Foenander Public Lecture 2026: The Real Impact of AI on Jobs

TOPIC
The Real Impact of AI on Jobs

OVERVIEW:
Many dire predictions about the impact of AI on jobs have been made, starting with the prediction from 2013 by Frey and Osborne at the University of Oxford that 47% of jobs were at risk of automation in the next decade or two. This prediction was clearly wrong for jobs at risk in the next decade, and the next half a dozen years will determine if it was any good over the longer time horizon of two decades. More recently, Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic has predicted that AI could eliminate up to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment in the US to 10% to 20% within a one-to-five-year timeframe. The reality is that neither economists nor technologists know what the net impact will be. But we can trace the outlines of what we do know. And this requires us to start making policy decisions today as people need to begin to educate themselves for what work remains, and as we need to ensure we have the right fiscal settings, so everyone gets a “fair go” in this AI powered future.

DATE AND TIME
Thursday 3 September 2026,  5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Light refreshments from 5:30 PM
Public lecture begins at 6:30 PM

VENUE
Woodward Conference Centre
Level 10, 185 Pelham Street
Carlton, VIC 3053

About the Speaker:

Toby Walsh is Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, research group leader at Data61, adjunct professor at QUT, external Professor of the Department of Information Science at Uppsala University, an honorary fellow of the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University and an Associate Member of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW.

He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and of AI Communications. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the ACM, Journal of Automated Reasoning and the Constraints journal. He has been elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the European Coordinating Committee for AI in recognition of his research in artificial intelligence and service to the community. He has won the NSW Premier's Prize for Excellence in Engineering and ICT, the Humbolt Award, the Research Excellence Award of the Association for Constraint Programming and the .IJCAI Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award. He has been Secretary of the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP) and is Editor of CP News, the newsletter of the ACP. He is one of the Editors of the Handbook for Constraint Programming, and the Handbook for Satisfiability.

The event is free and light refreshments will be provided. However, registration is essential.