The Future Is Arriving. Is Tumbarumba Ready?
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.
This is a free community talk for everyone in the Tumbarumba region. Whether you're curious, unsettled, or just want to understand what's going on before it catches you off guard — you belong in this room. You don't have to be a tech person. You just have to care about the future of this community.
Charlie Garrison will walk through what's actually happening, what it means for jobs, local business, and everyday life in rural and regional Australia — and what we can do about it. Not panic. Not paralysis. An honest conversation, with time for your questions.
Free entry. All welcome. Seats are limited.
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