Monash University Media Release
Ahead of today’s Economic Reform Roundtable session, Monash University AI expert and Australian Laureate Fellow Professor Geoff Webb is available to discuss the urgent need for Australia to upskill its workforce and develop sovereign AI technical expertise to lift productivity and secure the nation’s economic future.
Australian Laureate Fellow Professor Geoff Webb, Department of Data Science & AI, Faculty of Information Technology says:
“Australia’s economic prosperity is at a crossroads as artificial intelligence, often heralded as the answer to the nation’s stagnant productivity, begins to reshape the workforce. While AI promises greater efficiency, it simultaneously poses the risk of replacing Australian workers with automated systems. The movement of wages and salaries away from households and toward tech corporation service fees, particularly those owned overseas, threatens to drain vital income from the Australian economy.
“Without a robust domestic AI sector, Australia stands to lose significant revenue as fees for AI-powered services flow offshore. Unless Australia is able to generate its own income from providing AI solutions or enables Australians to leverage AI for substantial value creation, the nation risks falling behind in the global digital economy.
“The solution is clear: Australia must urgently invest in building sovereign AI capability. It is essential that local businesses cultivate expertise to not only reduce operational costs through AI but also to enhance the quality and competitiveness of their products and services. For Australia to develop AI solutions that can compete internationally, a highly skilled domestic workforce is required.
“Australia currently offers a range of excellent Master of AI programs, designed to provide this upskilling. However, the overwhelming majority of students in these courses, sometimes more than 95 per cent, are international. While the rest of the world recognises the importance of AI skills, there is a concerning lack of Australian participation in these programs.
“To secure the nation’s future, Australians from key industries such as mining, agriculture, finance, and construction should be encouraged to pursue AI expertise, positioning themselves as leaders in their respective fields during this period of transformation. If Australians do not lead these changes, others will, and the Australian economy will be theirs to plunder.”
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Valid points but I wonder if we are throwing too many eggs into the AI basket and sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Intelligent Artificial intelligence would surely conclude that Homo Sapiens is the most destructive force on the planet and without us the world would be a better place. If we could weed out those most responsible for the rape and pillage of the planet, starting with the weapons and arms manufacturers and working our way down through the malign dictators, the religious extremists of all types, the exploiters of natural resources who don’t share the profits equitably to the disgustingly wealthy we may just begin the process of healing without which we are all doomed. But first we need some rules to ensure AI is a force for good rather than evil. Already we are seeing too many examples where AI is abused whether it be by callow youths disrespecting girls/women, media using it to produce ‘news’ stories rather than journalists or the job replacement referred to in the article. To my mind these are abuses of AI and need to be controlled.
RomeoCharlie,
Artificial intelligence is not the same as human sentient intelligence which took millions of years to develop via Natural Selection and self-replicating DNA. It is not sentient, even if it passes the Turing Test and fools you into thinking it is sentient. It is just lots and lots of electrical circuitry making lots and lots of simple calculations extremely quickly so that a task that might require thousands of people thousands of years to accomplish can be achieved extremely quickly.
What rules did we ever adopt to ensure that the wheel was a force for good and not evil before we started using it? Or the written word? You need to remember that the intelligence behind AI that makes it look even remotely intelligent is due to non-artificial natural human intelligence. The media and its journalists don’t need AI to fool people into consent for whatever wars, genocides or other economic solutions they support for whatever social concerns they care to concoct. They are currently working on fooling some of the people in our great government of the people in the hope that a sufficient amount of them will consent to creating the rules that make access to AI legally restricted to a privileged few. Are there any rules to ensure that the Artificial Stupidity that is being manufactured all over the world is a force for good and not evil?
B. S. indicates areas to consider, in that there must be artificial stupidity as well as intelligence in the discussions of this topic. “We” put “it” in, but only a few insiders will control and profit. Evils…