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Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting personal. Chatbots are designed to imitate human interactions, and the rise of realistic voice chat is leading many users to form emotional attachments or laugh along with virtual podcast hosts.

And that’s before we get to the really intimate stuff. Research has shown that sexual roleplaying is one of the most common uses of ChatGPT, and millions of people interact with AI-powered systems designed as virtual companions, such as such as Character.AI, Replika, and Chai.AI.

What does this mean for the future of (human) romance? The prospects are alarming.

Better be nice to your AI overlord

The most prominent AI companion service is Replika, which allows some 30 million users to create custom digital girlfriends (or boyfriends).

While early studies indicate most Replika users are male, Caucasian and under 30, other demographics are catching up. Male sex robots have been in the making for some years. And they’re more than just vibrators with integrated jar openers.

For a subscription fee, users can exchange intimate messages or pictures with their AI partners. Over half a million users had subscribed before Replika temporarily disabled its “erotic roleplay” module in early 2023, fearing regulatory backlash — a move that users dubbed “The Lobotomy.”

The Replika “lobotomy” highlights a key feature of virtual companions: their creators have complete control over their behaviour. The makers of apps can modify or shut down a user’s “partner” – and millions of others – at any moment. These systems also read everything users say, to tailor future interactions and, of course, ads.

AI is coming to the physical sexbot industry too.
Shutterstock

However, these caveats don’t appear to be holding the industry back. New products are proliferating. One company, Kindroid, now offers voice chats with up to ten virtual companions simultaneously.

The digital world isn’t the limit either. Sex doll vendors such as Joy Love Dolls offer interactive real-life sexbots, with not only customisable skin colour and breast size, but also “complete control” of features including movement, heating, and AI-enabled “moans, squeals, and even flirting from your doll, making her a great companion”.

For now, virtual companions and AI sexbots remain a much smaller market than social media, with millions of users rather than billions. But as the history of the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon has taught us, today’s digital quirks could become tomorrow’s global giants.

Towards ethically sourced AI girlfriends?

The availability of AI-driven relationships is likely to usher in all manner of ethically dubious behaviour from users who won’t have to face the real-world consequences.

Soon, you might satisfy any kink with your AI girlfriend for an extra fee. If your AI wife becomes troublesome, just ask the corporate overlord to deactivate her envy module — for a price, of course. Or simply delete her and start fresh with as many AI mistresses as you like in parallel.

The way people form relationships has already been disrupted by dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble.

What will happen if, in the future, people looking for love are competing against perfect synthetic lovers that are always available and horny? Well, at least they’ll be able to create virtual replicas of those hot dates they didn’t land.

And for those who lack the skills to create their own virtual companions, there will be plenty of off-the-shelf alternatives.

AI sexbots aren’t limited to the virtual realm.
Aleksandar Plavevski

An ABC investigation revealed the use of generative AI to create fake influencers by manipulating women’s social media images is already widespread. This is generally done without consent to sell pornographic content. Much of this content depicts unattainable body ideals, and some depicts people who appear to be at best barely of consenting age.

Another likely application? Using AI sexbot technology to bring celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Clara Bow back to life. After all, dead people cannot deny consent anymore.

Replika itself was inspired by its founder’s desire to recreate her late best friend through a chatbot. Many use the app to keep deceased loved ones around. What a time to be alive (or dead)!

The potential for emotional manipulation by inventive catfishers and dictators is alarming. Imagine the havoc if figures like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jong-un harness this technology to complement their nations’ already extensive cyber-espionage operations.

Perhaps before long we will see corporations offering “responsibly sourced” AI girlfriends for the more ethical consumer – organically grown from consensually harvested content, promoting socially acceptable smut.

Society and the state must act now

With loneliness rising to epidemic levels — surveys suggest up to one in four people in OECD countries lack human connection — the demand for sexbots is only going to grow. Corporations will meet this demand unless society and the state set clear boundaries on what’s acceptable.

Sex and technology have always co-evolved. Just as prostitution is “the oldest profession”, porn sites are some of the oldest corners of the internet. However, the dystopian potential of sexbots for mass-customised, corporate-controlled monetisation of our most intimate sphere is unprecedented.

Users aren’t entirely blameless, either. There’s something vicious about replacing a real human being with a totally submissive lust machine.

Early studies suggest narcissism is prevalent among users of this technology. Normalising harmful sexual behaviours such as rape, sadism or paedophilia is bad news for society.

However, going after users isn’t likely to be the best way to tackle the issue. We should treat sexbot use like other potentially problematic behaviours, such as gambling.

As with other problematic behaviours where the issue lies more with providers than users, it’s time to hold sexbot providers accountable. As our links to AI are growing ever more intimate, there’s not much time to waste. Läs mer…

More than a year after the eruption of conflict between Hamas and Israel, the escalating war in the Middle East is roiling Australian society and politics.

Demonstrations about the conflict are a routine event, with mobilisations by pro-Palestinian activists especially commonplace on the streets of the major cities. In this impassioned climate, an unfocussed debate has emerged about political protest. Questions have been raised – though far from cogently answered – about what ought to be the acceptable limits of political expression and dissent in this country.

In this context, writers have contended that it is the Liberal Party that has traditionally upheld the right to freedom of political speech and the expression of dissenting views in Australia. Working from that premise, some of these writers have further suggested that Peter Dutton’s intimidatory remarks about pro-Palestinian demonstrators constitutes a significant departure from the party’s conventional habit of mind. Dutton has urged, for example, that flag waving activists be “subject to the full force of the law”, demanded amendments to Commonwealth law to empower the Australian Federal Police to arrest transgressors and made threatening noises about deporting them.

At a certain level this misconception is understandable. After all, it seems reasonable to assume that the Liberal Party, being a liberal party, stands on the side of the sanctity of individual rights, of which freedom of political expression is a fundamental subset. Yet, as those familiar with the story of modern Australian politics know, it illustrates that the Liberal Party has in practice a history of intolerance towards political dissent and protest.

In a Nine newspaper column, the former Liberal attorney-general, George Brandis, who one would expect to put forward a more nuanced argument, exalted the party’s founder, Robert Menzies, as the fountainhead of its forbearance of the expression of dissenting political viewpoints, no matter how repugnant to them. Menzies is indisputably among Australia’s greatest prime ministers, and he was emphatically more of a liberal than many of his current successors in the Liberal Party. Yet part of his governing record was a determined effort to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia. Those attempts were first by legislation in 1950, which was struck down as unconstitutional by the High Court, and then through a 1951 referendum that the Australian people wisely rejected. To say the least, these actions strain at the idea of a Liberal Party steadfastly committed to the defence of a free market of political ideas even those contrary to their own.

It is the Vietnam War era, however, that most unambiguously explodes the myth of the Liberal Party holding sacrosanct the right to expression of political dissent. The historical reality is that in that period it was the giant of the Labor left, Jim Cairns, who, both through the articulation of a powerful underpinning intellectual case and brave and strategic activism, supported by a legion of anti-war and anti-conscription foot soldiers, legitimised political protest in this nation. It is now mostly forgotten that the opponents of the war in those years had to run the gauntlet of an array of Commonwealth, state and city council laws and regulations that significantly circumscribed political expression. Only through defiance, by acts of civil disobedience, were those impediments to protest pushed back.

Important to this story, the agitations of Cairns provoked vitriolic attacks and calumnies from Liberal members of the Coalition governments (and many elements of the press), who regularly defaulted to equating protest with anarchy and mob rule. That debate – if it can be called that – culminated in the days preceding the first of the moratorium demonstrations in May 1970. In his characteristically stoic and understated style, Cairns defended the protest action as an enlargement of the democratic space in a speech that became a manifesto for political dissent in the peace movement:

Some […] think that democracy is just Parliament alone […] But times are changing. A whole generation is not prepared to accept this complacent, conservative theory. Parliament is not democracy. It is one manifestation of democracy … Democracy is government by the people, and government by the people demands action by the people. It demands effective ways of showing what the interests and needs of the people really are. It demands action in public places all around the land.

Jim Cairns.
National Archives of Australia

Meanwhile, Cairns’ Liberal opponents went into hyperdrive in their efforts to warn and bully the public to stay away from the moratorium. Future Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, shrilly likened the notion of a right to occupy the streets to French revolutionary extremism. Fellow Coalition minister, and another future Liberal leader, Billy Snedden, notoriously condemned would-be demonstrators as “political bikies pack-raping democracy”. The conservative press, too, was apoplectic at the spectre of mass protest action. The Sydney Daily Telegraph fulminated:

Best advice for the citizen […] is to avoid like a plague spot any Moratorium demonstration […] As one of the crowd, you add fractionally to the impressiveness of the mob. Fractionally, you buy a share in the mob’s blind recklessness.

So much for a tradition of tolerance of political dissent.

The May 8 1970 Moratorium drew 100,000 to Melbourne’s CBD (another instance of that city being the epicentre of progressive activism in this country), while smaller events were held across the land. All of the demonstrations were peacefully conducted, defying conservative forecasts of blood teeming in the streets.

The stunning success of that day struck a mighty blow for the right to protest in Australia. Indeed, it routinely goes unacknowledged that whenever and wherever today’s demonstrators take to the streets, and no matter their cause, they stand on the shoulders of the anti-Vietnam War activists.

Equally, it has all but disappeared from collective memory that Cairns, whose star fell so dramatically in the final year of the Whitlam Labor government, played a seminal role in that era. Cairns is the unrecognised father of peaceful political protest and civil disobedience in this country. The accent is on peaceful because he tirelessly worked to disarm intemperate elements in the anti-war movement who were prepared to break heads for that cause – earning their enmity as a consequence.

Cairns’ achievement of effectively straddling leadership roles in the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary spheres remains extraordinary and unique. Notwithstanding his later follies, he was a distinctive jewel in Australia’s political landscape.

Let us not then gullibly swallow the conceit that the Liberal Party has been a stalwart of the right to political dissent in Australia. To the contrary, the historical record shows that it is a party that has harboured a significant streak of conservative authoritarianism.

Its current leader, Dutton, embodies that tendency, albeit a particularly aggressive version of it consistent with the party’s rightwards pivot under his direction. I do not recall, for example, Liberal politicians in the Vietnam period going quite as far as calling for the rounding up of student radicals who waved Vietcong flags or chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” at anti-war rallies. Nevertheless, in his cavalier repressive attitude to pro-Palestinian protests, nor is he acting contrary to his party’s traditions. Läs mer…

With COVID still classified as an ongoing pandemic, it’s difficult to contemplate the next one. But we need to be prepared. We’ve seen several pandemics in recent decades and it’s fair to expect we’ll see more.

For the final part in a series of articles on the next pandemic, we’ve asked a range of experts what Australia got right and wrong it its response to COVID. Here they share their thoughts on the country’s COVID response – and what we can learn for the next pandemic.

Quarantine

The federal government mandated 14 days of quarantine for all international arrivals between March 2020 and November 2021. During that period, 452,550 people passed through the system.

The states and Northern Territory were given just 48 hours to set up their quarantine systems. The states chose hotel quarantine, while the Northern Territory repurposed an old miner’s camp, Howard Springs, which had individual cabins with outdoor verandas. The ACT had very few international arrivals, while Tasmania only had hotel quarantine for domestic travellers.

During the first 15 months of the program, at least 22 breaches occurred in five states (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia). An inquiry into Victoria’s hotel quarantine found the lack of warning and planning to set up the complex system resulted in breaches that caused Victoria’s second COVID wave of 2020, leading to almost 800 deaths. A breach at Sydney airport led to the introduction of the Delta variant into Australia.

In the next pandemic, mistakes from COVID need to be avoided. They included failure to protect hotel residents and staff from airborne transmission through ventilation and mask usage. Protocols need to be consistent across the country, such as the type of security staff used, N95 masks for staff and testing frequency.

These protocols need to be included in a national pandemic preparedness plan, which is frequently reviewed and tested through simulations. This did not occur with the pre-COVID preparedness plan.

Dedicated quarantine centres like Howard Springs already exist in Victoria and Queensland. Ideally, they should be constructed in every jurisdiction.

Michael Toole

Treatments

Scientists had to move quickly after COVID was discovered to find effective treatments.

Many COVID treatments involved repurposing existing drugs designed for other viruses. For example, the HIV drug ritonavir is a key element of the antiviral Paxlovid, while remdesivir was originally developed to treat hepatitis C.

At the outset of the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about COVID treatment among Australian health professionals. To keep up with the rapidly developing science, the National Clinical Evidence Taskforce was established in March 2020. We were involved in its COVID response with more than 250 clinicians, consumers and researchers.

Unusually for evidence-based guidelines, which are often updated only every five years or so, the taskforce’s guidelines were designed to be “living” – updated as new research became available. In April 2020 we released the first guidelines for care of people with COVID, and over the next three years these were updated more than 100 times.

While health-care professionals always had access to up-to-date guidance on COVID treatments, this same information was not as accessible for the public. This may partly explain why many people turned to unproven treatments. The taskforce’s benefits could have been increased with funding to help the community understand COVID treatments.

COVID drugs faced other obstacles too. For example, changes to the virus itself meant some treatments became less effective as new variants emerged. Meanwhile, provision of antiviral treatments has not been equitable across the country.

COVID drugs have had important, though not game-changing, impacts. Ultimately, effective vaccines played a much greater role in shifting the course of the pandemic. But we might not be so fortunate next time.

In any future pandemic it will be crucial to have a clear pathway for rapid, reliable methods to develop and evaluate new treatments, disseminate that research to clinicians, policymakers and the public, and ensure all Australians can access the treatments they need.

Steven McGloughlin and Tari Turner, Monash University

Vaccine rollout

COVID vaccines were developed in record time, but rolling them out quickly and seamlessly proved to be a challenge. In Australia, there were several missteps along the way.

First, there was poor preparation and execution. Detailed planning was not finalised until after the rollout had begun.

Then the federal government had overly ambitious targets. For example, the goal of vaccinating four million people by the end of March 2021 fell drastically short, with less than one-fifth of that number actually vaccinated by that time.

There were also supply issues, with the European Union blocking some deliveries to Australia.

Unfortunately, the government was heavily reliant on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was found, in rare cases, to lead to blood clots in younger people.

Australia’s vaccine rollout wasn’t seamless.
Richard Wainwright/AAP

Despite all this, Australia ultimately achieved high vaccination rates. By the end of December 2021, more than 94% of the population aged 16 and over had received at least one dose.

This was a significant public health achievement and saved thousands of lives.

But over the past couple of years, Australia’s initially strong vaccine uptake has been waning.

The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation recommends booster doses for vulnerable groups annually or twice annually. However, only 30% of people aged 75 and over (for whom a booster is recommended every six months) have had a booster dose in the past six months.

There are several lessons to be learned from the COVID vaccine rollout for any future pandemic, though it’s not entirely clear whether they are being heeded.

For example, several manufacturers have developed updated COVID vaccines based on the JN.1 subvariant. But reports indicate the government will only be purchasing the Pfizer JN.1 booster. This doesn’t seem like the best approach to shore up vaccine supply.

Adrian Esterman, University of South Australia

Mode of transmission

Nearly five years since SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) first emerged, we now know airborne transmission plays a far greater role than we originally thought.

In contrast, the risk of SARS-CoV-2 being transmitted via surfaces is likely to be low, and perhaps effectively non-existent in many situations.

Early in the pandemic, the role contaminated surfaces and inanimate objects played in COVID transmission was overestimated. The main reason we got this wrong, at least initially, was that in the absence of any direct experience with SARS-CoV-2, we extrapolated what we believed to be true for other respiratory viruses. This was understandable, but it proved to be inadequate for predicting how SARS-CoV-2 would behave.

One of the main consequences of overestimating the role of surface transmission was that it resulted in a lot of unnecessary anxiety and the adoption of what can only be viewed in retrospect as over-the-top cleaning practices. Remember the teams of people who walked the streets wiping down traffic light poles? How about the concern over reusable coffee cups?

Considerable resources that could have been better invested elsewhere were directed towards disinfecting surfaces. This also potentially distracted our focus from other preventive measures that were likely to have been more effective, such as wearing masks.

We now understand COVID spreads predominantly through the air.
Kate Trifo/Pexels

The focus on surface transmission was amplified by a number of studies published early in the pandemic that documented the survival of SARS-CoV-2 for long periods on surfaces. However, these were conducted in the lab with little similarity to real-world conditions. In particular, the amounts of virus placed on surfaces were greater than what people would likely encounter outside the lab. This inflated viral survival times and therefore the perception of risk.

The emphasis on surface transmission early in the pandemic ultimately proved to be a miscalculation. It highlights the challenges in understanding how a new virus spreads.

Hassan Vally, Deakin University

National unity

Initially, Commonwealth, state and territory leaders were relatively united in their response to the COVID pandemic. The establishment of the National Cabinet in March 2020 indicated a commitment to consensus-based public health policy. Meanwhile, different jurisdictions came together to deliver a range of measures aimed at supporting businesses and workers affected by COVID restrictions.

But as the pandemic continued, tensions gave way to deeper ideological fractures between jurisdictions and individuals. The issues of vaccine mandates, border closures and lockdowns all created fragmentation between governments, and among experts.

The blame game began between and within jurisdictions. For example, the politicisation of quarantine regulations on cruise ships revealed disunity. School closures, on which the Commonwealth and state and territory governments took different positions, also generated controversy.

These and other instances of polarisation undermined the intent of the newly established National Cabinet.

The COVID pandemic showed us that disunity across the country threatens the collective work needed for an effective response in the face of emergencies.

Politicians didn’t always agree.
Luis Ascui/AAP

The COVID response inquiry, due to release its results soon, will hopefully help us work toward national uniform legislation that may benefit Australia in the event of any future pandemics.

This doesn’t necessarily mean identical legislation across the country – this won’t always be appropriate. But a cohesive, long-term approach is crucial to ensure the best outcomes for the Australian federation in its entirety.

Guzyal Hill and Kim M Caudwell, Charles Darwin University

This article is part of a series on the next pandemic. Läs mer…

The independent inquiry into the government’s COVID response is due to report on October 25.

As part of its investigation into the government’s economic responses, I briefed it on the findings of my economic modelling, using the sort of model I helped design for the Australian Treasury and consulting firms including Econtech and Independent Economics, specially customised for this study.

I found that government responses such as JobKeeper and the Jobseeker Supplement were initially successful. They reduced the peak rate of unemployment by two percentage points, or by more if we count workers who are stood down as employed.

But they lingered too long, ultimately providing $2 of compensation for every $1 of private income lost to COVID.

Government support was essential

Some parts of the economy were deeply affected by the COVID shutdowns which began in early 2020, others much less so.

It is widely accepted that the best response to that (unusual) circumstance is to replace the income those workers and businesses lose. This means, for example, when movie theatres close, the government should replace the incomes of their workers.

This has two benefits. The first is to allow movie theatre workers to maintain their normal spending, stopping the downturn spreading to unrestricted industries. The second is to ensure movie theatre workers don’t have to bear an unfair share of the cost of measures put in place to protect everyone’s health.

Around one sixth of the Australian economy was severely restricted by government measures in the early months of COVID.

This made measures such as JobKeeper, the Boosting Cash Flow for Employers program and the JobSeeker Supplement appropriate.

Too much support for some, too little for others

The government spent $144 billion on these three programs, and my modelling finds the total was about right to compensate for the early losses of income.But the pattern of compensation was wide of the mark, with a mix of overcompensation and undercompensation.

JobKeeper was designed to guarantee workers a minimum income rather than compensate them for lost income. This meant typical full-time workers were undercompensated while typical part-time workers were overcompensated.

For businesses, the compensation for lost profits depended on workers being active, which meant the firms that lost the most because they had suspended their entire operations got no compensation for losing their entire profits even though some of their expenses continued.

Better programs were put in place in 2021 when the Delta wave of COVID struck. A COVID disaster payment more accurately compensated workers for lost hours, and programs such as NSW JobSaver more accurately targeted lost profits.

Extra support for the entire economy wasn’t needed

In principle, well-designed compensation for the parts of the economy that were actually shut down would have been enough to support the rest of the economy, but despite this, the government also announced broader supports aimed at the entire economy.

Among them were bringing forward the so-called Stage 2 tax cuts and allowing businesses to immediately expense equipment.

These general stimulus measures almost doubled the size of stimulus from $219 billion to $428 billion. Besides being large and unnecessary, most of the general stimulus was delivered late, after the worst of the pandemic was over.

How it could have been done better

I have modelled what could have happened if the government had only spent on the health measures that were clearly warranted and had limited its compensation to income actually lost at the time it was lost.

This so-called shorter stimulus scenario also includes a more usual response to economic recovery by the Reserve Bank in which it began lifting interest rates one year earlier, in May 2021 instead of May 2022.

In the shorter stimulus scenario, the Reserve Bank’s cash rate would by now be 2.85% instead of 4.35% because of lower inflation. Equally, in two or three years interest rates are similar in both scenarios once the economy has stabilised.

Australia’s unemployment rate would be higher than it is now at about 5.1% instead of 4.2% as it glides towards a sustainable equilibrium rather than having been pushed below it.

This glide path keeps inflation lower by avoiding a boom and bust and results in the same endpoint for unemployment.

Inflation would have peaked much lower at about 5% instead of about 7%.

About 1.4% percentage points of the reduction would have been due to better fiscal (spending and taxing) policy and about 0.7 points due to better management of interest rates.

In addition, the government would have saved about $209 billion in avoidable spending and government debt.

Nevertheless, even if the government had limited its response to the more targeted measures modelled in the shorter stimulus scenario, inflation would have reached 5% and interest rates and government debt would have still climbed, but by less.

Hindsight can help

The government’s responses to COVID were developed quickly at a time when no one knew what was going to happen, which makes some overcompensation understandable.

But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t examine what happened in order to work out how it could have been done better.

Australia will be hit by future pandemics and pandemic-like crises, which means it’s important to learn from our mistakes. Next time the government should concentrate on replacing income where and when it is lost. Läs mer…

It has been two decades since New Zealand decriminalised sex work. And while sex workers have workplace rights, they still worry about the risks of discrimination in everyday life.

In my recent research, local sex workers explained the benefits of decriminalisation – and what still needs to change. Their experiences highlight that while much has changed for the better, stigma remains an issue. Further change is needed to better protect sex workers from it.

New Zealand’s experience is relevant right now, as a number of governments elsewhere are reviewing their laws around sex work.

Scotland, for example, is considering a proposal that would criminalise the purchase of sex – known as the Nordic model due to its initial adoption in some Nordic countries.

Supporters argue this will help sex workers and extend gender equality. But evidence suggests the Nordic model actually harms sex workers: it impedes safety strategies, increases the risk of violence, limits access to justice, and enables discrimination.

What is decriminalisation?

The other options are decriminalisation and legalisation. While these terms are often used interchangeably, they are different. Legalisation of sex work (in Germany and the Netherlands, for example) means legalising an act that was previously against the law.

For sex workers, this means restrictive government regulation and control, which may include mandatory registration with authorities, compulsory sexual health checks, and permission to work in specific areas only.

Decriminalisation, on the other hand, means repealing laws that make an act or behaviour a crime, but not necessarily introducing restrictive regulations specific to the sex industry.

That said, decriminalisation does not mean there is no regulation. Instead, regulations are comparable to other businesses. The focus is not on regulating sex workers, but providing them with rights.

Under New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act (2003) it is an offence to induce or compel a person to do sex work. Sex workers have the right to refuse to see clients for any reason at any time. If a sex worker wishes to stop doing sex work, they can access unemployment benefits immediately (rather than having the normal stand down period ).

Impacts of decriminalisation in New Zealand

Research three years after the law came into force found a majority of participants felt they had more rights and were more able to refuse to see clients than before. Several participants felt police attitudes towards them had improved.

Subsequent research found relationships between street-based sex workers and police had improved. Decriminalisation supported the safety strategies of these sex workers better.

There have also been several high-profile cases where sex workers have exercised their legal rights. Brothel-based sex workers won sexual harassment cases against business owners, and convictions of rape against two clients who covertly removed condoms during their bookings.

Among the 26 sex workers we interviewed in New Zealand, participants described feeling fortunate to work in the decriminalised context. They also felt working conditions for sex workers were better than in other countries.

One participant said:

I also feel that we shouldn’t have to say “oh we’re so lucky” but we are compared to other people in other countries.

Another felt decriminalisation gave sex workers a “protective layer”.

This meant, as one participant put it, “we have rights, full stop”.

Participants appreciated sex work being defined as work and the rights that accompany this. Decriminalisation was considered both ideal and normalised. As another explained,

it’s been decriminalised for a long time now, like it’s part of our reality.

Room for improvement?

While participants felt grateful to work in the decriminalised context, this doesn’t mean there weren’t issues.

Decriminalisation in New Zealand doesn’t include legal protection from discrimination. Sex workers have little recourse if they are treated unfairly because of their job.

The sex workers we spoke with believed the social stigma of sex work was gradually fading, and instances of discrimination described by participants were rare. But they still feared the consequences of discrimination (such as being denied accommodation or premises to work from if their work became known to a landlord).

They supported further legal protection from discrimination. For one participant this meant,

I could tell people my job without […] any fear of backlash, and that would be fantastic.

Participants also wanted the protections of decriminalisation extended to temporary migrants. People who hold temporary visas face deportation if they are found to be working in the sex industry, making them vulnerable to exploitation.

Falling behind

After two decades of decriminalisation, New Zealand risks falling behind as more jurisdictions (such as Victoria and Queensland in Australia) adopt decriminalised frameworks that build in protection from discrimination.

Such protections mean it is no longer legal to deny a person accommodation or a job based on their sex work experience, or deny them a bank loan or mortgage.

To keep up, New Zealand needs to follow suit. The next step is therefore to strengthen and expand the rights sex workers have.

Perhaps then, in another 20 years, the country will still be seen as one that put the human rights of sex workers first and showed the rest of the world what equality really looks like. Läs mer…

Our research group has bred corals able to better survive marine heatwaves. Our work, now published in Nature Communications, shows that it is possible to improve coral heat tolerance even within a single generation.

We did this using selective breeding: a technique used by humans for thousands of years to produce animals and plants with desirable characteristics. Selective breeding is how humans turned wolf-like dogs into St Bernards, chihuahuas and everything in between.

Now, selective breeding is being considered as a tool for nature conservation, particularly for coral reefs. The Coralassist Lab (of which we are part) and the Palau International Coral Reef Center have been working on coral heatwave survival specifically. Our latest results are the culmination of seven years’ work.

Marine heatwaves trigger mass coral bleaching and mortality, with 2023-2024 declared as the fourth global mass bleaching event. Assisted evolution methods — like selective breeding — aim to boost natural adaptation to buy time for corals under climate change.

Yet the improvement in heat tolerance in our selectively bred corals was modest compared to the intensity of marine heatwaves expected in the future. While selective breeding is feasible, it is likely not a panacea. We’ll still need to tackle the cause of mass coral bleaching by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to mitigate warming and give assisted evolution programmes time to take effect.

How to breed corals for heat tolerance

The first step was to determine the heat tolerance of many potential parent corals on the reef. Then, we chose specific individuals to breed two separate families of offspring, selected for either high or low heat tolerance. We reared these offspring for three to four years until they reached reproductive maturity, and then tested their heat tolerance.

Some of the selectively-bred coral at the nursery in the Pacific island nation Palau.
Jesse Alpert

We conducted selective breeding trials for two different traits, either the tolerance to a short, intense heat exposure (temperatures 3.5°C above normal for ten days) or a less intense but long-term exposure more typical of natural marine heatwaves (2.5°C above average for a month). This enabled us to estimate the heritability of each trait, the response to selective breeding, and whether both traits have a shared genetic basis.

Selecting parents for high- rather than low-heat tolerance enhanced the tolerance of their adult offspring for both traits tested.

a) Overview of the experimental design and examples of (b) Acropora digitifera parents and (c) their offspring at the nursery in Palau.
Coralassist lab

Heritability was roughly 0.2 to 0.3 on a scale of 0 to 1, which means about a quarter of the variability in offspring heat tolerance was due to genes passed from their parents. In other words, these traits have a substantial genetic basis on which natural and artificial selection can act.

We measure cumulative heat stress and tolerance in terms of degree-heating weeks (°C-weeks), which reflects both how hot it gets and for how long. Given the trait variability identified in these particular corals, heat tolerance could in theory be enhanced by about 1°C-week within one generation.

However, even this level of enhancement may not be enough to keep pace with ever more intense heatwaves. Depending on climate action, the intensity of heatwaves is expected to rise in the coming decades by around 3°C-weeks per decade, faster than the enhancement achieved in our study.

Interestingly, corals selectively bred for high- rather than low, short-stress tolerance were no better at surviving the long heat stress exposure. With no genetic correlation detected, it is plausible that these traits are driven by independent sets of genes, and corals that are good at surviving the short sharp heat stress aren’t necessarily the best at surviving longer term marine heatwaves.

This would have important implications, as work like this would benefit from cheap and rapid tests that can effectively identify heat tolerant colonies for breeding. However, if these tests can’t predict which coral colonies will survive month-long heatwaves, it presents a serious challenge.

Coral fragments during a long-term simulated marine heatwave, with some remaining relatively healthy throughout (upper) and others bleaching (lower) or dying (not shown).
Liam Lachs

Scaling up selective breeding

Since it is possible to selectively breed corals for increased heat tolerance, the next step is to conduct large-scale trials in the wild. This will likely require considerable numbers of selectively bred corals to be deployed, perhaps by directly seeding coral larvae on reefs, or planting corals reared in an aquaculture facility.

For this to work, outplanted corals must become reproductive themselves and contribute to the wild population gene pool. Doing this at very large scales will be challenging, but it may not be necessary to replenish the coral coverage of large areas.

Instead, it may be sufficient to create a network of fewer strategically located larval production hubs, containing selectively bred corals at high densities to maximise fertilisation success. These hubs would serve to seed other reefs and could provide further broodstock for targeted actions.

A lot more research and development is still needed, with many critical questions remaining unanswered. How many corals need to be outplanted to have the desired effect? Can we ensure there are no trade-offs that could compromise populations (evidence so far suggests this is not a large risk)? How can we avoid dilution of selected traits once added to the wild? How can we maximise responses to selection?

Given the pace of ocean warming, optimisation and implementation of assisted evolution will need to happen soon for them to have a chance at success, even if only on small scales. Above all, the survival of coral reefs still depends on urgent climate action. Läs mer…

Just as calculators took over the tedious number-crunching in maths a few decades ago, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming coding. Take Kyo, an eight-year-old boy in Singapore who developed a simple platform game in just two hours, attracting over 500,000 players.

Using nothing but simple instructions in English, Kyo brought his vision to life leveraging the coding app Cursor and also Claude, a general purpose AI. Although his dad is a coder, Kyo didn’t get any help from him to design the game and has no formal coding education himself. He went on to build another game, an animation app, a drawing app and a chatbot, taking about two hours for each.

This shows how AI is dramatically lowering the barrier to software development, bridging the gap between creativity and technical skill. Among the range of apps and platforms dedicated to this purpose, others include Google’s AlphaCode 2 and Replit’s Ghostwriter.

In another example of the power of these apps, an eight-year-old American girl called Fay built a chatbot that purported to be Harry Potter. She had it up and running in just 45 minutes, at which point it asked if she had heard the rumours about the Deathly Hallows and suggested they discuss it over a butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks.

For those that already know how to code, numerous AI apps have become incredibly helpful too. At the other extreme from the natural language coding apps described above, tools like Tabnine and GitHub Copilot act as intelligent assistants, predicting and autocompleting code as you type.

Alternatives such as Sourcery and DeepCode go a step further, offering real-time code cleanup, suggesting improvements and fixing vulnerabilities. New tools are emerging weekly, such as OpenAI’s GPT Canvas, a new GPT version designed to help with sophisticated coding. Many of these tools can also translate code from one programming language to another, say from JavaScript to Python.

The productivity gains that these tools offer are revolutionising the software industry. As many as 70% of companies have already adopted the likes of GitHub Copilot, with coders reporting that AI is enabling them to write software that is more reliable and bug free.

By removing the need to spend so many hours ironing out human errors, coders are able to spend more time focusing on higher value tasks such as designing system architecture and collaborating with colleagues.

It is also changing the game for university educators like myself as we race to keep up. We’ve been having to rethink teaching materials and also assessment methods, wrestling with how exactly to grade a student’s coding in situations where AI tools are doing much of the work.

Today’s limitations

As exciting as all this is, AI coding is still in its infancy. At this stage it can only help non-coders to build simple applications or games. It can’t yet oversee big complex IT projects by understanding the big picture in a way that a human coder would.

It can’t yet invent new ways to solve problems either, and is still more likely to lag in areas like, say, spacecraft navigation that require highly specialised knowledge.

Many tools also don’t write perfect code: a program will often work but won’t be efficient or secure enough for use in the real world. Similarly, AI tools don’t inherently understand the context of the data they process, so may mishandle sensitive information or perpetuate biases present in the data on which they were trained.

For all these reasons, in professional situations there’s still a need for a coder to make sure that everything is meeting the necessary standards. No doubt in future we may see AI coding tools designed to handle everything from security issues to highly specialised subject matter. Their ability to help non-coders to build apps will also only improve. For now at least, however, AI coding is still amplifying the skills of coders rather than replacing them altogether.

How to build your own game

All the same, it’s incredible what you can do with these tools as a non-coder already. Here’s a quick guide to making a simple platform game:

Step 1: Sign up for an AI tool: Create an account with, say, Cursor or AlphaCode 2 and follow the setup instructions. Depending on which tool you choose, you may need to do a quick install. You may also need to install a programming language such as Python, as well as a source code editor such as VS Studio Code 2 – the coding platform will keep you right on this.

Step 2: Start your game: Open a new project in the tool. Into the prompt, type: “Create a simple platform game where the platforms are made of sweet treats”.

Step 3: See what it’s like: Click “run” or “preview” to see what you’ve created (depending on which system you are using, you may have to do this in the source code editor). You should see platforms made of candy or cakes.

Step 4: Make some changes: Let’s say we change the main character into a parrot. Simply type into the prompt: “Make the avatar a green parrot”.

Step 5: Add features: Now type into the prompt: “Let the parrot be controlled by the cursor arrows, insert some sweets for it to collect and add a score counter for how many it has collected”.

‘Pedro in the Sweet Shop’
Author provided

Step 6: Test and tweak: Click “run” or “preview” again to test the updated game. Make changes by typing things like, “Insert a black crow that will chase the parrot around the screen. If the crow touches the parrot, freeze the screen and display a message in the middle of the screen saying ‘Too Bad!!!’”. Keep repeating these steps until you’re happy with the results.

Step 7: Get it out there: You might now want to share your game with friends or online via an app store. It must be said that AI coders are not yet doing this well, so you may find this trickier without prior knowledge. One option is to deploy the game online via a free platform such as Zeabur, as explained here. Läs mer…

The UK and north-western Europe have had a particularly wet 2024. Extreme weather patterns caused by climate change are nothing to celebrate, but there is one group of organisms that will have appreciated all the rain.

Numerous languages have a saying to the effect of “growing like mushrooms after the rain”. Indeed, rainfall across the year is a major factor in the prevalence of mushrooms. These are the short-lived structures we see poking above the soil that fungi use for reproduction. The rest of the fungus is actually there all the time, growing within the soil in a web of filaments known as mycelium.

Similar to the way plants spread their offspring via seeds, fungi produce mushrooms to release spores that can be carried on the wind or spread by animals. As with any organism’s reproduction, it costs the fungus a lot of energy to make mushrooms, so its decision to make this investment will be attuned to when it is likely to have the best chance of success.

Spores need moisture to germinate, and it generally helps if it’s not too cold. Autumn in the temperate climate found across much of Europe usually provides these conditions in abundance. Add in a mild, wet summer to get things started and that’s why we’re probably looking at a bumper autumn for wild mushrooms in 2024.

Do the seasons feel increasingly weird to you? You’re not alone. Climate change is distorting nature’s calendar, causing plants to flower early and animals to emerge at the wrong time.

This article is part of a series, Wild Seasons, on how the seasons are changing – and what they may eventually look like.

How to make the most of it

Some of the most prized gourmet mushrooms can be foraged in autumn, like chanterelles or porcini. When done responsibly, it’s a great hobby. But foragers beware: there has been an influx of mushroom identification books written by generative-AI and riddled with (potentially deadly) errors, so always get information about edible mushrooms from a safe and reliable source.

Chanterelle mushrooms are edible (and delicious).
lzf/Shutterstock

If you ever feel tempted to pick something without being certain what it is, remember the adage: “there are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old bold mushroom hunters”. Never munch on a hunch.

Autumn is the most productive season for mushrooms in temperate regions, though spring is fruitful too; St George’s mushroom was named for its tendency to appear around April 23. It’s also not only mushroom-forming fungi that have these seasonal and weather-driven patterns. Cases of a nasty lung infection called valley fever in the south-western US are caused by the microscopic Coccidioides soil fungi. They peak in the autumn, with particular surges in years following wet winters.

Read more:
Fungal infections known as valley fever could spike this fall – 3 epidemiologists explain how to protect yourself

Considering fungi are so dependent on weather and temperature, it’s not surprising that the timing and overall length of mushroom production is being affected by climate change. This mirrors the shifts in seasonal patterns for plants and animals.

While an extended mushroom season could sound like good news to foragers, unfortunately, changing conditions may make fungal diseases like valley fever a bigger problem. And as extreme floods become more common, exposure to mould fungi will probably become a more pressing health issue in homes.

Mushrooms are full of water, so wet autumn weather tends to favour fungi.
Sergei Kochetov/Shutterstock

Fungi aren’t just rain-lovers, though, they’re actually also rain-makers. Spores released into the atmosphere from fungi can act as a surface on which moisture in the air can form water droplets, and when this happens on a large scale it can contribute to the formation of clouds.

This is just one example of the many underappreciated ways that fungi support our environment. Come rain or shine, I hope that you have the opportunity to get out into nature this autumn and enjoy the fungi. Läs mer…

Han Kang, the South Korean winner of the 2024 Nobel prize in literature, made her breakthrough in the English-speaking world with her first translated novel (her third in Korean), The Vegetarian. Published in English in 2015, it was an immediate success, making the Evening Standard bestseller list. It went on to win the Man Booker international prize the following year for Han and her young English translator, Deborah Smith.

In the summer of 2015, Han spent a week at the University of East Anglia (UEA) where she was the resident author for the Korean-English literary translation workshop at the annual summer school of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT). She was already a prize-winning writer in Korea and had recently published the controversial novel that Smith would go on to translate as Human Acts.

As part of the summer school in July 2015, Deborah Smith led a workshop with Han for six emerging translators of Korean, sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Han later commented that the event as a whole was “on a larger scale and more intensive than any other translation program I had previously heard about or experienced”.

It was already clear that Han was a major figure, and the power of her writing was reinforced by the quiet authority of her presence. For workshop participant Roxanne Edmunds: “The great thing about the workshops was that we were able to work on the translation with the author. It was a little intimidating at first, but Han put us at ease with her enthusiasm.”

Fellow participant (and subsequently Korea Times translation prizewinner) Sophie Bowman told me:

I remember that in the workshop we spent an hour or so moving around a comma, adding it to the sentence, taking it out. And spent a long time discussing the colour and feel and look of a cardigan one of the characters wore and how it signified. I was quite amazed at how we could do this in all seriousness – labouring over such details (not even there on the page), when I had been working until then on tight deadlines and weekly translation quotas. But Han’s work stood up to that scrutiny and expansive kind of reading.

The workshop culminated in a joint reading of the translated text as part of the summer school’s finale.
Anita Staff Photography, Author provided (no reuse)

Victoria Caudle, another of the workshop participants and now a doctoral candidate at UCLA, added:

Working with Han, I experienced a writer who respected translation as its own process of writing. She was fascinated by how we would agonise over how to express the slightest movement or smallest image in the text. Overall, I remember how generous she was, how softly she spoke and how strong her words were.

After a week of intensive discussion, the group produced a translated extract from Han’s short story Europa that was barely a page in length, but the value of such activities always lies at least as much in the process as in the product.

The workshop culminated in a joint reading of the translated text as part of the Summer School’s finale at Dragon Hall in Norwich, the beautiful medieval home of BCLT’s partner the National Centre for Writing.

Bowman and Caudle went on to found the Smoking Tigers, a Korean-English literary translator collective, together with several other alumni. Buoyed by the success of her translation of The Vegetarian, Smith founded Tilted Axis Press, which in turn won the International Booker prize in 2022 for Tomb of Sand, written by Geetanjali Shree and translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.

In response to Han’s Nobel win, the president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, Sooyoung Chon, remarked: “Han Kang’s Nobel prize in literature is a pivotal moment that highlights LTI Korea’s efforts to introduce Korean literature to the world.” BCLT has continued to collaborate closely with LTI Korea on several other summer school workshops, but the inaugural 2015 edition has proved particularly consequential.

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Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised to “rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment” in the UK. He was speaking at his government’s first international investment summit, an attempt to encourage the finance and business worlds to put more money into the country.

But the government will need much more investment – by both the private and public sectors – than can be drummed up with one summit and an intent to slash red tape if it is to meet its economic goals. So Labour’s upcoming first budget on October 30 presents a vital opportunity to lay the foundations for an investment boost over the coming years.

A major, long-term aim is to get the UK’s annual growth back to its pre-2008 banking crisis rate, when it was around 2% a year. The UK has been growing at about half that rate since then.

This slower economic growth has damaged people’s living standards as well as the tax receipts the government needs to fund public services, particularly since the pressures of the COVID pandemic.

Slow growth could be turned around by increasing investment in things like infrastructure. The UK has lagged behind comparable economies in this regard – it has had the lowest rate of investment in the G7 group of major economies for 24 of the last 30 years.

Last year, the UK’s GDP per capita (a measure of the average income) was nearly £11,000 lower than it would have been had the economy continued to grow at its pre-2008 rate.

Rather unusually, despite the UK’s debt recently reaching 100% of GDP – the highest amount in more than half a century – the usually fiscally conservative International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said the UK should consider focusing on investment. This, it says, could potentially boost GDP growth and thus stabilise the debt-to-GDP ratio.

And the UK’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), believes it is possible to raise economic growth through more investment. The OBR estimates that a sustained 1% of GDP increase in public investment could increase the level of potential national output by just under 0.5% after five years, and around 2.5% in 50 years.

So, there will undoubtedly be a number of investment measures in the Budget. But how many depends, in part, on whether the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, revises some restrictions on borrowing, known as the fiscal rules. There could be adjustments such as offsetting government debt with its assets, including student loans. Reeves is reportedly looking at this possibility – which could create as much as £50 billion of additional fiscal headroom.

Read more:
The chancellor has tied her own hands with her fiscal rules – here’s why she should change them

She could also re-institute the previous Labour government’s golden rule: only borrow to invest. This could separate out capital investment (spending on things like roads and other infrastructure), which is needed to support long-term growth, from day-to-day spending on public services. It would also increase the transparency of what the borrowing is for, and whether it can deliver growth that can help stabilise the debt-to-GDP ratio.

These changes would prevent public investment from being cut in order to meet one of the current fiscal rules Reeves is adhering to. That is, that debt must be falling as a percentage of GDP over a rolling five-year period. As it stands, this rule restricts how much Reeves can borrow – even if that is what the country needs to grow economically.

A change to this rule could help the government fund its two new initiatives to promote public investment: the National Wealth Fund, which requires just over £7 billion over the parliament, and GB Energy, which needs about £8 billion.

Convincing investors

Investments in the National Wealth Fund and GB Energy could further raise economic growth by “crowding in” private investment. For example, investing in infrastructure like a road entices private firms to invest too, perhaps in new premises or more staff, because a better transport link will make these firms’ investments more profitable.

The government’s aim is to bring in three times the public investment in the National Wealth Fund to invest in infrastructure and key sectors. GB Energy likewise intends to bring in private investors to support the green transition that can generate new output and jobs.

But targeting growth will take more than just finding the money. It also requires a regulatory approach and planning system that generates confidence among private investors to put their money in alongside the government.

The impending Budget won’t set out all of the details that investors are looking for, but they will expect to see the growth strategy and assess whether it is credible. For instance, successive governments have struggled with planning reform, so investors will be justified in wondering what will be different this time.

Rachel Reeves could potentially give herself an extra £50 billion to spend if she changes the fiscal rules.
Fred Duval/Shutterstock

Investors will also be on the lookout for a more certain regulatory regime over several years. The main impediments to investment tend to be uncertainty, including over regulation and planning, as well as being able to find workers with the right skills. This Budget is an opportunity to set out what the government plans to do in both areas over its five-year parliament.

One positive signal to investors would be if the Budget sets out a broad definition of “capital”. For physical capital like a factory to be properly used, it requires people (human capital). And we hear a lot about green assets and digital assets, which essentially means that capital can be physical, human or green, as well as digital.

By outlining its policies around infrastructure and skills, as well as its environmental and digital policies, any proposed growth strategy would be more holistic and likelier to have a positive impact on growth.

But the difference between a strategy and a great strategy is in its execution. The Budget will almost certainly set out various fiscal policies to support growth. But the ability to deliver this strategy will determine whether it is truly a budget for growth. Läs mer…