The tenth in the series of Ideas@theHouse events — joint presentations of Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC, Governor of New South Wales, and the Royal Society of New South Wales — was held on the evening of Wednesday 18 July 2024 in the Ballroom of Government House Sydney.

Ms Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, took the face-to-face and online audiences on a journey of the social and technical evolution of the World Wide Web in an engaging presentation titled ‘W x 3 — The World Wide Web (we weaved)‘. Her presentation began with the halcyon early days of a completely free and open Internet in which governments had no place in cyberspace, to today and what went wrong along the way, when amazing benefits come at enormous costs in the absence of regulation. She referred to ‘bottom line’ considerations leading tech giants to strive to be first-to-market, outweighing any consideration that their products and services be ‘safe’ — often disregarding their own in-house rules that would inhibit the transmission of misinformation and disinformation, irrespective of the costs to individuals and humankind more broadly.

Ms Inman Grant spoke of the “age of digital divineness” and the consequent threats to democratic ideas and institutions, urging that past mistakes should be learned from and that not only should safeguards be put in place but that governments should require the tech industry to ensure that that the fundamental building blocks are safer by design. She noted that 2023 was a pivotal year that led numerous governments around the world to finally take notice, not only of the long-term existential threats posed by generative artificial intelligence but also of current online harms with which society is already grappling, by initiating the implementation of regulatory frameworks and the introduction of online regulators, such as Australia has had for some time.

A recording of his presentation is now available on the Society’s YouTube channel and a gallery of images from that occasion is available from the preceding link.