Source : THE AGE NEWS
As enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith archly observed in a text that has shaped economic thinking ever since: “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. It’s called colluding, in the modern argot, but I rather like Smith’s description of the practice as a “conspiracy against the public”.
Likewise when the bosses of the AI companies, to date the most libertarian of tech bros, suddenly throw themselves at the feet of world leaders, begging to be put in chains, Smith might raise an eyebrow. Captains of industry seldom ask to be regulated, except as a conspiracy against their competitors.
Of course, they’re not going to say that. And there’s a sophisticated public relations campaign under way to persuade the general public that regulation is in their best interests. It’s even deployed the Australian government, right up to our prime minister, to achieve its goals.
Many observers have now noted that the sudden wave of concern over the dangers of artificial intelligence coincided with major US AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI planning to make their public debuts on the sharemarket. The timing of revelations that some gated (but not private) material on Medicare had been accessed by OpenAI to coincide with Anthony Albanese’s appearance at the UN was just too cute for some.
The prime minister rejected assertions that he’d held back the information in order to make a splash on the global stage. But there’s also no reason to believe the timing was of our government’s choosing. In fact, while the timing of the “hack” and the email sent by OpenAI might have worked well to give the prime minister a moment of global relevance, it worked even better for the company that owns the “rogue” AI.
It’s part of a flurry of stories over AIs “breaking out” and causing havoc after their guardrails have been reduced for testing purposes. You might think US AI companies are currently scaremongering over their own product. And if that seems strange, refer to the Smithian principle above.
A couple of years ago I spoke to international AI expert Georg Zoeller about the way Donald Trump was being manipulated by tech oligarchs. They showed up as supplicants praising the newly re-elected president, bearing the gifts with which they control him. What I didn’t write about back then was a direction our conversation took that wasn’t relevant to my article at the time: Zoeller described the “commodification” of artificial intelligence that was already well under way. He predicted that this would become increasingly problematic for companies trying to deliver shareholder value.
That is precisely the point we’ve arrived at now. The companies are about to float on the sharemarket. But Chinese open-source models, built at 5 per cent of the cost, are undercutting the US models. And they’re just or nearly as good as the US ones, catching up to them in a matter of weeks, not years. This is having a significant effect on what the US AI companies are valued at. As Zoeller put it to me when I got back in touch with him this week, the AI companies have “performatively burned more money than ever assembled for a single cause before in human history”.
Their solution is to try to keep prices high by excluding competitors from being able to compete. And the best way to squash competition is with regulation.
First came the scary media stories. Now, OpenAI has agreed to send “senior people” to appear at a Senate enquiry in the mostly irrelevant, tiny market of Australia.
They’re not doing that because they rely on the minuscule contribution Australia makes to overall revenue. They’re doing it because Australia is a regulation-happy country. We’re also reasonably prosperous, Western, and English-speaking. The perfect place to let a government “lead the world on controlling the threat of AI”. To build a convenient case study to impress governments in markets that matter. Expect many more trips for Albanese and his ministers to preach on the world stage about how Australia is setting the rules of the internet.
US AI companies would be happy to give them that glory, and publicly humble themselves, in exchange for regulation that would shut out cheaper open-source models. Surely it would just be a happy side effect if Western companies and governments became more dependent on more expensive US providers as a result.
This would raise costs and weaken the competitiveness of Western businesses using AI (which basically everyone should be in one form or another by now). But that’s not the AI companies’ concern. The gains would be concentrated right where they want them; the losses spread across other businesses and consumers around the world.
Worse, the wrong thing is being sold to the Australian public entirely. We don’t need to control the AI models but the “compute”. That is, the output of data centres. Australia needs plenty of these, as having them onshore and within our control gives us the ability to shut down AI if something goes wrong.
We don’t need a vague AI “kill switch” for all AI in the hands of the tech bros. We need a physical kill switch we can operate: the ability to turn off computing power if AI is acting up in our part of the world.
Zoeller compares AI to electricity. It can be incredibly dangerous. We have built layers of physical safeguards around it, channelling it to our homes with fuses (the original kill switch) so we can use a modern-day essential without worrying. If a big repair is needed, you turn it off at the power station.
We’re topsy-turvy in the Antipodes. Australians are campaigning against data centres – the things that would keep us safe – while embracing the idea of AI regulation, the thing that would keep us weak and backward. The conspiracy against the public is complete when the public is primed to vote to be conspired against.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.
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Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.
