We have become accustomed to talking about artificial intelligence as though it were weather.

AI is coming. AI is transforming everything. AI will change our jobs, our businesses and our economy.

The language sounds descriptive, but it does something more subtle – it makes the future feel inevitable. And when something feels inevitable, we stop asking who is making the decisions that determine what happens next.

The technology itself may well be inevitable, its consequences are not. Yet the language of inevitability quietly collapses the two, making acceptance of the first feel like acceptance of the second.

That is what makes the Albanese Government’s AI announcement last week so interesting.

In unveiling its plan for AI, including a new Office for AI and a national standard, the Prime Minister made a case that went beyond simply regulating the technology.

He argued that Australia could not “turn back the clock or press pause” on AI, but that the country could still decide how it would be developed and deployed here.

Albanese argued that Australia can “set the terms” and “determine AI’s social licence”, but warned that the country must act now before companies have “built whatever they want, wherever they want” and Australia is left trying to reopen negotiations.

That is an important shift in the conversation. It moves us beyond the question of how Australia regulates AI once it is here toward the more fundamental question of whether Australia has agency over what AI becomes here.

The most important decisions about AI are not being made somewhere in a distant future. They are already happening, often quietly, before the rules intended to govern........

© The New Daily