For as long as sex has existed, people have been shamed for talking about it. To this day, kids are taught a very narrow perspective on sex education which is comprised mostly of details of erections, ejaculations, and acts of heterosexual penetration. Sex education in schools teaches kids that virginity is really important and that sexual acts often end in unwanted pregnancy. So why are our kids learning similar lessons to the kids of the 1950s? 

The subject of pleasure is conspicuously absent from most sex-ed curricula where the focus is almost exclusively on the mechanics of either procreation or avoiding STDs. But according to Associate Professor Emma Jane, it’s vital that the birds and the bees talk cover so much more than the marriage, the baby-making, the man parts, and the money shots. “More than one in five Australian women say they find the sex in their relationship unpleasurable or only moderately pleasurable," she says. Providing more nuanced, inclusive, and realistic sex ed for our offspring is important because if they don’t get this info from us, they’re going to get it from their screens. 

In less than ten minutes, or roughly the length of time it takes to put a condom on an expired Epipen, A/Prof. Jane will give you the “sex talk” that you probably should have had when you were a teen, and outlines the importance of a well-rounded sex-ed curriculum.

Emma A Jane is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts & Media at UNSW Sydney. Emma’s research focuses on the social and ethical implications of emerging technologies, and she was recognised in 2021 as being in the top 2 per cent of researchers in her field globally (based on 2020 citations) in Stanford University's researcher rankings. Prior to joining academia, Emma spent 25 years working in the print, broadcast, and electronic media, winning multiple awards for her writing and investigative reporting. Her interdisciplinary research program combines scholarship and methods from gender studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and science and technology studies. Emma’s publications and talks focus on the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental (PESTLE) causes and effects of emerging technology, and span diverse topics, including social media, cybercrime, public policy, feminism, LGBTQI+ issues, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, and children’s media. Her memoir Diagnosis Normal will be released in March 2022. 

By 2062, experts estimate that we will have created machines as intelligent as humans. Already AI has become so integrated into our everyday lives that it’s often hard to detect… from home robots to smartphones telling you the fastest route home at the press of a button. 

So what happens when those algorithms go wrong? Can AI be devious? And how can we be sure that we don’t lose the human touch when we get zeros and ones to do the work for us?

Computers can be frighteningly smart in some ways, but dangerously dim in other ways. We’ve seen plenty of examples in the news of algorithms exacerbating racial profiling, swaying election results, or increasing the spread of misinformation. “You don’t need to fear super intelligence — at least not yet — but ‘stupid’ intelligence,” Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence Toby Walsh says.

The success of AI means we can and should hand over many routine decisions to machines, but we must ensure we are vigilant in preventing unconscious bias and unintended consequences that creep unnoticed into the algorithms we create.

In less than ten minutes, or roughly the same amount of time it takes a computer to win a million games of chess, Prof. Walsh will explore how we can make sure mutant algorithms don’t go too far.

Toby Walsh is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence. He is a Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, and he also leads the Algorithmic Decision Theory group at CSIRO Data61. He was named by the Australian newspaper as a “rock star” of Australia's digital revolution. He has been elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has played a leading role at the UN and elsewhere on the campaign to ban lethal autonomous weapons (aka “killer robots”).

Toby Walsh regularly appears in the media talking about the impact of AI and robotics on society. He is passionate that limits are placed on AI to ensure the public good such as with autonomous weapons. His work has appeared in the New Scientist, American Scientist, Le Scienze, Cosmos, Technology Review, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Conversation. Toby is the author of many books including 2062: The World that AI Made and his newest book It's Alive!: Artificial Intelligence from the Logic Piano to Killer Robots will be released in March 2022.