Sir lan Taylor is the founder and managing director of Animation Research.
OPINION: Minister Willis,
I woke this week to the news that the Government sees artificial intelligence as a pathway to removing thousands of public sector jobs. It may not have been how you intended it to be interpreted, but I couldn’t help wondering how anyone in the public sector, a sector created by politicians in the first place, must have been feeling on hearing that news.
And then I thought about the hundreds of university graduates I saw celebrating with their parents here in Dunedin for graduation week. If the government has endorsed the use of algorithms to replace thousands of jobs, like the ones they have been studying for, what does that tell them about their future, and the debt they will carry into that future.
What does it say to teachers, and their students, who are looking at a curriculum that is devoid of any mention of AI and the world those students will be heading into when they leave school.
