Australia can chart its own path on AI regulation and should not be compelled to follow the competing approaches of risk and safety-focused Europe or the hands-off US, ACTU assistant secretary Joseph Mitchell says.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions has been actively focused on AI policy development for several years and has become more vocal in recent months on the handling of workplace issues ahead of Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Productivity Roundtable scheduled for August.
Mr Mitchell says the organisation sees artificial intelligence as an opportunity. But as with any new technology there are downsides of disruption and dislocation that need to be identified and managed. Early employee engagement on AI-related workplace issues will be key to extracting maximum value from AI.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, Mr Mitchell says Australia can chart its own path on AI regulation and should not be compelled to follow the competing approaches of risk and safety-focused Europe or the hands-off United States.
“So just like any other major change in terms of the workplace, the earlier you engage with the workforce to bring them along, to upskill them, to invest in the way that they use that technology – that capital – the better the outcome is going to be,” Mr Mitchell said.
“There’s no reason why AI is that different from a massive new piece of machinery in a manufacturing plant, he said. “If you don’t train people how to use it effectively, you’re not going to get the best out of it.
“You really need to do that same thing with artificial intelligence.”
The ACTU approach to regulatory policy is to frame the opportunities for Australia, and to then work backwards on the policy decisions that will get us there.
“What we [at the ACTU] want to see is a tech future for Australia where we have more Australian workers with higher skills, working alongside new technologies, that are implementing more productive workplaces,” Mr Mitchell said.
“If you work backwards from there, there are a bunch of decisions that we need to be making now and along the path in order to get to that future.
“You can’t go to war with technology any more than you can go to war against the tide.
“There’s a lot of technological change that’s going to happen, but there is a way to make sure that the hard edges are taken off so that we promote best practice as much as we can.
“And we ensure that bad practices across workplaces – and risky use and malicious uses [of AI] – are reined in.”
The ACTU divides its focus on AI into three separate buckets of issues.
First, there is AI as a tool of work, where the issues are about what work it can augment, what tasks it can replace, and how it can be used to make workers more productive (and perhaps replacing tasks that might have been done by other workers).
Secondly, there is AI as a management tool, where it can be used to extend management’s prerogative, doing things like hiring, firing, rostering, performance evaluation and surveillance.
These are things that managers would normally do themselves, but through AI are changing the way workers interact with the places they work.
And finally, there are whole-of-industry issues, whereby AI has an impact completely outside of decisions made in the workplace, whether by employers, unions or workers.
This would include impacts like AI in the education system, when students start using AI to assist in completing assignments, how does that change work practices for teachers? Or new AI-generated creative output building new practices and potentially new industries on the back of stolen creative work, he says.
Regulation will be key to the management of these changes, and the ACTU wants a seat at the table of the way these regulations are developed.
Mr Mitchell said Australia does not need to tie itself to the regulatory regimes being developed elsewhere, that we can chart our own course.
“There is a global element to this, and there are two big gravitational forces that are happening in the sort of case of global regulation,” he said.
“There is what the EU is doing and how it is approaching AI regulation from a safety focused lens.
“And then there’s what the US is doing, where it is taking off all limits and punishing states that are looking to enact kind of sensible regulations when it comes to AI as well.
“Both of these will have an impact on us. but Australia doesn’t have to go one way or the other. We can chart our own path in this,” Mr Mitchell said.
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