Australia must urgently ramp up its spending on AI and research and development to avoid a generation of young people being “sacrificed for the profits of big tech”.
In an address to the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday, UNSW Professor Toby Walsh will say Australia is failing to adequately regulate AI, fearing the same mistakes made in relation to introducing guardrails for social media will be repeated.
“Social media should have been a wake up call about the harms of unregulated AI,” he will say.
“We’re about to supercharge the sort of harms we saw with social media with an even more powerful and persuasive technology.”
Prof Walsh believes there are fresh harms emerging in AI that weren’t thought of when existing Australian laws were drawn up.
He will talk about the “anger, outrage, and despair” he feels at the political conversation about AI being dominated by big tech companies.
“There are huge financial incentives for the tech industry to move fast and break things, to break things like the mental health of our youth,” he says.
“What I fear most is that I’ll be back here in three or four years time saying: “We tried to warn you. But another generation of young Australians has now been sacrificed for the profits of big tech.”
Pointing to Australia’s historic low on spending for research and development, Prof Walsh will urge the nation to boost investment to bring it into line with other advanced economies such as South Korea or Sweden.
“Our future isn’t in shipping red dirt and coal to China,” he will say.
“It will be in bits and bytes, increasingly AI generated bits and bytes.”
Also unleashing on Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Prof Walsh says it is outrageous the tech giant is allowed to trade in Australia, paying minimal tax.
“My view is that if they choose not to contribute back to the economy generating their wealth, they probably shouldn’t be allowed to extract from it,” he will say.
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