The development of ethical or responsible AI poses significant regulatory and policy challenges, including those focused on how to balance the need for promoting technological innovation against ensuring that harms to individual and social rights and interests are minimised. Balancing these competing imperatives self-evidently depends upon the ethical or regulatory frameworks from which policy issues are identified and analysed. This article introduces, surveys and evaluates Australian policy responses to the ethical and legal challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a focus on emerging Australian AI and ethics frameworks. The article begins with an introduction to some general features of the Australian approach to regulating new technologies, which we characterise as overwhelmingly ‘enabling and pragmatic’. These general features are then illustrated by examples taken from current Australian policy processes aimed at responding to the challenges posed by AI. First, the article explains the Australian initiatives taken in relation to the regulation of autonomous vehicles which, to date, is the most developed part of the Australian response to AI-based technologies. Secondly, the main elements of the Australian government’s ‘responsible AI’ framework are outlined, with an emphasis on the Data61 ‘AI and Ethics’ process, but including the Standards Australia process, which aims eventually to produce an AI Standards Roadmap. Thirdly, the article introduces the Australian Human Rights Commission’s (AHRC’s) project on human rights and technology, which has developed a particular focus on the human rights challenges posed by AI. Finally, mainly as a point of comparison with the consequentialist emphasis of the mainstream Australian regulatory tradition, the article explains The Ethics Centre’s ‘Ethical by Design’ approach, which adopts a non-instrumentalist framework, and points to the importance of taking ethical considerations into account in the design of AI applications. In the conclusion to the article, a number of observations are drawn from the analysis of the Australian policy responses to developing responsible AI that are explained in the article, bearing in mind that the policy processes are not yet fully developed. First, it seems clear that in balancing the promotion of technological innovation and protection against individual and social harms, that, based upon the Australian tradition of pragmatically enabling new technologies, Australia will favour approaches that promote and facilitate the introduction of AI-based technologies. Secondly, while the article identifies clear tensions between approaches that are essentially pragmatic and consequentialist, such as the Data61 approach to developing a national AI ethics framework, and those that adopt a more human rights or human-centred approach, such as the AHRC approach to its human rights and technology project, it seems likely that Australia will favour the former approach, so that any regulatory intervention will be ‘light touch’ and minimalist, probably consisting largely of self-regulatory (or co-regulatory) codes of practice. Thirdly, the Australian pragmatic and technology-enabling approach is likely to prevail, even though it effectively overlooks some of the most significant policy and ethical challenges arising from AI technologies, especially those concerned with protecting human-centred values, such as human dignity and autonomy, in the face of highly instrumentalist technologies. Fourthly, the rise of AI technologies poses novel regulatory dilemmas, including how to best build ethical considerations into the design of technologies and how to devise regulatory strategies that are appropriately ‘adaptive’ or ‘anticipatory’. Although these issues are likely to be raised in public debates relating to the policy processes introduced in this article, we conclude that it is unlikely that Australia will take the lead in pioneering policies and regulatory responses in this area, which we argue need to be as innovative and inventive as the technologies themselves.
Abstract Ⅰ. Introduction Ⅱ. AI Regulation and Ethics: the Australian Approach Ⅲ. Regulation of Autonomous Vehicles Ⅳ. Australia’s Responsible AI Framework Ⅴ. The AHRC Human Rights and Technology Project Ⅵ. The Ethics Centre’s ‘Ethical Principles by Design’ Ⅶ. Conclusion References