Cam Wilson

Perhaps bosses are saying, hey, Tim left and we don't actually need to replace him because perhaps we can give some of his job responsibility to someone else who can do that in a quicker amount of time.

But the top line, you know, these fears of a mass redundancies or layoffs and unemployment as a result of AI really does not seem to be there yet.

It seems to be projections and pointing forward, something that people want to prepare for, but is not currently happening.

Now, you know, it is a very common experience for Australians to see fake news AI swap, which is the kind of term for, you know, low effort AI generated content in your social media feeds.

And that's very much linked to the fact that there is also this question around what these AI models were trained on.

And that included a lot of people's intellectual property and creative works.

So many creative industries and rights holders are saying these companies that have become some of the most powerful and valuable in the world have built this technology off the back of our work and we've received very little, if not no compensation for it.

And then you've got the fact that this form of computing, artificial intelligence, is drastically more computing intensive than before.

So as a result, these companies are having to build out the infrastructure, which is these data centers.

Data centers are asking to use significant amounts of power, some water.

They're promoting these benefits that in some cases are diffuse, saying, we'll make the economy more efficient.

But at the same time, I can understand that even if they say, well, maybe these benefits come down the road, right now I'm kind of feeling the pinch and I'm not super happy about that.

Absolutely.

I see from the government that they understand this problem.

I have spoken to people in the industry, researchers, politicians who all see this as a massive issue.

Andrew Charlton, who is the Assistant Minister for Industry, he had a speech which he gave to the summit of business and tech leaders, usually an audience who it would be natural for a politician to go, rah, rah, we'd love to get investment and let's go.

To me, he delivered quite a solemn speech where he focused on saying,

We in Australia need to do what we can to avoid a US-style AI backlash.

And the way that we're going to do that is, yes, get money in from these AI companies to pay Australian workers and businesses, but also make sure that the benefits of this are spread across the economy and that we keep Australians safe from the harms of AI.

And they launched Australia's AI Safety Institute, which is a government body that's dedicated to saying, let's monitor and test for these risks from emerging technologies and dealing with them.