SMART DUMB
FOR a lazy $8 million, you can buy a luxe house in Toorak with a yard for the kids.
That’s what Levantine Hill winery managing director Samantha Jreissati did this month and all power to her.
Her previous home was in Melbourne’s tallest building, the Eureka Tower, where she basically had a half floor.
The views from that 73rd floor looked out into the bountiful backyards of Melbourne.
No matter how high you fly, the grass is greener on the ground and so Ms Jreissati went looking for a suburban home that had a more down-to-earth feel.
The house she settled on belonged to the former boss of the ACCC, Graeme Samuel, who also had the best interests of others at heart when he presided over the rules and regulations of business. (This will be a theme)
Anyway, the point here is that a quality house in Melbourne, or an apartment for that matter, can sell for about $8 million.
You can pay a lot more than $8 million for a house in Melbourne or Sydney, no doubt.
But the number we want to keep in our heads is $8 million — enough dosh for one, well-off person to buy a home.
Now, this is how much the Australian Government intends to spend in a year on its strategy for artificial intelligence and its impact in our backyard. Actually, it’s not a strategy at all. We haven’t got that far yet. It’s a plan for a strategy, like a road map thing you can stick on a wall.
In all, our politicians think that they can cover all the bases for the price of one house every year — about $29 million in four years. These are snail-paced years. It’s well known that snails move faster than our politicians and the French know this, which is why they eat them.
They also have been known to eat politicians, too.
Two years ago, France told one of its senior mathematicians to devise an AI strategy.
He went away and within a year (not four years) France committed $2.5 billion to implementing it.
You can buy 312 houses worth $8 million for that. That’s how far behind we are. Germany is naturally outspending France, because this is an AI arms race.
They’ve committed to invest $4.4 billion in AI research between now and 2025 to implement their strategy.
The UK is spending $1.4 billion as I write and has been identified by Deloitte as the most aggressive business community pursuing AI solutions. So, that’s an average of $2.8 billion to our pathetic, loserlooking $29 million.
Surely we can afford to do better than that? Yes, we can.
There’s a small country town postcode in South Gippsland called Nyora where 608 people pay net tax of $7.9 million a year to the Federal Government. They’re the hope of the side, this town.
All 608 of them pay enough tax to buy a house in Toorak, or fund Australia’s AI strategy.
We should help them out and throw a few more bigger postcodes at the problem.
Add a couple more Toorak houses. Maybe a few from Hunter’s Hill, Double Bay or Brighton.
Funding is not the problem. Mindset is. Australians like to think of themselves as early adopters of 21st Century technology, somehow smarter and more savvy than other parts of the world. But perhaps we are just lab rats.
How else can you explain the proliferation of shiny new things here and our world-trailing apathy about the ethics and regulation of such transformational technologies? I’m not alone here. Deloitte Partner Alan Marshall says Australia is “playing from behind”, nowhere near as advanced in its thinking as its European and North American allies.
“Australia is in the worst shape of the seven countries surveyed,” he says, “with 49 per cent of early adopters reporting ‘major’ or ‘extreme’ concern,”
CSIRO data boffin-of-themoment (because he has quit) Adrian Turner reckons this is “the most important conversation this country needs to have”.
“We need to start a collective movement to change the trajectory of Australia. I don’t want to be alarmist, but if we don’t solve this we will not enjoy the quality of life we do today.”
Which is why we are talking about it right here and will continue to do so.