The automation arms race will have huge consequences for workers

Source Domain: www.abc.net.au

Towards the end of my interview for That’s Business on Friday with Craig Scroggie, the CEO of rapidly growing Australian data centre company NextDC, we got onto the potential risks of artificial intelligence, which is proving to be quite a boon for his business.

I asked him whether he thought the massive investment he’s making, along with other data centre and AI firms around the world, would be paid for entirely by productivity gains, or whether there would also be mass staff reductions.

Scroggie’s answer: “I think … there won’t be an immediate displacement of roles.”

So not immediate — that’s something.

He went on: “AI isn’t going to replace you tomorrow. What AI will do, certainly, and we’re doing this in our company, and I know with many other CEOs I talk to, adopting large language models in order to improve the quality of their customer engagements, to reduce tasks that would have been done or speed up the time it takes to produce information, to be able to just do more from a productivity standpoint.”

Right then, it’ll be fine, which is what everybody involved in making money out of AI says, and you would expect nothing else.

And after all, things are going very nicely indeed, with the US share market back at record highs, driven almost entirely by a third wind of the AI boom/bubble.

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Big tech records mega profits

Last week, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft reported quarterly earnings totalling $213 billion for the four of them — about 40 per cent more than all the companies listed on the Australian stock exchange combined.

Mind you, some of those doing AI have also been warning that it could lead to the doom and/or the extinction of humanity.

In March 2023, 350 AI leaders, including all the current big ones like Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google and Dario Amodei of Anthropic, famously signed a statement for the Centre for AI Safety that said: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other…

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