In June, we have 3 awesome speakers lined up for you to talk about engagement in political debates, Artificial General Intelligence and if junk food impacts your brain. Our friends at Mr Wow’s Emporium will be hosting us again with cold beers and delicious food from the Burger Boys.  Be there and be square!

Tuesday, 7 June 2016
at Mr Wow’s Emporium
97b Smith Street, Fitzroy
Doors 7pm/$5

*Presentation 1
Dialogue with the disgusting
by A/Prof Sarah Maddison

Description: In public life the protection of ‘safe spaces’ is seen as a righteous aim—some views are considered too dangerous, offensive, even disgusting to be a part of our public discourse. So, for example, we have laws against hate speech, progressive organisations have campaigned for the refusal of entry visas, and activists sometimes engage in ‘no platforming’ against those whose views are deemed unfit for democratic debate. Counter this belief in the importance of safety, however, agonism suggests a way of thinking about democracy that understands conflict over competing views to be an essential political dynamic. Although the agonistic view is sometimes in tension with other democratic values, in this talk Sarah will consider the democratic risk posed by protective strategies, and suggest options for instead engaging offensive views in our political debates.

BioSarah Maddison is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her areas of research expertise include reconciliation and conflict transformation, democracy, Indigenous political culture, and social movements. In 2015 Sarah published Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation  (Routledge) based on research in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Australia, and Guatemala. Her other recent books include Black Politics (2009), Beyond White Guilt (2011), Unsettling the Settler State (co-edited with Morgan Brigg, 2011), and The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet, (co-edited with Marian Sawer 2014).

*Presentation 2
AI? Great idea! When do we start?
by Dr Colin Hales

Description:  Why has the robotic AGI technical solution not been found already? Figuring out this blindness has been harder and more fraught than the technical solution itself, which is fairly obvious once you see it. It turns out the reason we do not all have robot butlers is that we have been, for about 70 years, unknowingly inside a unique cultural anomaly in science that has systematically blinded us to the solution. The fix is more than just a technical correction. It’s part of a very rare kind of revolution in science. Colin thinks the privilege of being inside such a historic moment is very very cool.


Bio: Dr Colin Hales graduated from Monash University as an electrical engineer in 1979. He had an entire career in industry, establishing a sizable industrial automation company where he parted ways with in 2000. Colin had an opportunity to play with a lifelong fascination with AI and robots that started when little boy Colin saw the movies and TV of the 1960s. Factory automation is just big dumb robots and their real-time control systems. Colin wanted to sort out why they were so dumb, and now in a complex world, damagingly dumb. AI is currently in an explosion of successes. Despite this, and since its inception, AI and robotics has failed, and continues to fail, to create Artificial General Intelligence. AGI, not merely AI. Why? The reverse-engineering of the brain is a solution to this dilemma. Part of that involved a PhD in brain electromagnetism at Melbourne Uni. Dr Hales is now some kind of late-onset neuroscientist. He wrote a book. He’s had a smattering of other publications. Yet all Colin ever wanted to do is to solve the problem of robotic AGI. That is what started in 2001 and that is what continues today. Try as he did, academic funding of a nearly 60-year- old so-called early career post-doc with his own ideas was never going to work. So Colin now works on an alternate source of industry funding. He’s built a cognitive robotics lab for prototyping. A new kind of robot is the goal of a 5 year plan.

*Presentation 3
The Hungry (Hungry) Hippocampus
by Dr Amy Reichelt

Description:  We all know junk food is bad for us, but we continue to eat it. We are surrounded by fast food restaurants, supermarkets and cafes making it easy to access a plethora of delicious sugary, fatty treats. Food is associated with pleasure, and these processed foods are refined to hit you right in your sweet spot – your brain. Junk foods are not only tasty but can change our brains; altering how we behave and learn about the environment we live in. The memory centre of the brain – the hippocampus – is particularly vulnerable to the effects of junk foods and sugary soft drinks and becomes dysfunctional. In this talk Amy will tell you about some of the ways your banana bread / coca cola / muffin habit is impacting on your brain, and what you can do to minimise the damage.

Bio: Dr Amy Reichelt is an Australian Research Council Research Fellow and lecturer in Psychology at RMIT University. She relocated from UNSW, Sydney in March 2016, and will agree enthusiastically that Melbourne is far better than Sydney. She completed her PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience in 2011 at Cardiff University, a location that earned the title of Britain’s Wettest City. Her research seeks to explore how the brain controls our behaviour and understanding the mechanisms by which our experiences in the environment can shape our responses to events. A major focus of her research is how our modern day diets full of soft drinks and junk foods can alter our brains besides just making us overweight. Our brains not only make us want to eat more of these foods because they are damn tasty, but the high sugar and fat contents are damaging brain regions critical for forming memories and controlling behaviour. Aside from making rats obese and looking good in a lab coat, Amy enjoys “normal” things like drinking whiskey, travelling to other countries, eating brunch, going to CrossFit, attempting to touch wild animals and befriending people’s dogs.