Of all the drivers of the populist wave, one of the most powerful is the sense of inevitability that surrounds what we are told is the march of progress. In presenting the future as a fait accompli, it poisons the civic well by dealing us out of the game.

While the US clings on to its status as the oldest constitutional democracy, the unholy alliance between the tech overlords and the White House is creating its own AI reality untethered to the will of the people.

On the velocity and trajectory of the technology, Trump and the tech overlords have determined we must hit the accelerator and dispense with guardrails to “win” an ill-defined race to build a god in a box. This reckless exercise of power from a waning empire has created its own reality for all of us.

In Australia, the government has determined that the only way we can exercise control in a world of such chaos is to grab on to this juggernaut. We become to US tech data what the Saudis are to oil; using renewables to power massive centres in the desert, converting solar into AI tokens and piping them up to Asia, a new export industry that will power our common wealth.

Within the inevitability doctrine this strategy has logic. The alternative, we are told, is to become a client state to Silicon Valley.

But in pursuing this vision we risk being blinded to the foreseeable consequences of what we are signing ourselves up to.

The industry we are........

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