Aquatic robots have been on the coral reef killing dangerous crown-of-thorns starfish for years; work that would be hard and dangerous for humans. And with the dearth of backpackers during the pandemic, some farms have also turned to fruit-picking robots. The situation is somewhat different with AI doing tasks that don't require physical robot parts. Eric Swift, managing director for cloud computing company ServiceNow, said the average Australian already interacts with AI more than 100 times a day, and that in the future this would be practically constant. "Research from Deloitte shows Australians waste more than one day a week performing highly repetitive tasks, like data entry or searching for information," he said, predicting that these tasks will eventually become solely the realm of AI. "A future workforce will blend human and AI capabilities. Our'machine mates' will become teammates, and may even have their roles formalised into organisation charts."