There is a quiet battle going on that will have a big impact on our lives, our jobs and the country’s ability to employ people and pay them. But unions want their potential nemesis — bosses armed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) — restrained.

These union-insisted checks on what employers could do with AI, should be good for job preservation and better pay for those not taken out by robots and computer software alternatives to real workers, but it could mean Australia’s productivity improvement could fall behind the rest of the world.

Ultimately, it will depend on what other countries do, and while Europe might be like Australia and introduce checks on how AI can be applied in the workplace, you can bet the USA, China and many other Asian countries will be going long on this labour-saving technology with little regard for the social consequences.

This may well be the short-term experience but over a longer timem as the jobless rates rise worldwide, there could be worker riots of Los Angeles-proportions.

To avoid the consequences of AI added to businesses here in Australia, unions have come up with a list of demands and here they are in a nutshell:

1. White-collar unions want the government to enforce a “digital just transition” for workers affected by AI;
2. Unions want AI regulated;
3. Unions want the benefits of higher AI-generated productivity to mean higher pay for workers doing it with this new technology;
4. Blue collar unions want special processes that mean if AI raises productivity a factory (as an example), the workers share in the gains, and
5. Workers whose skills are used to introduce (or train) AI need to be compensated.

The AFR’s David Marin-Guzman explained the union’s thinking on this subject.

“White-collar unions want the government to enforce a ‘digital just transition’ for workers affected by AI, raising comparisons with measures for coal and gas-fired power jobs hit by the shift to renewables, while adopting requirements to compensate workers when their data is used to train artificial intelligence,” he reported.

Australian Services Union national secretary Emeline Gaske, explained what her union will want to talk about and insist on getting from the Prime Minister’s roundtable on productivity, set down for August.

“AI will undoubtedly reshape the way we work, but we can’t lose sight of the people behind the progress,” she told the AFR. “Workers whose knowledge, experience and judgement are used to train and refine these systems deserve to be recognised and fairly compensated.”

Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock, written 55 years ago, foretold what a digital revolution, ultimately driven by AI would mean for the world and the people who live in it.

He foresaw that automation would displace traditional jobs and redefine human roles in the workforce, demanding new skills and adaptive learning. Toffler got so many things right about the future we now live in, and it’s right for unions to be worried about the threat of AI, but we can’t afford to be luddites who try to kill off this technology.

We need smart leaders to ensure the benefits of AI — productivity, lower inflation and higher pay — are not knocked out by old world thinking.

AI will definitely kill jobs but it will redirect workers into those jobs that a robot could never do in the face-to-face services sector, though it will mean that some workers will have to learn to leave home to be an employee!

Toffler said many wise things but these two seem to be the most appropriate:

“If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And it could be worse.”

and

Our moral responsibility is not to stop the future but to shape it…to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.

My concern is that the likes of well-known US tech entrepreneurs will dictate what our future looks like and we have seen how some of their decisions have been great for their profits but not so great for society.

That’s why we need great leaders and not the political pygmies that prevail here and overseas nowadays.

That’s why the US ended up with its current president. Donald is no pygmy but he does have some shortcomings!