CAMERON MILNER: Anthony Albanese not up to challenge of AI regulation

Australia faces a genuine artificial intelligence conundrum. Just how much red carpet do we roll out for the tech bros and how much intellectual and environmental sovereignty do we concede in order to stay in the race?

AI policy is a hard political debate our nation needs to have, but it comes at a time when we have some of the weakest political leadership in Canberra.

It’s AI in the Age of Albanese.

So much of the AI industry’s political pitch is based on FOMO. If you don’t have a power-hungry, water-guzzling mega data centre you’re a Luddite and a loser.

If you don’t let your intellectual property, creative industries and journalism be raided for free, you are standing in the way of human progress.

There’s also the weight of speculative cash chasing ever bigger projects and some of the largest tech companies in the world looking to grease the wheels of Canberra with promises of an AI nirvana.

Assistant Minister for Science and Technology Andrew Charlton has done some seriously good policy work to provide guardrails and attempt to define the conditions under which the sector can develop in Australia.

This hasn’t stopped the ACTU calling for more worker protections as AI threatens mass unemployment as we humans are replaced with AI, or simply fear we will be replaced.

AI is becoming unavoidable, from enhanced Google searches and students using AI to write their assignments to genuinely innovative work to speed up analysis and modelling of complex problems.

Company CEOs and university vice chancellors alike are all asked what their AI plan is.

Education has become a fierce battleground in determining how much benefit can be extracted by integrating OpenAI, ChatGPT and now Claude into their previously human-only operating environments.

While there are many benefits, there are also risks and destructive uses for AI.

The Ukrainians are using significant AI capability with their drones in the war with Russia. It now takes less time for a Russian on the frontline to be killed than it takes to train them to be a soldier. Putin’s Ukrainian “meat grinder” is now firmly AI-powered.

In the past month, both Anthropic and OpenAI have admitted to their AI systems hacking third party companies during cyber security testing.

Then there’s the insidious dark data centres that are designed to be off-grid. These centres deliberately aren’t connected to the outside world and are the tech equivalent of the Wuhan Virology Institute. AI experiments and development will be conducted in locked-down facilities.

There’s now enough academic articles being published that AI systems are on the path to a Cyberdyne Systems moment of Skynet self-awareness.

Voters are also becoming politically aware of the full extent of the impacts of AI and the data centres that need to be built to run these systems.

Communities across Australia are protesting against the construction of new AI factories. This isn’t just an Australian issue as communities in the US and Europe also question the environmental impacts.

A new mine that demanded that much guaranteed power and water would have people up in arms, so a point of reckoning is coming for the sector.

In the midst of this huge policy challenge, though we are blessed with the Albanese Government.

The PM hit yet another personal milestone last week with Sydney Swans players on an alleged bender reported to have referred to getting a lap dance as “doing an Albo”. Melongate has consumed the Prime Minister, we simply can’t trust that he has the bandwidth to lead on AI.

As the Ukrainians stand up to Russia, our own Defence Minister Richard Marles looks like a luckless boxer taking blow after blow as he’s being punched around the ring.

First, it was Chinese ships circling Australia, then it was getting secondhand AUKUS subs and now new Hunter class frigates that weigh too much. He can’t get basic procurement right, so what hope is there for an AI-enabled ADF?

We have a Treasurer who is now the Trillion Dollar Man. A Federal Budget written in red ink, ratcheting up intergenerational debt with record taxing and record spending. Running the economy into the ground is hardly a qualification for getting AI policy settings right.

And we have the Minister for Bird Flu, Julie Collins, only now vaccinating penguins despite the strain being known about since 2022. This isn’t COVID, it’s the political equivalent of forgetting to order polio vaccines. This minister is also deciding on AI.

Even simple bans on online gambling ads in sport — like the ones we did for cigarettes — have proven too difficult for Anthony Albanese to legislate.

The Albanese Government has senior ministers testing previously unknown levels of incompetence. Albo still can’t bring himself to say sorry.

Is it any wonder that Australians are deeply concerned the Albanese Government might not be up to the challenge of AI policy.

Albanese will use a National Cabinet meeting on Wednesday to provide a roadmap for new data centres, including demanding they be self-sufficient for water and power. But the community already thinks the horse has bolted and holds deep concerns about AI.

The wider problem for the AI global tech bros and their spruikers here in Australia is the need for good old social licence to operate. Companies such as BHP live that daily and others like Telstra recently learnt how quickly you can smash it.

Voters are rightly concerned about how AI will affect their jobs as communities fear easy approvals for vast new AI factories will drive up the price of electricity and consume vast amounts of our scarcest resource in Australia — our water.

In the midst of this we have an AI-driven policy challenge that requires real leadership. We have Albanese and his Albanistas running the response. What could possibly go wrong?

Cameron Milner is a former Queensland Labor State secretary