There are two versions of AI developing – those with global tech businesses who already have a foot in the door like Google, would prefer an unregulated environment where they’re free to take the technology wherever they please, and there’s the version for the general public, distrustful and fearful of AI who worry about their jobs and the harms it will cause, preferring an environment with safeguards and legislated rights.
We have a terrible living standards problem owing to our immigration-led, labour market expansion economic model, which devours productivity.
On the other hand, we have a technological breakthrough that is all about productivity (in theory, anyway).
Meanwhile, global governments, the only institutions with enough power to alter the approach of these companies, are beginning to show regional differences, with the strongest regulatory initiatives coming out of Europe amid an increasingly unreliable United States.
Caught up in the middle are Australian small- to medium-businesses and their leaders, start-ups, artists, writers, journalists, teachers, students, coders, lawyers, health practitioners, marketers, translators, designers, actors, accountants, number crunchers, office managers and general workers who will be on the receiving end of this technological disruption, with very little by way of defences.
AI will be a revolution, but probably slower than we expect, like most technological innovations, for scale.
AI is still producing too many hallucinations to be genuinely useful as an alternative to a person at scale as a service provider.
Still, it is coming, so what should we do about it? Nothing.
Let it come and displace all those jobs. Let it shock productivity to life and resume lifting living standards.
We only need to do one thing to ensure those lifting profits are shared with labour, making it all worthwhile.
Cut immigration to zero.
That will balance the labour market while turbocharging productivity and incomes, more affordable homes, decongested infrastructure, improved budgets etc.
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