This week on the show is Aubrey Blanche. Aubrey is somewhat of a professional enigma - she’s lived multiple careers already, from time inside big tech and early stage investing, and now she’s at the Ethics Centre, while she’s an expert in human resources, diversity and inclusion and ethical AI. Aubrey has also established one of Australia’s largest regular AI newsletters and her writing has been featured in publications like Wired, The Wall Street Journal and Australian Financial Review.

I wanted to get Aubrey on the show to chat about her myriad professional and personal experiences, to try and chart a course to understand the thread that runs through the life of someone with such diverse perspectives and experiences, but also to chat about her work in recent years in advising organisations with their own artificial intelligence deployment and implementation. If any organisation in Australia who may have a clue how to do this - and not focussing on the false flag of productivity and hooked by the marketing spin of large language model AI - it’d be The Ethics Centre, an organisation I have a huge regard for. Aubrey’s work there, and her background more broadly, struck me as resonate considering it was framed as requiring design with the affected people, to question its value and understand how it could be useful, but also that conscientious objection and the right to opt out is a legitimate option too.

So this is a conversation that I hope does justice to Aubrey’s personality and spirit - it traverses everything from pain and trauma to healthy relationships and the need to undertake ongoing honest self appraisal, this moment of deranged LLM AI tech bro bubblemaxxing and how organisations fixated on using it for short term productivitymaxxing benefits are likely in for a rocky future. Fundamentally though, this is a conversation about values and what we value - from ourselves in this moment of job uncertainty to how we uphold the dignity of humanity to reprise a spirit of custodianship and responsibility for life more broadly.

Some extra reading relevant to this episode from our friends at Altiorem.

AI systems at work: A changing psychosocial work environment

AI-driven productivity gains enable more CO₂ emissions than they avoid in a global energy–economy model

Top 10 principles for ethical artificial intelligence

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