How Much Technology Do We Want in Our Lives?

Australia is racing towards an AI future.

Governments are encouraging investment in artificial intelligence, attracting global technology companies and facilitating the enormous data centre infrastructure required to support an increasingly digital and automated economy.

The assumption underlying much of this is that demand will continue to grow.

More AI. More computing. More automation. More digital services. More data centres.

But there is a question that should come before all of that.

How much technology do we actually want in our lives?

Not how much technology can we build.

Not how much AI can do.

Not how much investment Australia can attract.

How much do we actually want?

Because somewhere along the way, technological capability seems to have become confused with social progress.

If something can be digitised, we digitise it. If something can be automated, increasingly we automate it. If artificial intelligence can perform a task currently undertaken by a human being, the discussion quickly turns to productivity, efficiency and how soon the technology will be adopted.

Far less attention is given to another question:

Should it be?

We have been here before

Perhaps the clearest warning is sitting in our children's classrooms.

For years, technology was enthusiastically introduced into education. Tablets, laptops, online learning platforms and digital textbooks were presented as progress.

Now governments are beginning to pull back.

Sweden has explicitly shifted towards more reading time and less screen time. Its government has invested in physical textbooks and said younger pupils learn best with pens, paper and physical books.

Norway has gone further, announcing significant restrictions on the use of generative AI by younger schoolchildren amid concerns that children could skip important stages of learning.

Some Finnish schools have returned to printed books after teachers raised concerns about concentration. Denmark is restricting phones and personal tablets in schools. France has also strengthened restrictions on phones in education.

Australia is having its own reckoning.

The Australian Government recommends limiting recreational screen time for children and acknowledges that excessive screen use can affect development. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said he wants children “on the football fields, on the netball courts, not on their phones”.

There is something striking about all of this.

We embraced the technology first.

We started asking what it was doing to us afterwards.

That should give us pause as we contemplate a technological transformation potentially far greater than the arrival of tablets in classrooms.

It also establishes an important principle that governments themselves now appear willing to accept:

More technology is not automatically better.

So why does our national conversation about artificial intelligence so often begin with the assumption that ever-increasing technological adoption is both inevitable and desirable?

AI presents the same question on an extraordinary scale

Artificial intelligence promises enormous benefits.

It can analyse vast quantities of information, accelerate scientific research, improve productivity, assist people with disability, automate repetitive work and provide capabilities that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.

This is not an argument for rejecting those benefits.

It is an argument for choosing them.

Because there is an enormous difference between asking what AI can do and asking what we want AI to do.

Much of the discussion about AI and employment focuses on predicting how many jobs will disappear and how many new jobs will emerge.

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

How many jobs are we, as a society, willing to lose?

A job is not simply a unit of economic production.

Work provides income, certainly. But it can also provide independence, expertise, human contact, confidence, achievement, identity and purpose.

Some jobs are dangerous, repetitive or deeply unpleasant. Technology that relieves human beings of hazardous or genuinely mindless work can unquestionably improve lives.

But what happens when the target of automation becomes the work through which people think, create, communicate and develop expertise?

Writing. Design. Research. Music. Teaching. Administration. Translation. Programming. Customer service. Professional judgement.

Increasingly, even companionship.

The fact that a machine may eventually be capable of doing something does not answer whether human beings should stop doing it.

What happens to the abilities we stop using?

Human capabilities develop because we exercise them.

We learn to write by writing.

We learn to reason by wrestling with difficult ideas.

We become creative by creating.

We develop judgement through experience, mistakes and reflection.

We learn persistence by confronting things that are difficult.

We develop confidence because we eventually master things we once could not do.

AI offers the extraordinary possibility of removing much of that difficulty.

That can be immensely useful.

It may also come at a cost.

If a child never needs to formulate an argument because AI can formulate it, what happens to that child's ability to reason?

If we rarely navigate because technology navigates for us, what happens to our sense of direction?

If we stop writing because machines write faster, what happens to our ability to express complicated thoughts?

If machines increasingly create our images, music, stories and ideas, what happens to the satisfaction human beings derive from making something themselves?

And what happens to creativity itself when the difficult process of acquiring a skill can increasingly be bypassed?

Efficiency is valuable.

But efficiency is not the only measure of a good human life.

Sometimes the effort is the point.

Sometimes the satisfaction comes precisely because something was difficult.

Sometimes what matters is not merely the thing produced, but the human being who developed the ability to produce it.

Who gets to decide?

This may be the most important question of all.

The future is increasingly described as though it is simply arriving.

AI will transform work.

AI will transform education.

AI will transform government.

AI will transform the economy.

Workers will therefore need to adapt. Schools will need to adapt. Governments will need to adapt. Infrastructure will need to adapt.

But technology is not weather.

We are not merely standing beneath it waiting to see what arrives.

These are choices.

Governments choose which technologies they adopt and encourage.

Companies choose what work they automate.

Schools choose what technology children use.

Consumers choose convenience.

Communities choose what they value.

And Australians should have a meaningful voice in determining how far this transformation goes.

Are we choosing the role technology will play in our lives, or are we simply adapting our lives to whatever technology makes possible?

That is a question of human agency.

The infrastructure follows the choices

This conversation may seem a long way from Australia's rapidly expanding data centre industry.

It isn't.

The cloud is physical.

Every AI query, cloud service, digital platform and automated system ultimately depends upon computing infrastructure somewhere.

Data centres require land. They require enormous quantities of electricity. Some require substantial water resources. They require transmission infrastructure, backup power, equipment, construction and capital.

Australia is now facilitating a significant expansion of this infrastructure, including enormous hyperscale and AI-oriented projects.

Our research has identified projects measured not merely in tens of megawatts, but in hundreds of megawatts, with some proposed campuses approaching or reaching a gigawatt of capacity. The ownership, customers and purpose of this infrastructure vary considerably, and a critical question remains how much is being built for Australia's own digital needs and how much is intended to serve regional or global AI and cloud demand.

These represent enormous, long-term commitments of Australian resources.

Yet the conversation tends to begin with an assumption:

Demand is coming. Therefore we must build.

That skips a rather important step.

How much demand do we actually want to create?

Australia needs data centres.

Hospitals, banks, businesses, communications, defence systems, governments and essential services depend upon secure digital infrastructure.

AI will also deliver genuine benefits.

But neither proposition requires us to accept unlimited digitalisation and automation as the inevitable destination of Australian society.

Every decision to digitise another part of life creates demand for infrastructure.

Every additional digital service requires computing, storage and energy somewhere.

Every task transferred to artificial intelligence requires computing power somewhere.

Every assumption that AI should become embedded in another part of everyday life contributes to the physical infrastructure required to sustain that future.

If we don't need technology in every corner of our lives, we don't need the infrastructure required to put it there.

That changes the data centre debate.

It is no longer simply about planning approvals, electricity consumption, water use, investment or jobs.

It becomes a conversation about what kind of society we are building.

Do we want technology that serves human beings?

Or human beings who increasingly organise their lives around technology?

What work do we want humans to continue doing?

What abilities do we want our children to develop for themselves?

What role should creativity, craftsmanship, concentration, memory, conversation, judgement and human expertise retain?

What conveniences genuinely improve our lives?

What technologies solve problems that actually need solving?

And where might we decide that enough is enough?

These questions cannot be answered by technology companies alone.

They cannot be answered simply by calculating GDP growth, investment or productivity.

They cannot be answered by assuming that because the technology exists, its adoption is inevitable.

They belong to all of us.

Decide the future first

Australia is currently asking how we secure enough energy, land, water, infrastructure and investment for the AI economy.

Perhaps we have the order wrong.

First, decide what kind of society we want.

Decide what childhood should look like.

Decide what role we want work to play in people's lives.

Decide what human abilities we want to protect and develop.

Decide where AI genuinely improves human life and where human involvement has value precisely because it is human.

Then decide what technology we need to achieve those things.

And only then ask how much infrastructure we need to support it.

We have already learned, through something as seemingly simple as screens in classrooms, what can happen when society embraces a technology first and asks about its consequences later.

We should not make the same mistake with artificial intelligence on a vastly greater scale.

The future of technology should not simply be something that happens to us.

It should be something we choose.