Aotearoa has lapsed into a stifling negativity about AI. We think that this negativity stems from an overemphasis on risk. AI’s risks are real but a focus on benefits suggests how they can be proactively managed.  

This online course consists of two one-hour sessions. The first session will take place on 4 April, followed by the second on 11 April.

You will be guided through the opportunities and risks of AI by University of Waikato Professors Albert Bifet and Nicholas Agar.  

The mindset of this course is:

In AI think first of the benefits. Only then think about the risks and, if the benefits are sufficient, seek to mitigate them. 

New Zealand seems far from where everything is happening, and the big money is being made in AI. But that doesn’t matter. For much of our history we lamented the tyranny of distance from Mother England. In the age of the internet, distance from California or from Guangzhou doesn’t really matter. Aotearoa can put our stamp on AI, but this requires us to see AI as a good news story. Let’s not turn it into another bad news story like climate change.

Aotearoa has all we need to be a world leader in AI, perhaps focusing initially on what Paul Callaghan called the “weird stuff”. Weird stuff, by its very nature, cannot be predicted. Who in the 1990s could have predicted Rocket Lab’s 3-D printed engines? But weird stuff will be prevented if our current negativity persists. Telling a young genius that AI is basically a technology for AI is often portrayed primarily as a technology for amplifying bias or even triggering catastrophe is a way to tell them either to direct their creative energies elsewhere or to find somewhere else to explore the limitless potential of AI. 

This course will be future-focused. It’s good that many people are currently experimenting with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Spending a bit of time with it immediately disconfirms many overconfident pronouncements about AI. But ChatGPT, as a Large Language Model AI, is but one variety of AI. There is also machine learning AI. The future will bring other kinds of AI each of which brings different benefits and risks. A focus on the future suggests the great importance of future proofing for the new advances that are surely coming. It is not required that people taking this course acquire knowledge about building AI to render informed judgements on their possible benefits and risks. What is important is to get past the sense of shock that too many people feel with each advance in AI.