AI or bust
Fears are growing that artificial intelligence will have a devastating impact on Australia's jobs market, but failing to take advantage of AI's productivity benefits would be a worse outcome.
Finally, we have a solution for Australia’s seemingly interminable, decades-long productivity funk. And it’s AI, of course.
That’s the argument of the Business Council of Australia (BCA), the high priesthood of Australian commerce, which dropped a meaty report today arguing Australia can reignite growth and revolutionise its workforce by becoming “an AI leader by 2028”.
BCA CEO Bran Black is in Capital Brief this afternoon, writing that we’re at a flashpoint where Australia’s advantages in talent, research and stability position us not just to ride the trend, but to win it.
You can see the logic, or at least the hope. With much of our national wealth trickling down from the resources sector and four in five Australians working in services, we have fewer and fewer easy levers to pull to increase our output per hour worked. Now, almost overnight, we have access to powerful tools that could introduce the benefits of automation to knowledge work — at least in theory.
