The Wire with Joel

Last week, the government announced that they’d be scrapping same-day election enrolments, alongside a number of other changes to electoral laws.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said that current electoral laws were “placing too much strain on the system” and increased the time needed for the vote count.

Earlier this week, the Climate Change Commission released its annual monitoring report on emissions reductions,  which showed that Aotearoa New Zealand was on track to meeting its first emissions budget for the period of 2022-2025, but not towards meeting future budgets around the 2050 period.

And the Greens recently launched a petition calling on Rail Minister Winston Peters to reinstate passenger rail services across the country.

For our weekly catchup with the Green party, Oto spoke with MP Ricardo Menendez-March to get the party’s take on all of these issues.

About 70,000 people are currently affected by dementia in New Zealand. Because of this, the healthcare cost of the neurological condition is around $274 million per year and is expected to double by 2050. But what if we could predict who was most at risk, years before obvious symptoms appear?

At the moment, health professionals can struggle to assess whether a person is likely to get dementia, based on reports of their memory loss and ability to function from patients and families. As a result, a $4 million project, which includes a team of experts from the University of Auckland and Singapore, has begun to create an AI tool that can identify a person’s dementia risk.

To talk about how this new AI tool would work, as well as how it might impact the future of prevention and treatment of the neurological condition, Producer Max to Dr Catherine Morgan, a senior research fellow from the University of Auckland.

The growing usage of AI deepfakes has been for a number of different reasons… Whether it’s just for fun, or to jeopardise someone’s career, these AI-generated images, videos, and voice recordings have become more accessible and easy to make.

Deepfakes have been used for financial fraud, during election campaigns to taint the reputations of mostly female candidates, and also to spread propaganda and misinformation.

However, Denmark has proposed a law to grant individuals copyright over their own face, body, and voice. Although the move has been hailed as world-leading, and a step forward to address the harms of AI deepfakes, it has drawn criticism for not being effective enough. It has also provoked concerns about the act of copyrighting one’s likeness to the same degree as intellectual/artistic property. Producer Faith spoke to Professor Alex Sims from the University of Auckland’s commercial law department about the proposition, and its effectiveness.

For Dear Science this week, our expert, Professor Allan Blackman, chats with us about an astronomical discovery, the passing of the great Tom Lehrer, and the latest estimate on your required daily step count

In our weekly catchup with the National Party’s Tom Rutherford, I ask about the government’s recent electoral reforms, and the latest Homelessness Insights report
In light of this homelessness report, I also speak with Manaaki Rangatahi spokesperson Brooke Stanley about her views on addressing homelessness in Aotearoa, as well as Dr Madeline Shelling from Ihi Research about the health impacts of housing insecurity for Māori and Pacific populations 

Finally, Faith spoke to commercial law Professor Alex Sims from the University of Auckland about the ongoing problems caused by AI deepfakes, and what Denmark is doing to tackle them.