The biggest threat from AI is the sense that we have no say in it. To that I say game on | Peter Lewis

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 building derives value by replacing workers, it has been built on the stolen work of creators, its unregulated deployment is causing unconscionable harms particularly in theatres of war, it has an insatiable thirst for energy and water, while even its creators say there’s a not insignificant chance it will destroy humanity. The “inevitability doctrine” demands we concede rather than properly explore and negotiate these trade-offs.

This facade of democracy leads to its populist backlash. We are seeing this in the US where the Bannon right and Sanders left are joining forces to block the scale out of datacentres, part of a broader and timely political reckoning. A few things have been happening over recent weeks to suggest something similar is starting to happen here.

First, Australians who despite their high take-up of some AI tools remain among the world’s most sceptical, have a low tolerance for tech overlords. GetUp’s successful campaign against Coles’ partnership with Palantir, the data company that licenses its software to the US military who bomb children and immigration officials to track individuals, shows the vulnerability of public brands who lean in too close to the beast. Second, creators whose work has been stolen to train models that will diminish the value of their future careers are standing their ground.