‘AI is the technology of our time’ - AIML Professor testifies on AI’s global impact and why Australia needs to get on board
University of Adelaide professor and AIML Chief Scientist Anton van den Hengel testified Tuesday, 16 July before the Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) on AI’s far-reaching and enormous impact.
‘AI is the technology of our time,’ said Professor van den Hengel, ‘and it’s already having a huge impact on the productivity of other nations.’
‘AI is revolutionising every industry and it will continue to do so because it improves productivity 80% of the time and enables entirely new global business models. [Australia’s] focus on risk instead of opportunity has seen us slow to adopt AI and thus slow to capture its benefits.’
Professor van den Hengel noted in his remarks before the committee that countries similar to Australia are much further ahead in terms of AI investment.
‘Compared to most of the countries that we like to compare ourselves to, we have been very slow to make the transition,’ to an AI-enabled economy said Prof van den Hengel. ‘Canada has done a lot better than we have. They’ve just spent billions on this.’
‘Singapore has just spent another billion and South Korea has spent billions as well,’ he said. ‘In contrast, Australia rates 93rd in the world out of 133 countries for economic complexity and we’re going down. We’re just below Uganda in economic complexity.’
University of Adelaide professor and AIML Chief Scientist Anton van den Hengel testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Adopting AI, 16 July 2024
Prof van den Hengel spoke of how Uber and other tech companies have ‘disrupted’ long-established industries including taxi services, journalism and other fields and that AI’s impact will be similar.
‘We have this idea that because our agriculture and mining industries are physically grounded that they are somehow protected. That is not the case.’
‘The Uber model [of disruption] applies just as much to agriculture and mining as it does the taxi industry, if not more so.’
When asked by Senator David Shoebridge about addressing public fear around AI based on the ‘the previous promises of re-training and re-positioning [that] were never made good in the past’ including in the manufacturing and garment-making industries, Professor van den Hengel noted that garment-making and other industries left Australia for other countries with better productivity.
‘This is our chance to improve [Australia’s] productivity.’
Professor van den Hengel encouraged the Senate committee and the Australian government as a whole to increase its commitment to and investment in sovereign AI capabilities including the creation of a sovereign Large Language Model (LLM) developed in Australia and trained on Australian data. He noted that building this sovereign LLM is one step on the path towards creating the infrastructure for an AI industry in Australia because the capability built developing this LLM will stay in-country.
‘If we don’t make this transition, if we don’t drive this transition, it will happen anyway,’ said Prof van den Hengel. ‘The truth is, our opinion [of AI] in this country is almost entirely irrelevant because we are not active players in the global AI space.’
‘The only way to have a say in what happens globally in this critical space is to be an active participant.’
Click here to view Professor van den Hengel’s Senate testimony - https://www.aph.gov.au/News_and_Events/Watch_Read_Listen/ParlView/video/2643767