Another day, another rash of wild predictions regarding the impact of artificial intelligence.
Following today’s Productivity Commission report on “Making the most of the AI opportunity” — which predicts lots of lovely efficiency-created dosh flowing into Australia’s economy, at the cost of lots of jobs — Treasurer Jim Chalmers said it is the government’s job “to make sure that people have the skills they need to adapt and adopt this kind of technology”.
“There’s a lot of very smart people who have concluded that the opportunities for workers outweigh the risks, that it’s about augmenting people’s work, not always just automating it, and so the responsibility that we embrace is to make this work for people, not against them, and make them beneficiaries, not victims of this change, including in the workforce.”
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In the newest Paint by Numbers, Crikey breaks down the bewildering statistics behind the impact of AI and the wildest predictions about it — plus a few of our own.
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The amount of money AI could inject into the Australian economy over the next decade, according to today’s Productivity Commission report: $116 billion
Portion of Australian jobs at risk by 2030, according to the Australian Council of Trade Unions: 1 in 3
Portion of all energy in the US that currently goes toward AI data centres: 4.4%
Amount of electricity in the US going to data centres that will be used for AI by 2028: More than half
Portion of worldwide energy use AI is projected to account for by 2027: 0.5%
Portion of worldwide energy that the entirety of Argentina accounted for in 2023: 0.426%
Portion of US households’ electricity use estimated to be used on AI by 2028: 22%
The amount of water projected to be used by global AI demand in 2027: 4.2–6.6 trillion litres
Amount Apple plans to spend on manufacturing and data centres in the US over the next four years: US$500 billion
Amount Amazon plans to spend to expand data centre infrastructure in Australia: $20 billion by 2029
Number of new data centres likely to be built as part of OpenAI’s US$500 billion Stargate initiative: Up to 10
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Peak of contribution to US GDP growth by spending on AI infrastructure over the past six months: Nearly 2.75%
Consumer spending contribution to US GDP growth over the same period: Around 0.75%
Number of takes it took Jackie Chan to perfect the “shuttlecock” scene in 1982’s Dragon Lord: Around 2,900
Number of classic Kung Fu films — including Chan’s — being “reimagined” by AI, according to a collection of Chinese studios: Around 100
Number of “songs” generated by AI start-up Boomy: 14.5 million
Number of years it would take to listen to those AI-generated songs (assuming the average pop song length of 3 minutes and 30 seconds): 96.6
Time it took Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel: Roughly four years
Time it took Crikey to generate the following image of the Sistine Chapel, reworked to feature 1980s pop duo The Proclaimers: Roughly four seconds
Is AI usage already getting out of control?
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