David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

COLEMAN () (): I'm really pleased to speak on this motion. I want to thank the member for Casey for highlighting the importance of technology, because, oddly, whilst in the broader community and the business community we talk about technology all the time, we actually don't talk about it a great deal here in Canberra. In some respects that makes sense, because government is not—and nor should it be—the main driving force when it comes to technological adoption, because government will never be at the centre of innovation in the same way that the private sector is. So what the government should do in this area is to focus on where it can add value, on where the role for government is and what it should be doing, as opposed to trying to do everything, because that's clearly not the case.

By coincidence, we actually happen to be at a very interesting point in technological development. We have seen, in the last couple of months, a pretty extraordinary development in artificial intelligence that I think is going to be hugely significant over the coming years and decades.

I'm about to show my age, but I remember, in 1994, sitting in the Law Library at UNSW and someone showing me this thing called Netscape—which was the first big mainstream web browser—and thinking, 'Wow, this is going to be a very big deal, because the capacity to access information is just far beyond what we've ever seen before.' And I spent most of my career prior to coming to this place in technology. I was head of digital for Nine Entertainment Co and chairman of Ninemsn, and I did a number of other things in technology.

We've seen extraordinary developments over the last 30 years, since the development of the internet, and probably the growth of mobile, in the last 10 or 15 years, is the second most significant thing after the creation of the internet itself. But I think the growth of artificial intelligence is about to be extraordinarily significant. When ChatGPT came out a couple of months ago, a few days later I used it and was quite struck. It was quite an extraordinary product. I was moved to tweet, which I don't do all that often, to say just, 'Wow! This is an incredible development.'

And we are going to see extraordinary changes, because we've now got to a point where artificial intelligence can explain the theory of relativity better than most academics; it can write an essay about Hamlet far better than most students; and it can write a script for a play or a short story, based on some quite limited prompts, which is far better than most human beings could do. That is a big deal and is something that people have talked about in science fiction for decades but the moment has arrived. It is inevitable that artificial intelligence will be widely adopted because economics will mean that businesses will make use of artificial intelligence to do tasks more efficiently and at lower costs and, therefore, provide better products to consumers, so that proliferation of artificial intelligence is inevitable. We are going to see some time shortly this year the next iteration from OpenAI, the ChatGPT product, and there will be others from Google and others. We are about to enter into a very interesting and different world, so the question is: What is the role for government? Frankly, that is going to happen regardless of what the Australian government does, but the question for the Australian government is: What should we do? If I was in the ministerial role, which I am not—us, of course, having lost government—I would be asking the Public Service, which is set a difficult task: What is the impact of artificial intelligence on Australia and on the Australian economy? What is good, what is bad and what should we do? Where is the place for government? Because if we can position Australia to benefit from these changes, that has immense potential. Equally, it is always better to develop and own intellectual property than to just use it, so if our government can take steps to encourage an environment in which the development and ownership of intellectual property and artificial environments occurs, that will be a job well done, and that is a difficult task for the bureaucracy but difficult tasks should be set; that is the whole point.

This is a massive issue which, frankly, will be far more significant than many, if not most, of the things we debate in this place. It will have revolutionary impacts on our society and our community in the coming years and it is critical for the government to take steps to act in Australia's interest on this issue.

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