Technology is coming for Australian jobs, but white-collar workers have much more to fear than blue-collar workers, according to a visiting Canadian expert in the area.
Dr. Andrew Miller, who will address the Urban Development Institute conference in Perth on Tuesday, said artificial intelligence (AI) is not coming before most physical jobs.
He said technology such as ChatGPT – which uses AI algorithms to generate human-like text – will have profound effects on how work gets done..
“But it’s going to change the world of work for white-collar workers who spend a lot of time typing, people who use a lot of computers,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
“But for people who work with their hands, AI will be less able to do that,” he said, adding that robot deliveries could soon be normal in Australia.
Technology is coming for Australian jobs, but white-collar workers have much more to fear than blue-collar workers, said Dr Andrew Miller (pictured with a robot delivery truck in Tokyo)
A test drive of self-driving trucks in Melbourne last November was described by lorry driver Luke McCrone as ‘job-killing’, but Dr Miller said such technology will not lead to an overall job loss.
“Maybe you no longer have a driver who carries a load over a long distance, but the truck has to be loaded, it has to be secured, it has to be kept safe, it has to be weighed,” he said. said.
“There is still a lot of work to do in logistics and shipping, but less in simply driving the vehicle from one place to another.
“People will do less of that and more of those other things that so far only a human can do.”
A company called Wing can deliver up to 250 Coles items to addresses in Canberra (pictured)
In November 2022, driverless trucks were traveling at 80 km/h on the fast lane of a highway in Melbourne (pictured, one of the driverless trucks)
Dr. Miller, who works as a senior leader in urban solutions for the multinational group Hatch, dislikes the use of the term “autonomous vehicle” for self-driving cars.
‘If something is autonomous, that means it makes all the decisions. So an autonomous car, if there was such a thing, would get you in and take you where it thought you needed to go,” he said.
“But an automated car is one where it drives, you tell it where you want to go and it drives.
‘The driving task is automated, but not autonomous. It’s not making choices for you.’
Regardless of what people call the technology, it’s coming, although some people fear and resist it.
Dr. Miller compared it to the work of elevator operators, which existed until about 30 years ago in, say, the Grace Brothers department store on Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall.
Dr. Andrew Miller said people driving their own cars will pave the way for elevator operator jobs (pictured)
But in a time further back, when elevator operators were commonplace everywhere, “the idea of getting into an elevator where there wasn’t a professional to drive it was, so to speak, ridiculous,” Dr. Miller said.
“We have to look at Mad Men (1960s TV series) to remember such a world where there were elevator operators,” he added.
‘And that’s how it would go with [automated] the driving. People will find it hard to believe one day that they didn’t have cars that could drive themselves.’
Having goods delivered by drones may seem like something out of science fiction, but it already exists in Canberra, where a company called Wing can deliver up to 250 Coles items.
Dr. Miller was not surprised that Wing chose Canberra to depart from, as it’s “a city that’s not that densely populated, the people are less spread out, so it’s cheaper to send it by air than to try and find a ground path ‘.
He thinks that for very densely populated cities, such as Sydney or Melbourne, ground-based robot delivery would make more sense than using drones, but said major changes would need to be made in Australian cities to accommodate the technology.
“Since the robots will be using the sidewalks, they won’t have to fight pedestrians for that space. Make the sidewalks bigger so that there is room for people and robots,” he said.
Robotaxis, as pictured, are already in use in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and, closer to home, in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen
He also said bike lanes should be made bigger to accommodate cyclists and e-scooter riders as well as robots, and that the extra space should come from private cars.
‘You don’t want people driving from A to B through your city anyway. Look what Paris is doing. Look what Barcelona is doing,” he said.
“The future of major global cities is one where we take space away from private cars… and more for humans to get out and about and in the future for robots to get out and move.”
If the lack of space for cars makes it less attractive to drive, there will be an opening for robo-taxis already in use in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and, closer to home, in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
“These are things that are happening now. They’re not happening in Australia because Australia hasn’t made it their business to create things like that and maybe that’s the right thing to do,” said Dr Miller.
It is not for me to tell Australia what to do and what not to do. My point is that if this is something Australians wanted, they could have it at short notice.
“That’s what I would say to the Prime Minister, you need to work with state governments and city councils to make cities less hospitable to private cars and more hospitable to everything else.”
Drone technology (pictured) can work well in a less densely populated city like Canberra
However, he said good regulation is vital and the Uber model of setting up and asking permission later is not the right way to do things.
“The Silicon Valley creed was act fast and break things, (that) it’s better to want change and so go ahead and change things, you don’t wait for permission because that takes too long.
‘And that’s a great motto when it comes to software development, but then you can (move) physical objects through busy spaces at high speeds.
“You definitely don’t want to break things when you move things in[a crowded]space,” he said.