Labour's plan for data centres and what its spokesperson Reuben Davidson thinks about overseas panic about AI's threat to humanity

Labour has released its election plan for artificial intelligence (AI). The party is promising to introduce an Office of AI, a minister responsible for AI, tight new rules for data centre electricity use and copyright protections for artists and media.

Here, Interest.co.nz asks Labour technology spokesperson Reuben Davidson about Labour's plan for data centres, how much Labour's AI plan will cost and what he thinks about the overseas panic about AI ending humanity.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, watch the video above. 

Anna Whyte: Do you want New Zealand to be a data centre hub?

Reuben Davidson: There's a really interesting conversation around data centres that we need to have. We've obviously seen some political parties propose moratoriums, and we've been really clear that we don't think that's the right approach.

But we do need to think really carefully about making sure that we have the right size centres, data centres, in the right places. We need to look at ensuring - we've spelled that out really clearly - that they need to provide their own renewable energy. They need to manage their environmental impacts. They need to also look at what their water use is.

We need to have some clever thinking around co-location. If data centres are going to be generating all the heat, then we need to be thinking: Well, what other things do we have where we need a lot of heat? 

Anna Whyte: I want to know when you want to have legislation in place, specific legislation for AI, and also how heavy-handed that will be with the need to be agile for AI because it's moving so quickly.

Reuben Davison: That's exactly why this is an action plan, not a series of very specific policy. We're very conscious of the fact that there's an election in November. 

But what we need to make sure is that we set out our intent very clearly, which the action plan does, and then that puts us in the best possible position to, if we're lucky enough to be forming government, prioritise how we step through the various legislative steps required to put into law what we have put in our action plan.

Yeah, we don't have two years. We've wasted enough time with the current government's light touch approach already. What we've said is this needs to shift from the Parliamentary Service Commission into DPMC [Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet]. It needs to sit with the Minister at the cabinet table. It needs to be a real priority and will be a real priority for a Labour-led government.

Anna Whyte: I'm still not really clear whether you think that our public service data should stay onshore, or are you comfortable with that going offshore still?

Reuben Davidson: We need to be far more conscious about how our public service uses AI, and we've put some really clear points in the action plan around that. We've seen a shift towards higher favourability for ADM, for automated decision making in the public service, and there are some opportunities for better and faster decisions to be made when data is managed and processed in new ways using AI tools.

But what's really important to us, and I think to all New Zealanders, is that we retain a human in the loop, because if we don't have a human in the loop over what are quite often in the public service, very human issues and very human considerations, then we're really putting at risk not just those specific decisions that affect people, but also overall public trust in artificial intelligence.

Anna Whyte: What do you think about the story that came from Anthropic about humanity? (A former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon on X accused Open AI and Anthropic of "gambling with our lives", followed by Anthropic chief executive, Dario Amodei, who wrote an essay pushing to slow the pace on AI improvement, backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk).

Reuben Davidson: I think... some of those quite alarmist, quite concerning headlines and articles and media coverage on various perspectives are useful for catalysing the conversation with with people. But what we've got to be really careful about is that we're not just scaring people into inaction.

Anna Whyte: What is your level of trust of these big tech companies, and I ask you this because they have been… part of some of these major hacks. And you even see situations where their platforms are being used to influence elections, and our public services are putting our money into those big tech companies, where's that line there?

Reuben Davidson: We need to be really careful and really conscious of - with any government procurement of where those investments are being made and of the assurances that government can be provided and ultimately that citizens of the country can be provided about the safety of their data - the value proposition for what they are getting in return for us stepping into those platforms.

But also financially... there seems to be a real lack of coordination across the spend on those platforms from various government departments, and that's why having a minister responsible and sitting that office within DPMC actually ensures that there's top-level oversight over the direction we're heading, where that investment's being made, and what the implications more broadly are.

Anna Whyte: Have you looked at what other countries are spending on their public service AI rollouts? What are we going to be spending?

Reuben Davidson: This is the thing. It's a great mystery because currently the ministers are really only prepared to talk about the jobs... and the fact that this product called AI, no more specific than that, will be able to do that job instead of those people.

But there isn't seemingly any real consideration of the financial cost or investment required.

Anna Whyte: If you're minister responsible for AI… if you've looked at Singapore or you looked at Australia, how much do you think that we are going to be having to spend, for example, in the next four years, or is that just a complete unknown?

Reuben Davidson: There are too many moving parts to be able to put just a simple dollar figure on it, and I think that's why having action plan that comes back to the principles that we will bring to our approach is so important. Because what we don't want to do is simply say we're going to just spend this much on it. It might be far too much. It might be nowhere near enough. What we need to do is come back to the principles in that action plan, which say we need a proactive approach.

Anna Whyte: ...what [dollar] ballpark do you think New Zealand might be in? 

Reuben Davidson: I think there's so many variances by way of population, by way of use, that it's not particularly useful to make for me to pluck dollar figures … and say this is where I think we're going to land. 

Anna Whyte: What's the biggest concern that you have with AI in New Zealand right now?

Reuben Davidson: The current approach from the current government would be the biggest concern that I have, but it's also a concern that I've heard from lots of quarters. Those perspectives are represented in the action plan that we've released. So, so people generally are concerned that the government, by its own admission, has adopted a light touch approach, and the rest of the world has, more recently, moved into a far more engaged and proactive approach to AI. That's what our action plan is. It's very intentionally aligned with the Australian approach, and our government, our current government, seems happy to continue a very light touch approach, which risks putting New Zealanders at risk. But also, the biggest risk is that New Zealand gets left behind.

Anna Whyte: On data, the fee and the margin costs that New Zealand businesses and government agencies having to pay to retrieve their own data from offshore is that a concern to you? Would you have considered a cap or a mandate on that? 

Context: Peter Boyle, , co-founder and CEO of Exaba, a New Zealand company whose customers are the local data centres and managed service providers, describes 'egress fee' as when a cloud provider like Google Cloud, often called the hyperscalers, charge you to move your own data off their platform. 

"Getting data in is usually cheap or free. Getting it back out, to back it up elsewhere, run it through another tool, or switch providers, is where the meter starts running, and it's billed on usage, so the amount changes month to month rather than sitting on a fixed plan."

He said New Zealand's public cloud spend is on track to almost double from NZ$2.6 billion in 2022 to a forecast NZ$5.6 billion this year, "and the overwhelming majority of that sits with US-owned hyperscalers". 

Boyle said the Government as the "largest cloud customer in the country... can make defined, capped egress pricing, guaranteed data export rights, open formats and tested exit plans standard procurement terms".

Reuben Davidson: This is a real consideration. We've announced some small business support with AI, and that sits in that space of supporting small businesses with a better understanding of the implications of using some of this new technology and the costs further down the track, or as they continue to use it for being able to retrieve their data.

All of this and all of these issues have a common theme, which is you need a proactive plan. You need a government that is actually prepared to set out how we will govern and and lead AI for the future of New Zealand.