Artificial Intelligence has now produced a real life case of the robot devouring its creator’s job!

It’s the brave new world on the information superhighway. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now produced a real life case of the robot devouring its creator’s job!

This happened within our biggest and most successful bank in the form of the CBA.

Despite trade union efforts to keep the despised AI genie in its bottle, this is only the tip of the iceberg! Excuse my mixed metaphors but I think the need for dramatic effect outweighs quality literary expression.
In a very old TV show called Dobie Gillis, he had a cool, beatnik friend, Maynard G. Krebs, played by Bob Denver who later became Gilligan in the TV hit, Gilligan’s Island. By the way, Chat GPT – an AI product — helped me recall that info!

Anyway, Maynard was always going to see a mythical movie called The Monster that Devoured Cleveland, which reminds me of what this monster called AI is set to do with a lot of jobs. This CBA story gives us a glimpse of that future, which, unlike Maynard’s film, won’t be a myth.

At an AI symposium in Parliament House in Canberra put on by a worried ACTU, Kathryn Sullivan, who’d worked for the CBA for 25 years, explained how she trained the chatbot that ultimately, when fully equipped, replaced her.

This is how news.com.au reported the incident:

“Kathryn Sullivan was made redundant from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) in July, alongside 44 others in what were the first job cuts directly attributed to an Australian company’s uptake of AI.”

Sullivan remains a fan of AI’s potential pluses but thinks regulation is required. “While I embrace the use of AI and I can see a purpose for it in the workplace and outside, I believe there needs to be some sort of regulation to prevent copyright (infringements)...or replacing humans — you still need the human touch.”

After Finance Sector Union protests and bad media publicity, the CBA reversed its decision and reinstated the workers. However, this is a sign of things to come.

While the ACTU accepts that the AI wave can’t be turned back, it does want ‘sea walls’ to minimise the potential damage. “What we don’t want is Australia following a United States style ‘let it rip’ approach, where the benefits of the new technology and productivity flow through to multinational tech companies, leaving workers without a say or a meaningful stake in the potential gains,” said ACTU Assistant Secretary Joseph Mitchell.
While the union movement has a role to make sure AI doesn’t rampantly kill jobs, demanding unions and governments, with excessive regulations and taxes, don’t make employers look to AI to reduce costs and help make enough profits to want to risk their assets and their peace of mind in being a creator of jobs and a payer of wages.

Most employers are good people who have a lot of curve balls thrown at them. So, if AI hits a few of those balls out of the park, then it will become an important part of future business. And yes, some jobs will be lost.