OpenAI 'productivity' scam is self-interested garbage
One of the persistent features of the “productivity debate” in Australia is business pushing its own interests disguised as benefits to the economy through enhanced productivity. Crikey readers know all about it — the demands for company tax cuts, the slashing of “red tape”, the push to remove protections for workers.
This week’s “report” by OpenAI, loftily titled “OpenAI’s Economic Blueprint” and touted by visiting “chief economist” Ronnie Chatterji, is straight from the same playbook we’ve seen for so long from business lobbyists in Australia.
As was the case with the way an amnesiac media treats every recycled business “report” as some sort of staggering new insight, Chatterji and his tome — which runs to 15 (count ’em) generously spaced pages — received a warm welcome from the media.
The $115 billion a year boost
Only Mark Di Stefano in the Rear Window column was prepared to call bullshit (and point out the Labor connections helping Chatterji into ministerial meetings that many small and medium Australian businesses could only dream of — or pay a lot of money to a lobbyist for).
As always, OpenAI’s big claims of windfall economic benefits came with a demand: to earn the purported $115 billion in benefits, Australia would need to provide tax incentives for businesses to adopt AI, embrace AI in government and give AI companies access to government data, devote taxpayer money to “AI-ready infrastructure like data centres”.
Questionable numbers
For a credible look at the potential productivity benefits of AI, we need to turn to an independent body, not a pack of self-interested rent-seekers. An OECD working paper from a year ago looked at the peer-reviewed literature around AI productivity and found a very different story.
One reason is that the history of automation over the past few hundred years has shown that increasing productivity as a result of automating technology simply pushes demand and resources to other, less productive sectors of the economy, which become correspondingly larger.
Conclusion
This is the key point about Open AI’s report and the feting by the media and politicians of its spruikers: it is simply the same rent-seeking and influence-peddling that we’ve seen so often from the country’s biggest corporations over decades.
OpenAI’s effort might come dressed in the fashionable garb of digital services, but it’s the same rent-seeking s**t underneath.
