James Thomson

I mean, look, there's obviously a lot of subjectivity around the pointlessness and stupidity of someone's job.

What might appear pointless and stupid to PD or the anthropologist, you know, might actually be a reasonably important cog in the wheel.

I take, you know, I take the point that there's a lot of –

meetings that could have been emails in many workplaces and lots of waste in those industries, finance, insurance and real estate.

There's probably also lots of bureaucracy in government services and the public service and that sort of thing.

So I guess the question though is, you know,

To take those two jobs that PD suggests are socially beneficial, teachers and nurses...

how do they get affected by AI?

I mean, a lot of nursing will be handed to humanoid robots eventually, you would think, and a lot of teaching is education, you think, is right in the gun of AI.

Okay, Andrew has a bit of a related question.

If AI causes unemployment of 10% to 20%, given the budget is highly reliant on personal income taxes, how will this affect government revenue?

Poorly, you would think.

Not well.

That's right.

I did sort of sit there in the budget lockup, Alan, thinking yesterday, you know, there is a bit of talk from the Treasurer at times like this.

Obviously, the forward estimates cover the next five years and some of the budget projections go out for a decade.

And you sort of do think, you look at some of these projections and you think along the lines of Andrew's questions.

What's the economy going to look like in 10 years, five years even?

will any of this, you know, any of the firestorm about CGT and negative gearing make a jot of difference if, as Andrew says, we did have unemployment of 20%?

We would have some serious...