South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas says Australia needs to get ahead of the AI boom, after the state announced a royal commission into the issue yesterday.
“I’ve just got back from the US, and I couldn’t help but be completely blown away about the size of the opportunity, but also the scale of the challenge,” he told Today.
“Here we are talking about very complex questions around the way that people work that need to be resolved.
“We’ve got to be thinking about what we’re teaching kids in schools and what level of comfort we have with them using AI, but also thinking about the way that we use AI in public service delivery, where there are clearly some big opportunities around productivity, but also some risks.”
He said the $3 million cost of the royal commission was “small beer” compared to not getting the state’s approach to AI right.
The South Australia government recently signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI, but Malinauskas said he expected tech bosses to enthusiastically participate.
“The people that are developing this technology are often the same people who are the most alarmed about it,” he said.
“I mean, we’ve seen warnings come out from the owners of OpenAI, Anthropic, amongst others, saying governments need to wake up and start responding and putting in place some guardrails because the pace of change is so acute, it is so rapid.”