Workshop 4 - “Anticipating the threat impacts of AI on public health”
Tracks
Track 4
Workshop - Novel applications in public health
| Tuesday, November 10, 2026 |
| 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM |
Speaker
Mr Darren Menachemson
Chair
Education Futures Foundation
Anticipating the threat impacts of AI on public health: a strategic red-teaming exercise for policymakers and health system leaders
Workshop
The next decade will see exponential growth of AI’s capability, use cases and impact.
Like other general-purpose technologies before it - from the world wide web to social media - AI will create profound opportunities and serious, unprecedented risks to the health of Australians. The ability to anticipate the downsides of AI and inoculate society and organisations from them is difficult but urgent.
This workshop will focus on how advancing AI capabilities might be used by bad actors with geopolitical, profit or influence motives to degrade public health infrastructures, programming and trust.
Participants will:
* Learn about likely future capabilities and harms that the rise of AI will bring to public health in Australia, as well as as important concepts like the pacing problem and the Collingridge Dilemma of Control
* Engage with realistic future scenarios that make medium-term AI-enabled public health threats tangible
* Use strategic red teaming to step into the role of a bad actor and examine how public health systems could be disrupted at government, community, organisational and sectoral levels
* Use anticipatory governance patterns to design effective and pre-emptive regulatory and policy responses that anticipate these threats and engage with the fuzziness that comes with exponential technology disruption.
The workshop is aimed at those with strategic roles to play in governing and stewarding public health systems and institutions, as AI’s impact on Australia’s public health system dials up.
Like other general-purpose technologies before it - from the world wide web to social media - AI will create profound opportunities and serious, unprecedented risks to the health of Australians. The ability to anticipate the downsides of AI and inoculate society and organisations from them is difficult but urgent.
This workshop will focus on how advancing AI capabilities might be used by bad actors with geopolitical, profit or influence motives to degrade public health infrastructures, programming and trust.
Participants will:
* Learn about likely future capabilities and harms that the rise of AI will bring to public health in Australia, as well as as important concepts like the pacing problem and the Collingridge Dilemma of Control
* Engage with realistic future scenarios that make medium-term AI-enabled public health threats tangible
* Use strategic red teaming to step into the role of a bad actor and examine how public health systems could be disrupted at government, community, organisational and sectoral levels
* Use anticipatory governance patterns to design effective and pre-emptive regulatory and policy responses that anticipate these threats and engage with the fuzziness that comes with exponential technology disruption.
The workshop is aimed at those with strategic roles to play in governing and stewarding public health systems and institutions, as AI’s impact on Australia’s public health system dials up.
Biography
