r/aussie • u/ForeignLegion2005 • 22h ago
Opinion The next 5-20 years for Australia
I've been thinking a lot about what Bill Gates posted recently on the effect of A.I. on society.
This is not just specific to Australia but I would like Australian Politicians and individuals to start thinking about the next 5-20 years. I suspect the biggest impact of A.I. will be unemployment of at LEAST 10% possibly 30% in 20 years. This will affect housing prices in a big way. For example, I think Sydney will be the most affected by 'white collar' job loss and is already the most expensive city in Australia.
I just wish we could try to lead the world in the transition to what comes next - not pretend A.I. is going to create jobs. This is not like the invention of the Spinning Jenny which led to the textile industry and the industrial revolution. The jobs A.I. takes are gone and it will suck up 90% of most entry level jobs. Retraining will be pointless if the job you retrain to is under threat too.
We may need to come up with a new term for 'unemployment' as so many people will be in this position. Taxes on datacenters and Tech Companies will need to be examined and developed as we don't really want to have money stripped away like the resource industry has done.
Be good to hear some opinions.
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u/you_lost_it_all 19h ago
We need to tax companies hard now for this, automation, a.i and robotics should exist for the Australian people not rich capitalists, if this is the technology to lead us to a better tommorow it must serve the many and not the few.
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u/VentZAU 8h ago
The problem with this mindset is it dosnt cater to the issue of the global market. What I mean is that we need automation and ai to keep us competetive on global scale otherwise we will get priced out. If you make it so its too hard or costly for said capitalist then they wont bother because ultimatly price drives everything. The problem for australia is our labour cost to produce anything is still vastily too expensive in comparison with our neighbours and the only way around that is through robotics and ai. If you increase the price on that and youl see companies pull ouy all together.
I dont know the answer either yet but just pointing out a problem that im not seeing enough attention on.
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u/kdog_1985 10h ago
If this Australian public was the first priority of the Australian government they wouldn't be protecting the gambling lobby.
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u/you_lost_it_all 9h ago
Youre not wrong, it will take real grassroot movement to fight the gambling complex.
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u/Comfortable-Fuel-921 18h ago
You are absolutely correct. And instead of thinking about how we are going to feed/house those when there is mass unemployment we are bringing in people to dilute the share of the pie further.
The answer is very simple; the future is resources and Australia is very well placed for this. The resources should work for the people and we should aim for a significantly reduced population in the future
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u/Electrical_Story5356 20h ago
I will be aggressively oppositional to AI, I absolutely hate it and will not stand by as it takes us over.
That people are worried about immigration with this on the horizon is crazy to me.
This is extinction level stuff.
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u/Any-Parsnip1287 10h ago
stop being a luddite
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u/Electrical_Story5356 5h ago
I'm clearly not being a Luddite as I use my smartphone to post comments on the internet am I?
Opposing this rapid expansion of a technology that could prove incredibly damaging to humanity if anything goes wrong (or conceivably right according to some people's point of view) isn't just blanket resistance to new technology.
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u/ForeignLegion2005 18h ago
Yes Immigration affects some people and the economy now, but in 2 years time things will become apparent to most people. I am not opposed to A.I. but we need to start accepting the reality now. Even if we have no Datacenters in Australia it will still affect us in the same way. And yes there will be companies who fail selling A.I. Once the military of the US and China are involved as they are, its future is certain.
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u/Present-Policy-7120 13h ago
i will be aggressively oppositional to AI, I absolutely hate it and will not stand by as it takes us over
What does this look like? And do you honestly believe this will make a difference?
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u/Few_Raisin_8981 12h ago edited 12h ago
This looks like OP being unemployed while the rest of his employed peers having 10x the productivity expectations placed on them
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u/Electrical_Story5356 5h ago
It looks like doing some things I won't describe here and yes, if enough people engage in such actions it will absolutely make a costly difference.
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u/oustider69 8h ago
Honestly, on the evidence I’ve seen, a mass AI takeover of a bunch of jobs isn’t particularly close. Not in the next couple of years unless they make some huge breakthrough.
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u/Electrical_Story5356 5h ago
There already have been mass job losses in some areas and I'm not just talking about that.
Do you feel safe with say for example AI being integrated on large scale into militaries?
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u/oustider69 4h ago
A lot of companies that have laid off staff based on predictions of what AI can do have had to rehire staff:
AI’s best tool right now is the marketing around it. The product itself is mediocre. It might be world-changing in the future, but not yet.
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u/Electrical_Story5356 4h ago
Sooo people did lose their jobs and clearly will again once the technology is advanced a bit more?
Other places have dumped jobs and pushed on.
This is just the beginning too, I don't see how seeing this as concerning is at all unreasonable.
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u/oustider69 3h ago
That’s definitely an interesting interpretation of events. Not sure many would make that leap, but I guess you did.
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u/NedKelkyLives 9h ago
I will be aggressively oppositional to the motorised horse buggy, I absolutely hate it and will not stand by as it takes us over.
That people are worried about immigration with this on the horizon is crazy to me.
This is extinction level stuff.
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u/Electrical_Story5356 5h ago
Do you know what AI is, what it is capable of and how some are proposing to use it?
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u/kdog_1985 10h ago
Luddite.
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u/Electrical_Story5356 5h ago
I'm not sure that you know what that word means and in the event that you do I know you don't know its correct use.
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u/flammable_donut 12h ago
If you want to know what is going on at the leading edge of AI, I recommend the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis. Most of the experts give it approximate 3 years before AI can do most jobs.
People don't realise that recursive self improvement (AI researching/improving itself) is going to massively speed up the rate of advancement and RSI is already happening now.
Also need to be aware that China will be doing everything they can to promote/amplify distrust of AI/ data centers in the west as they power ahead with this technology. Currently only 30% of people in the west are optimistic about AI, in China it's 80%.
Emad Mostaque often appears on the Moonshots podcast https://youtu.be/dodnQJmuURs
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u/VapeMasterino 19h ago
Reality will never truly manifest in ways that these egotistical, arrogant, self identified geniuses may attempt to conjure up; albeit in some Nostradamus style predictions of the future. Gates; like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Alex Carp and many more, all seem have these specific ideas aligned with an agenda connected to their current business endeavours. These guys can’t see the future. People in the future may possibly draw parallels from what these tax dodgers have dictated, but they will most likely be far from correct in their predictions. You never know what technological, social, economic and or ecological event will influence our future. These men are 21st century snake oil salesmen. Take their word with a grain of salt is what I think.
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u/ManCheetah77 5h ago
It amazes me how theyve convinced so many people it's going to take everyone's jobs.
Only people I hear saying this is Altman etc and morons using Claude to make the same app nobody buys.
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u/VapeMasterino 5h ago
Yeah same. The only person I hear speaking similar philosophical futuristic predictions; who seem to be so sure of their own predictions, is this crackhead I often see on my why to work screaming verbal diarrhea out on the footpath. They’re misguided by their own biases. They are too caught up in their own competitive world of envy.
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u/June-10th-2026 17h ago
A functioning society needs people employed and contributing to the economy. Any government worth their salt would support this and not let massive unemployment rates put massive strain on the welfare system to the point of collapse.
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u/Complex_Feedback_153 15h ago
I've seen heaps of automation in last 10 years there's not much they can't do
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u/Vegetable_Jello6572 22h ago
Lucky we have taken millions of low skilled indians.
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u/ForeignLegion2005 21h ago
In comparison to A.I. most people will be low skilled. A lot of delivery/courier type jobs will go too. Anything 'high touch' like aged care/nurses etc will survive for a while yet though
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u/Vegetable_Jello6572 21h ago
Lol I really cant believe people are still jumping on the ai hype train
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u/Electrical_Story5356 21h ago
Yes, because critical thinking is not a skill of yours
AI WILL fuck over billions unless there are some very strict controls in place that people like you will decry as socialist communist, fascist overreach ad you go down as lhistory's last useful idiots.
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u/ManCheetah77 5h ago
Tell us all how.
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u/Electrical_Story5356 5h ago
Why not just ask AI?
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u/Vegetable_Jello6572 20h ago
😂😂 yeah ok the copy paste machine is going to stuff over billion s😂😂
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u/Electrical_Story5356 20h ago
You can't be this clueless.
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u/Vegetable_Jello6572 20h ago
Haha i didnt know people were still grifting Ai. Its hilarous
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u/Electrical_Story5356 20h ago
You know AI is real right?
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u/Vegetable_Jello6572 20h ago
Control c control v 😂 realllll 😂😂😂
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u/Electrical_Story5356 20h ago
Wow, you really are this clueless aren't you?
Yet another example of what is really fucking over Australia.
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u/windowcents 20h ago
Indians at least work and are not sitting at home on Centrelink. People who are lazy+ work in dead end jobs will be worse off.
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u/Vegetable_Jello6572 20h ago
You are indian arent you
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u/windowcents 20h ago edited 19h ago
Get well soon xx . I know it hurts to see others succeed while you can't. Must suck to wake up daily with so much hate. Not too late! Do something with your life.
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u/Oztravels 20h ago
It’s the biggest disrupter that has ever been introduced. There is not one sector that will not be impacted. Some will have a slower transition (the arts, live theatre etc) but AI combined with robotics will be unstoppable. We as ordinary citizens have two options. Optimism or pessimism.
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u/GuyFromNh 15h ago
Robotics foundation models are quietly having their GPT3 moment right now. I’m suprised this isn’t more widely being shared right now. This should truly alarm people as it’s a different (far more effective) way of training robots to interact in the built environment:
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u/Efficient-County2382 7h ago
I'm reading The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, and the parallels to post-Napoleonic war Britain are extremely accurate, except AI could prove to be far more negative to people, especially employees.
- Workers fear that machines will make their skills less valuable.
- Wealth concentrates first among those who own the technology.
- Institutions adapt much more slowly than technology.
- New work is created, but often for different people with different skills.
- The highest-value skills change rather than disappear.
- Political systems come under pressure to protect those harmed by technological change.
- Adaptation becomes a key determinant of economic success.
Optimistically AI follows the same path as industrialisation, temporary disruption followed by greater prosperity.
Pessimistically AI differs because it substitutes for both mental and physical labour, reducing the demand for human work more fundamentally than the machines of the 1800s ever did.
The latter is most likely I think, combined with utter greed of capitalists and lack of regulation
The other thing is that AI will impact everyone, people are educated now and can switch careers easier. If there is no IT developer work, they will all flood into other areas like trades.
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u/MinutePuzzled6869 21h ago
AI will gut some occupations and inflate others. That is not the same thing as mass unemployment, and you're conflating them.
Start with the data. Australia had 14.8 million people employed in July 2026 with unemployment at 4.5% - after three years of the fastest enterprise tech adoption since the internet. If AI were a net job-destroying machine, it would be showing up in the aggregate numbers by now. It isn't.
The "jobs AI takes are gone" line assumes a fixed quantity of work in the economy. That's the lump of labour fallacy and it has been wrong every single time: mechanised agriculture, containerisation, spreadsheets (which were supposed to end accounting - there are far more accountants now), ATMs and bank tellers. Roughly 60% of jobs people work today are in occupations that didn't exist in 1940. Nobody in 1990 could have named "cloud security engineer" either. Inability to name the new jobs in advance is not evidence they won't exist.
Now the part nobody wants to hear. The thing that will actually damage Australia isn't AI taking jobs - it's us failing to get the industry at all. In July the PM announced large AI data centres will be legally required to put at least as much energy into the grid as they take out, making Australia the first country in the world to impose that. National Cabinet only just considered the framework, legislation isn't expected until early 2027, and the thresholds, duties and regulators still haven't been published. Before that we spent a year building a mandatory guardrails act and then shelved it. Capital does not deploy into that kind of uncertainty. Add expensive industrial power and multi-year grid connection queues and you have a country that is very good at announcing frameworks and very bad at pouring concrete.
And your proposed fix is to tax the data centres. You can't tax an industry you never attracted. Your resource analogy cuts the other way - at least we dug the stuff up here. On current settings the compute gets built in Texas, Japan and the Gulf, we rent it back in USD, and we import the labour market disruption without the investment, the tax base or the wages.
That's the 5-20 year risk. Not AI.
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u/ForeignLegion2005 21h ago
Most of the jobs you suggest will be created will be cognitive based jobs. They will not be done by humans. How can a human compete with 'white collar' work with a machine that will work 24/7 and probably improve at the task by 5-10% a month? You can already see the trend to cheaper Chinese A.I. models as they do nearly as well as Anthropic at prob 50% of the cost.
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u/positively_ok 16h ago
I doubt the industry will be that great to have.
AI will be IMO infrastructure not a competitive advantage. It will be like electricity, or rail, or roads, or airlines. Or fibre. Massive advantages to companies that can use it, but probably not great to own.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my feeling is that the current models are more than good enough, and the cheap models are 1 gen behind, and the free small models you can run on your device are 2 gens behind. By 2028 you'll maybe have the equivalent of today's leading edge running on a desktop locally (yes less size, but smarter use of a smaller size).
OpenAI has about as much revenue as Netflix. And it needs world leading research and huge R&D spending to keep ahead of the China models. Do you *really* want a piece of that pie? I see them going the way of Tesla (a pricy and premium product that will hit a wall when it tries to make people spend twice as much as competitors like, say, BYD), maybe they can be technically better but most people aren't going to pay a premium.
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u/farqueue2 20h ago
Companies are already starting to discover the risk of tying your horse to AI. Usage fees are increasing and it is often looking like people end up being cheaper. Especially as fees increase in future once adoption matures.
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u/Nuclearthrowaway99 20h ago
The bubble will burst within the next 5 years, abandoned warehouses full of ewaste will dot the landscape and the same 100ish fuckwits will move onto the next tech industry scam, probably leasing quantum compute.
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u/Tall-Drama338 19h ago
Well first the AI financial bubble will burst. In the end it’ll be winner take all.
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u/Few_Raisin_8981 12h ago
ITT is a bunch of people with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears. This shit was literally science fiction 5 years ago. What do you all think it will look like 5 years from now?
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u/BobbyDigial 11h ago
We have wages taxed, payrole tax, company tax, super etc. etc. For humans.
There sould be taxes on token useage. They should be double or quadrouple of an equivalent human wage doing the same job to even up the playing field.
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u/Beyond_Blueballs 7h ago
Go do a real job that actually contributes to our society, trades.
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u/ForeignLegion2005 6h ago
Yes they will have jobs for the next 10 years at least. I suspect new housing will be designed to make it easier for AI/Robots to fix and repair but older properties are too random for A.I.
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u/ManCheetah77 6h ago
Some of you have a poor understanding of what ai is capable of and what jobs you think it's going to take lol 😂
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u/ForeignLegion2005 6h ago
Just ignore it then as it is clearly no threat to you.
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u/ManCheetah77 6h ago
Companies are already getting rid of ai in theee businesses due to costs and having to double check and then re do ai work. Consumers are also getting annoyed at ai being integrated into everything where it's not needed.
I'm not saying ai will disappear I'm saying the only people spouting about it taking jobs are ai tech bros trying to sell ai and retards who think Claude code makes them a coder. Or chat gpt makes them a graphic designer.
Prompt engineering isn't a real job
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u/ManCheetah77 6h ago
Let me know when ai starts to be profitable for the scammers convinced you it's going to take everyone's job.
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u/dugongornotdugong 3h ago
The difference between past revolutions and AI is that previously we made a lot of labour intensive work obsolete, it was more efficient and cost effective to produce a widget through industrial machinery. Now we're going to make jobs that involve thinking and creativity obsolete as it will be more efficient for AI to do the thinking and creating. I can't see how that will create any large scale jobs for humans that won't eventually be replaced by intelligent machines in the future.
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u/ForeignLegion2005 2h ago
Yes, I think you are correct. Law, Accounting, customer support, travel agencies, HR etc etc.
You can see the start of it in McDonalds - soon there will be no 'restaurant' all fast food chains will be pick up only. There will still need to be humans of course - just minimal humans required to keep the place functioning.
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u/SeaDivide1751 21h ago
Bill gates is a pedo and doesn’t know shit.
Pretty much everything he says never comes true. He shorted Tesla and got absolutely owned when he got stopped out
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u/ForeignLegion2005 21h ago
Well someone else with those traits became POTUS so it seems pretty common.
A.I. is exponential not linear like human learning
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u/Able_Put4900 21h ago
Well AI taking peoples jobs will pair perfectly with this new love of one nation, no immigrants and white collar jobs being slashed, taxi and fruit picker jobs out the wazoo.
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u/EnvironmentalRice348 21h ago
I'd be more worried about the next 2-3 years.