willedoo

I could be wrong, but the way I see it, most of the job losses will be office workers. I'd think they'd be more concerned about AI putting them out of a job than blue collar workers would.

In a perfect world, SME's would fund staff pay increases with an increase in productivity. That is, productivity increases earning the business more profit to be able to fund higher wages. A lot of the times unions and some governments expect the business owners to wear the cost of higher wages without an increase in productivity. When that happens it's a total loss for the business. The use of AI tools to increase productivity could earn businesses more money so that any future wage increases are fully funded intsead of a drain on the bottom line. It could be a win/win.

Pete, that makes you half Queenslander; you might even qualify for a passport. Let me know if you need a reference.

Anthropic is planning to build Australia's biggest data centre near Dalby in Queensland. It will lease land at the proposed Western Downs digital park that a Singaporean company is planning to build. The park will be a four stage project, with Anthropic's section around 725 hectares of land, currently used as a feedlot. It's yet to go through the local council approval process.

I think John West processes in Thailand now as well.

Crikey Peter, lucky you found it. All the best with the surgery on Saturday.

Thanks for your insight Jerry. I've been thinking in recent times about some of the points you raised, but don't have your skills in articulating it. The up side of it will be some amazing stuff no doubt. Medical advances, business, construction and engineering, and maybe no more aeroplane crashes because of software glitches. Compare space programs using AI to that movie set in the 1960's, Hidden Figures, where they used human computers. Imagining the benefits is the easier part; trying to predict the dangers and regulate them before it's entrenched is the hard part. At this stage, it's a bit like the big bad wolf offering us a big bag of lollies with one hand. It's the other hand behind his back that's the concern, and whether it's holding a big stick. The potential is certainly there for bad governments and bad actors to suppress people. In times past when it came to the subject of government interference in our lives, it's been said 'why would they bother with the average person'. That's very true when it comes to economy of scale and the high cost of doing so. It often doesn't pass the cost vs benefit test, but with advances in AI, all that cost and difficulty in pursuing it goes out the window. If it's not regulated and dealt with properly, it could lead to mass unemployment and poverty, along with the associated crime and outright anarchy. As Jerry indicated, our financial system is based around milking the punters. If those punters no longer have jobs or money to target, the whole house of cards will tumble.

I was reading an article related to the tennis at the U.S. Open and there was some mention of the American player Jessica Pegula. I don't think any of them are in professional tennis just for the money, but Jessica Pegula is one certainly doing it for the love of the game if her family wealth is anything to go by. Her father made his money in oil, gas and energy, and her family own two sporting teams with an estimated value of eleven billion dollars, so she's not short of a quid.

I think with the debate on AI we're just tinkering at the edges. It won't keep developing at the current pace; the pace of advancement will snowball quite rapidly. I'm sure we'll be having a very different conversation about it in two years time, and most of that conversation will be about the downside of it.

A Wooden Indian, not the cigar type.

A beautiful old KB Inter

One example of job losses will be in the modelling industry. There will still be a need for physical catwalk models but almost all of the print and media advertising will go to AI generated models. That's a spin off from the graphics getting to the point where AI models can just about pass off as the real thing. A lot of photographers and modelling agencies will have to find something else to do. It's happening already; most of the online clothing retailers are using AI generated models now. It's not something that's going to happen one day; it's happening now and things will really accelerate, like a snowball effect. I can see the point of it though. If you were running a retail business or you were an advertising agency doing advertising work for companies, why would you employ a modelling agency when you can do it all with a few mouse clicks. No photographers, no studios, no booking venues and sets for model shoots. Unfortunately also no jobs for those people.

It's hard to keep up with banks these days. I've been with Suncorp since back in the days when it was Metway Bank, then Suncorp Metway, then Suncorp, so more than 35 years all up. They sold the banking arm to ANZ a couple of years ago and sometime over the next few months Suncorp Bank will vanish and I'll be an ANZ customer. There will be nothing to miss about Suncorp as they have zero loyalty to their customers. They shifted the credit cards off to NAB a long time ago, closed down almost all of their physical branches, sacked a heap of people and outsourced to 4,500 workers in third world countries to take their place. The only loans they offer now are business and housing loans, no more personal loans offered, so they've become a bank in name only. I've got this new thing going now where I want to try to deal with companies that employ Australians, but I don't know if there's any banks left like that.

I can remember watching the Canadian football grand final on the telly when I was in Alberta in 1985. There was a bit over four minutes left on the clock and the game finished about 35 or 40 minutes later. A lot of stops and big pow-wows. One thing I noticed during the MCG match was the coaches with a speaker/microphone headset covering their mouths with the playbook when they were calling a new play through to whoever it goes to. I'd never thought about it before, but maybe the teams employ lip readers to get a heads-up on what the opposite team is about to do.

In 2005 my brother and I took our dad on a road trip to see the war memorial in Canberra. On the way down we stayed a night in Cowra to have a look at the old POW camp as my dad was in a training battalion there at the time when it happened. In town there was a small museum and they had a hologram show depicting our POW's overseas. The point I'm getting at is that I wonder whether holograms will be replaced by AI created video or whether they will co-exist with it.

There's been big graphics advances just in the last few months when it comes to image to animated video. Not so long ago people's faces were obviously AI, in looks and facial expressions. With some of the better ones now it's almost spooky how realistic they are becoming. All those little things that define a person's personality are now being captured, especially the eyes and the smaller subtle facial movements.

On the positive side of AI, the advances in graphics are leaping ahead. It won't be too long before we can watch movies that don't look like a video game. It will soon get to the stage where the realism will surpass that.

All the talk in the news lately about artificial superintelligence and the urgent need to regulate it reminds me of a virus that's already escaped the laboratory. I get the feeling that the genie will be well and truly out of the bottle before the world's lawmakers can do anything about it.

Big day at the MCG, only three short of capacity with a crowd of 100,021.

I see where a bloke from Anthropic rates it a 10% chance AI will cause human extinction by 2030. That's it, I'm definitely not buying a new car, the old one should see me out.

That's right, the SanFrancisco 49ers flew in eight days ago and the LA Rams this morning. Polar opposite way of doing things.

Big day at the MCG tomorrow for NFL fans. First ever regular season game played in Australia. Rams vs 49ers, live on channel 7, kick off 10.35 AEST. They have to fly back to the US and play next week without a bye.

I've got two magnetos on the place, neither attached to bikes. One lives on an out of comission David Brown tractor, and the other one I'm not 100% sure, I think it's off an R-670 Continental.

I guess they have some type of spoof software that makes the calling number look like a local number.

I did some Googling and learnt a handy trick for potential scam calls. In the search bar, you type the number in and at the top of results is a website called reverseaustralia.com. It has a forum like format where people post their experiences of receiving a call from that number. I've got to the stage where I don't answer calls from numbers not in my contact list. I figure if they're genuine, they'll leave a message in messagebank and I can ring them back. Unusually, the call today did leave a message. When I dialed 101 to retrieve the message it was an AI generated female American accent voice pretending to be from the Red Energy who I recently switched to as a power retailer. One of the commnts on the reverse call lookup website said the same thing except they said they were from AGL.