There’s a particular kind of media week where the volume of the coverage is inversely proportional to how much the average person is actually affected. This was one of those weeks.

Labor’s proposal to increase tax on the top one per cent. Specifically, about $400,000 more over a lifetime for those earners. The coverage has been wall to wall. The op-eds have been breathless. You’d think they’d announced a forced organ harvest program.

There’s something deeply exhausting about Pauline Hanson still being a thing. I was in high school when she first crawled out of her Ipswich fish and chip shop and onto the national political stage, and here we are, decades later, still talking about her. People I went to uni with have had entire careers, raised kids, and retired, and Pauline Hanson is still out there, microphone in hand, telling us she represents “everyday Australians.”

There’s a story doing the rounds this week that probably shouldn’t surprise anyone paying attention, but here we are. Someone apparently discussed “Luigi-ing” tech CEOs in an online chat — a reference that’s become grimly shorthand since the healthcare CEO shooting in the US late last year. The suspect in a plot targeting Sam Altman has been arrested, and the internet has responded with… well, not exactly an outpouring of sympathy for the OpenAI boss.

Geoffrey Hinton’s latest warning about AI making “a few people much richer and most people poorer” has been bouncing around in my head for days now. The man who helped birth modern AI is essentially telling us we’ve created a monster that’s going to eat our economic lunch. And honestly? Looking at the conversations swirling around this topic, I’m starting to think he might be understating the problem.

What strikes me most about the online discussions is how many people see this coming and feel utterly powerless to stop it. Someone pointed out that Hinton has upgraded from “AI will kill us all” to “AI will make us all destitute” – which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly cause for celebration. Poverty kills people too, just more slowly and with less dramatic headlines.

Been thinking a lot about Sam Altman’s latest blog post after stumbling across the discussion online. The Gentle Singularity - what a perfectly Silicon Valley way to package the complete transformation of human existence, right? Like calling a Category 5 hurricane a “weather event with enhanced precipitation opportunities.”

The most telling part of the whole piece wasn’t even Altman’s writing, but the reaction to it. Someone pointed out that this might be the last blog post he writes without AI assistance, which is both fascinating and slightly terrifying. Here we are, watching the CEO of OpenAI transition from human writer to human-AI hybrid in real time, and he’s treating it like switching from a typewriter to a word processor.