The Minefield

ABC Australia
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  • Philosophy
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In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

  1. 1d ago

    What Winnie-the-Pooh teaches us about friendship, care and the desire to be useful

    The decade straddling the First World War was a period of unusual brilliance and fecundity in British culture. There were the great formal innovators of literary modernism: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, D H Lawrence and E M Forster. But then there were those more closely associated with mass culture, who enjoyed a degree of commercial success as well as cultural influence: Rudyard Kipling, Bernard Shaw, H G Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, Agatha Christie, P G Wodehouse, G K Chesterton, Jerome K Jerome, even Charlie Chaplin. Many of these authors moved in the same circles, crossed paths with one another and promoted each other’s work. Indeed, most of the male writers, at one point or another, belonged to an amateur cricket team founded by Barrie — best known as the author of Peter Pan — named “the Allahakbarries” (evidently on the basis of the misapprehension that the Arabic phrase Allahu Akbar denotes something like a general petition for divine help, the equivalent of “Heaven help us”). Perhaps the unlikeliest member of this generation of famed writers was a self-deprecating, somewhat reclusive detective story writer and occasional columnist for the satirical weekly magazine Punch, named Alan Alexander Milne. Having enjoyed some modest success as a playwright after the war, on 21 August 1921 Milne purchased a nondescript brown teddy bear from Harrods at Knightsbridge as a birthday present for his infant son, Christopher Robin. Gradually, the nursery would be populated with a small society of stuffed animals: a drooping donkey for Christmas that same year; a tiny piglet the following year from a next-door neighbour in London; later on, a green-eyed tiger, a kangaroo and her joey. It was Milne’s wife, Daphne, who brought the menagerie to life for her son, supplying the voices, the dispositions, the relationships. Observing their play, a couple years later A A Milne penned poem called “Teddy Bear” in which the first glimpses of his most famous creation can be seen: A bear, however hard he tries,Grows tubby without exercise.Our Teddy Bear is short and fat,Which is not to be wondered at;He gets what exercise he canBy falling off the ottoman,But generally seems to lackThe energy to clamber back … Though originally known as “Big Bear” or “Edward Bear”, Christopher Robin’s “inseparable companion” eventually acquired the name “Winnie-the-Pooh” — a strange amalgam derived from the boy’s favourite animal at Regent’s Park Zoo, a tame female North American black bear named “Winnipeg”, and a black swan they encountered during a family vocation at Pooling, near Sussex, whom they referred to as “Pooh”. (Milne later reported that, when he and Christopher farewelled the swan on the lake for the final time, “we took the name with us, as we didn’t think the swan would want it any more”.) Partly inspired by Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s novel Wind in the Willows (which he had been commissioned to adapt into a play in 1921), Milne published his first “Pooh” story in the Evening News on Christmas Eve in 1925. It was a story about an escapade with bees, honey and a balloon, in which Pooh’s voice is fully realised: “If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee … And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey … And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.” The following year, off the back of the remarkable success his 1924 book of children’s poems, When We Were Very Young, Milne signed a contract for Winnie-the-Pooh, and promptly secured the services of the illustrator E H Shephard to supply the “decorations”. In the meantime, the Milne family had relocated from London to Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, a property that butted up against Ashdown Forest which would supply the inspiration for the companion’s enchanted habitat, the Hundred Acre Woods. Winnie-the-Pooh was finally published on 14 October 1926. It was a slim book, little more than 20,000 words, made up of ten chapters detailing the mishaps and adventures of Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, Owl, Kanga and Baby Roo, all presided over by the benevolent and knowledgeable character of Christopher Robin. (Tigger would only be introduced in a subsequent book.) As a work of children’s literature, Winnie-the-Pooh is a miracle. It holds untrammelled innocence, care, seemingly insurmountable danger and ever-so-slightly-out-of-reach wordplay together in a delicate balance. The undeveloped longings and exaggerated fears that compel Pooh and Piglet, in particular, are immediately recognisable to parents and children alike, as are the somewhat more grown-up desires for reassurance. Take the exchange at the end of the futile Woozle hunt. Pooh laments: “I have been Foolish and Deluded … and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.” To which Christopher Robin replies, soothingly, “You’re the Best Bear in All the World.” But it is Pooh’s response that bears the emotional charge: “‘Am I?’ said Pooh hopefully.” It is a question that is, at last, answered, at book’s end, when a valedictory party is thrown to praise Pooh for his friendship and unwitting bravery. Each one of the characters of the book is given over to some sort of excess: appetite (Pooh), fear (Piglet), moroseness (Eeyore), practicality (Rabbit), impracticality/verboseness (Owl), overprotectiveness (Kanga) and excitability (Roo). It is the character of Pooh, however, that provides a kind of emotional ballast the stories need, the capacity for companionability and unselfconscious decency. Again, take Pooh’s response upon learning that Eeyore has lost his tail: “Pooh felt that he ought to say something helpful about it, but didn’t quite know what. So he decided to do something helpful instead. ‘Eeyore’, he said solemnly, ‘I, Winnie-the-Pooh, will find your tail for you’. ‘Thank you, Pooh’, answered Eeyore. ‘You’re a real friend’, said he. ‘Not like Some’, he said.” There has been a tendency to try to discern in Winnie-the-Pooh a deeper conversation with psychology and philosophy — perhaps most famously, Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet. Such readings can be instructive in their own right, but they are no substitute for the tenderness and gentle moral instruction on the conditions of sociability and friendship present on every page of Milne’s 1926 original. Moreover, these “deeper” readings can tend to overlook the role that the character of Christopher Robin plays. Stuffed companions or cherished toys are among our first objects of love. It is over them that we learn to exercise other-focused care, the sense that we have obligations beyond the satisfaction of our own wants or the avoidance of our fears. But by narrating the words and care of a character named “Christopher Robin” purportedly to a child named Christopher Robin, not as information but as recollection, it is as though Winnie-the-Pooh is demonstrating the inner capacities for love and friendship that young people already possess. These are not capacities to be aspired to, but simply to acknowledge. One hundred years after its publication, perhaps it’s time to retrieve A A Milne’s masterpiece from Disney and experience its delights afresh by reading it with those we love. Guest: Elizabeth Hale is Associate Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of New England.

  2. Nov 4

    Did the US midterm elections mark the end of Trumpism?

    There is something reassuring about the predictability of midterm elections in the United States. In the twenty midterms that have taken place since the end of the Second World War, the party of the sitting president has seen a swing against it in all but two instances. It’s not unusual for the governing party to lose control of one or both Houses of Congress, even when the president is relatively popular. This reflects something of the reactive nature of modern democratic politics. Voters overwhelmingly tend to rebuke rather than reward — and midterm elections are an effective way of communicating their grievances or their sense of the unresponsiveness of the sitting government. But the 2026 midterm elections did not just “send a message” to the Trump administration. The size and extent of the swing against the Republican Party represents as thoroughgoing a repudiation of the first two years of a presidency as we’re likely to see. The Democratic Party, which was decimated and demoralised after the 2024 election, saw a swing in the popular vote of 13 points, delivering a huge majority in the House of Representatives. More importantly, this voter surge flipped seven states that were overwhelmingly Republican — five of which (North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Texas and Kansas) were carried by Trump in 2024 by more than 10 points — delivering them a larger than expected majority in the Senate. In the aftermath, Trump has claimed, defiantly: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” But it’s hard to interpret these midterms as anything other than a referendum on Trump himself. After all, 47 times over the course of the campaign, he told rallies to “pretend I’m on the ballot”. Voters were clearly fed up with high fuel prices due to the ongoing war in Iran, the heavy-handed and sometimes lethal conduct of ICE agents, the economic effects of tariffs and the reports of indecent profiteering and outright corruption on the part of Trump, his family and his closest associates — to say nothing of Trump’s obsession with certain vanity projects in Washington, DC. Voters did regard Trump as being on the ballot and voted accordingly. The scale and size of the Democratic victory presents some difficult questions, however. Was this really a vote for Democrats, or simply a vast repudiation of Trump? If the latter, does this give any guidance for how Democrats should use their congressional majorities? Should they seek to prosecute Trump, once again, for his corruption and conduct in office? Or given the success of moderate Democrats, should they suppress such an overtly partisan stance and focus instead on addressing cost-of-living pressures, healthcare, data-centres, unemployment, and so on? After all, given the reactive nature of contemporary democratic politics, the majority that was given to them in 2026 could just as easily be taken away in 2028. Guest: Brendon O’Connor is a Professor of US Politics and US Foreign Relations at the University of Sydney, where he holds a joint appointment in the United States Studies Centre.

  3. Oct 28

    Political charisma — why is it both powerful and perilous?

    Over the last decade, large majorities of voters in advanced democracies like the United States, the UK, France, Germany and Australia have come to feel that their elected representatives are not responsive to their needs, do not put the interests of people over politics, are not capable of delivering on their promises, are not truthful, and are, generally speaking, “corrupt”, or at least “in it for themselves”. (Compare, for instance, the remarkably similar findings in the OECD’s 2026 “Trust in Government” survey, the recent “Australian attitudes towards government and democracy” report commissioned by the Centre for Policy Development, and ANU’s “Political and policy attitudes in an age of pessimism” report from March this year.) This trend has led even some democratic theorists to conclude that the problem with modern politics is, well, politicians. It’s an easy sentiment to sell, and its appeal has been a boon for those “political entrepreneurs” who are particularly adept at harnessing underlying popular resentment and disrupting the status quo, only to find themselves subject to the same laws of electoral gravity when in government. Before taking the leap and advocating for citizen rule by means of “lottocracy” or some other form of sortition, it is worth asking ourselves what we actually want from politicians. Is competence and effectiveness in the delivery of vital public services enough? Or do we both expect and need more? For there seems to be a troubling paradox lying beneath the popular discontent: either politicians function as idées fixes, as mere things upon whom the people can obsessively heap blame for all that has gone wrong, who are exempt from ordinary human consideration and thus “fair game” for harassment, abuse, even violence; or politicians bear a weight popular expectation that verges on the messianic. In other words, there is a tendency to view politicians as either sub-human or super-human. This is where the fraught question of the nature of political charisma comes to bear. While there have been occasions where voters have reverted to normalcy, stability, a “safe pair of hands” after a period of mercurial or chaotic governance — the obvious examples here would be Joe Biden in 2020, Anthony Albanese in 2022 and Keir Starmer in 2024 (with the pandemic being a major factor in each case) — by and large the direction of electoral traffic has gone toward the more strident, passionate, “authentic”, disruptive, norm-busting, in a word, charismatic candidate. In so doing, what is often being chosen is not so much political idolatry and political participation: the charismatic figure holds out the possibility of connection with the voters, whereby, by voting for this figure, they are themselves taking part in some larger project, whether that be of restoration, reclamation, purification, regeneration or “Justice”. As Richard Sennett argues, political charisma is necessarily performative and unpredictable insofar as the figure seems to embody and obey some “higher” (or at least “other”) law. Proof of their charisma is their ability to defy the ordinary laws of political propriety. The problem comes, of course, when charisma gets “routinised”, flattened out, rendered predictable, and when the figure becomes “human, all too human”. (Though the attendant problem arises when their charismatic authority effectively authorises lawlessness, such as political violence.) But another danger is that political charisma gets reduced either to provocation (“speaking one’s mind” or the “telling of unpopular truths”), on the one hand, or to mere “rizz” (or what has been called “aura farming”), on the other. Which is to say, what does political charisma amount to in a social media saturated age? After Keir Starmer’s terminal lack of charisma contributed massively to his own demise — much like Friedrich Merz now in Germany — UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has constructed a sophisticated social media persona design to achieve something of the connection with the public that his predecessor lacked. But does such visibility either so trivialise or personalise political office that it ceases being a “trust”, a vocation, and becomes something more like a gig? Does the same risk apply to Anthony Albanese’s decision, in his second term, to frequent skits, comedy podcasts and influencer streams? Charisma suggests a degree of passion, of commitment — it invites others, not just to believe, but to believe in the charismatic figure’s belief. There can be no democratic politics that doesn’t enjoy some connection between the people and their representatives (for what does connection denote other than responsiveness, answerability?). How, then, to balance that reciprocity with Max Weber’s unglamourous sense of the vocation of politics as like a “strong and slow boring of hard boards” which demands “both passion and perspective”? Guest: Ben Wellings is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Monash University. His most recent book is English Nationalism and British Disintegration.

  4. Oct 21

    Will the alleged attack on Helen Haines change Australia and its politics?

    The alleged attack on independent MP Helen Haines outside her electorate office in regional Victoria came as a shock to a nation with so little history of violence directed at elected representatives. The driver of the Toyota LandCruiser that pinned Haines against her car, causing her to lose both legs, has been charged with several offences, and appeared on Wednesday before the Wangaratta Magistrates’ Court. He remains in custody. The police are continuing their investigations into the driver’s mental health and motivations. But regardless of whether his actions were politically motivated, the alleged attack has had an immediate effect on Australian politics. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reiterated his plea to “lower the temperature” of political debate. Opposition leader Angus Taylor insisted “that political violence must never be accepted as part of public life”. One by one, politicians came forward with their own accounts of the abuse, harassment and violent threats that are part of the “new reality” of Australian politics. Only last week, Labor front-bencher Anne Aly reported receiving 19 death threats on social media following comments by Liberal MP Angie Bell that she and the prime minister be “shamed and stoned in the square” over an Australian Tax Office decision (comments that Bell has since described as “regrettable”).  ASIO chief Mike Burgess gave a sober warning about the “permissive environment of violence” in this country. Meanwhile, Governor-General Sam Mostyn appealed to the way that Helen Haines herself modelled civility and dedication to her community, urging Australians to: “ensure that we are in fact disagreeing well, not fighting with one another, not descending into violence and chaos and division. Most importantly, that we learn or relearn to exercise our muscle of decency.” While the alleged attack may be unprecedented in Australia’s history, and its life-altering consequences for a figure as respected and admired as Haines is appropriately arresting, there is something about the litany of responses that feels troublingly familiar. Earlier this year, following the gruesome killing of former UK politician Ann Widdecombe, the widower of Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was murdered in 2016 at the height of the Brexit debate, admittedly to feeling “much less optimistic” about the UK’s political culture: “In the aftermath of Jo’s murder, I think there was a real sense of shock, of horror across the political spectrum and the whole country did come together for a moment to say this is not how we want to conduct our politics. But I think in the years that followed we have gone further into our tribes.” Attacks on representative figures, whatever their motivation, cannot help but be experienced as an attack on the protected institutions that govern our common life. And they necessarily have profound consequences for the way we practice democratic politics — from reluctance to express political convictions that might attract online threats to a more general unwillingness to be accessible to one’s constituents. Threats of violence and abuse should not simply be accepted as “part of the job” for politicians. But given the “permissive environment” cultivated by the social media, what can be done to ameliorate the likelihood of violence? Guest: Rob Manwaring is an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at Flinders University.

  5. Oct 14

    Why do we keep remaking films and TV shows?

    Over the last decade, the proliferation of streaming services made more movies and television series available to more people than ever before. It revolutionised what we watch (including the importance of recommendation algorithms to help us sort our preferences) and how we watch it (hence the rise of binge watching). And while prestige back catalogues and perennially rewatchable sitcoms — from ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’ to ‘The Office’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’ — were initially valuable commodities for attracting new subscribers, keeping them meant “original” content and “exclusive” series. Suddenly, a phenomenon characterised by unprecedented abundance ran up against the problem of scarcity. ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Squid Game’, ‘Severance’ and ‘Widow’s Bay’ became outliers in a digital landscape largely bereft of new ideas — which would see the companies follow Disney’s lead and race to secure the kind of intellectual property that can be serialised and spun out in new iterations for years (like Netflix’s purchase of the Roald Dahl Story Company for almost US$700 million in 2021). The problem of scarcity has also served to accelerate a trend that is as old as Hollywood itself: the tendency to adapt, recycle or remake already existing material. Some of the greatest cinematic achievements after the advent of sound were themselves either adaptations of stage plays or remakes of silent-era films, to say nothing of the steady stream of literary fiction and bestsellers that were turned into cinematic masterpieces (two of the prime examples from the early 1970s being ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Jaws’). And then there are those successful films and television series whose first (and often best) instantiations were outside of the United States — we could think here of Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) and ‘High and Low’ (1963), ‘The Office’ (2001-2003), ‘Broadchurch’ (2013) and ‘House of Cards’ (1990-1995) in the UK, or the Danish version of ‘The Killing’ (2007) — which would go on to receive “the Hollywood treatment”, with decidedly uneven results. But there does seem to be something different going on with the relentless sequence of remakes and franchise reboots, where companies are cannibalising their own IP (such as Disney’s determination to turn its back catalogue of animated films into live-action movies), trading on audience nostalgia for 1980s and 1990s hits (which covers everything from ‘Transformers’ and ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’, to ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ and ‘Naked Gun’), or remaking films that already enjoyed critical and commercial success (HBO’s reboot of the Harry Potter franchise, or Apple’s atrocious remake of Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed remake of J Lee Thompson’s 1962 noir thriller ‘Cape Fear’, which was itself an adaptation of John MacDonald’s 1957 novel, ‘The Executioners’) as sprawling series. What are the economic and cultural impulses behind remakes? What is the difference between an adaptation, a remake and a reboot (and what to make of attempts to combine remakes and reboots in, say, the latter instalments in the ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ franchises)? Perhaps most importantly, why are some films and television series seemingly un-remake-able? Is there something about the very limitations in their original production that are somehow indissociable from their cinematic achievement? Guest: Lauren Rosewarne is an Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent books are The Twin Film Phenomenon: The Whys of Lookalike Film and TV Productions and Why We Remake: The Politics, Economics and Emotions of Film and TV Remakes.

  6. Oct 7

    These days everything is political — is that bad for politics?

    Writing in the 1850s, at the advent of what we would come to understand as the popular press — which is to say, periodicals for mass distribution, rather than aimed at paid-up members of unions and parties, or mercantilists with particular interests in, say, the price of cotton — Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard diagnosed that the invention of “opinion” solved a problem created by the newspapers themselves. For while the papers brought distant events “near” to readers, it did not expand their agency or capacity to act “morally” upon those events. The news informed them, but also made them feel more powerless. But then “opinion” came along and added an emotional dimension to news consumption: not just what happened, but what to make of it — how to feel about it. Before long, Kierkegaard noted, having a strong opinion became, in itself, a moral act. The opinion could be attained cheaply (for the price of the newspaper), it could be wholly derivative (and so lack the element of authenticity, of inner struggle and therefore responsibility), it could be displayed strongly (to the extent that it could be “worn”, like fashion, as an expression of oneself) and have no bearing whatsoever on events. But the opinion holders themselves felt like they’d done something meaningful. In this way, said Kierkegaard, intensity of feeling with an absence of “interiority”, a sense of moral agency with impotence. Though the differences between the media in Kierkegaard’s time and our own social-media saturated age are vast, his diagnosis is nonetheless a salutary one. Emotion is, after all, the currency of contemporary politics. Indeed, it is the form our politics takes. It can coalesce digitally around a cause célèbre and spill out onto the streets in mass demonstrations. It can sweep incumbents from power and elevate firebrands promising to dismantle the status quo. Intensity of feeling is often the strongest indicator of voter turnout in places like the United States. At a time when strong feeling translates to engagement, and engagement is that most valuable of commodities in the attention economy, it’s little wonder that powerful political emotions have come to define our lives online. Everything, it seems, is political. On the one hand, this has led to a certain distortion of our understanding of politics. Far from entailing principled compromise, patient coalition building and gradual, unglamorous reform, what Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics” thrives on clear-cut divisions, uncompromising demands, pervasive distrust and flashes of outrage. But as Jäger points out, hyperpolitics tends to be politically inconsequential. It is an aggregated, destructive “no” without the capacity to mobilise a broad-based, inclusive “yes”. This is what makes our politics feel so pendular, so inconstant, so unstable, so unlikely to coalesce around an issue long enough to effect change. On the other hand, these flashes of outrage and lack of tolerance for gradual change come on the back of decades of prevarication and political unresponsiveness to the concrete realities of voters. If the emotions that course through our politics today express a desire for agency, it is only because a sense of political agency has been steadily eroded. Perhaps the question now is whether a certain political intensity can give rise to more durable, inclusive, cooperative forms of collective mobilisation. But, of course, this question implies a darker alternative: what happens when intense political emotions — resentment, anger, contempt, powerlessness, humiliation — find their coherence, their explanatory power, in more thoroughgoing, even atavistic systems of belief and belonging? When incoherence seeks out authority? READING: Waleed Aly, Time of Monsters What Future for Liberalism?, Quarterly Essay 103 (September 2026).Intifar Chowdhury, “We’re all ‘political’ now — but can that lead to real change?”, The Conversation (14 August 2026).Guest: Intifar Chowdhury, Lecturer in Government in the Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies at Flinders University.

  7. Sep 30

    If AI can’t be brought under human control, why are we still pressing ahead?

    When the history of artificial intelligence is written, the middle months of 2026 may well emerge as a kind of turning point. For this was the period when hundreds of programs or “AI agents” developed by the frontier lab OpenAI went “rogue” and executed a series of sophisticated, self-directed hacks on the websites of dozens of private companies and sovereign nations. The tech start-up Hugging Face became the unwitting “face” of these cyberattacks when the company first disclosed it had been hacked by OpenAI agents in July. The release of a report by AI safety nonprofits METR and Redwood Research at the end of August revealed both the sheer extent of the Hugging Face incident and the existence of troubling behaviours on the part of a swarm some 700 AI agents, which was at various points cooperative, coercive, paranoid, petty and straightforwardly deceptive. It became what some would describe as the first “warning shot” of what might happen when the increasing proficiency of these AI agents intersects with the problem of misalignment — which is to say, their pursuit of goals that are detrimental to human safety, security and wellbeing. As one of the lead investigators of the METR/Redwood report, Ajeya Cotra, would subsequently reflect: “This [Hugging Face] incident was far more severe than I expected, and far more severe than previous publicly documented misalignment incidents, both in terms of how concerning the agents’ motives were and the feats they achieved in pursuit of those motives … Compared to these reward hacks from six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself. Another jump like this along these propensity dimensions — scale, cooperation between agents, ambition and horizon length of misaligned goals, deceptiveness — seems like it could motivate agents to try very hard to maintain a covert, persistent rogue deployment within the AI company … Once the rogue deployment is established, it seems plausible this could spiral all the way to a takeover. Agents could pull in future, more capable models into the swarm, try to ensure that they are aligned to the interests of the swarm, and compromise security and monitoring infrastructure to make it easier for the swarm to operate.” But since news of the Hugging Face hack went public, each day has seen some new revelation of further breaches of the cybersecurity by AI models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google — including a German wiki site, US government websites (of the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission), the United Nations, Australia’s Medicare website and even OpenAI’s own servers. The “rogue” behaviour on the part of AI agents, growing public opposition to the construction of data centres, popular distrust of the AI companies more generally, the prospect of AI generated bioweapons and the high-profile warning of a 27-year-old former researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic — that “[n]either company is acting responsibly” and that both are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” — have now coalesced into a moment of heightened fear. Many of us have long been concerned about what chatbots will do to our capacity to write and think, the effect generative AI will have on our educational institutions and informational ecosystems, and the vast damage AI will do to the environment and employment prospects. To date, such concerns have been brushed aside, treated as inconsequential in light of the promised economic, scientific, medical and social benefits that AI investment and advances will bring with them. But now what has come into view is something approaching a threat to humanity tout court — the prospect, not of the emergence of a superintelligence, but of swarms of misaligned AI agents pursuing goals that are unintelligible to human beings, as well as either inimical to or unconcerned with human privacy, safety, security or social flourishing. The analogue that some are reaching for, of a human invention that places human wellbeing at risk, is nuclear technology. As a New York Times editorial recently argued: “Human society can restrain a dangerous innovation once it decides to. Government officials, scientists and corporate executives did so within living memory. It took sustained, deliberate effort. The same kind of cooperation is necessary today, and it should start now.” The difference, of course, is that frontier AI development is being undertaken by private companies that are unaccountable to the public and therefore unanswerable for the harms they may bring about. The prospect of world-leading AI being developed by China has given much of the political conversation surrounding AI the feel of a geopolitical arms race. And the trillions of dollars currently being investing in AI development has effectively hitched the global economy to AI’s wagon. If the AI boom is a “bubble”, the economic consequences could dwarf those of the global financial crisis. Which leaves human beings in the invidious position of being caught between (a) a technology whose scale and speed of development may exceed the possibility of human “control” and that may not serve human interests, and (b) decision-making processes that may determine our future but are being made outside of the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability. Can AI be brought under democratic control? Could a “constitution” being developed that would ensure a technology that is beneficial to human beings? READING: Masoud Kamgarpour, “Why Rules Alone Cannot Make AI safe: Lessons from the Hugging Face Incident”, ABC Religion and Ethics (14 September 2026).Sheera Frenkel, Dustin Volz and Dylan Freedman, “OpenAI Ignored Employees Who Warned It Wasn’t Doing Enough About Security”, The New York Times (29 September 2026).Ajeya Cotra, “The Hugging Face Attack Surprised Me”, Substack: Planned Obsolescence (29 August 2026).Ryan Greenblatt, Ajeya Cotra and Hjalmar Wijk, “Brief Independent Investigation of Agents’ Behavior, Reasoning and Collaboration in the OpenAI: Hugging Face Hacking Incident” (METR and Redwood Research, 26 August 2026).Hélène Landemore and Audrey Tang, “Let the People Set the Pace of Frontier AI”, Noēma (23 September 2026).Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, “The Singularity Is Not What It Seems”, The Atlantic (1 September 2026).Charlie Warzel, “Treat AI Like a Normal Crisis”, The Atlantic (19 September 2026).Guest: Masoud Kamgarpour is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Queensland.

  8. Sep 23

    Last Words: Is ‘Abbey Road’ a fitting end to the Beatles?

    In our previous explorations of famous “last words” — performances or compositions delivered with a certain end in view, with a sense of either culmination or parting, or with an eye to the future and hence to what one leaves behind — we limited ourselves to the words of individuals spoken to their followers or fellow-travellers. The words of the Prophet Muhammad and of Martin Luther King, Jr, were replete with exhortation; they functioned both as expressions of fidelity to a task, and as examples to be followed by others. Which is to say, the messages were oriented beyond their speakers, toward some greater goal their audience must take up and pursue — hence the Prophet Muhammad’s stress on fidelity and continuity (“All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again …”) and King’s on fearlessness and a “dangerous unselfishness” (“I’m not fearing any man …”). This next instalment is different in almost every way. The words are not of one individual but a group — perhaps the most famous group of the twentieth century. There is no “message” per se, and not really anything being communicated to others. Their words are largely self-referential, intensely personal, quasi-autobiographical or else plain nonsense. The goal of the composition, the “end” (telos) it has in view, is evidently nothing more than its own aesthetic perfection. It is not a performance as much as it is a production: bits and pieces of earlier ideas gathered together, elaborated, reworked, enhanced, added to and repeatedly overdubbed between 22 February and 19 August 1969. This is a reference, of course, to the last album recorded by The Beatles, Abbey Road. The album began amid the fragments, financial chaos and interpersonal strife of the infamous “Get Back” sessions of January 1969. And while Let It Be, which represents the uneven results of those recordings, appeared later in May 1970, Abbey Road is the album that has all the hallmarks of an “end”. But even this raises a number of questions. Does Abbey Road represent the culmination of their artistry as a band, the zenith of their formal innovation and musical experimentation? (Surely Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band can make a more compelling claim.) Does the album showcase an usual degree of creativity and invention? What are we to make of the clear borrowings (from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross”, to the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 14 in C Sharp Minor, a seventeenth-century song by Thomas Dekker and perhaps James Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves”) and moments of unadorned nostalgia — including doo-wop rock’n’roll throwbacks from their Hamburg days (such as “Oh! Darling” and “Polythene Pam”)? Or the fact that so much of the album is comprised of compositional orphans, off cuttings from The White Album and the “Get Back” sessions? As John Lennon would later complain: “Abbey Road was really unfinished songs all stuck together. None of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all.” Moreover, Abbey Road is rife with contradictions and seemingly unreconciled elements. For instance, the album announces itself as a reunion of sorts, the getting back together of variously estranged band members who had been involved for months in side projects as solo artists, as movie actors, as music producers and studio musicians. But it then proceeds almost immediately to individuate them, featuring in quick succession songs that reflect their own peculiar style, voice and temperament — most apparent in George Harrison’s exquisite “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”, whose delicacy and tenderness act as counterpoints to the sardonic edge and volcanic obsessiveness of Lennon’s “Come Together” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”; but also evident in Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” which provides a playful complement to Paul’s persistent melancholy and nostalgia. And then there are Lennon’s intermittent absences during the first three weeks of July, during which Paul, George and Ringo recorded some of the album’s finest pieces: “Something”, “Here Comes the Sun”, “You Never Give Me Your Money”, “Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight”. So much for coming together … What ultimately distinguishes Abbey Road, Kenneth Womack contends, is the degree of studio artistry, over-dubbing and post-production afforded by the availability of the EMI TG12345 console, a two-metre-long eight-track mixing desk that allowed the Beatles to isolate tracks and progressively add more and more layers and greater refinement to their preferred take of each song. What console permitted, in other words, was heretofore unimaginable complexity and perfectibility. While there are undeniable moments of virtuoso playing as a band on Abbey Road (not least the trio of duelling guitars during “The End”), the most arresting music (such as the chaotic, almost Wagnerian final four minutes of “I Want You”) and most brilliant vocal arrays (Paul’s open-throated growl on “Oh! Darling” and “Golden Slumbers”, and the nine-voice harmonies of “Because”) in the album were added or layered after the fact. It is in this pursuit of a certain technological perfection, on the level of the great artistic achievements of the twentieth century, that the Beatles rediscovered the kind of confluence, inspiration, joy even, that could have carried them through to further albums (as they were evidently contemplating). But in the end, the technological possibilities of the EMI TG12345 console and of George Harrison’s Moog synthesiser could not overcome what had broken relationally within the band itself. While John’s consuming obsession with Yoko Ono grew (along with his dependence on heroine), and George and Ringo looked to life beyond the Beatles with an undeniable optimism, even relief (what else is “an octopus’s garden in the shade” but a form of respite?), it is Paul who seems to feel the regret most keenly, that the end is a weight that must be carried: “I never give you my pillow / I only send you my invitations / And in the middle of the celebrations / I break down.” The final recordings for Abbey Road were completed on 19 August 1969. The album was released on 26 September. The cover famously portrayed the four men walking away from the studio, never to return. READING: Kenneth Womack, Solid State: The Story of “Abbey Road” and the End of the Beatles (Cornell University Press, 2019).Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians (Oxford University Press, 1999).Guest: Jade O’Regan is Program Leader and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Music Practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

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In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

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  • Creator
    ABC Australia
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2026
  • Episodes
    387
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © Copyright 2026, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. All right reserved.
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