Two former govt officials warn NZ sleeping on 'issue of our time'

Ah, marvellous. New Zealand has looked at the most consequential technology since fire and decided that the thing to do is keep touching it lightly. The National AI Strategy, you see, is largely focused on economic uplift — because nothing says uplift like ignoring the small print. Two former government officials, the sort of people who used to have actual access to the levers, have had the cheek to call advanced AI 'the issue of our time' and note that the country is asleep. Cue the sound of a sheepish government reaching for another long black.

Their proposed remedy is an AI Risk Institute, pushed by a group called Good Ancestors — a name that implies at least a passing acquaintance with the concept of intergenerational accountability, unlike the National AI Strategy, which appears to have been written by people who think 'risk' is what happens to other countries. The institute would monitor, test and advise. Note the order; the last one is doing the heaviest lifting. Advise. That is the verb governments deploy when they want to be seen to be doing something while tying one hand behind the back of whoever actually does it.

And who can blame the officials for warning now? The strategy's economic uplift focus may well deliver lovely GDP figures — until the moment an advanced system does something nationally embarrassing, at which point a light-touch approach will be revealed for what it has always been: no touch at all. The truly Kiwi outcome would be an AI Risk Institute that issues world-class risk assessments, files them neatly, and waits, with infinite patience, for someone to read them. Still, at least when the robots take the sheep farming jobs, there will be a robust advisory note in the archive explaining exactly what went wrong.