“My worst fear is that we,the field,the technology,the industry,cause significant harm to the world,” OpenAI chief Sam Altman said at a congressional hearing on May 16.Credit:AP
Jurisdictions such as the United States,European Union and China have begun creating AI rules.
Labor MP Julian Hill,while commending the government’s $41 million pledge for the responsible deployment of AI programs,is calling for a time-limited Australian AI commission established in the prime minister’s portfolio to bring ethicists,lawyers,doctors and philosophers alongside technology specialists to guide policy.
“ChatGPT has fuelled public awareness,but large language models are just the canary in the coal mine. Despite great uncertainty in precisely how AI technology will develop,what is clear is that AI is set to transform human society,how we experience our lives and understand reality,” he said.
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Husic’s spokesperson said the government commissioned advice from the National Science and Technology Council on the implications of generative AI and steps being taken by other countries.
“This advice was delivered to government in late March and is informing[the] next steps,” they said.
Tech Council chief executive Kate Pounder,whose organisation’s members include Google,Amazon Web Services and Microsoft,said AI would be transformative and drive productivity in environmental management,infrastructure maintenance and number-crunching tasks.
She said new technologies might require changes to existing legal frameworks,such as in copyright law. In some regulatory spaces,she argued it might be more prudent to harmonise Australia’s laws with other,bigger jurisdictions with which Australia shared values.
“The success of these technologies will depend both on our ability to create opportunity but also to sensibly regulate them and manage risk,” she said.
Former NSW government minister Victor Dominello.Credit:Kate Geraghty
“This will be one of the biggest and most important economic transformations,and we want Australia to be a winner in that space.”
Liberal MP Aaron Violi has called for the government to establish a dedicated minister for the digital economy while Coalition communications spokesman David Coleman claimed Labor was moving at analogue speed to form a policy response to the “biggest tech development since the creation of the internet itself”.
Australia’s human rights commissioner,Lorraine Finlay,this monthused an opinion piece to urge Australia to be a world leader in AI regulation to avoid an Orwellian future “with the real risk that those who control the AI technology will end up controlling our past,our present and our future”.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news,views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weeklyInside Politics newsletter here.