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Artificial intelligence has been playing an increasing role in our lives at the micro level for years, from our televisions and smartphones to our playlists and emails. But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s speech entitled AI in Australia’s interests at the University of Sydney this week marked a turning point in acknowledging that the technology is reshaping our nation at the macro level.
The speech focused on the issue of data centres, which are now being built all over the country as states and territories engage in feverish competition to attract the billions of dollars in investment they represent.
The NSW government’s Investment Development Authority has received proposals worth more than $70 billion for data centres and technology-related infrastructure. But many of these proposals are meeting strong community opposition.
Blue Mountains residents last month claimed victory when plans to build a centre on a residential street in North Katoomba were shelved. “We’ve been fighting this force that we didn’t know we would be able to stop and this horrible feeling that … it would change the whole of our little village.”
Albanese seems to have grasped growing public unease and concerns over whether rules in place are adequate. “We cannot revisit this issue after companies have built whatever they want, wherever they want, and try and then reopen negotiations,” as he put it.
That unease has crystallised around three concerns that the prime minister identified: “Where they are built – and the power and water they use”.
In his speech, Albanese committed to ensuring that “the next generation of large-scale data centres” would be net generators of energy rather than net users, in theory preventing them from pushing up power prices for other consumers, a hot-button electoral issue. He also said they would be legally obliged to “build new renewable generation – and firming – to strengthen our national energy resilience” and rules would oversee their use of water.
While much will depend on the detail of the legislation the federal government puts in place, the Herald welcomes a national focus and national regulation of these pressing questions.
The tech sector itself has been working to address alarm over its water consumption by using dedicated recycled water, and in this weekend’s Good Weekend, Victoria Laurie interviews DUG Technology’s Australian chief executive, Matt Lamont, who believes he has found an innovative and cost-effective solution to reducing the power demands of data centres.
But as our foreign affairs correspondent Matthew Knott writes, the prime minister’s speech “offered a bit of something for everyone … reflected in the fact both unions (who want tough AI regulation) and big business (who want a more hands-off approach) praised [it].”
The question now is whether Albanese and other party leaders grasp that questions around data centre construction and AI development more generally are not simply about economics, but ones that go to the heart of their political licence.
The major missing piece in the approvals landscape at present is transparency around what we are signing up for, its effect on our transition to renewable energy (“how clean is your cloud”, as protesters have put it) and an effective voice in the process for the public.
Whether a centralised Office of AI in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet can bring us closer to that goal is questionable. If, as one writer put it recently, this country’s political class decides “transparency is for the little people” when it comes to these mega-projects, then trust in our current political model is likely to erode further. The prime minister has his work cut out.
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