Your say: week beginning August 11

Every day, we publish a selection of your emails in our newsletter. We’d love to hear from you, you can email us at yoursay@theconversation.edu.au

Monday August 11

Genocide?

“I would be very interested in the views of the legal and genocide experts as to whether they consider the massacre by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent torture and murder of the hostages they captured to be genocide too? Given the very broad definition of the word ‘genocide’, I’m also interested in whether there is now another specific term for the intentional systematic killing of a group of people – for example, by rounding them up and forcing them into gas chambers?”

Pnina Levine, Deputy Head of Curtin University Law School

AI slaves

“Artificial intelligence looks set to take over all of the higher paid ‘intelligent’ financial, IT and accounting jobs, leaving humans to become the ‘slaves’ working as cleaners, personal carers and hospitality workers. This doesn’t encourage kids at school to study hard. What’s the point of going to university if your job is just going to be taken over by AI?”

Kylie Freak

Artificial Unintelligence

“Your recent fascination with so-called ‘AI’ is one-sided and starry-eyed. This technology is NOT intelligent – it can only rehash what it has seen – and is radically contributing to declines both in human intelligence and the possibility for a healthy climate.”

Clifford Heath

Tuesday August 12

Muddying the waters

“I’m disappointed that you chose to publish the recent comment by academic Pnina Levine (above, August 11). It undermines genuine concern over the genocide currently taking place in Gaza — a matter that is, in fact, under consideration by the International Court of Justice.”

Samantha Altmann

Save the AND

“The Australian National Dictionary is a cultural icon. It must continue in perpetuity. Recording and disseminating the evolution of our language is integral to who we were, who we are, and who we may become. Things must be desperate at the ANU to target the AND. Are there no other savings to be had such as reducing senior executive salaries by 10% or reducing the extent of fixtures and fittings in planned new capital works?”

Dr John Halsey, Emeritus Professor, Flinders University

Embracing…

“Watching our new tourism ad, I cannot fathom why many Australians refuse to acknowledge and share that the world’s oldest living culture is here. What about Indigenous fashion and music? What about ancient fish traps and storytelling in the stars? The colour, the vibrance and the open hearts are ready and we need to proudly embrace them as part of our welcome to visitors.”

Val Adamson

Wednesday August 13

Open minds

“Your article about a million-year-old stone tool says Homo erectus arrived in Sulawesi ‘by accident’ and that it’s unlikely they had the ‘cognitive ability to develop watercraft capable of making sea voyages’. This reminds me of the first Europeans who encountered the Great Zimbabwe Ruins in the late 19th century who concluded that an unknown ‘superior’ people must have occupied the area because Africans could not have built such a complex – only to later realise that Africans did indeed have the ability to conceive of and build such a complex. Any interpretive science (including my own field of geology) requires an open mind rather than a mind blinkered by preconceived notions and unfounded assumptions.”

Dr Phillip Plummer, Visiting Research Fellow, Geology, Adelaide University