AI is central to our current national conversation about productivity, efficiency and standards of living. And yet, even as AI represents a key to “unlocking productivity”, it also presents an imminent threat to employment itself. Modelling by Goldman Sachs found that, while AI could drive a 7 per cent boost in global GDP by 2030, this would likely come at the expense of 300 million full-time jobs worldwide.
AI is technology that will produce entire areas of economic activity where human labour is either wholly redundant or greatly reduced, leading to a paradoxical situation where the economy is thriving and unemployment is high.
It’s perhaps not surprising that the possibility of a Universal Basic Income is being mooted — including by the pioneers, purveyors and prophets of AI themselves — as a necessary remedy to the radical disruption of humanity’s relationship to work that is likely to transpire between now and 2030.
In the week of the Federal Government's Economic Reform Roundtable, Professor Greg Marston joined journalists on ABC Radio National's Podcast, The Minefield. Greg discusses how to navigate a preferable future rather than an all too predictable future in the face of AI and technology.
