The news that advocacy groups are pushing back against xAI’s Grok being used in US federal government operations caught my attention this week, and frankly, it’s got me thinking about the bigger picture here. While some might dismiss this as just another case of advocacy groups making noise about everything, I reckon there’s something more substantial worth unpacking.

The immediate reaction from many seems to be one of dismissal - after all, there are groups opposed to just about everything under the sun. But when it comes to AI systems potentially being integrated into government operations, especially one as unpredictable as Grok has proven to be, maybe we should be paying closer attention to these concerns rather than writing them off as background noise.

There’s been a lot of chatter online lately about Australia being a “wealthy country in gentle decline,” and honestly, it’s got me thinking about how we’ve managed to sleepwalk our way into some pretty serious structural problems while patting ourselves on the back for being the “lucky country.”

The irony isn’t lost on me that Donald Horne’s original “lucky country” quote was actually a criticism, not a compliment. He was calling us out for being “run mainly by second rate people who share its luck” and for lacking curiosity about the world around us. Fifty years later, and we’re still coasting on that luck while the foundations crumble beneath us.