Lumen Spring Summer 2023 - Flipbook - Page 13
AIML Director, Professor Simon Lucey
I think it’s more white collar than blue
collar jobs that are going to be affected first.
There’s a classic problem in robotics called
the universal grasping problem or manipulation
problem. It’s difficult to get any robot or
machine to pick up any object universally.
We take this for granted as humans. Most
things that are roboticised or mechanised are
very closed and focused on one repetitive
task. Humans are amazing in our ability
to carry out many different tasks under
different scenarios.
Interestingly, we are already familiar with
change in white collar jobs. What I was
doing when I started my job is very different
to what I do now. There is an opportunity
for AI to be used as a productivity tool in
situations that do not rely on any high-risk
decisions like legal defence or performing
surgery. For those decisions you still need a
human in the loop.
AI is great for productivity, and could be
a net job creator, especially in Western
countries like Australia. There is a lot of
fear over job losses, but I believe they’re
largely unfounded. All Western countries
are getting greyer and older; we’re going to
need productivity tools to keep the economy
ticking along. There will be disruption, but
I think the pace that it will occur, and the
type of disruption, may be overblown. AI is
potentially a job creator.
Australia needs to invest in AI just so
we can tread water, so we do not lose
jobs to other countries investing in AI. If
we invest strategically, we could achieve
job growth and bring back the jobs lost
through globalisation. The reason those
jobs left is because of the cost of labour,
and so automation reduces those costs.
Burying our heads in the sand saying ‘this
is scary, we hate it, we’re worried, let’s not
do anything’, is a catastrophic decision for
the country because that will lead to a less
complex economy, poor productivity, and
fundamentally a lack of opportunity for the
next generation of young Australians.
What is AIML doing to advance AI?
One of the big challenges with AI is how
well it can mimic what humans can do, but
AI does not learn like humans. AI works on
frequency of data, let’s say I am deploying a
robot to Mars, there will not be a lot of data
on that. Autonomous vehicles for example
have been exposed to millions of hours of
driving time, yet they still cannot drive like
a human. Whereas a 17-year-old in South
Australia only needs 75 or so hours behind a
wheel. Our focus at AIML is to get AI to not
just perform like humans but to learn like
humans so they can go out and do
different things.
We are ranked in the top 10 in the world
in computer vision, which is impressive
considering other institutes are in
superpower countries like the US or
China. I was a professor in the US for
15 years, and it’s the reason I came back
to Adelaide, because nowhere else in the
country is similar and AIML had that global
reputation.
We are also strong in something called
vision-and-language which is the intersection
between computer vision and natural
language processing. Say you have a robot
LUMEN – SPRING/SUMMER 2023 13
