⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa #44: Escaping strategic cruise control🛣️
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Kia ora and welcome to this week’s ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa, my newsletter and book-in-progress thinking about emerging tech and the unfolding future in my corner of the world, Aotearoa New Zealand. Thanks for reading!
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Aotearoa roundup
A brief(er than usual) roundup of recent threads and events…
More on AI and education
Following on from my thinking out loud last week about AI’s impact on the Tertiary education sector, some radical thinking in a similar vein came from an unexpected quarter this week with an opinion piece in The Weekend Australian by David Carvhalo (CEO of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, nonetheless): ‘We don’t need no education’: Schooling in the age of AI’ (paywalled, but believe me he doesn’t hold back):
“for school or university students... the award of the credential is a more powerful, extrinsic motive, more important than the underlying understanding for which it purports to provide evidence. This is a function of the way our education system has evolved into an instrument at the service of the economy, a sorting mechanism and a tool for training that prepares people for work…
... in the age of AI, what employment opportunities will there be for these graduates once they gain these credentials? Many of the jobs in the so-called knowledge economy will be done much more effectively and cheaply by AI systems…
...it also raises questions about the wider purposes of education – the why, not just the what (curriculum) or the how (pedagogy). ...if AI is going to do our jobs so much more cheaply and effectively, what does that mean for the way we think about education’s purpose? ...
AI is an iceberg that is going to sink the current schooling paradigm because it is disrupting the society for which schooling is supposed to prepare our children.“
(🎩Thanks Joe R for sharing the article).
Is anyone in a similarly influential role progressing this line of debate here in Aotearoa as well? My 2c: the education system needs to play catch up quickly to get ahead of this tsunami of change…
(On a more positive note, I saw an awesome Year 3-4 primary school class project this week where the kids have been getting hands-on using Midjourney to create AI self-portraits as fantasy or action characters … a great introduction to understanding these new tools at a formative young age — remember the next generation will never know a time before Generative AI, in the same way as GenZ never knew a time before the internet.)
See also: Hong Kong rolls out first AI curriculum for junior secondary students including practical hands-on use of generative AI tools as well as:
"lessons on learning basic AI concepts, computer vision, speech and language, robotic reasoning, AI ethical issues, and the technology’s impact on society"
Dates for your diary
Quite a few upcoming events to share — most in my home town as it turns out but with online streaming options if you can’t make it in person.
Future of innovation I’m taking part at an event tomorrow evening on The Future of Innovation in Ōtautahi: hosted by the awesome team at Webtools at The Loft coworking space and introduced by TOP Leader Raf Manji (the only politician with anything close to a coherent AI policy…).
FWIW I’m not a fan of the word “hub” in this context, particularly as applied to a small regional city on the far edge of the world — “interconnected node” is my preferred metaphor…
Creating Intergenerational wellbeing Also in Ōtautahi next month Sophie Howe, who has recently completed her seven-year term as inaugural Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, is visiting Aotearoa and speaking on Creating Intergenerational Wellbeing on 25 July. Registration is free.
As Matt Boyd points out, The Productivity Commission recently recommended a "Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and establish a Commissioner for Future Generations" — Matt argues that this office should also be given an explicit mandate to consider Global Catastrophic Risks too.
Electrifying women founders
The Electrify Aotearoa conference returns, this year being held in Tāmaki Makaurau just over a month away on 1 August.
Kudos to organisers Ministry of Awesome, in particular CEO Marian Johnson for her tireless work growing Aotearoa’s startup scene, in particular nurturing more female-founded companies. Here she is speaking recently with Ben Moore and Peter Griffin on the Business Of Tech Podcast: NZ Needs Women Founders.
Reaching the summit Finally, I’m going to be speaking on How Emerging Technology Is Defining The Future Of New Zealand…And What We Can Do About It at the annual Canterbury Tech Summit on 5th September. Always a big day out, hope to see you there!
Rollcall
HUUUUUGGEEE - 2023 Hi tech awards
Congratulations to chair David Downs, event organiser Bob Pinchin and the whole team involved in putting on Friday’s biggest ever NZ Hi Tech Awards (also in Ōtautahi, what’s going on!?). Over 1100 people gathered at the spanking new Te Pae conference centre to celebrate Aotearoa’s bubbling tech sector… what a massive undertaking to organise (and jeez, there were a *LOT* of awards to get through…😵)
Great to see so many familiar faces on the night! And congratulations to all the finalists and winners… in particular eCommerce engine and emerging global SaaS ERP challenger Cin7 for winning the supreme award. Great product, great team, watch them go.
Despite the ambient recession and international tech sector cutbacks, the local industry still feels pretty buoyant!
⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa - Escaping strategic cruise control🛣️
(Final chapter of the book, first instalment…)
In 2023, perhaps more so than any time since WW2, our geographically remote nation state of Aotearoa New Zealand lacks any kind of unifying, coherent national vision of what the future might look like. Political debate is short-termist, adversarial and binary, largely focused on the next election / next quarter’s earnings report.
As a direct result of this vacuum of vision, the whole country — almost its entire economy, society and culture — operates on strategic cruise control… at a time of escalating global uncertainty. Efforts to steer the ship towards more regenerative, equitable outcomes meet with the heavy inertia of vested interests and legacy viewpoints.
My thesis throughout this book project is that the global polycrisis of ecological, climate and geopolitical change, but above all exponentially advancing technological change, is causing a future global environment for which our current national institutions, societal conventions and values are drastically unsuited for.
Furthermore, this polycrisis mostly originates far beyond Aotearoa’s borders, in concentrated centres of economic and geopolitical power around the planet — and now even out into space. The era of Aotearoa being able to mostly ignore what is happening in the rest of the world is rapidly drawing to an end. So what comes next?
In this final chapter, I’m going to sketch out four alternative future scenarios and then outline a (post-)national vision and (technology-enabled) strategy to look ahead for each.
The four alternative scenarios:
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - actually the future looks much like the past and human-run nation states remain the primary framework for organising global affairs… just keep the geo-socio-political strategic cruise control switched on (and perhaps occasionally change lanes by — woah, there —introducing different taxation rules…)
Technopolar hegemony pan-national technology firms incrementally take control over global economic and geopolitical decision making, establishing meta-nation-state governance systems across the Earth, Moon and near space.
Neo-Cambrian intelligence explosion superintelligent human-AI hybrid symbionts emerge within a small number of years, quickly work out how to fund and arm themselves better than nation-state governments and establish a new solar-system-wide order that looks *nothing like* anything we’ve known before.
Hitting the Jackpot1 some combination of climate change, ecological collapse, nuclear war, bioterrorism and nanoengineering kills off billions of humans and the world’s ecosystems in a fast-unwinding global apocalypse, leaving a few left behind (and their AI symbionts) to rebuild from the ashes of civilization.
The first three are differentiated mainly by the speed of technological acceleration in the next few decades. Consider them “Horizon 1”, “Horizon 2” and “Horizon 3”. The last is catastrophic: “Horizon X”. Hopefully it never happens but if it does, there are things we should do now to get ready…
Strategy 1: Plus ça change…
The default timeline that all contemporary political discourse deals with: the future should be modelled as a continuation of past trends. Business. As. Usual.
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