{"id":208592,"date":"2025-10-12T20:16:29","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T20:16:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/208592\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T20:16:29","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T20:16:29","slug":"how-should-the-government-regulate-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/208592\/","title":{"rendered":"How should the government regulate AI?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The federal government continues to drift along on AI regulation, betwixt and between, with different stakeholders attempting to pull it in different ways: AI companies demanding handouts, the Productivity Commission urging open slather and an unfettered right for AI companies to use others\u2019 content, creators urging the opposite (backed by unlikely supporters like News Corp), and unions demanding the economy be frozen in amber lest someone, somewhere, lose their job.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, colossal sums are pouring into IT infrastructure \u2014 which comes with eye-watering energy demands \u2014 for a product the business case of which doesn\u2019t quite exist yet but could eventually dwarf search engines<\/a> in terms of monetisability. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s not so much a policy problem for the government \u2014 unless it\u2019s stupid enough to succumb to calls for \u201csovereign AI capability\u201d and waste money on an \u201cAussieGPT\u201d (Richard Holden nailed the risks of such shonkery<\/a>). There may very well be an AI bubble, and if it pops it will inflict serious damage on sharemarkets and perhaps even financial markets, but it\u2019s private money being poured away. An AI company like OpenAI could be the next Google or Amazon or it could be the next WeWork. Let the market decide.<\/p>\n

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The policy problem for the government is that it\u2019s unclear exactly what the policy problem is \u2014 not in the sense that government\u2019s should go looking for problems to solve (there\u2019s too much of that as it is), but in the sense that it\u2019s very likely the economic, social, political and cultural impacts of AI will be considerable \u2014 at least as large as those of social media and search engines, and quite possibly much bigger if agentic AI become a key interface between individuals and the rest of the world, generative AI is used to manufacture disinformation, and chatbots replace personal and professional relationships on a population scale.<\/p>\n

Given we\u2019re still working out how to regulate social media long after it has inflicted material damage \u2014 and provided some benefits \u2014 on a society-wide scale, the ability of democratic governments (even those not owned by big tech, like the Trump regime) to respond in an effective and timely manner to the negative impacts of AI looks slight indeed.<\/p>\n

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That concern prompted the head of the Australian Law Reform Commission, Mordy Bromberg, to call in August<\/a> for a process to proactively begin scoping the regulatory challenges posed by AI across the economy, rather than the siloed debate that was occurring ahead of the productivity roundtable, in which vested industrial interests pitched their case for specific regulatory changes.<\/p>\n

Bromberg\u2019s call fell into a void. It\u2019s not that there is no-one within government thinking about AI. Andrew Leigh, an inveterate magpie mind, spoke yesterday about the role of AI in what he termed a \u201cprogressive productivity agenda\u201d, citing the way in which AI had seen demand for radiologists increase, rather than killing the profession, as some had predicted a decade ago.<\/p>\n

That example demonstrates the impossibility of predicting the impacts of AI (as a former spruiker of the wonderful \u201cinterconnectedness\u201d delivered by social media, I\u2019ve got particular experience of being badly wrong about the impact of new media technology). There are smart, experienced people in the tech space who hold very different views to Leigh \u2014 who see a coming jobs hecatomb as AI significantly more advanced than the current publicly available versions emerges from labs and begins wreaking havoc on white collar jobs, dislocating employment markets on a large scale, with attendant effects on the financial system and the wider economy.<\/p>\n

Even if such risks are limited, they aren\u2019t, in the view of well-informed people, trivial. Perhaps Leigh\u2019s future of AI firing up productivity, increasing demand for skills and improving outcomes will come to pass. Perhaps the opposite will. It\u2019s thus incumbent on governments to be thinking in risk management terms about AI: not merely about the regulatory impacts, as per Bromberg, but about the potential of significant economic, political and social dislocation.<\/p>\n

While risk management is a core part of bureaucratic management systems (or should be; auditor-general reports seem to regularly emerge suggesting the benefits of risk management are rarely pursued by the public service), bureaucrats are used to dealing with known, foreseeable risks that can be prepared for and mitigated. The problem of AI policy is unknown risks \u2014 unknown both in scale and nature. And that\u2019s on top of a more traditional bureaucratic problem: that the public service lacks the specialist expertise to properly address the technical issues involved.<\/p>\n

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One solution to this risk management problem might be for the government to establish a relatively informal advisory panel of wise heads to maintain a watching brief on economy and society-wide AI impacts, with the goal of regularly reporting to government on what they\u2019re seeing, and flagging for governments potentially significant issues. The panel would act as a precursor to the bureaucratic process: once it identified what it believed was a significant issue that merited government attention and, perhaps, action, the bureaucrats could be charged with investigating the issue.<\/p>\n

The wise heads would need to be experts from a variety of fields \u2014 economists, scientists and engineers who understand AI and its resource requirements, investors with a deep understanding of the financial side of AI and its infrastructure needs, and lawyers with a grasp of the regulatory issues. In a relative shallow gene pool of Australian civic life they might be hard to find, but the search needn\u2019t be confined locally. The goal is smart people flagging issues for the government quicker than the bureaucracy could, and without the influence of vested interests. And it wouldn\u2019t cost a great deal.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a low-risk solution to a risk-management problem. It could cost a couple of million a year to buy the time of clever people. But it might give the government a heads-up on emerging issues it needs to consider. It might even spare us from repeating the bizarre problem that we\u2019re still trying to effectively regulate social media long after the damage has been done. Only, the damage might be magnitudes greater.<\/p>\n

\tWhat should Australia be doing to prepare for the rise of AI?<\/p>\n

We want to hear from you. Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au to be published in Crikey. Please include your full name. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The federal government continues to drift along on AI regulation, betwixt and between, with different stakeholders attempting to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208593,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,128663,10826,16570,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-208592","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-australian-public-service","14":"tag-big-tech","15":"tag-regulation","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}