Professor Kai Riemer joins ABC RN's Download This Show
64 gigabytes of RAM — the amount a decent gaming PC wants — cost around $300 a year ago. Today it's closer to $1,000. That's the AI infrastructure boom arriving somewhere unexpected: the bill of materials for a games console. And it's part of the story behind Microsoft cutting thousands of jobs across its gaming studios (the industry term, apparently, is "Ramageddon").
Professor Kai Riemer, Director of Sydney Executive Plus, joined host Rae Johnston and ABC games reporter Gianfranco Di Giovanni on ABC Radio National's Download This Show to trace the connections: deep cuts at legacy studios like id Software and Obsidian, the disappearance of the physical game disc, and the quiet transformation of games from products you own into services you rent — with everything that implies for sharing, preserving and paying.
The second half of the episode is heavier. The UN Secretary-General has called for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons, and Kai explains why the issue has become urgent a decade after it was first raised: cheap consumer drones, battlefield lessons from Ukraine, and vision models now good enough to select targets — though with error rates nobody can fully specify. Connect one of those predictions directly to a decision to fire, and the human judgement that once sat between them is gone.
The whole conversation runs about half an hour, and it's a model of what public discussion of technology can be: specific, sceptical and occasionally very funny. There's even a sincere moment of mourning for the game disc.
Listen to the full episode
Want to go deeper? The AI fluency sprint, with Kai as sprint leader, builds the judgement to make sense of AI's claims — and its hype — for yourself.