How we can leverage emerging technologies for a brighter future

If we were to fast-forward decades from today, what would Aotearoa look like? What would we want it to look like? And how can we harness emerging technologies to help us achieve this?

They’re questions Memia founder Ben Reid would like us to consider more in New Zealand, with the technology futurist also questioning if our institutions and existing rate of technology development are capable of seeing us into the future.

“We’ve inherited a lot of legacy cultural, political, legal, economic systems and institutions from the past,” says Reid, who recently spoke at the Canterbury Tech Summit.

New Zealand’s export economy still follows a business template set by the first frozen meat shipment more than a century ago, he says. While there’s nothing wrong with us exporting meat, wood, fruit and wine, we are importing petroleum, manufactured goods and technology, relying on the latter predominantly from five large US tech companies. Perhaps, says Reid, we should consider whether we still have economic sovereignty.

“What do we want the shape of our economy to look like in 10 or 20 or more years’ time?” he asks. “Right now our country is running on strategic cruise control. We’re assuming that the cultural, political, legal, economic systems we’ve inherited in the past are going to be fit for purpose to deal with an increasingly uncertain future.”

Reid has written a book, Fast Forward Aotearoa, in which he focuses on the fact that emerging technologies will define our future. 

We must prepare ourselves for the forthcoming polycrisis, he says, in which we’ll need to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss, demographic change and geopolitical uncertainty – requiring significant human effort and wise decision-making.

“The world is a very unstable place….Aotearoa’s ability to walk the tightrope between selling commodity exports to the Chinese market and maintaining our security alliance with the US is getting more and more tenuous by the day.”

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Pace of change

Are we equipped for decision-making in this increasingly fragile landscape? Reid believes this poses an immediate challenge for politicians, but questions whether New Zealand’s existing institutions can keep pace as the rate of technological change speeds up exponentially.

“We’re seeing 24/7 robotic science…it’s just going to accelerate science.

“We’re seeing robots able to completely automate logistics.”

Examples of this have already been developed, he says, including around-the-clock grocery order processing and automated weed selection and extermination in the agriculture sector.

We’re already aware of rapidly advancing generative AI – with text to text, video, image and voice – and 3D-printed food and buildings. We’re even seeing advances in nuclear fusion and mind-reading AI, Reid says, so how can we harness these emerging technologies to help our economy and influence our decision making? 

“At the moment we turn grass and cows into milk, we bash wood with nails and build houses. 

“Do we want to continue to do that in 20 years’ time, or do we want an economy that’s far more complex and precise and automated?”

In other words, asks Reid, do we as a country want to be making the product, making the machine that makes the product, or making the system that builds the machine that makes the product?