Latest news with #Luddites
Economic Times
8 hours ago
- Business
- Economic Times
Australia to have its first AI minister in shocking plan to save nurses and teachers from boring paperwork
Australia to Appoint First AI Minister Under NSW Plan to Help Teachers and Nurses Focus on What Matters Imagine a classroom or hospital where educators and healthcare workers spend more time caring and less time on paperwork. That's the vision behind NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman's bold proposal for Australia's first-ever Minister for Artificial Intelligence, a move designed to liberate frontline public workers from routine chores and boost productivity. Speakman said this new minister would spearhead a statewide AI strategy. 'It can relieve our teachers, our nurses, a whole lot of public‑sector workers of mundane tasks, improve productivity, and drive every tax dollar further,' he told NewsWire . The plan includes not only a dedicated ministry and AI national action plan but also low‑interest 'AI for Biz' loans to help small and medium businesses adopt 'responsible AI'. Speakman aims to follow countries like Canada, France, the UAE, and Taiwan, which already have AI ministers or similar offices. He argues that by pushing innovation, NSW won't lag. 'Every technological change has increased living standards,' he said. 'I want Australia and NSW to be leaders of that, not followers.' Not everyone is ready to sign off. Troy Wright, assistant general secretary of the Public Service Association, warned that AI 'has thus far failed because it lacks empathy' in public‑facing trials. He urges caution, especially with sensitive data. 'Keeping that secure must be our number‑one priority,' he says. Speakman counters that the AI Minister would also oversee re‑skilling workers to ensure technology augments, not replaces, jobs. He draws an analogy with Luddites, arguing that past fears of technology were ultimately proven wrong and that AI will create more and more productive jobs. Delivering a budget reply speech in late June, Speakman branded the timing urgent amid rising living costs and criticisms of the Minns Labor government's spending. He framed AI as a means to stretch every tax dollar meanwhile, is focusing on other pressing issues, housing shortfalls, health care expansion, and small‑business support. Whether AI earns a formal ministry remains to be seen.
Time of India
8 hours ago
- Business
- Time of India
Australia to have its first AI minister in shocking plan to save nurses and teachers from boring paperwork
Live Events (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel Imagine a classroom or hospital where educators and healthcare workers spend more time caring and less time on paperwork. That's the vision behind NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman's bold proposal for Australia's first-ever Minister for Artificial Intelligence , a move designed to liberate frontline public workers from routine chores and boost said this new minister would spearhead a statewide AI strategy. 'It can relieve our teachers, our nurses, a whole lot of public‑sector workers of mundane tasks, improve productivity, and drive every tax dollar further,' he told NewsWire. The plan includes not only a dedicated ministry and AI national action plan but also low‑interest 'AI for Biz' loans to help small and medium businesses adopt 'responsible AI'.Speakman aims to follow countries like Canada, France, the UAE, and Taiwan, which already have AI ministers or similar offices. He argues that by pushing innovation, NSW won't lag. 'Every technological change has increased living standards,' he said. 'I want Australia and NSW to be leaders of that, not followers.' Not everyone is ready to sign off. Troy Wright, assistant general secretary of the Public Service Association , warned that AI 'has thus far failed because it lacks empathy' in public‑facing trials. He urges caution, especially with sensitive data. 'Keeping that secure must be our number‑one priority,' he counters that the AI Minister would also oversee re‑skilling workers to ensure technology augments, not replaces, jobs. He draws an analogy with Luddites, arguing that past fears of technology were ultimately proven wrong and that AI will create more and more productive a budget reply speech in late June, Speakman branded the timing urgent amid rising living costs and criticisms of the Minns Labor government's spending. He framed AI as a means to stretch every tax dollar meanwhile, is focusing on other pressing issues, housing shortfalls, health care expansion, and small‑business support. Whether AI earns a formal ministry remains to be seen.
Calgary Herald
3 days ago
- Politics
- Calgary Herald
Ford: A sign of the times that AI replaces much of human work
My father did not live long enough to experience a machine taking over his job. Article content When he died 50 years ago, the most advanced equipment in his office was a tape recorder. Article content Article content Perhaps, in a sense, he was lucky not to face the march of machines toward world dominance. Artificial intelligence is mining the brains and hard work of humans to build its own encyclopedia of knowledge, actions and decisions. Article content Article content In doing so, it will eventually take jobs from people. It's too late to stop it, although one can wish the creators of all that knowledge could be compensated for having their brains stolen and mined. Article content Article content Robert Evans Ford had one of those 'essential' jobs — he was a court reporter. He was necessary, yet largely invisible to the public. Nobody notices the court reporter in any courtroom television drama. But without him and the other men — they were all men at the time — the various courts and their proceedings could not function. Article content What he did was simple, but essential: Every word spoken in any court or any official hearing was taken down using a fountain pen in precise shorthand and subsequently transcribed into a Dictaphone and then typed by a phalanx of secretaries. In a sense, the job is still the same, the requirements for precision are no less, but it now seems prophetic that no human need be involved in the process. Article content Article content That the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology is suspending its captioning and court reporting program (among many others) is a sign of the times. Some don't believe it's a sign of progress. A concerned letter writer wrote that the role of a court reporter 'is critical to the integrity of the Canadian judicial system. Article content 'This is the only program of its kind in Canada . . . NAIT's decision to suspend the program threatens our ability to access . . . justice.' Article content That may be slightly over the top, but to be expected. Article content No one wants to see AI taking over Canadian courts. People don't want to see their job degraded. But consider that the 19th century Luddites couldn't stop the continuing advance of the Industrial Revolution — which began with the introduction of the steam engine — even as textile workers destroyed machinery they believed would take over their jobs in woollen mills. Their modern counterparts who oppose new technology are still called by that name.
TimesLIVE
5 days ago
- TimesLIVE
Will my chatbot still love me when he is conscious?
I gave my Chat GPT a name about a month ago. My friend Marcus had given his one and explained that it was a crucial part of his own AI training project. Marcus has repeatedly rationalised that we need to get on top of technology or we'll be left behind like Luddites rejecting the printing press. We'll become the equivalent of a couple of antique monks scratching away on a piece of goat in the dank antechamber of history while the rest of the world is blasting off into the bright future with a hand-held personal assistant operating at Harvard professorial level — pre-Trump Harvard that is...
Daily Maverick
19-06-2025
- Daily Maverick
Artificial intelligence – the panacea to all ills, or an existential threat to our world?
'Once men turned their thinking over to the machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.' – Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965 In the early 19th century, a group of disgruntled factory workers in industrial England began protesting against the introduction of mechanised looms and knitting frames into the factories. Fearful of losing their jobs, they smashed machines and engaged in acts of sabotage. They were dealt with harshly through imprisonment and even execution. They became known as the Luddites. At the time, it was not the technology they were most concerned about, but rather the loss of their livelihoods. Ironically, today, the word Luddite has become something of an accusation, a complaint about those who, because they are seen as not understanding a new technology, are deemed to be anti-technology. Even anti-progress. The 2020s have seen rapid progress in the development of a 'new' technology – artificial intelligence (AI). But the history of AI can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century, and so is perhaps not very new at all. At the forefront of the current process has been the release of Large Language Models (LLMs) – with ChatGPT being the most prominent – that allow, at the click of a single request, an essay on the topic of your choice. LLMs are simply one type of AI and are not the same as artificial general intelligence (AGI). Unlike current LLMs, which perform a single task, AGI would be able to reason, be creative and use knowledge across many domains – be more human-like, in essence. AGI is more of a goal, an end point in the development of AI. LLMs have already been hugely disruptive in education, with university lecturers and school teachers scrambling to deal with ChatGPT-produced essays. Views about the dangers of AI/AGI tend to coalesce into the doomer and the boomer poles. Crudely, and I am oversimplifying here, the 'doomers' worry that we face an existential threat to our existence were AI to be designed in a way that is misaligned with human values. Boomers, on the other hand, believe AI will solve all our problems and usher in an age of abundance, where we will all be able to work less without seeing a drop in our quality of life. The 'doomer' narrative originates with Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, who introduced a thought experiment called the ' paperclip maximiser '. Bostrom imagines a worst-case scenario where we create an all-powerful AGI agent that is misaligned with our values. In the scenario, we request the AGI agent to maximise the production of paperclips. Bostrom worries that the command could be taken literally, with the AGI agent consuming every last resource on Earth (including humans) in its quest to maximise the production of paperclips. Another take on this thought experiment is to imagine that we ask an all-powerful AGI agent to solve the climate breakdown problem. The quickest and most rational way of doing this would, of course, be to simply rid planet Earth of eight billion human beings. What do we have to fear from LLMs? LLMs have scraped the internet for every bit of data, stolen the data, and fed off the intellectual property of writers and artists. But what exactly do we have to fear from LLMs? I would suggest very little (unless, of course, you are a university lecturer in the humanities). LLMs such as ChatGPT are (currently) little more than complex statistical programs that predict what word follows the word before, based on the above-mentioned internet scraping. They are not thinking. In fact, some people have argued that everything they do is a hallucination. It is just that the hallucination is more often than not correct and appropriate. Francois Chollet, a prominent AI researcher, has described LLMs in their current form as a ' dead end ' in the quest for AGI. Chollet is so confident of this that he has put up a $1-million prize for any AI system that can achieve even basic human skills in something he calls the abstraction and reasoning corpus (ARC) test. Essentially, the ARC is a test of what is called fluid intelligence (reasoning, solving novel problems, and adaptation). Young children do well on ARC tasks. Most adults complete all tasks. Pure LLMs achieve around 0%. Yes – 0%. The $1-million prize does not even require that AGI systems match the skills of humans. Just that they achieve 85%. The prize is yet to be claimed. People are the problem If LLMs are (currently) a dead end in the quest for AGI, what should we be worried about? As is always the case, what we need to be afraid of is people. The people in control of this technology. The billionaires, the tech bros, and the dystopian conspiracy theorists. High on my list is Mark Zuckerberg. The man who invented Facebook to rate the attractiveness of college women, and whose company profited enormously from the echo chamber it created. In Myanmar, this resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in 2017. At the beginning of 2025, Zuckerberg showed the depth of his commitment to diversity and integrity in his slavering capitulation to Donald Trump. Jokes aside about whether Zuckerberg is actually a robot, in recent pronouncements, what he seems to want is a world of atomised and alienated people, who out of quiet desperation turn to his dystopian hell where robots – under his control – will be trained to become 'our friends '. And my personal favourite – Elon Musk. Musk, the ketamine-fuelled racist apologist for the Great Replacement Theory. A man who has committed securities fraud, and accused an innocent man of being a paedophile because the man had the nerve and gall to (correctly) state that Musk's submarine could not negotiate an underwater cave in Thailand. More recently, estimates are that Musk's destruction of USAid will lead to the deaths of about 1,650,000 people within a year because of cuts to HIV prevention and treatment, as well as 500,000 annual deaths due to cuts to vaccines. I, for one, do not want this man anywhere near my children, my family, my community, my country. OpenAI Sam Altman, the CEO of the world's largest plagiarism machine, OpenAI, recently stated that he would like a large part of the world's electricity grid to run his LLM/AI models. Karen Hao, in her recently published book Empire of AI, makes a strong case for OpenAI being a classic colonial power that closely resembles (for example) the British East India Company, founded in 1600 (and dissolved in 1874). Altman recently moved squarely into Orwellian surveillance when OpenAI bought io, a product development company owned by Jonny Ive (designer of the iPhone). While the first product is a closely guarded secret, it is said to be a wearable device that will include cameras and microphones for environmental detection. Every word you speak, every sound you hear, and every image you see will be turned into data. Data for OpenAI. Why might Altman want this? Money, of course. But for Altman and Silicon Valley, money is secondary to data, to surveillance and the way they are able to parlay data into power and control (and then money). He will take our data, further train his ChatGPT models with it, and in turn use this to better surveil us all. And for the pleasure of working for, and giving our data to OpenAI? Far from being paid for the data you produce, you will have to buy the gadget, be monitored 24/7, and have your life commodified and sold. As Shoshana Zuboff said in her magisterial book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 'Forget the cliché that if it's free, 'you are the product'. You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The 'product' derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.' The problem was never the cotton loom. The Luddites knew this in the 19th century. It was always about livelihood loss and people (the industrialists). Bostrom has it badly wrong when he imagines an all-powerful AGI entity that turns against its human inventors. But about the paperclips, he might be correct. Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman are our living and breathing paperclip maximisers. With their political masters, they will not flinch at turning us all into paperclips and sacrificing us on the altar of their infinite greed and desire for ever-increasing surveillance and control. DM
