We don’t need to panic about AI. We need to hold its creators accountable when things go wrong | John Quiggin
If a chatbot prompt like ‘find Australian medicine statistics’ results in a website breach, the responsibility does not lie with a piece of code
The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.
This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches.
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We don’t need to panic about AI. We need to hold its creators accountable when things go wrong | John Quiggin
October 2, 2026
