What our lives will be like after this seismic change — some say AI will impact our lives even more than the first and second industrial revolutions — is really down to us, it’s a choice.
Yes, we can use it to make our lives more comfortable, enjoyable and personally rewarding or allow it to fall into the hands of the profit mongers making our lives “nasty, brutish and short” as Thomas Hobbes wrote the “Leviathan”.
Workers in the Goulburn Valley, as with their compatriots around the world, sit somewhere on the arc of threats from AI, ranging from immediate to of no real concern.
Those who see AI and its impact on life through the prism of comfortable, enjoyable, collaborative, constructive and rewarding, and thing to be shared, celebrate.
However, if it’s captured by those who can only imagine exploitation, privatisation, profit and opportunity through which they can tighten their grip on public largesse, then the wonder offered by AI quickly evaporates.
Two groups working quietly in the background, Basic Income Australia (UBI) and Degrowth Network Australia (DNA), welcome AI with almost breathless anticipation.
Many businesses and organisations within the Goulburn Valley already make use of AI, mostly, however, to make whatever it is they do, quicker, easier, more productive, cut its use of workers, yet ensuring growth and increasing profitability.
Those ideas conflict with goals and ambitions of both the UBI and the DNA who, in the case of the former wants to see the workload on individuals reduced it not eliminated and replaced by state funded basic income, while the latter wants to see growth slowed significantly.
AI, and all it brings, means a blinding acceleration to nearly all things instructive in our lives, so much so that changes what took hours, days and months will now be completed in less than seconds, so much so that many of us are left sitting in the dust wondering where the future went.
Like other existential threats to our being, among them climate change, the beneficial application and use of AI hinges entirely upon social governance.
Do it with thought, compassion, kindness and the purposeful interest of putting human wellbeing ahead of profit, while enlisting the dizzying potential of AI to ensure the health of earth’s environment, then all is good.
However, here in the Goulburn Valley, the good life will be knocked askew if the reverse happens and the darker aspects of AI are allowed to surface.
So remembering the silence means consent, when you see AI infringing on your human rights, even when legitimised by promises of profits, then make your displeasure known.
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