Even lefty Anthony Albanese has gone all in on AI | David Penberthy
He might style himself a lefty but the Prime Minister is all business on the next wave of tech disruptions threatening Aussie workers, writes David Penberthy.
One of my first jobs as a cadet journalist on this newspaper involved a character-building three-month stint doing the “night chores”.
Night chores were a vaguely humiliating rite of passage for aspiring Woodwards and Bernsteins in that it taught you that in journalism, you had to walk before you could run and that accuracy was everything.
On night chores you were entrusted with the accurate delivery of crucial information – all of which these days can be readily obtained online – but which in the early 1990s was the bedrock of the information section of the printed newspaper.
Chores covered everything from the shipping times and flight arrivals and departures to the winning lotto numbers and weather blurb for the front page with the following day’s maximum and minimum temperature. If you ever got any of this information wrong there would be hell to pay.
By hell, I mean real hell, back in the days when human resources did not exist and feedback was delivered in such a direct, profanity-laden fashion that it makes me misty-eyed thinking about it in this modern snowflake era.
The way we assembled all this information makes for timely discussion as the world faces another technology-driven workplace upheaval through the advent of artificial intelligence.
In the early 1990s, all of this information I described was entered into our system by a group of workers known as the “comps”, an abbreviated nickname for compositors.
On chores you would get all of the above information from a printout on a telex machine. Using scissors and glue you would cut it out and adhere the information to individual work sheets, which you would take by hand to the comps’ office in the beautiful old art deco ’Tiser building in a laneway at the back of Waymouth St.
The comps would then enter the data into the system so it could be published in the newspaper next day.
By modern day standards this workplace practice could be described as absurd. It would also be slammed by those beady-eyed time and motion types from the Boston Consulting Group as an industrial make-work scheme for people whose jobs had been made redundant by technology.
As harsh as it sounds, such an assessment was true. Their roles were redundant, and their existence amid the advent of desktop publishing and digital content delivery was the kindly industrial by-product of simply not knowing what to do with a whole bunch of good people who had bills to pay, families to feed, and who had worked diligently at the ’Tiser for years, since hot-metal printing.
All this was happening at the same time that my very first pay slip included a tiny extra payment called the VDT allowance, VDT standing for “video display terminal”, the payment being a penalty our union had secured to compensate us for the hardship of using a computer instead of a typewriter.
This is what technological change and dislocation looks like in its human form. But it is as nothing compared to what the world is now facing as it grapples with AI.
My daughter has just finished uni, proving that talent skips a generation, by earning great marks and actually completing her course. Despite doing so well, I wonder how much of the work which she and her peers are doing in their chosen field is under threat from AI, and how quickly and broadly that threat will manifest itself.
It was not surprising to see such consternation from the union movement this week ahead of the Albanese government’s announcement of a national AI plan.
Despite his lefty styling, Prime Minister Albanese has taken a pro-business approach in saying companies should be free to embrace AI and that there would be no heavy-handed rules governing its use.
The government has embraced the bullish interpretation of AI evangelists who argue that rather than merely killing existing jobs, AI will free up workers to work differently, more creatively, more flexibly, while also creating up to 200,000 new AI-specific jobs by 2030, as predicted by the Tech Council of Australia.
This sounds great but it will be cold comfort to those workers who now have heaps of time on their hands after being let go from the banking, data entry or logistics sectors.
“AI has done little to improve the quality of working conditions for most Australians,” ACTU assistant secretary Joseph Mitchell warned this week in response to the government’s AI plan.
“Instead, too many big businesses have seized on AI technology to try and replace workers and to intrusively monitor their employees by placing them under Orwellian levels of surveillance.
“AI technology has also been deployed to impose dehumanising engineered standards to workflows, adding to the intensity of job demands, including in warehousing, finance, transport and elsewhere.
“The use of generative AI has also been trained on the theft of creative works without the consent or proper remuneration for creative workers, including journalists, artists, musicians, and others.
“This type of AI misuse threatens the Australian ethos of a fair go for working people in times of transition.”
All of this is undoubtedly true. And as per this column’s recent thoughts about the rise and rise of Temu, the ACTU’s criticisms are made in a global economy where businesses in Australia are competing with businesses in other countries which will be much less responsible with their use of AI, making it harder for us to remain competitive.
It’s enough to make an old journalist like this one weep for the days of hot metal, the comps room, and want to sneak into the back entrance of the long-gone Criterion Hotel to have a quiet one and reflect on simpler times.
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