Panel discussion: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
We are about to hear from our phenomenal panel I am but a humble journalist who's researched this stuff we're about to hear from the real deal the experts and drill down please have a think about what questions you'd like to ask on slido because we'll ask them throughout the conversation it's a rare opportunity to pick these people's massive brains I'm very excited all right first of all I'm going to invite actually online fine we have someone joining online the founder of Magpie travel a California based company that provides a way to manage information and content for the tourism and travel industry please welcome hopefully we can get him up online Christian Watts hello Christian hello you can hear me yes we can thank you for joining us I'll invite the other panellists up and then I'll get going incidentally Magpie travel very clever spelled m a GP AI I love a quirky name next is a business consultant with lots of experience in helping organizations change and adapt for the future particularly in the space of artificial intelligence please welcome Dr Elissa Farrow, Elissa thanks so much for joining us and Dr Farrow's just come from another event so we are really grateful for her time you're on the run today finally we have a principal scientist in strategy and foresight from syyro his work is often future focused on how to get more Science and Tech applied in Industry please welcome Dr Stefan hovic and I quoted Stefan in my book another Shameless plug all right let's start by finding out a little bit more about how new tech technology is being adopted by the tourism industry how hard it is to predict the future because we're all sitting up here as crystal ball gazers okay educated Crystal Ball gazers but the future is an unknown before we get into that though I'd like to hear from each of you your definition what is artificial intelligence Stefan I'll start with you all right so I think the first important thing is there's no such thing as artificial intelligence we we haven't invented it yet um it's a bit of an incorrect name I'd call it maths and stats but still incredibly powerful and Incredibly impactful in what it's going to do artificial intelligencce is maths and stats that is capable of doing a really good job at predicting the ne next thing or generating something based on a huge amount of information and that alone is quite transformative but uh I think if you if you really were to look at it I'm not sure that we have invented yet artificial intelligence I love that I knew this would be controversial Elissa what's your definition a little similar to that hi hello everyone um for me artificial intelligence is a tool it's a tool that has been created to replicate some of the processes functions features of humans and I think at the moment the concept of sentient AI which means that they are smarter than humans in all areas doesn't exist but I certainly believe that AI as an area of computer science has got some pretty exciting features at the moment so certainly it's smart tech to me I'm so glad you said sentience doesn't exist cuz it obviously doesn't but I remember a New York Times writer playing with chat GPT when it first came out and thought the robot was falling in love with him and imagined that the bot was sentient so I think there's that tension between humans and technology that we think it's more humanistic than it is and I did read your road map in research for my book in 2019 syro produced a road map on AI how is this sort of information put together and what did it say about the tourism industry at that time 2019 yeah look we totally didn't see 2023 when we when we were working in 2019 on artificial intelligence so I I wrote the national road map for Australia on artificial intelligence it was launched by the federal government in 2019 and I also wrote the ethics framework which was launched in the same year which is now a set of principles two fascinating things is firstly how those ethics principles we we ummed and aahed over maybe they're so here and now and very relevant to all all of us um I think what our voluntary principles will also become mandatory and then the road map um we didn't really foresee how much capability was going to happen I think a lot of the developers of the larger language models the Claude Gemini uh chat GPT the ones you know but a lot of models like that the human performance Benchmark was up here and within only years these models were hitting performance benchmarks for for language reasoning for for competition mathematics um image classification image generation we've been Amazed by it I think it is fair to say You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet a lot more is getting into the R&D pipeline a lot more capability is coming we saw the first big gains by putting more and more data into these models more than we ever had done before um now and we also saw the the Transformer architecture of 2017 come into play in 2017 some Google researchers published what is now I think the most cited paper in science ever uh and the paper was titled attention is all you need and it was a Transformer architecture which focuses the machine learning model on the bits of the problem that really matter and it was a we're able to use that technology and that's what also made all of these models that we interact with now so amazingly powerful it really did transform what we could do with machine learning but those sorts of discoveries are continuing to get put into the R&D Pipeline and it's hard to know sort of what will will work and have a big impact into the future but the next big thing that's about to hit us as we see the next upgrades of these models is an enormous Step Up in computer processing power this puts a lot more layers and neural networks into the deep learning models which means it's going to get better at making predictions of the next thing and I think we will see substantial up improvements you gpt3 to GPT 4 was significant I think likewise Claude has taken some really big steps forward I think we will see more of that we're moving into the era of foundation models and yeah what is interesting to me is I I work foresight similar to to you to you and uh I think we just totally did not see the extent of what was happening happen in terms of tech capability and human use and economic use of the these models so it's such a fast-paced world I'm just feel like someone at the center of it I feel like I'm drowning in it I can't keep up with all of the things that are going on I can't get my head across all of the things that are happening in the world of AI all the time and also have learned not to underestimate what it's going to be able to do but not to overestimate at the same time wise so much time has passed since 2019 that was the year Christian that you started Magpie AI if your audio is fixed I'd love to hear from you how much has the business changed since the ideation back then to what it is now yeah we we started out as a Content management platform we were're a single source of Truth for product content and then we distribute that across the travel industry the the biggest thing we didn't have when we started out is we didn't have the ability to write content so we're great at Distributing content but the number one problem was that tour operators weren't very good at coming and actually writing it that's not a service we provided so if I could have almost imagined the best tool that we could have ever brought into the business it was chat GPT in 2022 so from that day onwards we've been able to create content and it's really good it's been really good from day one for creating that content and also Translating that content so now we've got perfect almost perfect product description in the tone of the tour operator we've got unlimited translations to whatever language they need so it's really revolutionized our business that's just one of the tools that we use it for so can you hear me content creation is so important because uh social media requires so much more content these days so if it can be done automatically or autonomously that's a game Cher Alysa your PhD focused on the implication of AI organizational Futures what are these implications what of those are specific to the tourism industry I might ask out AV team to put up my first discussion pack how excellent you're very organized I like that hopefully aha it's up there yeah perfect excellent is it up yep excellent so the first the first slide that's up there is just to give you a brief introduction to futures and Futures thinking so my doctoral studies explored organizations of the future and the implications of artificial intelligence on leaders teams and the adaptation approach in particular it also delved into the areas of mindset and what sort of mindset was required to help anticipate and move towards the Futures and this first um image that's up there is what's called a Futures cone that demonstrates for us that there's multiple Futures that exist our future is not known it's not unknown and there's many multiple features that could happen can we go to the next slide please what I explored in my research was organizations of the future I SLE my research in 2040 as a good futurist does try to stretch the planning Horizon out a little bit covered through on a Continuum of what organizational operating models would be like in the future knowing that some of these operating models might exist simultaneously but in other circumstances in a tourism Venture we might choose to um select a certain element the Continuum goes from fully Ai No human involvement which we might not be at quite yet the other end of the continuum focus more on human only and in a tourism context we could almost visualize Futures where maybe the human only context could be almost like a VIP experience as opposed to to the AI only might be the budget special one more slide please what's also in existence to prepare for my uh part of the panel today was just to explore some futures of Tourism what you can see up there in the screen it's just some purely scenario options of what could be longer term possible Futures in various tour tourism sectors they range from items to do with personalized experiences where maybe we are carrying around an app that updates in real time so our tourist experience updates as real time information does we might have robotic concierges which your exhibit showed in those examples we might also have examples where perhaps for us we might have in the future robotic companions robotic tour guides we might even have um AI as your tourism agent as well and back office staff again for me from a Future's perspective all of these possible scenarios come with choice and for me the first question I'd like to encourage anyone to ask is what part of our value proposition as business owners or leaders do we not want to erode with artificial intelligence even though we possibly could such good advice and I love the idea of VIP experiences Being Human to human and personal and more mainstream broader experiences being powered by AI Stefan what is some of the positives and negatives of AI I touched on a few earlier you can dig deeper and how big do you think it will be in the tourism sector in 5 10 years so I think AI is going to be the most significant thing for your tourist company in the next five years and pretty much every company in every career it is a general purpose technology that's reaching into everywhere uh it's got a it's at the beginning of the journey the world's five largest companies now are all AI companies you know Nvidia is now at about 3 trillion it it's the the world is sort of made up its mind then this this AI thing is significant uh it's going to be significant for your companies it's going to be significant for how people learn about whether to purchase tourist services from you versus someone else it also will give you an opportunity to change the way you plan and manage your business in lots of fields we're seeing generative AI associated with huge productivity uplift more than we've seen before we're seeing software Engineers do their jobs 53% faster that's about 110,000 people in Australia who suddenly have got twice as fast at their job and a lot of them are certainly not telling their boss this we found out because they can have the afternoon off instead of um working more but that that's that's a that management Consultants customer support staff in wide ranging organizations we're seeing this produ productivity up if possible but there's downsides too let's let's and it's not all just the ethical stuff it's also the complexity of using it we hear more about the AI successes than we do the fails for all of I work with companies on AI adop about what are all the different AI tools and Technologies I can plug into my business and make them work getting that question right is hard and complex and and is where often source of failure occurs companies are using the wrong AI tools the wrong data sets they're not they're not seeing the results from it so it's a mixed bag when you really look into it there's a lot of um using AI that doesn't lead to productivity uplift for certain reasons a lot of your AI work is actually really boring stuff it's data a lot of it is not about AI about about looking at your data and usually that's the key thing that will make or break an AI application that's special in your industry we also you know let's zoom out to the economy and we can see that the treasury has downgraded productivity from around I think it was about 1.88% Pere growth down to 1.2% the numbers aren't quite great something like that GDP growth has gone down as well we're telling our kids they're going to have um lower rate of income growth than we enjoyed significantly lower because productivity is falling so why with all of this Ai and with all of this digital technology are we still not seeing productivity uplift this is called Solo's Paradox you know that the evidence of productivity uplift is everywhere other than in the stat sorry the evidence of productivity uplift from computers is everywhere other than in the statistics we're not seeing National level productivity or wealth generation from it so so I first of all I tell you that yeah this is massive for your organization it's about productivity uplift it's about changing your career all this is very true and I think it is but then this adoption quog that we have this is the hard work that comes next it's not guaranteed that it does this there's a lot of complexity and then I love all the sort of stuff that you showed us of the the ethical bits the the ability for AI to be used harmfully wrongfully the damage it's doing at the same time I think a lot of our attention quickly needs to go to uh the use of AI that that feeds to our teenagers what they see in social media because it's highly addictive it it also pull them into different areas where we they shouldn't necessarily the AI algorithm doesn't care too much about them or you it's trying to get clicks and it's incentivized a different ways so we we have this sort of Here and Now thing of not the Terminator apocalyptic typee of AI concern but more really pedestrian current level things that we need to be looking at about what a is doing lastly the competitive stuff what Uber did to taxis is just starting up um I'm working with companies where we've we can see really big risk for an overseas Tech disruptor to come in and change the way things are done here um take one example Canada Post uh during the pandemic it saw e-commerce deliveries go up it was great for business but so did another player Amazon uh Amazon shipping in in the US and about two or three Chinese tech companies went into Canada and Canada Post market share went from 69% down to about 29% a huge huge drop and that's put it into a survival situation how did they do it they leveraged AI for customer service chatbots for for Network optimization and to to embrace the gig economy and I think lastly around the legislation and regulation I think the voluntary principles I wrote will become legislated in Australia in about two years but that ain't going to be enough we cannot regulate to safety here and uh I think in the next question I want to pick up Sovereign capability issues definitely Christian aside from content creation where do you use AI in your business what do you find of the positives and the negatives and what would you advise other tourism business operators yeah so I I'll start with the dramatic what they interviewed Sam Alman right after chat GPT came out Sam alman's the CEO of open Ai and they asked him what he thinks about and the number one thing he said and you're expected him to sort of talk about the product or pricing or something like that and first thing he said is well capitalism might fail and he wasn't trying to be funny he was he actually thinks that this is where this may look so we need to look at different ways of running the economy so I think in the long term it's going to revolutionize everything um in in the short term and I think just just spoke about it there some of these things do take time you know when the iPhone came out it took maybe five or six years before people were really using Uber and Instagram and some of these other applications so things take time the the the stuff that we use is actually some of the simple stuff just writing content translating content summarizing content and I think that's a really easy place for most people to start anybody can jump on to chat GPT or Claude or Gemini without any um knowledge at all without any expertise and just start using it and just ask it questions ask it questions about your business ask it how ask the CH ask the chatbot how to best use the chatbot for running my business and I think it's just really easy for people to jump in and test it and there seems to be a gap that I think people are afraid to almost go in and jump in and and test these tools out but they're so accessible today and they're free mostly there there's versions of all the tools that are free so I think people should just get in there and and test it out and see where they can use it for the business and one of the things people often ask me as far as prompts they say something like how how would I advertise my tourism business and Target German tourists arriving in July between the age of 25 and 40 how would I write a prompt for that and the answer is that's your prompt whatever a question you were going to ask the human just ask the chat Boot and it comes up with amazing answers you've articulated that so well Christian because uh I was saying before you came online that I've as a 57 year old woman who considered myself a technophobe for a long time I now love it and part of the reason I love it is it's really easy to jump in there and play with it there's a lot of free apps it's a very low entry level when it comes to being you know Adept with technology one of the things everything in everyone in this room can do is what's called machine teaching which is basically getting in there with the chat Bots and the image generators and teaching them to be better to be less bigoted to be less biased we've got fantastic questions coming in so I'm going to start asking them now please pop them in on slid o if we've got about 20 minutes left so make sure you get questions in uh I like this one if there's one thing we could start and stop doing today regarding AI what should it be Alysa great question thank you uh start and stop doing uh for me I would start saying thank you every time I engage with a AI instance and I do this with Chatgpt all the time that whenever I utilize it I always say ah thank thank you very much like I really appreciate that um and partly because if I if I see AI it's almost like a little child like what sort of role model do we want to be for a little child because they're learning from all of us and if we're bad examples well maybe AI might be a bit dystopian um if we're good examples maybe it will go oh these humans aren't too bad after all we might look after them as well what we'd stop doing I think what we'd stop doing is putting our head in the sand about the regulations or guidelines or controls that maybe need to be in place the moment as you mentioned it's quite unregulated we've got some regulation starting to form and shape up but the industry at the moment is based on people doing the right thing and I think we need to make sure that um those groups who are deliberately not doing the right thing are called out as quickly as they become known definitely Stefan yeah so I love Christian's advice about just getting on and using it if you haven't yet it's so EAS what you know I spent the last 10 years telling everyone to to do stem get Tech learn how to code I think I also getting that a bit wrong I think we've now made the computer speak you so you don't need to speak computer and this is the advantage you can take the the knowledge hurdle to getting into another area of disciplinary expertise and skill set has dropped you can I can go into areas of statistical forecasting I couldn't previously do I can go into all sorts of things in csro that I thought were Beyond reach and not only can I talk about it I can get a computer program a python script to that I can run and actually do the thing and I've been astonished at at how that's worked but what I would like to say one thing we need to be doing more as a as a society as Australia and the tourism sector you guys the tourism sector in Australia needs to build Its Own Foundation model you need to take all of the smarts that chat GPT has behind it it's an llm and and the others the Transformer architecture we need to feed Oodles of Tourism data from Australia by Australians all about Australia's tourist sector into it so we have a tourist tourist Foundation model that is doing things such as helping small businesses plan for their tourist operations it's helping with marketing and advertising at the national and state level to attract tourists in it's helping us predict flows of tourist movements so we know where there might be crunch points in the system where where overcrowding could occur it's doing a lot behind the scenes my vision and we've just released a report on this in csro on Foundation models is that every industry sector is going to have its own Foundation model supporting it large companies large banks are probably building Foundation models at the moment to support all of the things they do the key thing is the data that goes into them and when we create Australian ones then we can get a whole lot more confident that we can make it behave and talk about Australia to Australians but to to the world from our point of view I don't think we're ever really going to succeed in having Claude and chat GPT and Gemini communicate the North Queensland tourism sector to the world the way that it makes sense and can't control for that you know as much as we we can't regulate for it we can't make laws about it we need to start building So my answer to the question start building and that's another inbuilt bias actually in the systems that it tend to concentrate on urban areas predominantly in the larger population countries to Adam Spencer's point this morning Hobart misses out Perth misses out cans misses out he's a really good question for you Christian how can we adapt the use of AI to the growing need for memorable experiences that must involve human feelings yeah that's an that's an interesting one I I just did a talk on this on creating memories in travel interestingly as much as I talk about Ai and as much as I do think it revolutionizes the world when when you look around when you're actually having experiences it's it's the it's the moments in the restaurants isn't it and and on the beach and walking around the town looking at the sites and all of these things I look around and I I see minimal AI implications for that because I think ultimately we travel to have those human experiences and I hope that's the way it will stay in the future and actually the the very final experience shouldn't be affected as much by AI I think it affects everything that happened before that so all the planning all the booking all the transactions I think transport gets affected but hopefully the final experience piece will stay the same I think to answer this question probably needs about half an hour so I'm going to leave it there it's an interesting interesting question nerdy follow-up question do you think we'll see sentience within our lifetimes that's to me yeah um you know we were just talking about saying thank you to the chat but I do that as well but it quickly becomes more human and I have a I I have a name for my chat but I I have a female name for it which is definitely a slippery slow I I don't think sentient but I think there's a fine line between sentient and and Ai and I think they don't need to be sentient to have 99.9% of the same capabilities or or feelings as a sentient humans I I I I'm not sure we'll see the difference we're starting to get really future focused now so I'm going to go to another question about this when do we think AGI artificial general intelligence will be realized and what country will create it first oh gosh I I would like to think that someone may have already created it and just not told us it's a conspiracy theory you know but futurists go all sorts of wacky places including those wild cards or Preposterous features do you think that actually is possible though I I believe so but um not too sure where you might have a syyro would be more tapped into the intelligence of the world than what I would be and you might want to explain in the answer what age GI is as well artificial general intelligence and even the concept is debated about whether or not it's a thing but it could be I mean never dismiss anything and that's what we're learning from Ai and I think Christian Point as well we may not I I have to pinch myself sometimes talking to chat GPT that I'm talking to a computer and a machine I know how it's working but I'll just get into a convers I'll use niceties as well I'll say thank you and please and but just in case you know um I I want to make a friend so but but you know there's there's Ray kwell from I think from Google who's with the singularity point of view he his View and he's he's a really good thinker um that we we're on this trajectory it's going to happen by 2040 he's saying and that's when we will have uh computers and AI that is more advanced in reasoning cognition the ability to problem solve than us um you know I don't have a clear way of either saying no he's wrong or yes he's right I just don't um and I don't think any expert can clearly answer the question either sentience is a different thing yet again sentience is it deciding what it wants to do and then doing that and I I don't know that we have any evidence of that occurring um The New York Times example you gave at the beginning that is fascinating that was before the guard rails were on that's right if I'm yeah and what was interesting is when the chatbot started to tell him that she was in love with him um the how goddamn manipulative it got in terms of saying that his wife didn't really love him it was her and yeah he he said he didn't sleep that whole night afterwards because when the guard rails are off these things are pretty scary in terms of how realistic they get and how capable they are of making you have real emotions and real feelings and real thought and I'm you know I had a I had a debate with chat GPT at one point about whether or not it had creativity and I it said no I don't have cre creativity I just look at a lot of um information and ideas online and put them together to create my own thing I said hang on a t that's what I do when I have an idea all I'm doing is looking at a lot of other people's ideas and assembling it to make an idea and it said nice thought Stefan but no and and we had a de I was having a debate but it was kind of proving how good it was at to so so look that's a ramble to say this is one of those questions we can't easily answer entertain everything don't under underestimate or overestimate where AI is headed in the near term though I think expect some pretty amazing advances in what it's capable of what you said there reminded me of the importance of critical thinking and being an optimist I think that we will be able to move forward to a protop and future if we enter a golden age of critical thinking and that's why playing with the tech is so important because we're talking about future Focus topics I'd like to go to the question on the metaverse Alissa is it still a thing three me all these curly questions so I think I think it is still a thing um I I think that this is this is for me the whole point around uh equity and access comes into the play because the concept of the metaverse for me um is something that certainly is being advertised as as the next the next realm um or is a current realm but but I think it just for me feels um feels a current void and and creates a language and a terminology to replace something that requires more deeper critical thinking and Analysis um is it does it exist um I think it certainly would do and there's plenty of examples to indicate that even um in the darker sort of um more dangerous subsections of society that there's um elements of a dark form of metaverse that would exist which is why crimes and Global um criminal activities and cyber hacking activities may happen so yeah so we we've got the good we've got the bad and we've got the really dangerous and ugly there was a period of time though wasn't there where some large corporations I think it was about five or seven years ago were having meetings in the metaverse and doing training in the metaverse so you don't think why would you want to go in there I know right I I can't get far enough away from it um so maybe it's thing that's my view I mean for me and working in a I just want to get away from computers away from AI as much as possible when I can into nature with my family with real people um doing real actual things AI works for me when it disappears the idea of going into the meterse is a is a nightmare Yeah by choice great Point Christian there's been a question here and it's a really wonderful practical one can you think of any examples aside from Magpie AI where there are tourism operators globally who are using artificial intelligence really well that we can learn from yeah the most common are the customer service ones right there's a ton of customer service uh chat Bots which are taken away from um humans having to answer questions and really getting customers really quick help on um on products on hotels or any kind of any kind of Tourism product those work really well they are quite difficult to develop inhouse I think professional companies are the best way to go on that another couple that I've been looking at because I'm in the destination space are some of these AI tour guide things now I I don't think they're going to revolutionize the space I don't think we actually want AI tour guides I just think it's an interesting technology so the idea of being able to walk around any place you want and just create a tour as you go just ask questions what is this building what is this beach what's the history of this church to be able to do that in real time is pretty much there today and I think that's a really interesting space because we do spend a lot of our time on vacation maybe lost and have questions and we end up shopping and getting our phones out and going to Google and asking those questions but now that's going to be available as an AI tour guide just as we're walking around maybe just simple questions but I think that's a really interesting application which is going to it's going to grow not going to take over but I think that'll be a really useful tool in the future controversial Christian controversial addition to your answer uh when you said virtual tour guides my uncle's a tour guard and I thought oh no he's going to lose his job how do you feel about the balance between technology doing the work and people doing the work yeah it's it's it's going to come up but like I said at the start and and I I tell this to my kids I think the jobs of the future are the ones are the places that where we want humans and I think we want humans to be tour guides I think we want humans in restaurants I think a lot of those places in destination we want humans because that's why we're that's why we're there no one wants to sit in the empty restaurant but I think some of those jobs where you're just sitting there and repeating tasks over and over unfortunately content creation which is a lot of us that go to these conferences we if you sit on a laptop you're in maybe some trouble so you need to think about the tasks that the AI can do not not the whole job but the tasks and then you just need to become better at using the AI to do those tasks but it's going to have major effects absolutely i' take your uncle any day over a robot I think so and like it so when we looked at jobs and automation risk back in 2016 barista were like high risk repeated rules based structured there's they haven't gone anywhere there's the the population of Baristas in Australia has increased and that's because people like a person making their coffee who Smiles at them knows their name it's it's a different it's a it's a fuller experience I have a theory there's a counter Trend about to really kick in for authenticity for non- AI stuff for an image that isn't AI for something that is real flesh and blood human um so a lot of my AI strategy work is how to do something which has nothing to do with with AI invest in the real world put put your effort into to people iners interactions I think you're right the cheap tourism experience is going to be the AI one whereas the real human experience you know my favorite tourist experience once was in the bun mountains when this this old guy had a horse and cut he made a fire we had to light the fire he was just part of the landscape it was so free of anything technical um I think that's the sort of experience that that is going to be the high-end high paid one that we we see out if you can't afford it you'll have a robot do it yeah I would I I I think the operating models of of any industry in the tourism industry I I just as Tracy mentioned just came from another event prior to this which was talking about the future of education and uh in my presentation I had a lot of principles and teachers and in the future um their industry is going to be disrupted as well and already is with um AI tutors avatars that can be used to sort of teach kids um but but the element that teachers bring about the warmth the connection the ability to model human like behavior that we want to expect and see hopefully in the vast majority of cases to also acknowledge that technology at the moment is reliant on energy and that energy could fail uh it's also very carbon heavy on the planet so I also would think that from a broader lens that maybe there's a deliberate sustainability choice about not having an AI augmented tourist experience because it's actually going to be better for the planet how do we set up our children for jobs in the tourism industry in the future if so much is going to be automated I'm happy for anybody to take this yeah I mean I I don't want to sort of dismiss the importance of AI I think it just works when it gets invisible and behind the scenes I think there is a real I'd be really would have loved to have set through your presentation on the future of Education cuz I don't totally know really where it all goes and I don't know ' got two kids and the extent to which they use chat GPT it's actually not that much they're not that interested in it which I think is about right but um what do what do they need to learn yeah well that's what hit me do they need to learn stem and Tech skills maybe not as much the head of um generative AI at IBM I've forgotten his name but he said if you want a tech job with us do do an arts degree do creative thinking design um we want logic and and so forth the skill set may have changed yeah do philosophy philosophy yeah yeah absolutely there's a wonderful job that's developed called a prompt engineer I'm a bit obsessed with it because when we were creating the cover for the book we put in the prompts into mid journey to create that and it doesn't necessarily have to be a tech person who comes up with the words it's good for them to be perhaps a journalist or a writer or a philosopher to come up with the right words that have the right meaning to create the appropriate image we've only got 3 minutes left but before we finish up I'd love to hear from from each of you about some future Trends what do you expect to see and certainly with a tourism bent in the next 5 10 50 years in this sector Christian I'll go to you first yeah I I I talk about agents nonstop so I think agents are the future agents are two things what it's our personal agents our personal agent that follows us around it knows us as humans it will probably record everything we do and listen to everything and watch everything we see and it will act as our agent it will do the best for us both professionally and in personal life and then on the other end of that we're going to have business agents or other agents so our agent will talk to the hotel agent we'll talk to the airline agent we'll talk to the tour operator agent and a lot of the communication that we do as we talked about that stuff that happens behind the scenes will happen between agents so a lot of the stuff back and forth with Communications will be done automatically and hopefully we'll end up getting what we want without with minimum fuss but I think agents are definitely going to be the biggest part of the future here thank you if this goes well in another 10 years we'll have a foundational modeling capability an AI based one which is giving Australia's tourism sector an unfair advantage in the global market that it's really responding to the needs of everything Australian tourism operators want to do we manage it and control it within Australia to a much greater extent uh and then has sub branches which deal with particular regions or or topics within it so we've we've done that we've worked we work in harmony all of you in the audience are working in harmony with AI you've got used to what it can do what it can't do and it's there working with you to make you better at what you do that's that's another thing that's gone on you work a 4-day week instead of a 5-day week um we're able to decrease the amount we work because we've become more productive uh those would be a couple of things about what it will look like if if it goes well I I think also if it goes well we'll have greater Equity of access uh we'll have a strong uh ability to make sure that data access is accessible to everyone uh that the bandwidth speed is accessible throughout Australia and not just fast in the cities and Antiquated in the in the countries or with the spots that exist where there is no access at all I would also like to see the guard rails being embedded and that they for there's an expectation that people who create AI augmented or AI Solutions actually have a large tick of approval that's gone through a rigorous vetting process that also includes end users as well as the funders and designers of the technology it has been a great privilege and a joy to pick each of your large brains the size of small planets would you Please put your hands together for Christian, Elissa and Stefan!
2024-08-22 12:26
