Peter Lewis: Australian resistance rises against AI 'inevitability doctrine'

Firmus IPO failure, Coles-Palantir campaign cited as evidence of pushback

Peter Lewis, a columnist for The Guardian and the non-executive chair of the progressive research company Essential, wrote this week that “the biggest threat from AI is the sense that we have no say in it,” and cast the technology industry’s push for rapid, lightly regulated expansion as a fight over public consent. “To that I say game on,” he wrote.

In the column, Lewis argued that the “sense of inevitability” surrounding what he described as the march of progress — the presentation of the future as a fait accompli — “poisons the civic well by dealing us out of the game.” He wrote that tech companies and their allies are “banking on us giving in to their ‘inevitability doctrine.’”

Lewis described the doctrine as demanding that the public “concede rather than properly explore and negotiate these trade-offs,” and wrote that “this facade of democracy leads to its populist backlash.” In the US, he wrote, “the Bannon right and Sanders left are joining forces to block the scale out of datacentres” — part, he added, of “a broader and timely political reckoning.”

On the US, he wrote that “the unholy alliance between the tech overlords and the White House is creating its own AI reality untethered to the will of the people,” and that Donald Trump and technology executives have determined the country must “hit the accelerator and dispense with guardrails” to “win” an ill-defined race “to build a god in a box.” He called the approach “a reckless exercise of power from a waning empire” that “has created its own reality for all of us.”

Lewis wrote that Australia’s government has concluded “the only way we can exercise control in a world of such chaos is to grab on to this juggernaut,” positioning the country “to US tech data what the Saudis are to oil” — “using renewables to power massive centres in the desert, converting solar into AI tokens and piping them up to Asia,” a new export industry. “The alternative, we are told, is to become a client state to Silicon Valley,” he wrote.

He warned that the strategy risks being “blinded to the foreseeable consequences of what we are signing ourselves up to,” noting that the industry “derives value by replacing workers,” has been “built on the stolen work of creators,” is causing “unconscionable harms particularly in theatres of war” through unregulated deployment, has “an insatiable thirst for energy and water,” and carries what he said even its creators describe as “a not insignificant chance it will destroy humanity.”

Lewis cited three developments in Australia over recent weeks as evidence that “resistance is rising”: the success of GetUp’s campaign against Coles’ partnership with Palantir, a stand by creators over the use of their work, and the failure of the Firmus IPO.

On the Coles-Palantir campaign, Lewis described Palantir as “the data company that licenses its software to the US military who bomb children and immigration officials to track individuals,” and wrote that the campaign “shows the vulnerability of public brands who lean in too close to the beast.” He wrote that Australians, “despite their high take-up of some AI tools, remain among the world’s most sceptical” and have “a low tolerance for tech overlords.”

On creators, Lewis wrote that those “whose work has been stolen to train models that will diminish the value of their future careers, are standing their ground,” and that they are “rightly aggrieved and won’t just wave through anything that feels like an amnesty.” They are “demanding compensation for the theft of their work as well as an ongoing model to give them control over the terms of its use,” he wrote.

On Firmus, Lewis wrote that the decision not to list the company — whose IPO “was to have been the biggest Australian float since Telstra” — “followed the withdrawal of a datacentre in Sydney, the first major project to fall over due to local community pressure.” He noted “a range of possible reasons the bid failed, including accusations of greed,” but wrote that “surely the growing community backlash to datacentres had some scratching their heads about the prospects of a hyper-scale out.”

Lewis wrote that “consumers, creators, communities are all challenging the ‘inevitability’ storyline,” and that “together they add up to a series of counter-punches that suggest our democratic faculties have not yet been fully exhausted.”

But the “inevitability doctrine” is “durable,” he wrote, and “any pushback will need to be ongoing, because these companies have the resources, influence and bald self-interest to pursue their objectives with all the commitment of an AI agent gone rogue.”

Lewis wrote that “the biggest danger to our democracy this technology poses is not in the cynical misuse of an untested and unregulated deployment (although this will be hugely destructive) but in the broader sense that we have no say in what is happening to us. Right now, its game on.”

He wrote that in Australia’s parliament “over the coming weeks there will be fights to land privacy reform, a digital duty of care, standards on datacentres and rules on how governments will use the technology on its citizens,” that in workplaces “there will be struggles over usage, surveillance and displacement,” and that “in our schools and social circles, real negotiations on how we choose to use the bots and agents, or whether we need to use them at all” will take place.

“I know it’s exhausting and overwhelming and that is what the tech bros and their highly paid sock puppets are banking on, that we just all run out of steam and seek refuge in the user experiences designed to meet our every desire,” Lewis wrote.

“But the resistance many of us feel is real and, so long as we remain a democracy, it will be at the ballot box where we will have the opportunity to demand those who purport to lead us challenge this sense of the inevitable,” he wrote, adding: “Because here’s the thing: inevitability is also a choice.”

Lewis is non-executive chair of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company that undertook qualitative research for Labor in the last federal election, and hosts the weekly podcast Burning Platforms. His Guardian columns carry the accreditation Proudly Human.