How do you stop being addicted to your phone?
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You pick up your phone to check one message. The next thing you know, you've spent half an hour watching a lady trading in Perth build a backyard water slide for her dog. True story. Social media is remarkably, intentionally, really good at turning a spare minute into an entire lunch break. So if these platforms are designed to capture our attention, what can we do to make them less addictive. Also, why don't we have widespread online voting yet? And the latest AI training scandal involving nearly every Aussie artist you can imagine. This is Download This Show on ABC Radio National. I'm Ray Johnston.
Now joining me to unpack some of the biggest stories in tech right now and why they matter for all of us. We've got Professor Vanessa Teague, who is CEO of Thinking Cybersecurity and an adjunct professor at UNSW. Welcome to download this show, Vanessa. Hello, Ray. And we've got Professor Michael Cowling, Professor of Educational Technology at RMIT, otherwise known around here as Professor Tech. Welcome back, Michael.
Thanks, Ray. Great to be here.
I think it's safe to say that we are lacking trust in our politicians at the moment. One thing that we do have a lot of trust in, though, is our electoral processes. Online voting sounds like a natural next step for a digital society. So is this something that we might have in place by the next time we have to hit the polling booths? Vanessa, where does Australia stand with online voting? Are we close to having it? It everywhere or nowhere near it at all?
Well, we have experimented with it, remember. I mean, you're in New South Wales. New South Wales for a long time had the largest internet voting project in the world, which crashed spectacularly. uh during the twenty twenty one local government elections and disenfranchised thousands of people.
Why does my phone feel impossible to put down and how is it designed to be addictive?
So where we are in terms of being close to having it is we've had it and it didn't work all that well. And I would like to think we've had a little bit of an educational salutary experience. However, the Victorian Electoral Commission has recently come out and said that they'd like to run internet voting for local council elections here. So I'm not sure where we're at.
Hmm. Okay. So interesting times to be tapping into this topic. Uh Michael, when we hear online voting, what do most people imagine and how is that maybe a little bit different to the reality?
I look, I don't know about most people, but definitely for me, I think we imagine, you know, the slippers and the cup of coffee sitting at the computer at home, clicking a button and deciding which person's gonna be the next Prime Minister. But I think in reality it's a little bit more complicated than that. And sometimes when people talk about internet voting or online voting or using technology, they just mean using technology in the in the in the booth and not necessarily what we're doing at all. at home and uh regardless, um especially if we're thinking about what's doing we're doing at home, it's just really hard. Uh as Vanessa just said, in terms of security, in terms of availability, it's it's a difficult problem to solve.
Yeah. V Vanessa, can you give me an idea of what can go wrong with online voting? What what has specifically happened previously? What are we afraid of?
Well, how long have you got? Uh but I actually think it's really important. To understand that the obvious crash is not the worst thing that can happen, not even close. The worst thing that can happen with an unverifiable electoral system is that everything seems fine. And everybody goes home happy and everybody announces a shiny looking election result.
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