Jerry_Atrick

A little thread drift, but an associate member of the EU hasn't been defined, so knowing the EU it may take a very long time, although the desire to move away from the USA may speed things up a little. But there will be hurdles. There are three freedoms that are preserved across the EU: movement of capital, movement of goods/services, and movement of people. Will these have to be included in an associate membership? If so, then your control of immigration from any EU country goes out the window. So, given Australia's very tight grip on immigration compared to other countries, the preservation of this free movement may well be a problem. The EU will need to think about things very carefully. There sort of is already associate membership - it is the European Economic Area. It allows Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein to basically be in the EU without being in the EU, and they are required to comply with most of the obligations of the EU. Yet they don't get to vote on the EU rules they need to comply with. Switzerland has a similar arrangement through a bilateral agreement. And of course, after the messy divorce, there is this country called Britain, which tried it's own bilateral deal, but all was offered was Switzerland's deal. So, the EU has some existing memberships and deals, that if they give special treatment to Canada in this Associate Membership status, might peeve off a couple of these others, and may trigger a whole round of renegotiations of these arrangements. And given the rising anti-EU sentiment within the EU and the rising right, if Canada gets some sort of cushy deal, well, there will be individual countries coming under pressure to leave the EU and join a cushy deal, too. Outside of a free trade agreement or similar type of bilateral arrangement, I can't see this one being negotiated and agreed upon anytime soon. These are not insurmountable problems, but the political risk for the EU is very much there.

Not the only cynic:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8vgy3pq5ywyo There are the first steps of Canada and EU becoming very close by Canada becoming an associate member of the EU. What that means, I am not sure, but Chump's reaction was yet another tantrum. Howver' Carney's speech to the EU was priceless as it basically was the most polite sticking up of two fingers I have seen. go to 3:10 of this video: Of course, Chump came out with threats and basically throwing his toys out of the pram. But, the USA doesn't need Canada nor Europe, so he really shouldn't care.

Good point.. that still provides 66 per shift... which still seems high. Hardware doesn't fail that often and it will have fail over redundancy; and can later be swapped out.. so i was still being generous with 20 hardware and network engineers.. In addition, if there is a catastrophic failure, requests will be handled by other sites. And of course what is the balance of full time v part time. I still think 200 full time employees is on the high side to be directly employed at the site to give the region the boost it claims to. I have been to data centres and there aren't many people around

I am not sure how that translates to pilots having to undergo more rigorous foreign conversion process than a doctors.. but I may be missing something

200 ongoing jobs seems a bit high unless they include indirect employment. The compute side can be remotely managed; there would need to be a number of hardware and network engineers - probably in the order of 20; 180 maintenance and security people with a few admin staff seems high.. but i guess they are large sites

I think I do have a clue of airline pilot conversions and ongoing checks.. We are talking about recognition of foreign qualifications and I would suggest you have no idea of what it takes for a doctor (especially consultant) to be able to practice in Australia when qualified overseas if you think an airline pilot undergoes a more rigorous approach. Let's stop the personal attacks and pissing match baits. And yes, I would like both professions to be rigorously assessed before being allowed to practice.

Doctors. They are tested as much.. if not more. Ask my sister in law what she had to and continually has to go through. Some "lesser" professions they do not accept and you have to start all over again

Robotics technology coupled with AI will eventually come after blue collar workers, but outside specific functions, e.g. car manufacturing, drainage cleaning and the like, where robotics is already in place, the dexterity and processing capabilities of robots has a way to improve before you will see one up on your roof or re stumping a house.

I don't know if it is a pretty wobbly financial model.. I think it is a bit like the .com (or .bomb) boom and bust. As a nascent industry where there is a lot of promise, there are a lot of players coming to market, despite the costs. Investors can see the gravy trains, but need to bet on which ones will survive. It's almost certain there will be a bust and from the ashes, a few phoenix's will rise. The bets are anthropic, despite Chump's disdain for them are going to be one of them; Open AI - not so. The success or otherwise though, in this case, won't be the consumer, but businesses. They are the ones who will fork out the big bucks to automate as long as the payback is there. And it is already for a lot of them. I can't speak about our company specifically, but if you think from SMEs to large corporates the automation capability is there now, especially in sectors that rely on information processing or content generation. Anthropic has already moved to a token based billing system where tokens pay for units of work. I think there are different token costs for say art generation versus software development. Eventually this model will probably prevail because you can work out your costs per unit of processing and apply a profit accordingly. The typical investment banking middle level contract programmer will cost around £200K/year; a permanent will cost not much different when you factor in pension, health care, holidays, training, sick, etc. If AI if 15 more efficient then I would happily pay half of my salary/contract payment bill, which runs with well into the 7 figures per year to whichever AI company we would happen to use.. It also benefits the business by being quicker to market and keeping up or beating our competitors. One of my report's sons has a job in a hedge fund or something similar as an intern. We caught up with him a couple of weeks ago and the stuff he as an intern and a developer with I think it is Claude crank out makes me wince.

Are you sure?

From my time working in Abu Dhabi, which was admittedly very short you could probably find most of what is in the above prose and being frequented by locals. Men are men at the end of the day..

It's the qualification that is of interest; not the job title.

Serious question - in the absence of an Aussie core AI company, should the federal government proactively encourage/sponsor a local industry, legislating 100% Aussie ownership of our own AI companies?