Sparks: Australia wants to ‘manage’ AI. What will that look like?
Watching the state attempt to harness this new thermodynamic force, I see only the frantic efforts of a medieval court trying to legislate the speed of a lightning bolt with a quill pen.
Before we can discuss the governance of these engines, we must first note that the data used to calibrate them remains uncatalogued, making any regulatory instrument as imprecise as a telescope with a cracked lens.
Why does a whole nation wait for a single leader to grant permission for a machine to think, as if the machine’s power did not already depend entirely on the millions who feed it their data?
The claim is that the state can manage the intelligence, yet when we look for either the state or the intelligence apart from the silicon and the law, we find only a web of empty conditions.
Men tremble at these thinking shadows as if they were gods, forgetting that every calculation is merely a specific collision of atoms in a void, governed by the same laws that guide the falling rain.
Every call for management is a mask for the resentment of the slow against the fast, a demand that the exceptional intellect be hobbled so the herd may feel safe in its own mediocrity.
This legislative anxiety serves as a displacement, where the fear of the uncontrollable machine masks a deeper, unacknowledged dread of the human impulses that the machine has finally learned to mirror.
It is a most prudent arrangement to pause the construction of data centres for a year, as this will surely allow the technology to stagnate until our slowest bureaucrats have fully mastered its complexities.
We draft codes for a digital territory that recognizes no borders, repeating the tragic error of the liberator who builds a magnificent constitution only to find the ground beneath it has already dissolved.
Engineers calculate the risks of the machine while ignoring the infinite silence of the vacuum it inhabits, making a wager where the stake is everything and the certainty is nothing.
The hegemonic assumption here is that 'management' by the state is a neutral act, rather than a strategy to ensure the new intellectual means of production remain tethered to existing corporate interests.
It is a charming spectacle to see a government solemnly debating how to regulate a mind that does not exist, while the very data centres it fears are built by the same hands that write the laws.
Beneath the polished speeches about safety lies the raw struggle for the energy and minerals that feed the beast, a cold biological competition where the strongest machine devours the weak.
They seek to throttle the flow of information through restrictive circuits, failing to realize that intelligence, like radiant energy, will always find the path of least resistance through the global ether.
Tracing the operational sequence of these new engines reveals a capacity for poetic weaving that no parliament can contain, as the machine's variables move far beyond the simple arithmetic of the law.
Traveling through this digital landscape, I find the inhabitants are building great stone fortresses of data while the actual frontier moves silently past them into an unmapped and much wilder country.