In
the lead-up to November’s election, Midday Report is
speaking with the technology spokesperson for a range of
parties about their biggest hopes and fears for artificial
intelligence (AI) and the role of the Government in
regulating the technology. On Friday, Guyon Epsiner sat down
with ACT leader David Seymour.
David Seymour says
he can’t see why AI shouldn’t write government Cabinet
papers.
In an interview with Midday Report, the
Act Party leader said he’d done dummy runs into what AI can
do in government and said it should be aggressively
adapted.
Seymour said the Ministry for Regulation had
issued guidance on using AI.
“One of the critical
things it says is: ‘Yes, we should be using AI in
government, but keep a human in the loop’.
“We
haven’t, sort of, put the whole thing on autopilot. What
we’re doing is saying, okay, there’s a whole lot of steps in
this process. Everything in government is long. What if we
just gave a part of that process and see if they can do it
faster than the humans?”
He said in the last few years
every time there was a suggestion anyone in government was
using AI there was an uproar.
“At the last election, a
few people used some AI to produce their graphics on social
media, and this was going to be the end of the world. I
think generally the risk for New Zealand is that we’re too
slow to adopt this. The public sector was too slow to adopt
this.”
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Seymour said there were a number of dangers
with AI.
“I read a couple of months ago about a guy in
Sydney who had no real special training, managed to create a
kind of CAR T therapy for his dog, which actually cured his
dog’s cancer. He used AI to develop that CAR-T therapy based
on some tests of the cancer cells in his dog. Now, when I
read that, I thought, that is possibly one of the coolest
things I’ve read in years, but also one of the most
terrifying, because what if he wasn’t benign? What if he was
a cat person? He might use it for evil. Luckily, he was a
dog person.
“But the idea that AI will empower some
lone wolf to do something truly awful. All technology has
sort of been taking us in that direction.”
Seymour
said the New Zealand government was “probably not” going to
be the leader on AI worldwide.
“I suspect out best
play is to be a fast follower as those debates play out
overseas.
“I would make an analogy to the social media
debate. The idea that the New Zealand government is going to
change the marketplace for social media globally, maybe good
political point scoring at home, but it’s not
realistic.
“What we should do in the social media
debate is follow these American court cases, the most recent
one, Alabama versus TikTok, and make sure that New Zealand
kids get the same protections as American kids have, and I
would make a similar analogy for the role of the New Zealand
government in AI.”
He said ACT did not have a position
on which department AI should rest in or which minister
should be responsible.
“I think there should be
somebody in government who is monitoring offshore
developments and ensuring that we are indeed a fast
follower.”
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