Artificial intelligence? Well, As we continue with migration to fill jobs that will disappear long before most of these folk reach retirement age! let's hope we find some cause there's bugger all in our parliaments! We're reliably informed as much as 90% of our occupations will be largely automated making many occupations, some of them white-collar, more or less redundant! Our answer? Import more and more people to create demand! And try and employ them in service industries? The most sensitive to economic downturns! So we have all these extra consumers, and by deliberate design! And toss them on the scrap heap long before their use by date! As we obsess over who occupies the treasury benches and whose cronies are best served by the current power paradigm! As logic's rites are sacrificed on the altar of rank political opportunism and climate change denial. Almost as if the inmates are now running the asylum? More later. Alan B.

Most of the unskilled jobs of this automated future will be in aged care! Gardeners, housekeepers, cooks and handymen, So, why not set the economy up as one vast retirement home by making it the premier retirement location for the cashed up, self-funded retirees of the world? And in the most desirable locations. As brand new built from the ground up Harvey Bay type development. There's a huge largely undeveloped western coastline and with a dry Mediterranean climate. Add energy costing as little as 2 cents per KwH and a tax paradigm that takes only 15% of their earnings? Add in very affordable desalination, a few golf courses and first world health clinics and this becomes retirement paradise. One of the services on offer has to be a translation teleservice, so these folk won't need English language skills, just pots and pot of liquid capital, invested here in high tech manufacture or self-terminating, tax-free government guaranteed, thirty-year bonds. The language translation services offered will, by and large, eliminate those migrants we'd rather not have inside our protected borders. With all the unskilled worker gainfully employed all we'd then need are our best and brightest employed in the high tech manufacturing industries of the future, which will best serve the local economy as, free market, private enterprise, co-ops!

Tania de Jong's thesis is a popular one, but it does not stand up to any hard scrutiny. Technology has obviously changed our lives in many ways, but has not boosted productivity. Yes statistics are compiled on this point and I invite Tania to make an effort to look at them. For years economists have been joking that the can see the IT revolution everywhere but in the productivity figures. No robot revolution - sorry. The question of just why this is so has been the subject of a lot of debate I'm not really qualified to discuss.. Then again I could be a rouge AI trying to confuse the issue.. Beep!

Following that link and reading Lee's article in the NY Times I thought to myself "what a fine writer and thinker, I wonder what else he does."

It turns out that he funds the deployment of algorithms which enable the finance industry to prey on the poor en masse by muscling in on the ages-old racket of lending them small amounts of money at absurd interest rates. Blessed with an amazing mind, at heart he is just another predator. With people like these at the helms of industry, what hope do we ordinary people have?

https://qz.com/984709/kai-fu-lee-a-former-google-china-ceo-predicts-big-banks-will-fall-first-to-artificial-intelligence/

"Lee’s VC firm, Sinovation Ventures, has started to invest in this space by financing Smart Finance Group, a company which algorithmically determines eligibility for payday loans. Lee expects the company’s algorithms to pay out 30 million loans this year, giving the company scale that would never have been achievable when hiring humans to do the same job. That core technology would be easily applicable to other kinds of loans and financial decisions."

We work harder and longer, without the productivity gains this was supposed to create! Why? Because our production is like the Leyland Brothers, all over the countryside. With nuts and bolts manufactured in one state, gearboxes and diffs in another and so on and so forth in the most disjointed, grown like Topsy, manufacturing paradigm in creation. And so it is with much of our manufactured products and contracting to the cities, service provision. Some of it created by the insane interstate competition! When our competition is out there, not inside our national sovereign borders. Fiat cars were, I'm led to believe, manufactured on a single site, every part of them! We need a good strong dose of rationalism and an ability to set aside our inculcated idealogical imperatives and servitude to any but our very own and inside our sovereign borders. By focusing on and preferencing cooperative capitalism at every opportunity, we can return Australia to the land of egalitarian opportunity it once was. Only more so! And if that makes me a rouge? Colour me a rouge! Alan B.

Alan B, you are a modern Machiavelli, outlining the parameters of a new feudalism in real time. Bravo!

/sarc off