AI may be the toughest challenge Anthony Albanese faces this term. Guardrails are urgently needed | Peter Lewis

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 social licence an added barrier to the investor timeline.

Datacentres have become an avatar for the lived experience of AI as a “black box” for child abuse and creepy companions, worker surveillance and job losses, creator theft and erasure, scams and data breaches, misinformation and slop.

Enter the political economy of AI, as evidence grows that the rollout will widen wealth disparity, undermine secure work and concentrate more power in the hands of unaccountable tech overlords.

There’s the real political risk that the populist right and left combine to challenge the inevitability of AI’s march and its lack of a moral compass or capacity for self-restraint. If the government fails to get adequate safeguards in place, outright resistance will be the only rational response.

In establishing national standards and centralised control within government, the prime minister is taking the necessary first steps to ensure this doesn’t happen. Coherent decision-making and internal accountability are critical to meeting this manic moment.

There are big calls yet to be made across defence, copyright, safety, workplace, environment – not to mention the unfinished business of privacy reform and the financial model of any emerging industry. None of this will be easy and the power disparities will make it harder to resist the demands of big tech.

Like Albo, I was a very ordinary student but one of the highlights of my time at Sydney Uni was seeing the legendary political economist JK Galbraith in 1987 when explained the “golden rule” of capitalism: who has the gold makes the rules. One of the architects of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Galbraith was the first to describe the importance of “countervailing power” in a political system in mitigating this innate imbalance.

The thing the neoclassicists always miss is that their theories only work when the power dynamics are right. And right now, they aren’t.

The good news is that the government has leverage at its disposal: the flagrant breach of copyright in training the AI models provides a sharp weapon in asserting our national laws and rules on global technology; Australia’s stability and security for long-term investment; and stronger planning, environment and labour laws than most.

Civic green shoots are emerging as the community becomes more engaged with the challenges. Across the environment movement, trade unions and civil society there is a growing focus on the urgency of setting guardrails. At next week’s ALP national conference an internal group of rank-and-file members, Fair AI, will be launching to organise from within. Even the pope has called on all people of goodwill to step up on behalf of humanity.

Rather than enemies of the state, these voices of dissent will be a critical resource, a counterweight to the incessant demands of capital to privatise the benefits and socialise all of the costs.

As the PM embarks on this journey, it’s on us to keep his feet to the fire by demanding he puts our children, our creators, our careers and our communities at the centre of his AI equation. That’s real sovereignty.

Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company that undertook qualitative research for Labor in the last federal election. He is the host of Burning Platforms, a weekly podcast focusing on the politics of technology. His columns are accredited “Proudly Human”