Ai FOMO

How Australians became so paranoid about “missing out” on promised AI rewards that we've consented to our own extinction or slavery

Credit: Carlo Marcoli, Medium

I want to be clear. I use Ai. A little - not a lot - because I make my living and have built my self-esteem on performing the same analytical and sense-making tasks that the technology does, and I don’t want those skills to atrophy.

But using the technology does NOT mean I oppose sensible regulation. In fact, I yearn for the regulation that the Australian government promised us back in 2023: mandatory and designed to make the technology safe and trustworthy.

Instead, at the end of last year, Australians got a kick in the teeth. Reneging on their assurance to Australians like me that government had learned from the massive mistake they made in failing to regulate social media, the government has also decided not to regulate AI.

Or, as they wordsmith it in the National AI Plan they released in December 2025:

The government is monitoring the development and deployment of AI and will respond to challenges as they arise, and as our understanding of the strengths and limitations of AI evolves.

In this piece, I dig into why.

The harms of AI technology are well known, and agreed by the experts. They include threats to the ability of Australians to:

1. make a living through paid employment

2. maintain enough social cohesion to sustain our democratic mode of governance

3. ensure the survival of the human race at all, or as a free peoples, on a planet optimised by and for non-human super intelligence

The Australian Government’s regulatory failure

When ChatGPT first burst on to the scene, Silicon Valley and civil society tried, tried again and then tried a third time to persuade governments to properly regulate it.

But they failed. Governments were simply too craven, greedy, ill-informed or boggled by the promised productivity gains to act.

This is why humanity now faces PRECISELY the worst-case scenario the tech community knew would come into existence without regulation, and were trying to avoid.

Namely, a FOMO-driven race by puerile tech billionaires to be the first to drive AGI and superintelligence into existence.

This race is now costing the mental health of our children and accelerating the decline of the planet, including by aiding the destruction of the participatory governance systems that are the only hope of making governments accountable to their citizens.

Why has the Albanese government poodled along behind the Americans in refusing to regulate?

Because of FOMO, and their own lack of imagination. A lack of imagination that has led them to approach AI as a “business-as-usual” technological disruption and manage it in a “business-as-usual” way.

Specifically, by allowing big business to decide what technological products they’ll put on the market and into the hands of our kids and only stepping in decades too late - as they have done with the under-16 ban on social media - when the harms are so overwhelming as to be undeniable and democratic forces compel them to act.

The Treasurer’s desperation for productivity growth has also played a role.

In the past it’s been either breakthrough technology or structural reform that has lifted living standards. The government’s decision to squib meaningful regulation of AI suggests he’d rather humanity take on the risks of unregulated AI than the Labor government accept the political risks of long-overdue structural reforms to the Australian economy.

Ironically, this choice was made harder because of the failure of previous governments to properly regulate social media.

If they had, we wouldn’t now be watching democracies fall across the globe as citizens who once could be rallied by their leaders into showing virtues like esprit-de-corps, courage, faith, restraint and self-sacrifice now evince nothing but fear, rage, tribalism and grievance.

Precisely the vices that result from decades of exposure to an unregulated algorithm tuned by business for “engagement.”

Now, Australians can do nothing but wait.

Wait for the harms to pile up and for those who fought fruitlessly for the strong laws that protect our community from the harms of unregulated AI find the heart to try again.