Thought Pieces
Artificial Intelligence: Australia’s Ethics Framework
Monday, 8 April 2019
Data61 CSIRO
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to increase productivity, create new industries and provide more inclusive services. For Australia to realise these benefits however, it will be important for citizens to have trust in the AI applications developed by businesses, governments and academia. One way to achieve this is to align the design and application of AI with ethical and inclusive values.
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Australia’s automation opportunity: Reigniting productivity and inclusive income growth
Tuesday, 12 March 2019
McKinsey & Co
Powerful new automation technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced robotics are already transforming the Australian economy, workplace, education system and community. These technologies present an enormous opportunity to restore momentum to the Australian economy and extend the nation’s 30-year economic boom in an inclusive way.
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Three ways to react to the rise of the machines
Tuesday, 27 November 2018
Keith McNulty
“The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.”
Fans of sci-fi may recognize this quote from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. As a child, the scenario it portrayed utterly terrified me. It’s not the first movie that featured machines becoming self-aware. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is famous for the calm, monotonic but spine-chilling utterance from HAL 9000: “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”.
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Next Stop, Uberland: The Onrushing Algorithmic Future of Work
Monday, 19 November 2018
Intelligencer – New York Magazine
Adrian Chen
As much as we all hate bosses, you have to admit they have gotten slightly better over the years. Frederick Winslow Taylor, the odd and efficiency-obsessed father of management theory, was fond of dispatching managers to stand over workers with stopwatches and direct their every movement as if they were trained animals. Reacting to the obviously soul-crushing nature of Taylorism, a wave of touch-feely business gurus in the 1960s aimed to inspire people into becoming more productive. This has led, over the course of the last few decades, to the insipid corporate culture of team-building exercises and black-bordered posters of windsurfers at sunset, but at least there’s free coffee now.
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Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines
Monday, 12 November 2018
The Financial Times UK
Martin Wolf
How do you organise a society in which few people do anything economically productive?
As long ago as 1984, in his Paths to Paradise, André Gorz, a self-proclaimed “revolutionary-reformist” stated, baldly, that the “micro-economic revolution heralds the abolition of work”. He even argued that “waged work . . . may cease to be a central preoccupation by the end of the century”. His timing was wrong. But serious analysts think he was directionally right. So what might a world of intelligent machines mean for humanity? Will human beings become as economically irrelevant as horses? If so, what will happen to our individual self-worth and the organisation of our societies?
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The future of work won’t be about college degrees, it will be about job skills
Thursday, 8 November 2018
CNBC
Stephane Kasriel
Twenty million students started college this fall, and this much is certain: The vast majority of them will be taking on debt — a lot of debt. What’s less certain is whether their degrees will pay off.
According to the survey Freelancing in America 2018, released Wednesday, freelancers put more value on skills training: 93 percent of freelancers with a four-year college degree say skills training was useful versus only 79 percent who say their college education was useful to the work they do now. In addition, 70 percent of full-time freelancers participated in skills training in the past six months compared to only 49 percent of full-time non-freelancers. The fifth annual survey, conducted by research firm Edelman Intelligence and co-commissioned by Upwork and Freelancers Union, polled 6,001 U.S. workers.
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