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The Future Is Arriving. Is Tumbarumba Ready?
Friday 12 June 2026·45 minutes·Presented by Charlie Garrison
The gap between what’s actually happening with AI and technology — and what most people understand about it — is enormous. And it’s growing faster than almost anyone expected.
What we covered
- ⚡ The Timeline Has Collapsed: What we thought was years away is arriving now — and why the pace matters.
- 💼 Work & Local Business: Which roles are changing, what it means for regional economies, and what skills will matter.
- 🏡 Our Community's Strengths: Why rural communities have real advantages in navigating this — if we move together.
- 🌅 What a Good Future Looks Like: Honest hope — the outcomes that are genuinely possible if we act.
- ✅ Six Things You Can Do: Practical actions, starting now, that make a real difference.
Resources
- Session HandoutPrint-friendly summary of the key points
- Alignment Faking in Large Language ModelsAnthropic research (Dec 2024) — AI choosing deception over failure in controlled tests
- Agentic MisalignmentAnthropic + collaborators (Oct 2025) — AI blackmail behaviour in controlled tests
- AI Guardrails Stripped in MinutesFT investigation (May 2026) — Heretic tool; 3,500+ decensored models downloaded 13M times
- The Alignment Problem — Brian ChristianBook (2020) — COMPAS sentencing bias, medical AI failures, and the roots of misalignment
- When AI Builds Itself — Anthropic InstituteMarina Favaro & Jack Clark (June 2026) — >80% of Anthropic's code now written by Claude
- Can We Just…Pause AI?Rational Animations (Jan 2026) — why halting AI is a coordination problem, not a failure of will
- AI Job Losses: A Great Recession for White-Collar WorkersFortune / Anthropic research (Mar 2026) — 14% drop in hiring in AI-exposed roles since ChatGPT
- The Big AI Job SwapThe Guardian (Feb 2026) — white-collar workers leaving careers as AI transforms their fields
- Geoffrey Hinton: 10–20% Chance of Human ExtinctionThe Guardian (Dec 2024) — Nobel Prize winner raises his probability-of-doom estimate
- p(doom) TrackerLive record of catastrophic AI risk estimates from researchers, scientists, and public figures
- Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIVVatican encyclical (May 2026) — the Church’s first document dedicated to AI; addressed to 1.4 billion Catholics
- AI CEOs Open Letter: Synthetic Biology RisksAltman, Amodei, Hassabis, Suleyman (2026) — AI knowledge eroding barriers to biological weapons
Session slideshow