The University of Sydney was the natural setting for Anthony Albanese to lay out his vision for how Australia should confront the profound economic and social challenges posed by so-called artificial intelligence technology.
His time around the jacaranda and sandstone in the early 80s was a seminal marker in the future PM’s development, not as a scholar but as a rabble-rousing organiser honing skills that would make him the political grandmaster of his generation.
Albo is an unlikely vision-caster. He lacks Bob Hawke’s innate charisma or Paul Keating’s acerbic clarity, but that dynamic duo provide a lodestar for how to confront a changing world the Labor way.
They saw the tides of neoliberalism and globalisation powered by container technology and the ideology of the free market surging across the globe and determined that the only way to respond was to dive in rather than pretend they could stop the world at the shoreline.
While Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher let the market rip, Hawke and Keating built social guardrails through an accord with organised labour that centralised wage increases, embedded Medicare and, later, instituted universal superannuation that has created a national savings pool in excess of $4tn.
Today Albanese faces similar disruption, driven again by new technology and powered by an even more extreme rightwing ideology that expects us to, first, lay out the red carpet, then just lie down for the machines.
This may be the toughest political challenge Albanese will confront this term. A rightly sceptical public sees more risk than opportunity in the technology but there is a growing view inside the government that AI must be shaped and harnessed on the basis that (a) there are benefits in leaning in and (b) it can’t be stopped.
The PM has been here before. One of Hot Albo’s political dogfights at Sydney Uni was the decade-long battle waged in the department of economics, where neoclassicalists defended their rational market models against political economists who saw the real story written at the intersection of people and power.
Through a classical economics lens the idea of rapid scaling and adoption of AI is compelling for a prime minister wanting to find new ways to grow the economy. The best-case scenario sees Australia as a global AI training hub, exporting renewable-powered models to the region while exercising sovereign agency through our control of computing.
Classic economists tell us there are productivity gains that come from using tools that process information faster than ever and identify new patterns of data that will help people make faster, better decisions, which will then be distributed throughout the economy by rational market players.
But this is contested. Some see a massive hype bubble around frontier AI, as a growing chasm opens between investment and income, while the sunk costs of powering datacentres in a climate crisis are yet to be properly factored into the equation, with the lack of…
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