South Australia announces AI royal commission

Ah, South Australia. The Festival State has decided that the appropriate response to the rise of artificial intelligence is a royal commission, which is Australian for 'we are extremely concerned and would like someone else to hold the baby.' The government has announced it will investigate AI's 'effects on society,' a wonderfully broad remit that could cover everything from algorithmic bias to a chatbot stealing your grandma's pension. It is the official, gold-embossed, ceremonial way of saying we have noticed the machines, we are troubled, and we have done something that definitely does not require us to actually regulate anything.

Let us not pretend this is a rapid-response mechanism. Royal commissions are majestic, slow-moving, and expensively upholstered; they take years, produce interim reports, hear from every interested party, and eventually deliver a document that sits on a shelf next to the last royal commission's findings. Meanwhile, AI is iterating weekly. By the time the commissioner has finished thanking the first witness, the model under investigation will have been replaced, deprecated, and mourned. The announcement is not a brake pedal; it is a fluffy floor mat that may confuse the driver. It does buy time, though: five years from now, the government can point at the commission and say 'we're on it,' the eternal move of the well-publicised inquiry.

Still, one must credit South Australia with having the good sense to look worried in public. It is more than can be said for the tech companies that keep shipping increasingly powerful models and wondering why everyone screams. And if the commission does nothing else, it will create jobs for a small army of barristers, transparency lobbyists, and expert witnesses — the one industry that will always boom in the presence of a catastrophe. We await the final report, presumably for 2031, in which the commissioners will solemnly recommend that a second royal commission be established to look into the effects of the first one. Perhaps by then, the machines will be running the inquiry themselves, at least with fewer tea breaks.