Dinner speech & conference wrap up

The 2004 National Conference on AI: Post-Conference Wrap-Up

The World Wide Web—AI technology is an integral component of current and future trends in intelligent computing. There were nine different talks and papers on various aspects of this trend at AAAI-04, such as the invited talk by Peter Norvig, Google Director of Search Quality, who spoke about AI trends in Web search engines; and the presentation by Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Director of Human Dynam...

Wrap-up.

Wrap-up Discussion

The unifying theme of the conference has been that the inflationary effects associated with changes in commodity prices depend on the more fundamental shocks that drive commodity prices. Moreover, since changes in prices of oil and other commodities are relative price shocks they do not cause inflation. In contrast, central banks can cause inflation and they respond to real shocks, so it is nec...

Wrap-up Discussion

I recognise that the central bankers represented around this table are less prone than others to these pressures. I also recognise that sometimes when central bankers ease policy amid market turmoil, there are often reasons that are not always outwardly visible at the time. With that in mind, I hope no-one assembled here takes too personally my critical look at where we have travelled in the jo...

Wrap-up Discussion

There has been agreement I think that it was on the whole a pretty good decade for Australia. It’s true, as a number of the papers reminded us, that output growth was on average slower in the 2000s than in the 1990s. It’s also true that productivity growth was slower than in the preceding decade. And while the rise in wealth during the decade was formidable, by the end of the decade household w...