World's Most Boring Government Formally Announces New Office of AI to Develop Standards and Guidelines For Australia's AI Future

Australian PM, Anthony Albanese.

Amidst growing concerns by Australian artists, specifically musicians most recently, about AI being trained on their work, on July 15 the world's most boring PM, Anthony Albanese delivered a keynote address from the University of Sydney on AI in Australia.

I'm not going to pick apart the entire speech. Generally, it focused on the opportunities AI and its continued development in this country could bring to Australians, while assuring everyone the Government will be looking at (and possibly regulating) the negative aspects of the technology, such AI being trained with copyrighted data, and the environmental nightmare that data centres present with their excessive need for water and power.

To that end the PM is setting up The Office of AI, within his own department and cabinet, that will spend, the rest of this year looking into all the issues and likely working towards building a framework for how we can benefit from AI technologies moving forward and minimize the risks. It encompasses all areas where AI technologies are making inroads from education to defence, health, finance, media, the arts, and even in government itself.

For some reason the media that I saw, reporting on the speech, seemed to narrow the whole presentation down to regulating the building and management of data centers - since there is already development happening around those in Australia.

In general, I thought the PM's keynote speech was a good thing. AI technology has kind of broken through the 'what is this even useful for' stage with mainstream adoption in many areas. It is time to rein it in and start addressing the negative issues, particularly the environmental ones presented by data centers.

As the PM mentioned in his speech, water is at more of a premium in this country. Perhaps Australian innovation can create better systems that maybe don't even require water? Like everywhere, the cost of power is particularly problematic. Data centres should definitely not be allowed to cause the price to increase simply through their existence.

Personally (based on pure observation and no actual facts) I feel the tech giants have just been throwing money at data centres without any consideration for making them more efficient, or even downsizing them. They just want the compute power at any cost - and are just starting to realize that cost is unsustainable.

While The Office of AI isn't the most inspiring thing to come out of the PM's speech it's good to see the world's most boring government is taking the initiative on AI in Australia. It may not be the most exciting announcement ever but boring is preferable to the grievance politics of the right leaning political parties in Australia. They're not even trying to win my vote.