ADELAIDE — ABC reports, In a historic first, South Australia will hold a royal commission into artificial intelligence — a sweeping inquiry launched with a stark warning from the state’s premier that humanity stands at a “fork in the road” with no blueprint to follow.

Premier Peter Malinauskas announced the unprecedented investigation, declaring that while AI offers “exciting opportunities to advance the cause of humanity,” unchecked development poses a “material risk to the way society operates and a risk to the future of work.”

“We are at a really important fork in the road,” Malinauskas said at a media conference. “We can choose to allow this industry to come to our country and evolve in a way that is unregulated and unchecked … or we can choose to set the agenda. We can choose to set the guard rails and the policy frameworks to ensure that we use AI in a way that puts people first.”

The royal commission is expected to commence on October 1 and deliver its final report to the government by July 1 next year — a tight timeline that experts say reflects the urgency of the moment.

“There is no precedent for this — there is no precedent in humankind for a new form of intelligence that is able to match, and soon exceed, the capabilities of human beings,” Malinauskas said.

Global Heavyweights to Testify

The announcement follows Malinauskas’s recent trip to the United States, where he met with representatives from AI industry giants OpenAI, Anthropic and Apple — companies the premier says he wants to participate in the inquiry.

The commission will hear from businesses, unions, industry bodies, technology companies and academics, examining AI’s impact across education, skills, work, public services including health, and critical infrastructure such as the electricity grid.

“Whether it be the implications AI represents for the creative industries, whether it be the way AI is used in our schools, whether it be the way that AI is deployed in the delivery of public services where we know there are advances to be gained — these things need to be thought through,” Malinauskas said.

The inquiry’s terms of reference will be released within the next four to six weeks, with three royal commissioners to be appointed following an “international search.” Malinauskas confirmed he already has potential candidates in mind.

The cost of the commission is expected to be around $3 million — a figure the premier dismissed as “chicken feed in comparison to the cost of society if we don’t think through the complex questions that are going to be asked of us.”

Controversial Data Centres Excluded

In a notable exclusion, Malinauskas confirmed that data centres — which the government is actively courting for economic reasons despite concerns over their water and energy consumption — will not fall under the commission’s purview.

“This royal commission isn’t looking at the infrastructure that underpins AI; it looks at the use of AI,” he said. “We don’t want a situation where we get caught up arguing about data centres and whether or not they’ve done well, when the main game is what the data centres are actually being used for.”

The announcement has drawn praise from leading academics, including UNSW AI Institute chief scientist Toby Walsh, who said the commission would complement the federal government’s recently announced AI framework.

“If this is a way of getting the [federal] government to move faster, I welcome the idea that South Australia can again help us get to a good place,” Professor Walsh said. “There’s a lot of things the commission can examine. I suspect it’s going to have to work very fast.”

A Different Path

Malinauskas contrasted South Australia’s approach with other jurisdictions that have imposed blanket bans on AI tools like ChatGPT in schools.

“In a regulated way, we want to teach kids how to use AI but I don’t think we’ve done as much work as we potentially can or should,” he said.

The premier framed the royal commission as a defining moment for the state — and potentially the nation.

“Only governments, only parliaments have the tools and the resources to ensure that people are at the centre of the advancement and the rollout of AI-related technologies and industries,” Malinauskas said.

“A sign of success might be that a royal commission makes a bunch of recommendations that are well thought through, able to be adopted by state governments and that others may follow.”