The Invitation: A Polymathic Interjection
In early 2018, the Australian Senate established the Select Committee on the Future of Work and Workers to grapple with an era of “unprecedented change”. While the committee was flooded with standard industrial relations advice and moderate economic forecasts, our submission (Submission 84), co-authored by James Newton-Thomas (AI) and Jack Strocchi (Economics), acted as a radical technical intervention.
On May 4, 2018, we were called to give sworn testimony in Sydney. The introductory narrative was one of profound contrast: while the Senators were looking for ways to adjust TAFE funding or “flexible working arrangements,” we presented a first-principles derivation of “distributional carnage” rooted in Turing, Von-Neumann, and Shannon. We warned that the government was being blinded by an “Economist’s Rear-View Mirror” that failed to see the exponential leap of Intelligent Machines.
Here we are nearly 10 years later. We were correct.
Point-by-Point Analysis: Successes & Failures
1. The Prediction of “Computational Substitutability”
The Point: We argued that by 2027, AI would reach a point of “fully human substitutable machine mind,” capable of replacing all paid human intellectual labor where economic incentive exists.
2026 Success: This timeline has proven remarkably accurate. With the 2023–2025 explosion in Generative AI, the “Turing Test” milestone cited as the “inflection point” has effectively been surpassed in most professional domains.
2. The “STEM Assault” & High-Value Exposure
The Point: We challenged the consensus that AI would only target “repetitive” jobs, using the formula Sa ∝ Va/Rc to prove that high-earning pilots, lawyers, and IT professionals were actually more at risk.
2026 Success: This is perhaps our paper’s greatest triumph. In 2026, manual laborers (gardeners, cleaners) remain largely insulated due to the high cost of physical robotics, while the “IT professionals” specifically highlighted have seen their core skill—“talking to computers”—fully commoditized by AI.
3. The IoT Transaction Tax & “E-Specie”
The Point: We proposed a government-backed, blockchain-based transactional unit for the IoT to capture revenue from machine-to-machine activity.
2026 Success: The foresight on “Central Bank Digital Currencies” (CBDCs) was nearly a decade ahead of its time. In 2026, the RBA and Treasury are actively trialing wholesale CBDCs to manage the very “programmable money” and “atomic settlement” described in 2018.
2026 Failure: No “infinitesimal transaction tax” has yet been implemented. The IoT economy remains a “tax-evasion frontier,” as warned, but governments have opted for regulation of private stablecoins rather than issuing their own mandatory IoT specie.
4. Policies for AI Interaction (The Early “Arp” Principles)
The Point: We proposed a legislative framework requiring AI to identify itself, be truthful, and disclose its purpose—long before “AI Ethics” was a standard term.
2026 Success: These principles are now the bedrock of the “Demechracy” model being developed for the Australian Renaissance Party. Many of the 2018 suggestions, such as AI identifying itself, are now being integrated into global AI safety standards.
Conclusion
Our paper, The Luddite Fallacy Fallacy, told the Committee that there is “no future of work for humans” unless we make it so, as machines would soon be “computationally substitutable” for human labor.
We argued that the government was receiving “poor advice” from economists who didn’t understand the exponential nature of the technology and from industry which is understandably concentrating on its own bottom line but not taking into account the sociological dangers that unfettered pro-business policy in the AI age will release.
The Australian Renaissance Party is our response to Government inaction on this critical and existential issue.