AI to displace some jobs, creating others: Michele Bullock
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More news: RBA governor Michele Bullock expects that AI will redefine some roles, might displace others and create entirely new ones, prompting a “larger societal shift” beyond any impact on profits.
Delivering the Shann memorial lecture on Wednesday, Bullock said that “while many experts anticipate a net increase in jobs, it is likely to be more nuanced”.
She also acknowledged that “adjustments like this can be challenging for individuals” and flagged that they would “likely need support through these disruptions and there will be a need for investment in training and education”. Although she noted this falls “outside the scope of monetary policy”.
A recent survey of businesses on technology adoption through the RBA’s liaison program highlighted AI and robotics tools to “augment labour, automating repetitive tasks and redesigning the composition of roles”, Bullock said.
The businesses thought that headcount could initially increase as the new tools are adopted, “followed by a small decline” as tech adoption matures.
Meanwhile, it is expected that “lower-skilled roles may decline, while demand for higher-skilled roles is expected to grow, continuing (and perhaps even fast-tracking) a decades-long trend away from routine manual work”.
Higher-skilled tasks may eventually be automated but the businesses said it was “too early to fully understand” what the workforce implications from this.
The firms surveyed are "cautiously optimistic” about the productivity boosting potential of AI but recognised that “technology alone will not be a panacea” with benefits dependent on “complementary changes in skills, workflow and organisational structure”.
RBA's Michele Bullock reveals in-house AI chatbot 'RBAPubChat'
The news: The Reserve Bank has “designed and begun testing” an AI-powered chatbot dubbed RBAPubChat that is trained on the central banks knowledge base, according to RBA governor Michele Bullock.
Bullock delivered the Shann memorial lecture, titled 'Technology and the Future of Central Banking at the RBA', at the University of Western Australia in Perth on Wednesday.
The context: RBAPubChat, which Bullock said partly stands for ‘conversation hub for analysis and thought’, is intended to help staff “ask policy-relevant analytical questions and get useful summaries of our existing knowledge base spanning 40 years”.
The chatbot draws on nearly 20,000 internal and external RBA analytical documents, enabling it to support reviews of past work, contextualise new analysis, underpin new thinking and “constructively challenges existing insights”.
The RBA recently acquired its first enterprise-grade graphics processing unit to "develop and run advanced AI-driven analytical tools at scale”.
A separate “secure text analytics tool using natural language processing” has also been internally developed to help analyse the more than 22,000 conversations – representing an excess of 22 million words – had with businesses through the bank’s 25 year old liaison program.
Bullock said this helps the central bank “search, analyse and extract insights from this vast pool of qualitative information to assess its meaning”.
Natural language processing will complement the central bank’s 125,000 time series statistics to help build “a more complete picture of the Australian economy”.
Already the new tool “is promising” with its incorporation into “model-based nowcasts using machine learning” more accurately forecasting wage growth than a traditional Phillips Curve model.
Bullock also flagged that the bank holds 7.5 petabytes of structured and unstructured data supporting its analysis and operations. It also has archival records covering 200 years of Australia’s economic and financial history across 4.6 kilometres of shelf space.
An internal coding community which began as a grassroots initiative is also now a “well-established part” of how the bank operates with around 450 staff – about one in four RBA employees – using coding as a core part of daily work and staff “increasingly using AI-powered coding tools”.
For the avoidance of doubt, she stressed that the RBA is “not using AI to formulate or set monetary policy or any other policy. Instead, we are looking to leverage it to improve efficiency and amplify the impact of staff efforts in areas such as research and analysis”.
What they said: “As you might expect from a central bank, our approach is not about disruption. It is about deliberate, well-managed evolution,” Bullock said.
“This doesn’t mean that we avoid risk – we aim to make informed choices to manage risks, by striking the right balance between innovation and stability.”
The source: RBA governor Michele Bullock speech
