Last month, CSIRO's Data61 and the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science released Australia's Artificial Intelligence Roadmap: Artificial Intelligence: Solving problems, growing the economy and improving our quality of life (Roadmap). The Roadmap canvasses recent and emerging advances in AI, both nationally and internationally, and highlights AI's potential in the Australian context.
The Roadmap states that AI has the potential to generate around $13 trillion in global economic activity by 2030. It estimates that digital technologies, including AI, will be worth up to $315 billion to the Australian economy by 2028. In addition to highlighting potential environmental and social benefits, the Roadmap also identifies possible domains of AI specialisation in Australia, and proposes high level strategies to maximise its future benefits.
Strategies to maximise the benefit of AI
The Roadmap proposes that Australia will benefit if it takes a targeted approach and looks to specialise its AI capability in three key domains:
- health, aged care and disability services;
- towns, cities and infrastructure; and
- managing the environment and natural resources,
based on need and comparative advantage.
In particular, the Roadmap proposes a plan to locally adopt and globally export AI which improves:
- wellbeing and access to quality healthcare;
- safety, efficiency, effectiveness and quality of the built environment; and
- productivity and environmental management of agriculture, mining, fisheries and forests.
However, the Roadmap cautions that these areas of specialisation should not limit the organic development of core AI research and capability within diverse segments of Australia's innovation ecosystem. The intent of the Roadmap is to inform the Commonwealth Government's consideration of potential directions for AI, as well as support greater awareness and uptake of AI across the nation.
To enhance the benefits of AI, the Roadmap discusses developing 'business and knowledge ecosystems'. This strategy envisages the development of AI occurring across a range of public and private institutions, and signals the Government's support for a collaborative approach to innovation built on connecting existing organisations and resources, rather than building new institutions.
Ethical and governance issues central to the increasing use of AI
With the proposed collaborative 'ecosystems' approach, data sharing is essential. The Roadmap identifies that maintaining sound legal and ethical data governance processes is a core challenge to AI development and calls for more certainty to guide developers on the use of personal information. Lead author, Dr Hajkowicz, observes that 'AI is data hungry, so we need to improve access to data and also address increasing cybersecurity privacy concerns'.
These issues were also highlighted in April, when Data61 released the Artificial Intelligence: Australia's Ethics Framework. We discussed the Framework and the need to develop technical and ethical guidelines on data governance in our earlier article, Beyond Asimov's Three Laws: A new ethical framework for AI developers.
Support for ethical and privacy considerations to be a key focus in the uptake of AI was also discussed at the recent NSW Government AI Summit and is highly relevant to the State's maturing AI ecosystem.
Although recent moves to develop standards and ethical principles is yet to translate to legal regulation, continued discussion in this area signals potential for increased future regulatory efforts and a growing call for targeted investment of public funds into projects which are aligned with the Roadmap's identified areas of specialisation.
