Technology & Security Podcast with Dr Miah Hammond-Errey

On this episode of Technology & Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey is joined by Lisa Main, founder of Main Bureau and a former fellow at the Oxford Reuters Institute. What happens to a democracy when people can no longer agree on what’s real? Lisa explains why the most dangerous influence is the kind nobody can see, from faux media pages that mimic mainstream outlets to accurate content recycled without context across hundreds of Facebook pages.The conversation examines why AI chatbots and recommendation systems are opaque, breaking the traceable line between a claim and its evidence, and why trust in media institutions is in free fall. Lisa explains why we can’t fact-check our way out of the problem and makes the case for a full stack of defences: transparency in algorithms and advertising, accountable institutions and a sustainable model for quality journalism, so the burden of verification doesn’t fall on individual users. The episode closes with advice for leaders on thinking in information supply chains rather than content, and what a healthy information environment could look like in ten years.Lisa Main is a journalist with two decades in newsrooms and award-winning investigations from Sydney, Washington and the Middle East. She helped build ABC Fact Check and the ABC-produced Defending Democracy with former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and now advises executives on what happens when narratives become weapons.Lisa Main on invisible influence: how faux media and AI opacity undermine information integrity, and what leaders must do about it.

On this episode of Technology & Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey is joined by Professor Elke Schwarz, Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary University of London and author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies. When a machine helps decide who dies, who is left holding the moral responsibility? Elke explains how AI-enabled targeting acts as a cognitive prosthesis, why operators working within a 20-second decision window tend to over-trust system outputs, and how the moral friction between a decision and its consequences is being eroded.The conversation examines why "meaningful human control" has given way to a more technical logic "context-appropriate human judgment and control," and what an expanding targeting appetite means for civilians in conflict. Elke traces how venture capital's growth-driven timelines are pushing defence procurement toward speed and scale, and asks who bears the cost when defence starts to look like Silicon Valley. The episode closes on what it takes to build a more intentional, deliberate AI future, and why philosophy, ethics and social science belong in the room for security leaders, not on the margins.Elke Schwarz is Vice-Chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and a current British Academy Global Innovation Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. Her research examines the ethics of war and technology, including how venture capital dynamics are shaping military norms and defence spending.

On this episode of Technology & Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey speaks with Rohan Samaraweera, former AI and analytics lead at the Department of Home Affairs. The conversation opens with how AI conversations inside government have shifted since the arrival of ChatGPT. They discuss Hermes: how predictive analytics built for the international mail stream helped identify hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit drugs, and how they calculated the platform's broader social impact at roughly two billion dollars. They discuss why AI's return on investment so often lands on someone else's balance sheet, what Robodebt teaches government about governance and accountability, and whether Australia's new Office of AI can join up that picture across agencies.Rohan makes the case that access to frontier AI is a dependency, not an asset, and explains what genuine sovereign capability requires beyond a licence or a locally built data centre — drawing on his own experience at ASD and Home Affairs reducing reliance on contractors and vendors. He and Miah cover the diffusion of power between states and multinational technology companies, the opportunity for Australia to build small, reliable, high-trust AI systems rather than compete at the frontier, and what the country needs to invest in now to close the gap with allies. The conversation closes with why human expertise remains indispensable to AI deployment, illustrated by a striking anecdote from an international mail centre, and Rohan's take on the "one yes versus one no" problem facing anyone trying to innovate from inside a large institution.Rohan Samaraweera was the enterprise AI and analytics lead at the Department of Home Affairs, and a 16-year veteran of the Australian Signals Directorate. He recently founded Emrest AI and spent a year at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center researching AI and national security.

On this episode of Technology & Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey speaks with Professor Jon Whittle, founding CEO of Goldilocks AI and professor at the University of Melbourne's Institute for Digital Innovation and AI. With nearly 30 years in AI spanning a technical lead role at NASA, founding the National AI Centre, and five years leading CSIRO's Data61, Jon brings a long view and the practical experience of having worked on these questions from inside government, research, and industry. The conversation opens with what AI sovereignty actually means across the full stack, from data centres and foundation models through to inference, applications and responsible AI, and why focusing only on data storage creates a false sense of security.The conversation moves to the economic and geopolitical case for Australia building its own foundation models, why the argument that we are too small and too far behind deserves more scrutiny, and how being cut off from models like Fable has made that conversation more urgent. Jon and Miah discuss the gap between personal productivity gains from AI and the organisational productivity gains that remain elusive, the dimensions that actually determine enterprise AI success (most of which have nothing to do with technology), and the leadership anti-patterns holding Australian companies back. This episode also covers the rise of Chinese models, the risk of ‘Uberization’ of the Australian economy, what meaningful AI oversight requires from directors and boards, and why the conversation Jon hopes we are not still having in five years is the one we are having right now. Professor Jon Whittle is founding CEO of Goldilocks AI, professor at the University of Melbourne, and author of AI for Business. He is a former director of CSIRO's Data61 and founder of the National AI Centre.

On this episode of Technology & Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey is joined by Nicolas Miailhe, expert at the intersections of AI Safety and governance. Velocity shock refers to the gap between how fast frontier AI is being deployed and how slowly the institutions designed to govern it are moving. This episode explores what meaningful sovereignty is and what it means across the AI stack, the reorganisation of alliances now two dominant AI powers have solidified, and what it means for middle powers including Australia, Canada and the EU.The conversation covers why rigorous evaluation of frontier AI remains scientifically unsolved, why voluntary safety frameworks from labs are insufficient under competitive pressure and practical steps toward closing the technology use and governance gap. Nicolas Miailhe is co-founder of AI Safety Connect, CEO of Prism Eval, and former founding CEO of The Future Society. He is an AI expert for the OECD and UNESCO's AI ethics group.

Cybersecurity is often framed as a technology problem. Andrew Reeves argues it is fundamentally a human one. Dr Miah Hammond-Errey sits down with Dr Andrew Reeves, Deputy Director of UNSW's Institute for Cyber, registered organisational psychologist and cybersecurity leader, to examine what psychology reveals about attack, defence and victimhood in cybersecurity. From the power of cyber deception, to why security awareness training can backfire, to what cognitive load means for the people defending our networks, this is a conversation about the human factors that determine whether cybersecurity actually works.Andrew and Miah discuss the collaborative research project between UNSW's Institute for Cyber and Strat Futures, mapping the cybersecurity implications of emerging technologies in Australia over the next two to five years. Andrew shares what the data is revealing about the convergence of AI, biotechnology and brain-computer interfaces, why the most critical developments will come from how technologies interact rather than any single breakthrough, and what the tension between sovereign capability and international collaboration means for Australian organisations. They also discuss cyber security lessons from the golden age of piracy, the psychology of leadership under fatigue, and what forest bathing has to do with making better decisions.

On this episode of Technology & Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey is joined by Aurélie Jacquet, Chair of Australia's ISO AI Standards Committee, OECD AI expert, and advisor to some of the world's most influential organisations. Deploying AI responsibly takes far more than a good policy and this episode examines what responsible implementation actually demands. This discussion draws on lessons from capital markets, privacy law, international standards work and fortune 500 companies. Aurélie brings rare breadth to questions that matter; how organisations can move from AI ethics commitments to genuine controls, why scaling without governance is scaling risk, and what the AI conversation Australia will regret not having had today. Aurélie Jacquet is the CEO of Ethical AI Consulting, Chair of Australia's ISO AI Standards Committee and an OECD AI expert.

In this episode of Technology & Security, Dr. Miah Hammond-Errey is joined by cyber security and governance leader Min Livanidis. They discuss what resilience really means in an AI-enabled environment and how to reframe the conversation: AI risk is often a governance question. From identity and access management to data controls and shared responsibility models, the fundamentals of cyber security remain vital. While new forms of AI introduce probabilistic and agentic risks that require different safety considerations, the scaffolding of resilience—clear governance, structured risk management and technical literacy—has not changed.The conversation reinforces the need for fundamental security controls during technological acceleration. Most successful cyber incidents still exploit basic weaknesses, not advanced AI capabilities. At the same time, AI is amplifying both defensive tools and human vulnerabilities, particularly through scams, impersonation and disinformation. Great security is not expecting perfect human decision-making but designing systems that reduce cognitive load and embed security by design. Ultimately, resilience depends less on hype and more on discipline: clarity of purpose, investment in people, and the consistent application of fundamentals. Her start in intelligence gave Livanidis insight into elements of leadership including curiosity, diversity and how to create a tech capable workforce. Min Livanidis is a cyber security, risk, and governance expert, currently Chief Security Advisor for Public Sector at Microsoft, Chair of the UNSW Institute for Cyber External Advisory Board, Co-Chair of Home Affairs’ Resilience Expert Advisory Group, and a former intelligence officer with experience across government and industry. Resources mentioned: Journal Article: Big data, emerging technologies and the characteristics of ‘good intelligence’: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/02684527.2023.2287255 // https://miahhe.com/downloads Cognitive Edge podcast: https://share.transistor.fm/s/cfcd90d1

In this episode of Technology & Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey is joined by Major General Mick Ryan to examine how emerging technologies are reshaping war, alliances, and societies at a moment of profound global uncertainty. Ryan argues that the post-World War II order has ended, leaving democracies in an interregnum characterised by growing chaos. Against this backdrop, technology—from AI and autonomous systems to information and cognitive warfare—is not removing friction from conflict, but accelerating it, widening its surface area, and increasing the consequences of strategic misjudgement.Drawing on his recent work, Ryan explores lessons from Ukraine as a laboratory for contemporary conflict, emphasising that the most transformative shift is not drones or AI, but the speed at which societies and institutions can learn and adapt. This episode examines the changing role of alliances, the tension between values and interests, the risks of over-reliance on technology without organisational reform, and the ethical limits of AI in decision-making. The conversation concludes with an assessment of national resilience—economic, cyber, physical, and societal—and the need for clearer public conversations about risk, preparedness, and the responsibilities of citizenship in an increasingly contested world.Major General Mick Ryan (Ret’d) is a former senior Australian Army commander and leading analyst of war, strategy, and emerging technologies, currently a Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute and Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

In this episode of the Technology & Security podcast, host Dr. Miah Hammond-Errey is joined by Kate Carruthers. Kate is currently the head of data analytics and AI at the Australian Institute of Company Directors. She shares her journey from defending Westfield against state and non-state cyber attacks to leading UNSW's enterprise data, AI, and cybersecurity efforts, including delivering the university's first production AI system in 2019 and re-architecting its cloud data platform for AI and ML. She notes boardrooms are evolving from basic cyber literacy to probing AI risks like models, data, and risk registers.  Carruthers outlines some real-world examples, such as UNSW’s enterprise AI program, including a machine learning model that predicted which students were likely to fail a course, with 95%+ accuracy, so the university could design careful, humane intervention protocols to reduce self-harm risk. She argues that while frontier models like OpenAI and Gemini have a place, their compute costs, water intensity and general-purpose design make them poorly suited to some business problems, and that the future lies in smaller, industry-specific models trained on highly relevant data. The conversation covers the rise of agentic AI coding tools, the risk of deskilling junior developers, and the need for diverse, product-focused teams to translate technical systems into workable human processes.​ On security, she prioritizes CIA triad integrity over confidentiality, warning of data alterations in cars, medical devices, and government systems via poisoning or underinvestment in encryption. Carruthers urges Australian AI sovereignty—opting for open-source like Databricks over proprietary stacks—amid US-China model contrasts and outage risks from providers like AWS or CrowdStrike. Throughout, she encourages leaders not just to read about AI but to use multiple systems themselves, understand their limitations as probabilistic tools in deterministic business environments, and ground every deployment in clearly defined problems, ethics, and user needs.​