AI won’t replace human analysts, top spy Andrew Shearer says

Australia’s top spy says artificial intelligence will offer powerful insights but won’t replace the “hard critical thinking” of analysts.

The director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer.

The head of Australia’s national security community says artificial intelligence will offer “incredibly powerful” insights for the nation’s spy agencies, but won’t replace the “hard critical thinking” of experienced human analysts.

In a rare public appearance on Thursday, Office of National Intelligence director-general Andrew Shearer said AI would give intelligence agencies the ability to analyse vast classified and unclassified datasets.

However, he cautioned AI was “just a tool”, and required “people in the loop so that they can do the hard, critical thinking”.

“It offers real power, but if you don't go back to the basics … you’re not going to be any better off by unleashing the AI beast. It’s not going to solve the problem for us,” Mr Shearer told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Disruption and Deterrence conference.

He said the Australian intelligence community’s strength was “person for person, for a very long time, we’ve been the best”.

“You’ve got to have the system that’s got the maturity and the robustness where people can feel that they can call out those judgments, bring them to the table and thrash them out,” Mr Shearer said.

His comments come amid a major investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning across the nation’s spy agencies, including $10bn over the next decade for the Australian Signals Directorate.

In a panel discussion, Mr Shearer – who was appointed to the job by Scott Morrison but kept on by Anthony Albanese – also offered a glimpse of ONI’s “net assessment” approach to intelligence analysis.

He said the method, which draws on a multitude of variables including military, technological, and economic factors, offered deep insights into “the different dimensions of power”.

Asked by this masthead about China’s recent economic slump and its potential impacts on Beijing’s strategic calculations, Mr Shearer demurred.

“I think I‘ll confine myself to the observation that economics are fundamental to a multi-domain competition,” he said.

“Since 1977, ONI and previously ONA, had three limbs to its analytical remit, and they were political and strategic and economic. So right from our origins, economic analysis has been hardwired into my office.”

Fellow panel member Ross Babbage, a former head of strategic analysis at ONI’s predecessor organisation the Office of National Assessments, said the method overcame “static, short snapshots” of information to tell a broader story.

“It‘s really important because it looks at all the factors, not just the military, it looks at the economic, social, political, whatever else is relevant,” Dr Babbage said.

“And if you‘re looking at a country like China, it’s very important to look at even beyond that, because they tend to look far beyond that when they making their own calculations.”

Mr Shearer said a “promiscuous approach” to gathering information was key, and included “getting out and talking to people”.

“For example, if you are not out talking to senior business figures who really understand what‘s happening in global supply chains and the global markets, then you’re missing a huge part of the equation,” he said.

The ONI boss also warned intelligence analysts needed to be open minded to avoid the “intellectual conceit” of believing they had “perfect knowledge”.

“Another thing I like about (net assessment) is that it captures the inherent dynamism of competition,” he said.

“It thinks about not only the adversaries’ action, or my action, it thinks about the interactions between them, and the sort of second, third, and fourth order effects, and so forth.”