Category Archives: Society

End of the road for Lime?

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Earlier this month, Yarra City Council announced it was ending a 6-year trial programme for ride share e-bikes, after the incumbent commercial operator, Lime failed to meet the Council’s procurement requirements.

Despite this, Lime continues to operate elsewhere in the State of Victoria (City of Melbourne and the City of Port Phillip), and in other local government areas in Australia (Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra).

Some of the reasoning behind Yarra Council’s decision appears to echo safety concerns and public complaints regarding Lime in other cities around the world, such as London.

These issues include:

  • Riding on footpaths and in pedestrian-only zones
  • Inappropriate “parking” of ride-share vehicles
  • Joy-riding
  • Speeding
  • Tandem riding
  • Riding without helmets (a requirement in Australia)

In the case of Yarra Council, the original 1-year pilot programme had been extended or renewed unchanged since 2020. According to the Council’s website announcement and FAQs, Yarra did not receive any operating fees, and did not have the certainty and enforceability a commercial contract would have provided.

The biggest obstacle in Yarra appears to be Lime’s refusal or inability to take more responsibility for tracking and retrieving abandoned and illegally parked vehicles – which meant the Council has been picking up the cost.

If this is true, then it appears to be incredibly short-sighted behaviour on the part of Lime – and perhaps reveals a degree of obstinacy bordering on arrogance that comes with incumbency (and a degree of ubiquity).

I can’t believe that Lime cannot do a better job of tracking and retrieving its assets – if I was a shareholder, I would be concerned about this lack of financial management and poor corporate governance. If we can track our suitcases around the world with a simple e-tag, surely Lime knows where all its bikes are located at any given time, and identify which vehicles are illegally parked?

Likewise, Lime should be able to do a better job of immobilising vehicles so they cannot be used for joy-riding, or by under-age riders?

I’m sure we have all seen the social media posts of Lime bikes strewn across footpaths, dumped in waterways, or “parked” on bus shelters. Anecdotally, I’ve also seen ride share vehicles lined up outside my local pub – I get that we don’t want people to drink and drive, but should operators be implicitly encouraging intoxicated pub patrons to use their e-bikes and e-scooters instead?

I have also seen branded ride share helmets littered all over the place – I’ve even had them chucked in my garden. Most of these discarded helmets end up in landfill (as confirmed by one council street cleaner I spoke to in Melbourne’s CBD) because once they are damaged, they can’t be used again. (This also points to a lack of asset management and poor financial governance by the operators.)

There have also been increased incidents of accidents and serious injuries involving e-bikes and e-scooters. I’m not suggesting these are only caused by ride share vehicles, but there is no doubt an element of “don’t own, don’t care” when people use these short-term rental bikes. It would be illuminating to measure the percentage of accidents involving ride share vehicles (and food delivery drivers), as compared to privately-owned e-bikes and e-scooters.

I’d be interested to see more data on programme objectives, and whether or not those goals are being met. For example, a common argument in favour of the local ride share schemes is they help to reduce the number of cars on our roads – but again, anecdotally, where I live in the City of Yarra, I’ve not seen any reduction in car traffic in recent years. Other stated benefits are increased local mobility (easier to take short trips from A to B) – but Yarra is well-served by public transport (trains, trams and buses), and no-one is that far from a tram stop or train station. Another aim might be improved public health (less people using their cars) – but if these schemes result in more trips to A&E (and worse), surely that outweighs any perceived benefit?

Going forward, maybe we will see more local authorities take a similar stance to Yarra Council, or at least tighten up the operating licenses granted to ride share providers, and do more to weigh up the pros and cons of such schemes.

Next week: No More Songs

 

The cost of AI

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A variant on Moore’s law is the observation that the financial capital required to launch a new business decreases exponentially as technology gets cheaper.

Pre-internet, and using a notional geometric scale for the purposes of illustration, you might have needed $5m to found and build a new venture. The World Wide Web probably reduced that to $500k, while cloud computing brought it down to $50k. With the expansion of SaaS and API solutions, that cost might have been $5k to get going. Now, vibe coding and $500 of AI prompts can probably launch a new website, build a back end database, implement an e-commerce solution and deploy agentic AI bots to go and find your first customers.

This is a great outcome if measured by a lower barrier to market entry. It also enables founders to “fail fast, fail cheap”, and incentivises innovation by financially de-risking the process.

But even though the cost of AI tools is extraordinarily cheap in terms of the computing and processing power they deliver, there is a huge cost to our rapid adoption of AI that needs to be accounted for.

First, we are seeing corporate lay-offs among tech firms and parts of the service industry that no longer need as many human bodies and minds to operate at scale. So there is a human, economic and societal cost of increased un(der)employment.

Second, traditional skills and expertise are being hugely reduced in perceived value – why pay a graphic artist to design an image when I can use dall-e for free?

Third, as more and more creative tasks are being outsourced or delegated to AI (“create a short story about an F1 race in the style of Ernest Hemingway”) we risk losing our own innate creativity (that comes with experimentation, curiosity, play and reflection). This in turn devalues the creative process itself (thanks to cheaper, AI-enabled production).

Fourth, AI (and the Large Language Models on which it is trained) has no great respect for intellectual property. It doesn’t recognise boundaries between copyright material, content that is subject to creative commons, content that is in the public domain, and content which is publicly available. Again, if copyright owners and original content creators are not recognised or compensated for their work, why would anyone aspire to creating anything original?

Finally, there is the cost of resources (energy, water, rare earth metals) needed to maintain huge AI processing plants and data centres. (But at least this demand is accelerating the development of renewable energy.)

A few years ago, I posted a blog about the importance of the human factor, in the face of technological progress brought by automation and AI. I still remain cautiously optimistic that AI will bring huge benefits, despite the rampant growth of AI in the three years since I wrote that piece. But we are currently in an awkward and comfortable transition phase. If more jobs are lost to AI, and if human-led output is increasingly devalued, perhaps we will need to revisit the debate about Universal Basic Income and other policies to facilitate this transition.

Next week: Music, music everywhere…. and none of it very memorable 

Time for age limits on religion?

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As more countries consider following Australia’s lead in banning or restricting children and young people from accessing social media, I wonder why we don’t similarly consider a ban on religion for anyone under 16? Surely, if we want to protect our children from the potential harm caused by social media, we should include religious faith as having similar harmful effects on young minds.

I appreciate this may sound deliberately contentious, but bear with me. I come to this suggestion from a number of perspectives.

First, my own position on “god” and faith-based beliefs sits somewhere between agnosticism and atheism. For those who say “you’re just sitting on the fence” or “you’re hedging your bets”, I would reply I simply don’t have that die-hard certainty in theological beliefs or conviction of faith that is usually required (if not enforced) by most religions and cults. I have no problem with people practising or adhering to their own faiths. But in liberal, progressive, pluralistic and democratic societies the right to “freedom of religion” is balanced with the right to “freedom from religion”. Meaning I shouldn’t be disadvantaged or persecuted solely for my choice of a specific religion, or my choice of no religion. I would also side with the humanists and secularists who argue that your freedom to exercise your religion should not cause any harm to others, especially not to those who do not follow your particular persuasion. And your religious practices and preferences certainly shouldn’t curb my individual rights to things like legal birth control, divorce, gender equality etc. I would also argue that an individual’s freedom to choose their own religion (not have it imposed at birth as if it formed part of our DNA) should be based on an informed, independent and personal decision. Just as we have age limits for voting, driving, marriage and sexual relations, I think we should have minimum age limits for religious membership and participation.

Second, many of my ancestors were subjected to religious persecution. My French ancestors were protestants (Huguenots) and were effectively driven out of France; my Irish ancestors were catholics, and endured the strictures of British colonialism. Both suffered due to religious sectarianism – so I have little time for religious practices that foster discrimination, forced conversion or violence born of intolerance, fanaticism, extremism and fundamentalism. I certainly don’t want to live under theocratic rule!

Third, I spent much of my A-Level History course studying the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. From a political and cultural perspective, it is an extremely important period, and many of the key events and outcomes are echoed in today’s geo-political landscape. For example, Henry VIII’s break with Rome can be seen as the first Brexit; while vernacular translations of the bible and other religious texts (rather than the Latin versions imposed by the Catholic Church) were important for helping to spread literacy, and they have helped to inform notions of self-determination by nation states and ethnic minorities.

Fourth, those A-Level studies also exposed much of the nonsense that is spouted in the name of religion, for example: theological disputes around predestination and transubstantiation, and debates about how many angels can fit on the head of a needle. Much earlier in my life, I was a member of a church choir. I recall, aged 7 or 8, having to read out aloud during Sunday services some passages from the bible which I just didn’t understand (and which no-one in church could rationally explain). Yet, because they represented the “word of god”, they had to be true, and I was required to believe them, otherwise I was going to burn in hell. That’s surely not how we should be educating children, is it?

If we do want to teach ideas about religion to children under the age of 16, perhaps we need a different approach. While schools may offer classes in comparative religion, it’s largely under the auspices of religious education or religious instruction (or maybe social studies). Whereas, I think sacred texts should be taught as literature (fiction or poetry), and open to the same level of critical analysis applied to Shakespeare, Jane Austen or George Orwell. Maybe these texts could be studied and critiqued in philosophy classes, but certainly not taught as part of science or history subjects!

The current public debate around “religious freedom” is often tied up in torturous arguments about protected beliefs, freedom of speech, and the “right” to cause offence against someone’s personal beliefs. Increasingly, taking a secular or non-sectarian stance against religious overbearance (whether in the form of Islamic Jihadism, Christian Nationalism, Zionism, Hindu Nationalism or Buddhist ethno-nationalism) is dismissed and even prosecuted as evidence of racism, xenophobia, religious discrimination or incitement to violence. And as for the Federal government’s back-flip on launching a Royal Commission in the aftermath of the Bondi massacre, I think the Prime Minister was probably right to change his mind about holding an enquiry, but got it totally wrong by framing it in the context of only one form of religion. Instead, he should have made it a broader examination of religious extremism and sectarian intolerance of all kinds, and the harm this is having on society and our personal freedoms.

Next week: The cost of AI

And the public gets what the public wants?*

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Another Australian General Election comes and goes – although with a mere 3 years between federal polls, our politicians and their parties seem to be in constant campaign mode. Certainly, the formal election campaign lacked any significant new policies, so it felt like the leadership “debates” were simply a continuation of the stale language, petty point-scoring and tedious soundbites we hear day in, day out.

Cue the constant and familiar references to crises in housing, the cost of living and climate change. Both major parties tried to build platforms promising financial incentives for first-time home owners, with policies that were expensive, ill-conceived (albeit well intentioned), and with little regard for the consequences on the housing market or the broader economy. There was a failed attempt to have an informed debate about nuclear power, and tons of the usual pork-barrelling for pet industries and favoured constituencies. Even a major credit rating agency suggested that the Commonwealth’s coveted AAA status could be at risk as a result of all the campaign largesse. And of course, any lowering of the AAA rating would likely see an increase in interest rates, which would largely defeat the object of the first-time home owner policies.

At the time of writing, the Australian Labor Party has retained power with a significantly increased parliamentary majority, based on the projected number of seats it will win. But while the seats total may look like a landslide, it’s clear that a significant portion of the electorate voted tactically to either: a) keep the Liberal Coalition out of power; b) increase the chance of a minority Government and/or hung Parliament; or c) maintain the current status quo in a turbulent and uncertain world.

Based on the counts so far, both the ALP and Liberals have each only managed to garner about one-third of the total primary votes (4,678,061 – 34.81% and 4,315,961 – 32.1% respectively). While the national swing to Labor was around 2.3% since 2022 (with the Liberals seeing an opposite swing of -3.6%), this is enough to give them a large majority in the House of Representatives, thanks to the preferential voting system.

By contrast, in 2022, the ALP secured fewer primary votes than the Liberals (4,776,030 – 32.58% and 5,233,334 – 35.70% respectively), but managed to secure government with a slim majority. The point is, that the two major parties combined face a continued decline in their share of the primary vote. Given the performances by the Greens and Independents in recent elections, there could be a case for adjusting the current system of preferences to include a weighting or allocation based on the total primary vote by party. This might seem fairer in those constituencies with very marginal results, or where parties draw a significant share of primary votes nationally, but not enough to win (m)any seats, even with preferences. But given that most independent candidates (by their very nature) are not affiliated to any party, and usually focus on local issues (and often on single policy platforms), that allocation would be very difficult to calculate on a federal scale.

Meanwhile, it felt like the number of early-voting facilities was limited compared to previous elections, and there was little or no promotion of postal vote applications. This could have been due to the relatively short campaign period (although it always feels much longer…) combined with the large number of public holidays during that time. Cynics might suggest that this was a deliberate tactic by the incumbent government as early voting and postal votes are traditionally considered to favour the Liberal Coalition. I can’t find any compelling evidence for this theory. Partly, I suspect, because the major parties recognise that undecided, wavering and swing voters make a huge difference to the final results, so encouraging people to cast their ballot on election day helps them in that regard, even though more and more voters opt to vote before the big day itself. Whether the promise of an election sausage is sufficient incentive, I’d rather not speculate!

I experienced a huge feeling of disengagement with this latest election, mainly because I didn’t identify with any policies, parties or candidates that I could really get behind. When it came to voting for the Senate, I couldn’t see 6 parties (above the line) let alone 12 candidates (below the line) that I considered deserving of my vote. But we are forced to express our preferences for a minimum number of parties/candidates, hence the candidate lists are usually very long. I always think the large Senate voting slips are problematic, especially if you want to complete the full “below the line” choices, as we don’t really know what preference deals have been done behind the scenes.

Like many voters, I had issues with the unsolicited text messages I received, on behalf of candidates and/or parties. Apart from not disclosing how they obtained my number, some of the SMS did not carry the relevant authorisation statement; the sender’s number was anonymous (presumably they use automated systems); and blocking the sender had little or no effect – they still kept sending them! Since political parties are deliberately exempt from complying with laws against spam and invasion of privacy, the Australian Electoral Commission is relatively powerless to act. Presumably it’s in the parties’ interests to keep the status quo?

I was also surprised that polling stations still use a paper-based system to tick off who has turned up to vote. (I was using the same system when I was a polling clerk back in the 1980s in London.) Although the polling officers are required to ask me if I have already voted in another location, there is no immediate way to cross-check the electoral rolls. Surely an electronic tracking system would be a better solution? And on that note, I’ll end with a suggestion that it’s about time we put voter registration, voting and campaign donations on a blockchain to support voter ID and verification with privacy, secure proof of polling and force campaign funding transparency… as well as a speedier vote count!

*(with apologies to The Jam)