RODNEY HIDE: The Future

Somewhere this week a team of consultants are finishing a business case for Council for a car park building. It will rest on careful traffic modelling and solid historical data. And in fifteen years it will be empty while the cars that should have filled it are out working.

That's the problem with all government. It drives by the rear-vision mirror.

In six American cities, Teslas with nobody at the wheel are already carrying paying passengers. Since September, some of them have been Cybercabs: no steering wheel, no pedals, built on a line Tesla says is outpacing its deployments. Cameras, AI and cheap cars built at scale. The expensive approach, laden with LiDAR, won't scale. This one will. We are pouring concrete for a world that is leaving.

But driverless cars are the small story. I want to tell incoming ministers the big one.

We have artificial intelligence. Increasingly people are calling it superintelligence, SI. It already knows more than any of us. It has a better memory. It can draw on the experience of everyone who has ever written anything down. It doesn't have human intuition. It doesn't have a spiritual connection. But on knowledge, it wins.

Think about what that means. Soon the SI in your phone will know more medicine than the top thousand doctors in the world sitting in one room consulting each other about your case. And it will be available to every patient, at any hour, for fractions of a cent.

That's just the start.

Robots are coming. They will be more dexterous than us, stronger than us and more precise in their movements than us. They will be powered by SI. Think that through.

And robots will make robots.

Stop and think about that line. What are resources but applied labour? Ore in the ground is worthless until someone finds it, digs it, hauls it and refines it. All labour. What is power but applied labour? A power station is a dam, turbines and lines, built and run by people. So when robots make robots, it isn't only labour that gets cheap. Resources get cheap. Power gets cheap. Costs collapse all the way down.

What stays scarce? What labour can't make. Land and place. Time. Attention. Trust. Human company. And the scarcity we manufacture ourselves: rules, consents and permissions.

In an age of abundance, the scarcest thing left will be permission.

We are then in a world of super abundance. Food, housing, transport, care, education: all far cheaper than today.

When? Nobody knows. Some of the people building this say five years. Sceptics say twenty or more. I suspect ten. But the date matters less than the direction, and the direction is not in doubt.

Here is what matters more. The change is on the scale of capturing fire, discovering agriculture or inventing the wheel. Each of those remade how humans lived. Each took thousands of years to spread. This one will spread in a relative instant.

Economics is based on scarcity, trade-offs, and incentives to use less and make more. Government exacerbates scarcity with regulation and consent processes and then rations valuable stuff. Scarce doctors, so we ration them with waiting lists. Scarce teachers, so we put thirty children in a room. Scarce labour, so we license it, protect it and tax it. Scarce houses, so we fight over consents.

But with robots making robots we live in a world of superabundance. The price of produced things plunges to near zero.

And yet we still need permission. And who controls permission? Government. It holds the last scarcity. So here is my briefing to incoming ministers. Your job is to stop manufacturing it. Ask of every rule, every agency and every budget line: does this assume a scarcity that is about to disappear, or create one that needn't exist?

Start with the rule that governs everything else. New technology is lawful here unless there is a proven reason it shouldn't be. If a trusted regulator in the United States, Britain, Australia or Europe has approved it, it's approved here. A regulator who wants to stop something has 60 days to show real harm. Miss the deadline and the answer is yes.

We can't build frontier SI. We don't need to. We can be the most tech-friendly nation on earth, the place where it is allowed to do the most good with the least delay. That means going all in.

Cars first. Let driverless cars on every road the day Tesla says its system is ready, and make the maker liable when the machine is driving. Freeze new car park buildings.

Schools. Every child can have a patient, tireless SI tutor that knows exactly what they understand. Give one to every child now. Teachers become coaches and mentors. The struggling child whether shooting ahead or falling behind gains most. Our system is of necessity designed for the average.

Health. A first opinion better than any GP, at any hour. SI reading scans and lab results. Robots in hospital stores, pharmacies and theatres. The question for ministers isn't how to train more doctors on a fifteen-year pipeline. It's how fast we can let the machines help.

Energy. Robots will make power cheap, but only if we let it be built. Robots can't dig a dam or string a line we haven't consented. We have hydro, geothermal, wind and a stable democracy. What we lack is permission. Data centres and power stations should be consented in months, not years.

Here's the bit I like best. Tech firms and data centres get the fast lane: quick consents, guaranteed power, permission by default. In return they pay a levy on the power they use into a Citizen's Fund, which pays the same dividend every year to every citizen. Alaska has done this with oil since 1982. As machines replace wages, the dividend makes every New Zealander an owner. And districts would compete to host a data centre, because it becomes part of their dividend.

What about the tax base? People worry that if machines do the work, income tax collapses. Perhaps. But GST holds up. When prices fall, people buy more. Abundance means more consumption, not less. And please, no robot tax. Tax robots and they will get built somewhere else.

Welfare. A system built to ration scarce money to the needy, with caseworkers and means tests, won't fit a world where the necessities are cheap and a dividend reaches everyone. Ministers should be redesigning it now, not in a crisis.

Security. American and allied technology, welcome. Chinese state-linked technology stays out of our power grid, telecommunications, transport and health records.

And the state itself. The Public Service has around 64,000 full-time staff. Much of their work is forms and letters, which machines do now. Government should be the first and keenest user of SI, not the last, and shrink itself every year.

Officials will resist. Unions will resist. They always do. But the cost of doing nothing never shows up on a risk register: the patients on waiting lists, the kids who never got the help, the country that missed the biggest change since fire.

No minister can stop this. Each can only decide whether New Zealand leads or gets dragged along behind.

It needs a government willing to look out the windscreen.

Then we can stop building car parks.

POSTSCRIPT: I won’t have the above right. But it’s a start. We need to be understanding what SI means and it’s not about being just 10x -- it’s a complete change of life, society and government.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader