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Australia is set to take its first steps towards regulating artificial intelligence, with the federal government poised to examine regulatory gaps and potential legislative changes needed to capture emerging technologies.
Three government and industry sources said the government, led by Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic, had been in talks with high-level industry figures about a detailed discussion paper outlining the risks and rewards of AI and was preparing to launch public consultations.
The results of the public consultation are expected to inform the government’s regulatory moves in the rapidly growing field, according to the sources, who asked to remain anonymous because the government’s plans are not finalised.
The creation of generative chatbots and new antibiotics has highlighted the potential epoch-defining technological change brought by AI. But deep concerns have been raised about the possibility of harmful systems that challenge human conceptions of justice and morality in fields such as government services, banking and military decision-making.
The risks prompted Elon Musk and hundreds of AI leaders to demand a halt on new advancements, while ChatGPT creator Sam Altman last week warned superhuman AI posing an “existential risk” to humanity could eventuate within a decade. Billionaire Warren Buffett this month compared AI to the development of nuclear technology.
Victor Dominello, a former NSW minister for digital government regarded as a trailblazer in the field, said the gap between new technologies and regulation was so large it was nearly impossible to bridge.
“We need to put guardrails in place before something far worse than robo-debt happens,” Dominello, now leading the Trustworthy Digital Society Hub jointly run by UNSW and UTS, said in an interview.
“Robo-debt [a federal government automated welfare debt recovery scheme found to be illegal] could be just a drop in the ocean compared to what could come next.”
Working with the Tech Council of Australia, at which he is now a board member, Dominello is pushing for the establishment of what he calls a “tech reg vanguard” – a body that would analyse new applications of AI and rapidly develop advice to governments on how to manage any consequences.
The solutions would serve as mini government white papers, he said, adding that governments generally took years to regulate new fields whereas the body he was proposing would “go right up the front, identify issues with the tech and give expert advice quickly”.
“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.
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 month used 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”.
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