Albanese in charge of AI revolution as 200 experts release dire warning

Anthony Albanese will stamp his prime ministerial authority on Australia’s response to the AI revolution amid fears of mass layoffs and energy-guzzling data centres, creating an office within his own department to deal with the technology as he assures US firms Australia is open for business.

In his most extensive speech on AI, due to be delivered in Sydney on Wednesday, the prime minister will emphasise its “pivotal” role in resuscitating productivity and warn of extremists and hostile states using it “to spread disinformation that targets democracies”.

Albanese will borrow from European responses to reveal an Office of AI in his department, creating a single point of control for policymaking instead of dealing with each AI issue separately.

“Getting this right will enhance our appeal to international investors, by delivering greater clarity and speed for approvals,” Albanese will say, according to a copy of his speech.

The pro-investment statement suggests Albanese does not want to spook firms such as Anthropic and Google as policymakers navigate the confusing trade-offs presented by the technology.

Tech companies and others are keen to plough billions into data centres in Australia, but Albanese is also trying to attract investment while at the same time countering hostility towards data centres and convincing unions that Labor will protect workers from job losses.

After months of debate within Labor over how warmly to embrace artificial intelligence, the government hopes the Office of AI will empower ministers to use it to improve public service efficiency.

“Just as [Australia] developed co-ordinated approaches for other significant technologies from civil aviation in the 1920s to genetics in the 1990s, we must do this with AI as well,” Albanese will say.

“This year’s National Defence Strategy identified AI and machine learning as holding ‘the most significant potential for technological disruption’ in the years ahead.

“We know that both extremists and state actors already use AI to create propaganda … and to spread disinformation that targets democracies.”

The speech comes at an important moment for AI. The stratospheric valuation of the globe’s biggest companies has kickstarted a new era of wealth creation and positioned Australia as a top destination for rapidly expanding data centres – the buildings that require ever greater reserves of land to house the computing power needed to facilitate everything from video-streaming to chatbot searches.

Amid the hype about an economic gold rush, some community groups are pushing back on data centres that use huge amounts of energy and water. Worries about job losses and social dislocation are also coming to the fore.

On Tuesday, nearly 200 economists in the US, including 15 Nobel laureates and the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, released a statement saying the effects of AI could be “larger than the Industrial Revolution but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame”.

The statement was viewed as significant because some of the economists are sceptical about large-scale disruption in the jobs market. Many economists have said that AI could improve living standards and augment workers’ tasks, noting previous innovations such as computers that hit some professions but created others. Even under this scenario, many workers could be displaced in the short to medium term.

“AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” said the statement, titled ‘We must Act Now’.

Albanese’s office released only a segment of his speech on Tuesday. The excerpt was light on detail of any new regulations as the government chafes at suggestions it has taken a more interventionist approach. Trade unions will at next week’s Labor Party conference demand a more central role in navigating the industrial upheaval.

More announcements on how AI will affect specific sectors such as defence are expected on Wednesday. Anthropic has asked for a copyright exemption to train its models on Australian books, music and other productions, a move fiercely resisted by artists’ unions and associations.

The government is expected to reject a tech sector proposal to pay into a fund for creatives. Labor wants the digital giants to strike individual deals with artists. But Albanese is unlikely to announce a solution in his speech.

Ed Husic, who was drafting AI regulation laws until he was dumped from cabinet last year, said on Tuesday that self-regulation was “doomed to failure” because no company would want to be first to act to bring in guardrails.

Dr Dominic Meagher, who has written on AI for Labor think tank the John Curtin Research Centre, said the government should treat the challenge the way Bob Hawke and Paul Keating faced up to globalisation.

“Hawke and Keating faced it the Labor way, through negotiated change and shared gains. Australia came out of the ’80s with more social cohesion and a longer run of growth than the UK or US, which were subjected to Thatcher and Reagan efforts to let the market sort out the losers,” the Australian National University researcher said.

“This time around is similar: if you try to hold back the tide you’ll just get knocked over, so surf it instead and make sure it takes you where you want to go.”

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.