AI Educator drafts AI policy for New Zealand<\/p>\n
The next government should adopt 20 hours of mandatory AI training for all its ministers and chief executives, an AI expert says.<\/p>\n
Consultant and educator Mark Laurence drafted his own AI policy costed at $300 million over three years, which he hoped will be adopted by the next government.<\/p>\n
He said effective government leadership was the most important pillar.<\/p>\n
“AI is moreso a leadership and cultural change challenge than it is a technical challenge,” Laurence told Midday Report.<\/p>\n
“The tools are here, the tools are powerful, the tools are reasonably intuitive and easy to coach people to use. What it rests on is: do we have the leadership to guide people into this technology and the holistic changes that it’s bringing to organisations and by extension to society?”<\/p>\n
He said it was vital government leaders had hands-on experience with AI.<\/p>\n
“To put it really simply, you can’t lead a transformation of this magnitude when you’ve only been briefed on the technology,” he said.<\/p>\n
“When the leaders have done the work to actually train themselves and really experience what this technology can do, and I’m not talking like: ‘change the tone of voice of my email to make me sound more professional.’ Really when they can feel the power of the tools, that’s when the full realisation of what it means for our country will sink in.”<\/p>\n
Laurence was also calling for a $37 to 61 million fund for public education.<\/p>\n
“That’s budgeting for a million New Zealand adults being able to do a free course to understand the fundamentals of AI. It works out at about $60 per person,” he explained.<\/p>\n
“Finland have done a very similar version of this, and what I’ve done is try to replicate what we have done over five years with our digital boost programme, which cost around $60 million as well. That worked, that was independently judged to have worked in New Zealand, so why would we not do that again for the most consequential technology we have facing us?”<\/p>\n
The highest priority, Laurence said, was for teachers.<\/p>\n
“I’ve got a lot of empathy, we’ve got about 69,000 teachers out there at the moment, they’re being squeezed from both sides. They’re being asked to understand AI themselves, independently, because they’re not getting the guidance,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We’re also relying on them to guide our children, and if children are exposed too early or incorrectly to this technology we run the risk of growing up a nation of kids who are handing over their cognition to AI.”<\/p>\n
“If you cost all of that out, 69,000 teachers, $400 to 600 a year, comes to around $83 to 125 million over three years.”<\/p>\n
Laurence said his draft policy had been sent to every political party polling above one percent.<\/p>\n
“So far we’ve had a response straight away from the Greens saying they’re going to review it and get back to us. We’ve asked for replies by the 8th of October, which is when their internal nominations finish.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI Educator drafts AI policy for New Zealand The next government should adopt 20 hours of mandatory AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-606291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}