Ai’s Productivity Boom Needs A Worker Dividend

CANBERRA — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese began his Oct. 10 press conference on technology guardrails by observing with respect to artificial intelligence that “you can't turn it off and pretend it hasn't happened or it isn't happening.”

It’s the sort of observation you make when you know voters hate the subject of discussion. AI, like death and taxes, is inevitable so you may as well make your peace with it. Or, in this case: listen up to the ways the Australian government thinks it can shape AI in the national interest.

Albanese rattled off the “potential benefits from AI, boosting productivity, bolstering economic resilience, revolutionizing areas such as health care.” While nobody is going to quibble with a technology if it cures cancer, it hasn't yet. And until it does, there's a more relevant political observation: most voters seem to hate it or distrust it.

That was one of the key lessons from the U.S. midterms, in which a string of anti-data center ballot measures and candidates were successful.

Albanese nodded to those results by noting “what happened in other parts of the world without guardrails or standards” where “social licence slipped” as a result.

He didn't say it, but the prime minister must also be keenly aware that the problems exist in his own backyard. A growing list of successful local protests in his home state of New South Wales, which goes to the polls in March 2027, suggests Australia is on a similar trajectory.

The release of the recommendations of a snap review into the OpenAI data breach incident seemed designed to draw a clear, bright line between U.S. Republicans’ laissez-faire attitude to AI and the more balanced Australian Labor approach.

But aside from the fact that so many details of the new guardrails are yet to be determined, there is a problem with the Albanese government’s logic that Australia can take the good bits of AI without the bad. The problem is that even the good bits are scary, particularly the prospect that if productivity gains eventuate then the demand for and value of human labor will decrease dramatically.

Crashing into the prime minister’s promise of guardrails came airline Qantas’ announcement it will cut 850 jobs and outsource work to Accenture to overhaul its IT systems and prepare for [further] AI disruption of the travel industry. Perhaps AI will meet its promise of boosting productivity, improving shareholder value and decreasing the cost of customer service and air travel. In the meantime, for those affected, it’s a massive blow and many workers fear they will be next.

Economics correspondent Adam Creighton, now at the libertarian Institute of Public Affairs, wrote for The Australian in 2013 about how the media industry, with its successive rounds of redundancies and job cuts, had become the pinnacle of private sector productivity. Forced continually to do more with less, journalists were now writing up to three stories and 6,000 words a day, with a news cycle closer to 24 minutes than 24 hours, he wrote.

It’s only got more intense. Automatic transcription and smartphones freed us scribes from the drudge work, but it sped the job up even more. With the extra time one can make another phone call, read another report or meet another source. Journalism might be better for it. Audiences may have more information than ever. But full utilization of every working moment of the day on higher-order tasks adds to burnout.

Workers in every occupation have their own similar stories; and those entering the workforce do so with anxiety about what career, or even steady income they could build.

Last week I argued Albanese should be offering the public sector workforce some of the gains of AI: higher pay in return for greater efficiency. But it’s true also of the private sector. If workers knew that training AI or using productivity tools that intensify their day would be rewarded with a four-day work week, would they embrace it?

On Thursday workplace relations minister Amanda Rishworth called on businesses to consult with their staff about the rollout of AI — to win trust, and to answer their nagging questions like “will they share in the benefits being created?”

The Greens were blunt in response: workers need more than an “optional best practice guide,” party leader David Shoebridge said, they need better pay and shorter hours written into law rather than relying on the goodwill of their employer.

The gains have to be more tangible than Malcolm Turnbull’s declaration in 2016 that “there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian."

Voters don’t want excitement, they want material improvement: with inflation and interest rates rising, wages stagnant and house prices falling, there's not a lot of material improvement on the horizon.

Albanese jetted out to COP31, ASEAN and APEC, leaving Defense Minister Richard Marles as acting prime minister. On 2SM Radio on Wednesday, Marles explained AI is “going to be completely central to maximizing our Defence Force capabilities” on every platform: submarines, F-35 fighters, drones and soldiers wearing AI-enabled battle management systems.

The future of warfare with AI on both sides put in mind an analogy: nuclear weapons. That’s another technology that we can’t pretend doesn’t exist; the knowledge of how to split the atom changed human history forever.

But the inevitability of scientific advance, and the possible benefit of nuclear deterrent doesn’t mean voters have to love it. For decades Australian voters have said they don't: it's why the country still has a moratorium on even civilian nuclear energy.

We inhabit a moment in history when the enormous impact of AI is widely-discussed but not yet universally felt. Albanese’s AI guardrails are his attempt to nudge those with the blanket over their heads to come out from their ineffective cover.

The way to win the politics of AI is not merely to assert its inevitability — voters need to be given a reason to stop worrying and love the productivity bomb.