” and that she’ll serve as an informal advisor to the company going forward.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thanked her for the “extraordinary contributions” to the company.

Who is Sheryl Sandberg?

Sandberg, 54, joined Facebook in 2008 when it was still just a small startup. Prior to this, she’d spent about seven years at Google.

In 2012, she became a board member at Facebook, and during her tenure, the company became one of the most valuable in the world, topping $1 trillion market cap at its peak in 2021. She helped the company grow to include Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger– rebranding into Meta. 

Following multiple controversies, however, Sandberg announced her departure from Meta in mid-2022. Most notably, Facebook came under mass criticism for misinformation during the 2016 US election that saw Trump take the White House. There was also the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal in 2018, misinformation in the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020 and the US Capital riot in 2021. 

As the second in command, under Meta’s CEO Zuckerberg, Sandberg took a lot of the heat for the company’s missteps. When she stepped down as Meta COO in 2022, she was replaced by Javier Olivan, who’d been Meta’s chief growth officer. 

By then, Sandberg had served as COO of Facebook/Meta for 14 and a half years and as a board member for 12 years. 

‘Lean In’ controversy

While she stayed on at Facebook as a board member, Sandberg also took a deep dive into work with her non-profit organisation, LeanIn.org which focuses on women’s leadership programs. 

Lean In, however, has had its fair share of controversy, with critics saying Sandberg’s form of ‘feminism’ has focused on changing women to fit male-dominated spaces – an unsustainable solution to creating true gender equality. 

Sandberg’s public voice on women’s leadership burst onto the scene through her 2010 TED Talk. She followed the TED Talk up with a 2013 book title Lean In, expanding on her ideas of women needing to be more assertive and more willing to hustle to break the glass ceiling— concepts that many have pointed out pertain to on a certain subset of privileged women who find promotional success through these strategies. 

Her women’s leadership programs followed up the book, and are still running today. 

On the flipside of feminist voices, Michelle Obama’s criticism of  the ‘Lean In’ concept is among the loudest, such as when she told a 2018 crowd on her own book tour that “it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time”. 

A large portion of Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ ethos was that women could “have it all” in their careers and as mothers if they just worked harder. 

Following the death of her own husband in 2015 and becoming a single parent, however, Sandberg wrote in a 2016 Facebook post: “I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home.”

The post Sheryl Sandberg is ‘leaning out’ of Meta’s board of directors appeared first on Women's Agenda.

Mother-daughter duo Dr Christine Pitt and Skye Raward established Farmers2Founders in 2018 with a vision to put producers at the centre of innovation in agriculture and help solve some of the challenges facing the sector.

They’ve also launched a women-specific program, supporting female entrepreneurs with a technology idea or solution for agriculture. TEKWOMEN Victoria, a pre-accelerator program for female entrepreneurs, is currently inviting women to apply.

Speaking to Women’s Agenda, Raward said they had pinpointed a significant gap in funding for female-led startups, despite the evidence showing the remarkable success of female entrepreneurs in the agtech sector. As Raward shares, women are uniquely placed to offer solutions to some of the most pressing issues in agriculture.

“Our accelerator program is committed to addressing this challenge with a female-led approach, featuring experienced female mentors and coaches, along with the active participation of female founders,” Raward said. 

“We understand the broader issues contributing to women’s lack of confidence in entering male-dominated fields, especially in tech and farming. Our program will not only cover the standard topics but also incorporate additional elements specifically designed to foster confidence, focusing on nuanced areas to empower women in these industries.”

Raward said Farmers2Founders has supported over 250 early-stage startups and over 90 scale-ups, seeing exceptional success with some raising investments in the millions. 

“We have noted that the most successful startups are led by a diverse team – diversity drives innovation,” she said. 

Jessica Brunner, founder of The Bee Buddy, is one entrepreneur who has benefited from participation in the program for women.

The Bee Buddy recently launched at the Singaporean Food and Agritech Conference and is revolutionising the inspection and extraction process of beekeeping, ensuring a safer and more efficient practice. Her participation in the pre-accelerator program has been invaluable, she says. 

“The most valuable things were the network of support, both from the super experienced and knowledgeable Farmers2Founders team, as well as the amazing other entrepreneurs in the group, the opportunity to validate of my idea and understanding the commercialisation process and options, and being kept on track with tasks and timetables. I even won and R&D Grant which I hadn’t even known was available to me!” she told Women’s Agenda. 

Brunner said the Farmers2Founder program helped her to streamline her idea, focus on design and her minimum viable product, as well as challenge all of her exisiting business perceptions. 

Brunner says that women in agtech often don’t get given the same floor time as men, or necessarily have the time and space to focus on their project and commit to moving it forward. 

“Women in particular have a lot of balls juggling so having the mental space to be able to sit and commit is one of the biggest challenges – I definitely found Faremrs2Founders provided that for me,” she said. 

“I also feel that being selected and involved with Farmers2Founders gave me and my idea validity in others eyes. There was a sense of ‘well if she’s been selected and invested in then it must be a real project and not just some little hobby’.”

Feature Image: Jessica Brunner, founder of The Bee Buddy.

The post The program supporting female entrepreneurs to bring their innovative agtech solutions to life appeared first on Women's Agenda.

I was also experiencing autistic burnout so severe that I would soon be hospitalised and unable to work for six months.

It was during this period of hospitalisation that I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD, a turning point that would lead me to realise just how unhealthy and unsustainable my approach to work was. 

As I spoke to my doctors and therapists, I realised that the ‘high-performer’ label I had earned throughout my career was not an accomplishment but a reflection of how hard I was trying to keep up with an industry culture that wasn’t built for people like me. To prevent myself from burning out again, I had to find a workplace that was happy to support and accommodate my needs as an autistic person with ADHD. 

Unfortunately, I quickly learned that was easier said than done.

The discrimination, stigma, and backlash that I experienced when disclosing my diagnoses to potential employers were as shocking as they were disheartening. One particular incident stands out vividly: while in the final stages of the interview process for a role as chief technology officer – a position that I was highly qualified to take on – I told the panel of my diagnoses, watching as their faces fell and the room fell silent in response. Then, they asked the question that to this day serves as a stark reminder of the pervasive misconceptions and judgments surrounding neurodivergent individuals: “How can you lead people if you’re autistic?” 

Despite having years of successful leadership experience in the tech industry – and despite proving throughout the interview process that I was more than capable – revealing that I was autistic immediately put my abilities into question. I wasn’t offered the job, but this was an experience that would go on to fuel my passion for creating safer workplaces for neurodivergent people.

Creating a brighter future

After several experiences ranging from casually ignorant to blatantly offensive, I realised why so many people on the spectrum don’t tell their employer that they’re autistic or neurodivergent. In a neuronormative working culture, few people make time to truly understand or support disabled people. This often leads many people to keep their diagnoses to themselves in an attempt to not ‘rock the boat’. However, without adequate support, many neurodivergent people find themselves unemployed just three to six months after joining a new organisation. 

Even once I found a job for a company that agreed to help accommodate my needs – for example, working remotely multiple days a week and scheduling meeting-free days – I constantly found myself battling preconceived notions about my abilities and encountering microaggressions.

While these experiences were some of the most difficult of my life, the adversity I faced was the catalyst for The Safe Space Collective. Envisioning more inclusive, meaningful, and supportive workplaces for neurodivergent people, I realised that while there were plenty of training seminars available to help workplaces support disabled employees, there weren’t any functional resources that helped businesses implement support day-to-day. 

That’s when I decided that The Safe Space Collective would be exactly that: a hub that offered tailored and affordable education, advice, tools, and strategies that empower workplaces to support their neurodivergent staff. Through collaboration, education, and advocacy, The Safe Space Collective would give neurodivergent individuals and their employers access to meaningful and sustainable career opportunities.

As the only hub of its kind, we aim to be an ‘always on’ partner for businesses, providing resources, support, and guidance to HR teams and leaders. By bridging the gap between awareness and action, we want to ensure that neurodivergent employees not only survive in the workplace but thrive.

Overcoming harmful workplace norms

One of the biggest challenges for neurodivergent people is the neurotypical cultural practices that define most workplaces. The insistence on in-person conversations, return-to-office policies, and the expectation to conform to social norms can create a difficult environment for neurodivergent individuals to thrive in.

These are the beliefs that The Safe Space Collective is pushing back against – the idea that for a business to be successful, every employee must operate in the same way. We now know definitively that this isn’t true, with research showing that businesses with neurodivergent employees are 30 per cent more productive than those without them. It’s never been more clear that with greater inclusivity comes greater success.

To achieve true inclusivity, workplaces must go beyond lip service. It involves actively incorporating neurodivergent perspectives into the decision-making process, accommodating diverse communication styles, and reassessing workplace norms that disproportionately disadvantage neurodivergent individuals. 

As I have learned over the past few years since being diagnosed, the mental load of disability advocacy is enormous and we need to stop expecting disabled employees to carry it on their own. With ample resources available, it’s time for workplaces to step up by fostering an environment of genuine understanding and support.

The road ahead for The Safe Space Collective involves relentless advocacy, education, and empowerment for people on the spectrum. We are committed to dismantling the barriers that prevent neurodivergent individuals from realising their highest potential. It’s not just about creating a space, it’s about redefining the very nature of workspaces to ensure that every individual, regardless of neurodiversity, has the opportunity to pursue their dreams.

The post How autistic burnout ignited my passion for creating inclusive workplaces appeared first on Women's Agenda.