Imagine a world without AI
By Professor Anton van den Hengel
4 September 2024
For all of the concerns about the impact of AI, perhaps we should consider what a future without AI would be like.
The first thing that most people would notice is that their phones are no longer smart. Almost everything you do on a smartphone, apart from making phone calls, uses AI. There are billions of posts on Facebook, and it’s AI that decides which ones you might actually be interested in seeing. This won’t be an issue, however, as Facebook is funded by advertising revenue, and without AI-based ad targeting it wouldn’t be viable. The same goes for Instagram and TikTok. There would be no social media at all without AI.
Google wouldn’t exist, because most of what they do is driven by AI. It’s not just that web search is driven by AI, it’s the ads again. Google web search is primarily funded by advertising that uses AI to identify which ads might be of interest to which people. They pioneered the idea.
Computer games contain AI characters, but even simple ones like chess have AI-based opponents. Without AI we’d be back to playing pong.
Whichever of the maps apps you use on your phone wouldn’t work without AI, as it’s how they analyse the data to form the maps from. We’re thus going to have to go back to paper maps and the street directory, which will be a shock for younger navigators who’ve never learned to use them.
If you’ve been using email for more than the last year you will have noticed that the amount of spam you’re getting has dropped. This is because they’re using AI to filter it out. So without AI we’d still have email, but it’d be full of spam again. Spell checking uses AI too.
Online shopping won’t work, at least at the scale that we’re currently using it, because that whole business runs on AI. AI-based collision detection makes cars safer, and AI-based prediction makes weather reports more accurate, so they will have to stop. Without AI there’s no MRI, and no Uber.
None of this is going to happen, of course, because AI is adding far too much value for it to be removed. Whether you’re a fan of social media, or web search, doesn’t really matter because there are enough people who want them to have made the companies that provide them some of the most valuable we’ve ever had. No one really wants to go back to the way we lived in the 80s either.
The decision we can actually make is whether we want a future with our own AI or not. All of the AI above comes from overseas, and we show no sign of redressing the balance. Whether you believe that AI-enabled companies like Canva are Australian or not depends on whether you focus on their founders or funding. Either way, Australia is an AI lightweight.
One of the key challenges that being an AI lightweight poses for the Australian economy arises because AI enables global business models. Under this model a company offers AI-based services in a local market but that are hosted overseas. The challenge for the local market is that a significant proportion of the value of each transaction thus goes straight overseas.
Google’s revenue in Australia in 2022 was $8.4 billion, and at least $7.1 billion of that went straight to Ireland, because that’s where Google Australia buys its services from. They paid $92.6 million, or 1.1% of revenue in tax in Australia. Meta (who own Facebook and Instagram) run a similar model and TikTok Ltd is registered in the Cayman Islands. Every time you catch an Uber 27.5% of the fare goes to Uber. You’re now buying taxi rides from a company in the Netherlands.
The more of these transactions we have in our economy the more we send directly overseas. This is not sustainable, but it’s also not stoppable. Uber was illegal when they started in Australia, but services like AliPay mean that you can pay for dinner with money that never came to Australia.
The way to overcome the economic impact of AI in Australia is to have Australian companies running AI-based business models in other countries. The economy just went global, and we’re already feeling the impact. We can’t beat it, but we can join it. It’s not feasible to pull out, so we have to engage. It’s hard to imagine a future without AI, but easy to imagine one without Australian AI. Putting our heads in the sand won’t stop the impact, it will just stop the upside.
Professor Anton van den Hengel is the Founding Director and Chief Scientist of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) at the University of Adelaide.
