By Gareth Vaughan
Artificial intelligence (AI) should be a key election year issue especially given the technology has major potential to help improve New Zealand's productivity, says Mark Laurence.
Laurence, founder and CEO of Ten Past Tomorrow which is an AI consultancy and education business, spoke to interest.co.nz in a new episode of the Of Interest podcast.
"I'm kind of flabbergasted that it hasn't become a political talking point," Laurence says, noting AI "has become a really hot political topic" in the United States over the past six months.
He describes AI as "a general purpose technology."
"My focus is how does New Zealand, as a small, educated, economically prosperous and politically stable country, how do we become the best users of this technology where we as a nation, we're very skilled and very literate and know how to use it, know when to use it, know how to use it responsibly and ethically?"
"Because you can scale from the individual productivity to national GDP on a very clear line."
Laurence points out Singapore is spending NZ$1.25 billion over five years with the goal of tripling their AI practitioner workforce. The United Kingdom is investing US$500 million per year over the next five years with the goal of having 10 million AI literate workers by 2030. And Finland is spending €100 million per year for the next four years in AI readiness training.
So does he think getting a more AI literate NZ population needs to be government led?
"I do [think so] and I think importantly it needs to be non-partisan," Laurence says.
" Whichever party wins [the election], this needs to happen. It's like to me, it's that critical to New Zealand productivity challenges. And so yes, it absolutely needs to be publicly led."
However, he adds that in the countries making public investment he cites, private investment generally "floods in behind it."
"We [NZ] have an AI strategy which was released last year. It's pretty flimsy and really if you kind of read between the lines, it's basically saying at the moment we're leaving this to the private sector to kickstart. I do think the stimulus needs to come, the action needs to come, the motivation needs to come, from public sectors," says Laurence.
"Simply, this nation has an obsession with productivity challenges that we've developed in the last number of years. That's why I say sitting still is not a neutral option, it's a decision with consequences. The gap compounds [and] moves from being a gap to actually a chasm."
In the podcast audio Laurence also talks about how NZ businesses are working with and thinking about AI, AI training, education opportunities from AI, guardrails and regulation, the previous technological breakthrough he compares AI with, how the effect and harms of AI on children could be worse than social media, why he says "AI is going to
make lazy people super lazy and it will give dedicated people superpowers," and more.
*You can find all previous episodes of the Of Interest podcast here.
6 Comments
Why? Real world use cases for AI are limited and not fully established.
SINGAPORE: A new National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Council will be established and chaired by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong to coordinate and drive Singapore’s AI strategy.
The council will oversee the development and execution of “AI missions”, said Mr Wong on Thursday (Feb 12) in the Budget 2026 statement.
“These missions will drive AI-led transformation in key sectors of our economy, and push the boundaries of what is possible for Singapore and for the world,” said Mr Wong, who is also the finance minister.
The missions will focus on four sectors: advanced manufacturing, connectivity, finance and healthcare.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/budget-2026-national-artifici…
Winners in business will take the advantages A.I. offers seeking opportunities for advancement, those who don't will loose competitive advantages. This applies at all business scales and national scale. The statement 'Real world use cases for AI are limited and not fully established.' is not a reason for non action. If people use a.i. in attempting to solve problems, gain knowledge, explore previously unknown (to them) possibilities and test them based on a.i. analysis of proposals, means of implementation, and outcomes instead of proceeding only by trial and error into the future their refusal to use a.i. could lead to avoidable mistakes that could cost them dearly in time and money (I'm speaking from experience e.g. in building too small a heat exchanger because I couldn't do prior to ai being available the calculations that were fast and easy using a.i.).
A.I. is not creative and only operates on ideas and information (some false) that it scrapes from the internet and it makes mistakes, so a user needs to critically scrutinise its answers and know when to pull the plug on its hallucinations and errors. Starting questions in a different stream so that it doesn't loop back to previous bs answers is necessary to hammer out the information field and the limits of what is known, rational and worth further investigation and investments of time and money before you get to the build stage.
I agree. There are few "experts" on AI within existing businesses. It's often an HR or IT existing staff member who might not know much, and probably doesn't know how it can be applied to existing roles. But that means that there's some genuine opportunity to quickly develop in the space and this can become a point of difference in the job market. Or it might create new roles or business opportunities.
I work in an office role and I can tell you the real world use cases are vast. AI can already write code, write reports, write plans, summarise, organise and advertise better than people. It's increasingly able to combine these abilities to carry out complex work without oversight. Office work is going to be cut by half or more, unless we install artificial roadblocks.
Notably this kind of work tends to be an intermediate input into the economy wide production process, and I think there will be significant bottlenecks on both supply and demand sides that will limit AIs ability to boost economic output - but it will enable us to dramatically reduce labour inputs, if we wish.
We're going to need to show a lot more imagination and ambition in our policy settings to get the best of it though. Policies that promote reductions in work hours would be a good start. Else we're looking at a choice between wasting the labour-saving potential of AI, or a painful increase in unemployment. AI will also significantly increase the urgency of building a tax system that inhibits rent seeking and actively stabilises or even reduces wealth inequality.
I agree there will be job losses faster then forecast growth
most people are not first hand using this at scale so just do not even understand its disruptive ability
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