Should big tech be allowed to mine Australians’ text and data to train AI? The Productivity Commission is considering it
Should big tech be allowed to mine Australians’ text and data to train AI? The Productivity Commission is considering it
At least they are coming out and admitting that all of these texts are stored and ready to be mined....
I am sure this is good for every AU peasant, nothing can go wrong
Time to buy shares in postal services. They are bound to make a come-back
What's the likelihood of AI companies respecting any new regulations?
Well we either accept this, get a movement going where we give the AI millions of deliberately false SMS to ingest, or start using a better messaging solution. Not WhatsApp or Signal.
I know I'm going to regret asking this, but why not Signal?
Yes, I know it has the disadvantage of not being decentralised, and it's not anonymous as a phone number is required.
However, for the vast majority of people, it is the simplest and easiest solution to gaining E2EE comms.
Signal is objectively a far better choice than SMS or WhatsApp and all the options I'm aware of. I dunno what OP is angling at either.
The only easy to use E2E encrypted chats are centrally managed, eg: Signal - and even getting friends and family members to move to that is hard.
While a decentralized fully open source self-hosted solution would be great - that shits just not possible for 90% of people. Apps succeed or fail due to barrier of entry and ease of use, and the decentralized options typically have far less user-friendly apps, far fewer users, and often require tech know-how like choosing a federated server or even configuring your own online storage or server (egs: Matrix, Briar, StoneAge). Some bring up Session as another alternative while failing to realize it is also centralized if you want push notifications (which most users do).
There is no such thing as privacy.
Nice to see we are finally getting some regulatory movement here.
Let’s hope that either they come to the correct conclusion and do have some enforceable legislation; or the bubble bursts and the whole AI Bullshit Scam looses its funding.
Telstra can’t sell everyone’s SMSs if there is no one buying.
And Telstra can't sell everyone's encrypted messages if we can collectively move on from SMS.
PC modelling showed that even the most conservative estimate was that AI would deliver a $116bn boost to the economy over the next decade.
King said that this translated into a $4,300 kicker to the average Australian’s real wage in 10 years’ time, and that the actual benefits could be much larger.
fark sounds good
Sounds good but it’s all bullshit.
I can tell if that comment is in jest, he is for real drinking the koolaid with a straight face.
Whenever a technology has increased productivity, the extra profit made hasn't been passed on to increase the workers' real wages. Why would it?
We've already seen AI preemptively treated as a way to make workers redundant and not pay their wage at all, with some idiot bosses having to rehire entire teams they had fired because they bought into AI hype and thought it was capable of replacing them all. They've shown what their financial incentive is - increasing shareholder value by outsourcing to cheap markets or removing jobs. And in fact, removing jobs through automation could be a great thing if we had a market capable of retraining those workers to perform the jobs that society needs most. We don't. Our political-economy is run for profit, not productivity, and it's important we recognise how contradictory those goals truly are in the real world.
Whenever a technology has increased productivity, the extra profit made hasn’t been passed on to increase the workers’ real wages. Why would it?
Where did you read this? It certainly did in the past:
It stopped when a combination of the mining boom taking off, Australia being too expensive to be a manufacturing hub anymore and it's difficult to measure how many widgets we make when the widgets are hard to measure according to:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-27/productivity-wages-growth-australia-mining-boom/105338488
removing jobs through automation could be a great thing if we had a market capable of retraining those workers to perform the jobs that society needs most
Maybe we should use AI to train them :D
I think you're forgetting we live under capitalism, every job that can be removed, will be removed.
Automation will only end up being a net positive for society if we radically alter our economic system.
Automation to this level is not the same as industrialisation or the motormobile, we're not creating nearly enough jobs to offset those that would be lost in the process.
All at a time at which 2 incomes barely covers living expenses for many people, where 1 used to cover a house, a wife and 3 kids.
$4,300 extra over 10 years? Press X to doubt AI will have anything to do with it.
Automation to this level is not the same as industrialisation or the motormobile, we’re not creating nearly enough jobs to offset those that would be lost in the process.
I thought employment rate has been at record lows these last couple years?
All at a time at which 2 incomes barely covers living expenses for many people, where 1 used to cover a house, a wife and 3 kids.
If you take out housing payments/rents as they're due to the housing crisis that's definitely not true
If you're on 2 incomes and struggling with a paid off house you're doing something wrong
Standards were very different in the era you're talking about, there was no eating out, there were no yearly holidays, there was no 8 different subscription services, 3 ipads, 5 tv's, 3 computers, 2 cars, a huge house etcetcetc
Especially if you're a tradie or mining related, you're probably making absolute bank.
Translated how.
https://aussie.zone/post/23393953
like this, it allows gps to spend more time on the patient than writing up documentation
https://www.heidihealth.com/au
less time writing up documentation, more time spent helping patients and improving their lives, that’s a productivity boost
When there is nothing more to dig out of the ground we shall mine the population instead !