Sydney University staff stage Australia’s first academic strike over AI

Staff at the University of Sydney staged a 24-hour warning strike over artificial intelligence and the university’s ability to protect employees, students and the wider community, ERR’s R2 Portaal reported. Nearly 2,000 teaching, research and administrative staff marched on Wednesday, expressing their declining confidence in the institution’s leadership.

Concerns about job security and fair workloads had existed before the strike. They have now been joined by questions about how AI is being used at the university and what consequences that could have.

The striking staff compared the education system to canaries once used in coal mines to warn of invisible poisonous gas. An institution that acquires knowledge, tests it and teaches it should be particularly sensitive to social risks, they argued.

The union representing intellectual workers at the University of Sydney said the institution’s leaders had rejected all of its proposals concerning AI. University management told students that teaching would move online on the day of the strike. It did not explicitly say that teaching staff would be replaced by AI, but the university has invested heavily in introducing AI applications to support teaching.

The University of Sydney’s new strategy describes AI as the innovation that will transform education most profoundly. The university has placed its faith in the technology.

A strike is intended to cause such disruption that both sides feel extreme pressure, provided the strikers’ collective front is not broken. A person who continues working during a strike or agrees to replace a striking employee is known as a strikebreaker.

In this case, however, AI could perform work on behalf of the strikers without having to break the strike. It may be enough for the absence of a striking person to become harder to notice.

If students and the wider community come to regard AI’s work as more effective, and perhaps less constrained than human work, one possible scenario could see the university continuing to provide valued diplomas while AI provides the knowledge.