I’m in the Spectator Australia this week on a new proposal by the NSW Minns government to regulate AI through a workplace compensation bill.

Last week, with almost no fanfare, the Minns government introduced legislation to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace.

This would be one of Australia’s first AI laws. Unfortunately, it is a lesson about how laws on frontier technology can sound reasonable but be unworkable and counterproductive in practice. The bill is a recklessly broad bid for union control over workplaces, and, if passed, would be a serious brake on business productivity growth in New South Wales.

The idea of the bill is to prevent computerised work allocation and monitoring tools from imposing excessive workloads, unreasonable surveillance or discrimination. You can imagine some of the definitional problems here. The “critical algorithm studies” community have long called for government action in their field of study - well, here you go, the Minns government explicitly wants to regulate algorithms.

But my real concern is the remedy: it offers union officials vast power to inspect computer systems that they suspect are doing so.

Businesses that don’t want to hand unions leverage over their basic operations will either sever the digital work allocation systems from other systems, or avoid using them all together.

The bill is notable because it is focused on the technology, rather than the behaviour it seeks to prevent. After all, basically everything it covers is already covered by Australian and NSW workplace regulation!

Workplace law already targets psychosocial risks like excessive workloads and demands. The NSW Workplace Surveillance Act already regulates worker monitoring, and discrimination is the subject of a vast array of state and Commonwealth law. The novelty of the NSW bill is that it targets digital technology directly.

That is the key to understanding what’s going on. It is a play for union control over the adoption of technology in business. I also note some interesting historical parallels to the 1970s.

You can read the piece at the Spectator Australia here. As usual I’ll put it up at chrisberg.org in the next little while.