A simultaneously familiar and slightly terrifying robot dog wanders through the audience of a session at the Sydney edition of South by South West. On stage, the panellists opine about a future increasingly defined by artificial intelligence and automation. “It’s going to get much, much more significant,” says Ed Santow, the former human rights commissioner and current director of policy and governance at the UTS Human Technology Institute. “And for many people that will be a good thing, [but] for a lot of people it’ll be really, really hard.” AI has become ubiquitous in the past year, and at an event like SXSW it’s inescapable, but not everyone is convinced it’s a game-changer. Charlie Brooker, the creator of the Netflix series Black Mirror who is at least partially responsible for making robot dogs so terrifying, says he found AI “boring and derivative” when he asked ChatGPT to write an episode of the hit show about technology gone wrong. Charlie Brooker at SXSW in Sydney. Photograph: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images for SXSW Sydney “It’s just emulating something. …

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