On the AI revolution
The three leaders discuss their hopes, fears and ideas around the rise of automation.
Mehrdad Baghai
Every CEO of a large company in Australia has a collective responsibility to do this reskilling. If you just look at the top 50 companies and you see the numbers, you’re talking about something like a couple of hundred thousand people out of work. It’s not like they’re fired by one bank and another bank will hire them: it’s a structural problem. So where will they go? The challenge we have on the corporate side is not, “Let’s teach them blockchain.” They’re not [all] going to become data-security analysts. But they might have an idea. A woman sitting in a bank knows that she’s going to be out of work in two to three years, so she starts a business on the side. It grows so much so that she hires someone to run the business while she’s still at the bank waiting for the redundancy cheque. So if you’re the bank and you want to be a solid corporate citizen, you train this woman with marketing, e-commerce and the other things you need to run a small business. I think some of the reskilling necessities are not some of the things being talked about: “Let’s train everyone on data and blockchain.” Those skills will be great for hiring people out of university, but not for all of the people we’re talking about.
Catriona Wallace
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is being powered predominantly by artificial intelligence. AI has been around for 70 years, finding its place in the past five years because of growing computational power and big data. It’s going to change everything, not even just at work, but at home, how we live, our health, our bodies, everything. Combine that with the coming of quantum computing, which is only a small horizon away. Robots or machines that are either AI or machine-learning based – machine learning simply means software that can learn on its own account – will automate probably 40 per cent of service, admin and low-level technical jobs within the next five years. By 2025, we expect 40 per cent of jobs to be done by machines or robots. New jobs are going to be created: in the next 12 months we’re looking at 1.8 million jobs replaced by robots and machines and 2.3 million jobs created. Unfortunately, [most of] those 1.8 million removed won’t move into the 2.3 million jobs and the really distressing thing is that 90 per cent of the jobs that will be removed will be the jobs of women and minority groups. We’re facing a massive challenge around diversity, inclusion and bias in tech at the moment. These machines will provide great productivity and we’re looking at around $1.2 trillion of value in the next 12 months going from those companies without AI to those companies with AI. But there is great risk [to those jobs] and the fallout could be quite disastrous for a lot of people. I’ve worked closely with the government on the AI Ethics Framework. We’re at this incredible time where automation will improve productivity and decision making, but as a business community we’ve not yet thought through how we’re going to manage this ethically and to make sure it does good. There are some big questions there.
Tony Johnson
The fact is Australians are still very insular people. I’m generalising, but we like to engage, relate and invest in an Australian way. I don’t think we fully understand the power and importance of technology. The example I would use is we’re number 64 in the world for fixed broadband speed at the moment. Australians like to say, “OK, we’re not the biggest in the world, but we should be in the top 10 on everything.” That’s what we do with the Olympics. But with internet speeds, we’ve gradually gone down. Now, if data is king in a globalised world, how is Australia going to compete if we slide to 100? And yet we’re not seeing protesting on the streets that this is unacceptable. It’s not about watching our movie quicker, this is going to limit our growth significantly. It is a big issue for us and I don’t think we have an awareness of the infrastructure we need to build to be competitive.