Productivity and AI

In Australia we don’t really like improving productivity. That is because we are a services economy – millions of people employed in services businesses, serving the rest of us for our mission critical needs.

Any improvement in productivity usually means lower wages. Higher unemployment puts downward pressure on wages. Lower wages means less money to buy those services, and the economy sinks.

AI threatens the services sector the most because the services have the highest number of monitor-facing jobs. All very important of course, but also very amenable to AI replacement.

Australia is in a bind and the politicians have taken notice. However they are completely incapable of being honest with us because we Australians are living in a collective fantasy that we deserve our good luck (big, big country, not many people).

Therefore we prefer to practice high functioning hypocrisy; we are of course the hardest working, smartest, most inventive and nicest people on the planet. Any evidence to the contrary is entirely the government’s fault.

Since they are a bunch of people even lower than lawyers and real estate agents in embedded ethics, our politicians realise that there is no personal upside in bursting the bubble of our collective fantasies. But they also know their salaries and brown paper bags depend on the current state of the population’s spending power at K-mart.

Therefore the threat of AI is met not head-on but sideways. First, the large LLMs were mainly trained on stolen high quality content from honest aussie content creators, oi. Second, the large server and data centers required to provide LLM chat aren’t very good for the green tree frogs.

Therefore we will need to put up barriers like age verification for people to use AI. And we will find a way to tax the AI service providers, probably enough so they go away and abandon the Australian market.

Effectively we will become the Amish of the South Pacific.The only alternative is that our pollies will say lots but may do nothing, in the hope that the chickens won’t roost until they’re long ensconced in their corporate directorships.