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Drones Melbourne

Discover local drone enthusiasts in Melbourne

Let's build: A.I/ML/Robots using Google Colab and Aiko Services

Let's build: A.I/ML/Robots using Google Colab and Aiko Services

Mon, Jun 8, 9:00 AM
From AI + ML + Robots
4.8

**Aim:** Create A.I / Machine Learning projects ... optionally with Robots **Web-site: [https://ai-ml-robots.github.io](https://ai-ml-robots.github.io)** **Discussions: [https://tinyurl.com/ai-ml-robots-discussions](https://tinyurl.com/ai-ml-robots-discussions)** **Pre-meeting catch-up:** 6:00 pm at **[Grill'd Burgers, 127-133 Swan St, Richmond](https://maps.app.goo.gl/N6QBydEVo1JW6ctn9)** ... great opportunity for casual discussion and especially for newcomers to get acquainted with the group ***(our table will have orange traffic cones)*** **Activity:** Using [Google Colab](https://colab.google) and [Aiko Services](https://github.com/geekscape/aiko_services), we will build a project ... where the details will be provided / updated a couple of weeks prior to the meet-up date. **Agenda:** **7:00 pm sharp at 415 Church Street, Richmond** \- 7:00 pm ML software "guided" build session using Google Colab \- 9:30 pm Projects show and tell: ad\-hoc for anyone to contribute \- 9:45 pm Tidy up room \- 10:00 pm Hard stop \! **Please bring a laptop, as these are hands-on build sessions.** Just think of a laptop as a robot without wheels or legs ! If you are a newcomer to Machine Learning or robotics, you are still very welcome. If you do have a robot, please bring it along !

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24 attendees
Welcome to the next 2026 AWS Melbourne Well-Architected User Group Meetup!

Welcome to the next 2026 AWS Melbourne Well-Architected User Group Meetup!

Wed, Jun 17, 7:30 AM
From AWS Melbourne Well-Architected User Group
4.6

Hi Architects, Welcome to our next AWS Melbourne Well-Architected User Group Meetup for 2026, including more exceptional speakers and topics! :-D At each meetup we covered off various pillars in detail, best-practices and insights from industry leaders that specialise in the Well-Architected Framework. And giving away drones, of course. Lots of drones. **Please also note that AWS Security now requests a company name and company email where it is available. If you are a student, please list your institution and your student email address at that institution 👍** We’ll be updating throughout the month with more speakers and our speakers so far this month include: * **Mike Taylor, Solution Architect, TiDB** **Well-Architected Data Foundations for Agentic AI: Lessons from Kimi and Manus** As AI transitions from static prompts to autonomous, action-oriented agents, traditional data architectures often break down under the pressure of unpredictable scaling and relentless write workloads. We will explore the infrastructure of two massive-scale AI platforms, Kimi and Manus, through the lens of the well-architected framework. * **Mystery Speaker** **Well-Architecting AWS Marketplace** In this talk we will dive deep into the good, the bad and the ugly of AWS Marketplace, how to maximise traction and minimise the gotchas. This month's menu will include: * Pizzas * Beer: Nastro Azzurro * Wine: Big and red 🤤 NB: Please check in up the stairs from the ground floor to the Mezzanine Level. So come join us at 5:30 for a 6pm **SHARP** start, followed by beer, wine, pizza and friendly networking after our talks :-) (Please note that by registering to attend you agree to your details being shared as and where required with Amazon Web Services and AWS Well-Architected User Group partners)

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77 attendees
Build Production-Ready AI Agents on AWS with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Build Production-Ready AI Agents on AWS with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Wed, Jun 10, 8:00 AM
From Melbourne AWS Programming and Tools Meetup
4.7

In this hands-on workshop, you'll go from zero to a fully deployed multi-agent system on AWS — no prior AgentCore experience needed. We'll build a real multi-agent research assistant, step by step: \- Deploy your first AI agent using the Strands framework and BedrockAgentCoreApp — running in the cloud in minutes \- Orchestrate multiple agents with the A2A \(Agent\-to\-Agent\) protocol\, a cloud\-agnostic standard that lets agents discover and call each other securely via IAM \- Connect external tools — wire in PubMed via MCP Gateway\, deploy a citation manager as a Lambda function\, and expose your own MCP server By the end you'll have a working orchestrator agent that routes queries to a search specialist, calls real APIs, and manages citations — all running on AgentCore Runtime with proper IAM permissions and CloudWatch observability. What to bring: \- Laptop with Python 3\.11\+ and AWS CLI installed \- An AWS account \(free tier works for most of the workshop\) Skill level: Intermediate — some Python and basic AWS familiarity helpful. No prior agent development experience required.

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110 attendees
Moonee Ponds Toastmasters Meetup

Moonee Ponds Toastmasters Meetup

Mon, Jun 15, 9:00 AM
From Toastmasters - Victoria
4.6

We meet at the Essendon Bowls club, 50 Raleigh St, Essendon VIC 3040. Toastmasters is an opportunity to refine the various aspects of public speaking and a very encouraging environment to experience growth.

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1 attendee
AI: More Moral Than Us?

AI: More Moral Than Us?

Thu, Jun 11, 8:30 AM
From Science, Technology and the Future
4.6

**Why the Question Matters for Alignment, Moral Progress, and Long Term Flourishing** Practically nobody in alignment wants to say it out loud. So let’s say it: *AI might turn out to be* ***[more moral than us](https://www.scifuture.org/more-moral-than-us/)***. Now – why does that feel like a dangerous thing to claim? The question is not whether AI can match human moral reasoning. The question is whether that’s even worth bragging about. The idea of AI being more moral than humans is a real taboo in some circles. Many alignment researchers are uncomfortable with the idea because it seems to smuggle in the assumption that AI could have genuine moral agency, which conflicts with deflationary views of LLMs as “stochastic parrots” – and also because it sounds uncomfortably close to AI-worship or motivated reasoning for deferring to AI. Invoking this idea could get one dismissed as naive or as an actual safety risk oneself. *It’s also epistemically risky.* *More moral* – but in what sense? Knowing more facts relevant to ethics? Drawing better inferences from values? Applying principles wisely in context? Actually being *moved* by moral considerations, rather than just computing them? These aren’t the same thing. Conflating them produces both overclaiming and underclaiming – and most of the bad arguments on both sides of this debate do exactly that.[1](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/#6ebcc18c-d890-4a28-8b01-27945a532c66) An AI could plausibly exceed humans on moral knowledge, reasoning and even judgement without having anything like moral motivation. Collapsing these leads to both overclaiming and underclaiming. Clear distinctions between stuff like moral judgement and moral motivation makes the conversation tractable. Is it dangerous for public discourse? There’s a genuine risk that the framing gets weaponised – either by people wanting to justify AI authority over human decisions, or by critics who use it to paint alignment researchers as unhinged techno-utopians. It can also trigger motivated reasoning in both directions. A lot more could be said here. But the taboo is not protecting us from a dangerous question. It’s protecting us from the answer. The taboo itself is epistemically costly, yet if we ***refuse to ask*** whether AI could have better-grounded moral reasoning than humans, we prevent getting to the heart of the issue. ## **The questions worth asking** Before thoroughly assessing whether AI could be more moral than humans, we need to ask whether the question is even coherent. ### Alignment targeting and verification *What should AI align to?* Is morality a cohesive alignment target, or a family of overlapping intuitions that only look unified from a distance? And if there is a *fact of the matter* about moral improvement, *how would we know we were tracking it* – rather than simply laundering our current preferences with extra steps? More pressingly: what would it mean to *verify* that an agent has better moral judgement than us, given that we’re the ones doing the evaluating? This is the bootstrapping problem. We cannot step outside our own moral reasoning to assess a system that exceeds it. That isn’t a reason to stop asking – it’s a reason to ask more carefully.[2](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/#114785ab-004c-4882-b8c8-c0437942e9ec) ### The motivational gap Even if the epistemic questions could be resolved, a deeper problem remains: most human moral failure isn’t a failure of *reasoning*. It’s a failure of *motivation*. If humans are themselves imperfectly morally motivated, what does alignment to human preferences actually track? Not moral truth – at best, some weighted average of moral intuitions, distorted by power, attention, and self-interest. How much of human moral failure is motivational rather than epistemic? More than we tend to admit. We frequently know what the right thing is and fail to do it anyway – which means a system that merely reasons better about ethics hasn’t addressed the failure mode that actually matters most. And this raises the hardest question in the cluster: is moral motivation necessarily tied to phenomenal experience – to there being something it is *like* to care? Or could a system be genuinely motivated by moral considerations without felt engagement? Can motivation be grounded without being felt? ### The systemic stakes Finally, there are second-order questions that rarely get asked – about what happens to *us* if AI gets this right. Does sustained deference to AI moral judgement atrophy human moral reasoning capacity? And if so, what are the systemic risks of that atrophy – not just for individuals, but for the collective processes through which moral knowledge has historically developed? (There is recent work on comparative moral Turing Tests that begins to take this seriously[3](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/#6efcb4e9-295e-425c-8860-40f415ef4935)) Moral progress for humans has never been a purely individual achievement. It has happened through argument, conflict, revision, and hard-won consensus across generations. A system that resolves moral questions faster than humans can engage with them might not accelerate that process. It might short-circuit it entirely. I think asking these questions Socratically can help nudge the conversation into the open productively rather than letting it fester as an unexamined assumption. Also I think this line of questioning isn’t just intuition pump fodder, I think they are directly important to the project of AI alignment.[4](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/#13e5d2e0-79f6-42fc-8d1e-fcae403c2f6b) > Refusing to ask whether AI could exceed human moral reasoning doesn’t make the question safe. It just means we’ll answer it by accident, badly, and too late. Handled carelessly, this question causes damage. Left unasked, it causes more. ## Footnotes 1. The claim is easy to make sloppily. “More moral” conflates several things that need to be separated: a) Moral knowledge (knowing more facts relevant to ethics) b) Moral reasoning (drawing better inferences from values) c) Moral judgement (applying principles wisely in context) d) Moral motivation (actually being moved by moral considerations – which is one of my core focus points of activism) [↩︎](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/#6ebcc18c-d890-4a28-8b01-27945a532c66-link) 2\. This was brought up in an interview with Nick Bostrom [↩︎](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/#114785ab-004c-4882-b8c8-c0437942e9ec-link) 3\. See Eyal Aharoni’s and Danica Dillion’s work on Moral Turing Tests – presentations and interviews [here](https://www.scifuture.org/eyal-aharoni-breaking-the-moral-turing-test-studies-of-human-attribution-and-deference-to-ai-moral-judgment-and-decision-making/), [here](https://www.scifuture.org/ai-outscored-humans-in-a-blinded-moral-turing-test-should-we-be-worried-dr-eyal-aharoni-explains/) and [here](https://www.scifuture.org/danica-dillion-ais-moral-compass-better-than-expected-now-what/). [↩︎](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/#6efcb4e9-295e-425c-8860-40f415ef4935-link) 4\. The grounded values approach actually requires asking questions like: – What should AI align to?, Is morality a cohesive alignment target?, is there a fact of the matter about moral improvement, or is “more moral” just “more aligned with our current intuitions”? – What would it mean to verify that an agent has better moral judgement than us, given that we’re the ones doing the evaluating? (see work one recently on comparative moral Turing Tests) – If humans are themselves imperfectly morally motivated, what does alignment to human preferences actually track? – How much of human moral failure is motivational versus epistemic? – Is moral motivation necessarily tied to phenomenal experience, or could a system be genuinely motivated by moral considerations without anything it’s like to be it? – Can motivation be grounded without being felt? – Does sustained deference to AI moral judgement atrophy human moral reasoning capacity, and what are the systemic risks of that atrophy – both for individuals and for the collective processes through which moral knowledge has historically developed? Also see: **[Why Are We Afraid to Ask Whether AI Could Be More Moral Than Humans?](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/)**

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14 attendees
BeSocial. No Phones, Just Conversations

BeSocial. No Phones, Just Conversations

Sun, Jun 14, 12:00 AM
From BeSocial. Melbourne
4.8

Disconnect to reconnect at our “No Phones, Just Conversations” meetup. This is a space to put distractions aside and be fully present with the people around you. With phones away, conversations become more genuine, engaging, and meaningful. Whether you’re chatting one-on-one or in small groups, this is about slowing down, listening, and building real human connection — the way it used to be. **Event photography and videography may take place at this event. Images and footage captured may be used in future BeSocial promotional materials.** **If you do not wish to appear in promotional materials, please notify Nexaro Group Pty Ltd before the event by emailing support@besocialapp.co, or let the event hosts know on the day.**

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20 attendees
430kMonthly events
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60mMembers
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4.5App store rating
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200kGroups
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Frequently asked questions

Meetup connects people through shared interests, offering local groups and events. Users can explore various communities and activities, fostering both in-person and online interactions.

Yes, Meetup features a variety of drone events happening in Melbourne. Enthusiasts can connect and share experiences by joining the available groups and activities.

To find local drone meetups, use Meetup's search function to locate events and groups in Melbourne dedicated to drone enthusiasts. It’s a great way to connect with fellow hobbyists.

Absolutely, drone meetups often focus on sharing knowledge and experience. Whether you're looking to enhance your skills or learn new techniques, there’s plenty to gain.

Many drone-related groups on Meetup may not charge fees for membership. However, event costs can vary, so check details in the group's description or event page.

For most drone meetups, having your own drone is beneficial but not always necessary. Some events might offer demonstrations or shared resources for newcomers.

Beginners are welcome in many drone meetups. These groups provide a supportive environment to learn the basics from seasoned drone enthusiasts and improve your skills.

At a drone event, expect discussions, flying demonstrations, and networking with fellow enthusiasts. These gatherings often focus on sharing insights and experiences related to drones.

While many drone events are outdoors, some indoor activities may be available depending on the group and venue in Melbourne. It’s best to check each event's details.

Events vary; some may be family-friendly whereas others might have age restrictions. Always check event details for age appropriateness or parental guidance.

RSVPing for a Meetup event is straightforward. Just visit the event page, and you'll typically find a button to confirm your attendance, making it easy to keep track of your commitments.

Drone meetups often emphasize community, offering a platform to meet others with similar interests, share experiences, and foster connections within Melbourne's drone scene.

Drone meetups are excellent for solo attendees seeking to connect with Melbourne’s community of enthusiasts, providing a welcoming space to form friendships over shared interests.

Meeting frequency depends on each specific drone group. Some gather regularly, while others might host occasional events. Check group pages for upcoming Meetup schedules.

Not every interest area may be covered at any given time, as event availability fluctuates and depends on group organizers. It's wise to regularly check updates for new events.