AI: The Hope and the Hype - Recap from Royal Society of NSW's AI Event
I was fortunate enough to attend the Royal Society of NSW’s (RSN) recent event discussing AI entitled “AI: The Hope and The Hype”. It was hosted by the Patron of RSN, the Governor of NSW, her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC at her residence, Government House in Sydney.
Having only just joined the Royal Society of NSW I wasn’t sure what to expect, but failing to wear a jacket I was definitely under-dressed in such an opulent setting. It was a very formal affair but one that was far better informed on the realities around AI than I was expecting. Given my past observations and engagements with government and large companies, I had tempered my expectations of the event.
We were fortunate to have a lot of industry leaders attending including Victor Dominello who was the NSW Minister responsible for getting ServiceNSW’s digital delivery off the ground, something we all take for granted now. We also had Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck give a very informative keynote speech bringing everyone up to speed on where AI is at.
Each of the panel sessions had a distinct theme:
- AI and the Law
- AI in Communities
- AI in Health
- AI in Practice
- AI Research - Future Directions
There was so much content during the day it would be hard to distill briefly, but some key points that stood out to me:
Everything will move from X to AI + X, for instance, Architecture will become Architecture with AI, Customer Service will become Customer Service with AI. AI will augment the work people do. It’ll be rare that we can completely remove people from roles, the successful pattern moving forward will be keep a “human in the loop” for making key decisions.
While the sales focus of AI is primarily “improve productivity”, many roles will be using AI to optimise the work done. Dr Amandeep Hansra (GP and Chief Clinical Adviser to ADHA) shared that using AI Notetaking apps have allowed her to spend more time with her patients rather than seeing more patients to increase billings.
Professor Jie Lu raised that in the future, as AI Agents improve, we’ll spend time supervising them as we would a junior employee, rather than using them as a tool like we do now. It’ll definitely be an interesting paradigm shift to treat AI as independent resources rather than tools.
The arms race of AI is wasting a lot of power and money to try to attain market share. Our brain operates on 20 watts of power, but AI datacenters are using many orders of magnitude more power. The experts on the panel predicted that as we move to future generations of AI, the usage of power will drop significantly once we move to a more “steady state” AI market.
Videos of the day were livestreamed and recorded. They will be uploaded to the Royal Society of NSW Youtube channel soon. You can see the program of what was discussed at the event here
Overall it was a well-informed event and it was a pleasure to attend. It definitely challenged me to think more about how we can effectively use AI in devfu and what appropriate and useful opportunities there may be for AI in our products. As always, feel free to get in touch if you’ve got ideas no how we can use AI in our products to make your life easier, or would just like to chat about the future direction of our products.