AI must simplify, not complicate, our way of life

That dilemma is not limited to manufacturing workers. Some of the world’s best mathematicians, currently employed by the world’s largest finance houses and earning millions of dollars, will face the same fate. Almost every worker between these two extremes will be affected in some way by the arrival of AI.

It might feel like we’re in unchartered territory. And in a way we are. But society has been through such situations before.

When the Industrial Revolution took hold, the arrival of the steam engine quickly powered everything from factories to locomotives and shifted the power source away from hard-working people who had previously provided the muscle to generate energy. Mechanised cotton weaving and spinning machines took jobs away from highly skilled hand-loom weavers who were displaced by the new technology.

More recent history has seen the arrival of the calculator overcome the need for us to do maths manually. The personal computer meant that typing, rather than handwriting, became a newly important skill. Handwritten spreadsheets became a thing of the past when Lotus 123 arrived. The smartphone meant that we didn’t have to carry information with us, or for that matter even remember it. As long as we knew where we could find it.

As a result, while we learned new skills, the old skills evaporated. Long-form maths, handwriting, critical thinking and memory retention were no longer important.

At every stage, as the new technology took over our lives, it was accompanied by the promise that those lives would become easier. We were told that we would get more done, more quickly. Organisations would need fewer people, but the growth that came as a result would create new opportunities.

But it didn’t quite happen like that.

Instead of the technology generating new activities, it enabled complication. The void in the workers’ schedule had to be filled. People, no longer as busy adding, subtracting, writing or researching, filled the time by finding new things to do. The more steps they could put into a process, the more people they employed. The technology kept track of it all. The bureaucracy was built through complication.

The result is barriers and obstacles at every turn.

A decision once made on a factory floor, after consultation between a manager and a foreman, now occupies two layers of management resource and three rounds of consultancy reports.

A planning decision, once the result of a conversation on site between the property owner and a council planner, is now the subject of five, seven or even 12 months of shuffling between government, councils, architects and planners in the pursuit of a building or resource consent.

Some people, particularly those in and around central and local government, have become so fearful of making a decision, that another round of consultancy reports seems like the only call they can make.

And so, despite the advances of technology and the productivity it was meant to bring, we find ourselves burdened with unimaginable bureaucracy, paralysed decision-making structures and productivity gridlock.

As a result, whether you’re building a bedroom or a bridge, the regulation shuffle makes everything too hard, too slow and too expensive.

Our disabled world, laden in red tape, is about to be asked to harness the next round of life-changing technology. This time around we’ll witness the biggest series of changes of all, a period that will see people lose their jobs and have to go somewhere.

The challenge will be to ensure that the people go somewhere where they add to the productivity solution the technology brings, rather than recycling into the old processes and adding further complication.

It’s common knowledge that our productivity, as measured by labour output per hour worked, is poor. We rank in the bottom third of OECD countries. Many of us work hard, but collectively, we don’t get much done.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated by the fact that we spent $1.3 billion in the last year on consenting costs alone for infrastructure. That money didn’t build anything of course. It was just blown on trying to get permission to get underway.

A confluence of commentary over the past couple of weeks has brought the problems to our attention and demonstrated that the Government is finally doing something serious about the bureaucratic elephant in the room.

Firstly, former Central Rail Link boss Sean Sweeny came out of his overseas bunker and lamented our ability to build infrastructure at the right scale, cost and timeframes. It would have been nice if he had the nerve to do so while he was in a position to do something about it. But at least he said it. Someone had to.

Then, this week, the Government finally admitted that the surge in public servant numbers under the last government is unsustainable and that they will be seeking to eliminate about 9000 people from the core government workforce in order to save $2.4b over four years.

The finance minister says they’re looking for productivity, efficiency gains, and cost reduction. And then, there’s that abbreviation again; they’re suggesting that AI is part of the solution.

Of course, any announcement about public sector job cuts will bring out the opposition and their allies, the unions, with howls of contempt for the government action. These are the same opposition personnel who, when in government, proposed $4b in public sector savings, a move which their union friends then asked workers to support.

So, there’s no question that our finance minister is right to identify the problem. The previous government added 17,000 people to the public workforce without a noticeable improvement in services or outcomes. Despite media commentary to the contrary, those numbers have been maintained for much of the first term of this government. Meanwhile, we’ve been in and out of recession for most of the past five years. We’re borrowing money every day to maintain a lifestyle we can’t afford, and our interest bill is now the government’s fourth-biggest cost.

So, we must do something. And AI presents a golden opportunity for us to streamline processes, eliminate rework and get rid of the red tape. It also enables back-office cost reduction as the minister has clearly identified.

But it’s much more than that. AI tools bring entirely new ways of working. Smart new tools to support policy design, better-quality regulation, best practice analysis and better strategic decision support are available now. The world’s best research and development skills and resources are accessible and available for us to learn from. Innovation ecosystems and access to venture funding will become an open book for governments who care to look. Access to energy solutions will be made faster and more affordable with AI-enabled planning and best practice analysis.

The list goes on. If we can use the technology in a proactive and well-targeted manner, this could be the opportunity we need to quantum leap from our current woeful standing on the international scoreboard, and really seek the growth and wealth development that the Prime Minister speaks so passionately about.

But the starting point is an honest discussion. We must not do what we’ve done before. As we bring AI tools into our government operations, we will have to make tough decisions about the people we employ. We simply cannot afford to move those people elsewhere in the bureaucracy, where they occupy space and build barriers to progress.

The rest of the world is getting on with it. China just built the world’s biggest train station, the Chongqing East Railway Station in less time than it’s taken us to build the 4km Auckland Central Rail Link. In Croatia, they built the 2.4km Pelješac Bridge across the Adriatic Sea in four years.

It would take us longer than that to get our paperwork and consulting reports prepared for the consent hearings.

We should applaud the Government for having the nerve to announce the tough decisions. But announcements don’t matter that much. Execution and delivery are critical.

I’ve never seen anything get better because you complicated it. The world is moving. We need to get going.