Albanese’s AI speech was a good start. Now Australia must confront these bigger questions | Julianne Schultz

The PM’s vision must look beyond datacentres and copyright to questions of capability, security and public benefit Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Every new technology has a tipping point, when it speeds towards ubiquity, changing the world as we once knew it. In the past six months, artificial intelligence, in its various forms, has crossed that threshold. You can measure it in the billions of dollars being invested; the hope-tinged-with-fear decrees from presidents, prime ministers, Nobel laureates and even the pope. It promises to be the most transformative technological change since the introduction of electricity, touching everyone and everything as “AI companies monetize the collective knowledge of the human race”. It will challenge centuries-old notions of national sovereignty and human autonomy in ways not seen since imperial colonisation was at its peak. Will Australia become, as the John Curtin Research Centre asked in its May review of AI, a “cloud hostage” – physically hosted, legally governed and operationally controlled from abroad? For most people, it still feels a bit abstract. What does it mean when Demis Hassabis, the Nobel