Jim Chalmers

It's now front and centre.

It's front and centre in the government's thinking.

It's front and centre in the public.

And one of the things that Mike Quigley and I talked about at the very start of that book is something that John Kenneth Galbraith said a long time ago, which is that the essence of leadership is addressing the major anxieties that people feel about in our society.

And this is certainly one because of people are observing the potential impact on the workforce.

Now, in its best version of itself, AI is about augmenting jobs, making work easier.

making our economy more productive at the same time as we teach and train our people to give them the skills to adapt and adopt this technology.

That's the best version of it.

That's the gold standard where people are sufficiently capable of using AI to augment their work, to make their lives better and to make our economy stronger.

And that means not dismissing the very real concerns and anxieties people have about how the workforce will change as a consequence of this AI.

Obviously, we're not sitting around waiting for it to happen.

We haven't modelled that 20% scenario that you referenced, Alan.

But we are putting together the intergenerational report.

I'm hoping to release that in the third quarter of this year.

But the work that's going into that is already informing some of our partners.

budget deliberations and other deliberations.

And as part of that, if you think about those five big shifts that I keep returning to, energy, demography and the like, one of them is technology.

And of course, when we think through technological change, we think about the impacts on employment.

So the modelling work, the analytical work that the Treasury does is really about feeding into that intergenerational report, thinking about how our economy and our society will evolve over the course of the next 40 years or so.

Look, a little bit.