If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then?
Date
From: Wednesday November 19, 2025, 12:30 pm
To: Wednesday November 19, 2025, 1:30 pm
The potential benefits of AI are hotly debated. But even if AI achieves its goals, facilitating a significant increase in productivity, automating tasks and allowing firms and people to more easily solve complex problems, how will that reshape our (monetary) economies? Does AI mean an era of material abundance, mass unemployment, or both?
Looking to past experiences of technological unemployment, recent experiences with cash transfers during the pandemic and emerging evidence of employment changes, this talk will explore the implications of AI success from the viewpoint of money, work and value. Are these changes purely technological, or is AI better understood as shaping social and political struggles over value? It will focus on longer-run dynamics, exploring how lessons from previous technological transitions might apply to AI and opening up questions for discussion.
Join us from 12.30 - 1.30pm at 123 Pitt Street (Level 24) or online via Microsoft Teams. Please let us know how you plan to attend when registering.
This is a free event for members and $10 for Non-Members
Registration and Joining this Webinar
To register please book online below. The link to join this event will be automatically generated and sent within your confirmation invoice.
The timing of this event is AEDT (SYD/CBR/MEL).
Ben Spies-Butcher is Deputy Director of the Macquarie University Housing and Urban Research Centre and co-director of the Australian Basic Income Lab, a collaboration between the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, the School of Social and Political Science at Sydney University and the Crawford School at ANU. He teaches Economy and Society in the School of Communication, Society and Culture. His research focuses on the political economy of social and ecological policy, particularly how economic and political change shape the welfare state, climate policy and housing finance. His current research explores how financial logics common in the private sector are reshaping social and climate policy through changes in public sector budgeting, and the potential for these changes to open new opportunities for egalitarian social provision.
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Venue
Macquarie University City Campus
Level 24, 123 Pitt Street, Sydney NSW 2000