MOTIONS

Senator FARUQI (New South Wales—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (10:15): This matter is urgent. An Anthropic researcher has just quit, warning that AI could bring catastrophic harm to humanity. A tiny club of depraved tech oligarchs, billionaires and corporations accountable to absolutely no-one are racing to build technology they themselves warn could destroy millions of jobs, upend democracy and even threaten humanity itself.

This is insanity, and we are letting it happen. These threats are not hypothetical. These threats and risks are urgent.

AI is already being weaponised for warfare, surveillance, deepfakes and sexual abuse, while its sprawling data centres swallow staggering amounts of water, energy and land. This machine is already chewing through the planet and giving powerful people terrifying new tools to exploit and control us. Nobody voted for this.

Nobody wants billionaires gambling with humanity's future. Nobody wants data centres sucking up water and energy while the planet burns and floods. Nobody wants every click, every conversation, every photograph and every detail of their life harvested for profit.

Nobody wants a handful of self-interested men deciding what our future looks like, yet governments are rolling out the red carpet. Labor will regulate ordinary people and punish protesters, but when they're confronted with corporations and billionaires wielding the most unimaginable wealth and power, with technology capable of unimaginable destruction, suddenly they turn to water, suddenly their courage disappears.

We should be afraid and we should be angry. But, most of all, as Naomi Klein says, we should build a wealth and tech disarmament movement. That's what the Greens are doing, because we cannot let oligarchs own our future.

Humanity is not a billionaire's experiment. The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I will remind senators we do need to be relevant to the suspension motion.