Aware Group chief executive Brandon Hutcheson, Dr Amanda Williamson, an AI lead at Deloitte and Glen Willoughby who is chief executive at Staples VR and also an advisor to NASA on emerging technologies during a panel discussion at the New Zealand Economics Forum. Photo: Supplied / Screenshot
A data entrepreneur says facial recognition could be used in classrooms to call the roll.
An economic forum at Waikato University on Thursday has been looking at new uses of artificial intelligence in education, health and industry.
Aware Group chief executive Brandon Hutcheson told attendees a child would waste half a school year during their entire education, on attendance checks.
"We could have replaced and improved our education system a long time ago just by using facial recognition in classrooms for attendance.
"Singapore's done it, China's done it, lots of the countries in the world have done it," Hutcheson said.
He also said PhDs needed rethinking because AI was outpacing what could be learnt doing one.
Another technologist on the AI panel, asked how it could help the "crumbling" public health system, pointed to AI learning within six months to read mammograms more accurately than a radiologist who took 14 years to train.
Glen Willoughby, head of virtual reality company Staples, said the AI could complement the human specialist.
Getting to that point required seizing the moment when people were most open to change - when an existing system had become "untenable".
New Zealand had an edge, Willoughby said.
"The great thing about ... the New Zealand health sector, it has incredible datasets.
"These are the most important assets of any AI project - the dataset, not the tool," he told attendees.
But when they tried to do the breast cancer screening AI trial here, they hit regulatory hurdles.
"We were trying to do that in New Zealand. We blew one and half million dollars, we took it to New York - one of the most bureaucratic, difficult health sectors to work in, that was the place we could innovate."
This was despite the country's "superpower" in AI - its small, smart and innovative population.
This was weighed against the likes of the $360 billion investment plan for AI laid out by the European Union this week, he said.
This was one reason to give the AI innovation portfolio to a "rock star" minister in any government - but often the opposite happened, he said.
AI featured in a speech to public sector bosses by the Minister for Digitising Government and of the Public Service, Judith Collins, mid-week, with her saying: "If done right, the digitisation of our public service will be game changing, and I am committed to ensuring this happens."
She is pushing for much more use of AI in public service delivery.
Another constraint was power demand; the panel discussed how AI was incredibly hungry for power and water, and expected that would outstrip the country's energy supply in a decade or so.
Dr Amanda Williamson, an AI lead at Deloitte, said the hope was that AI models were getting better but using less energy.
Hutcheson mentioned nuclear power as an option, unpalatable as that might be just now.
On ethics, the panel said New Zealand could display leadership.
It has just signed up to a new declaration on "inclusive and sustainable" AI at a Paris summit, though the US and UK refused to sign, dealing a blow to hopes of a united approach.
But the danger was a strategy of "paralysis" - "let's talk about ethics, let's talk about bias, let's talk about everything, but then we don't do anything", said Hutcheson, who advocated rapid experimentation.
This was why the country had dropped to 49th out of 193 countries on the [https://oxfordinsights.com/ai-readiness/ai-readiness-index/
Oxford AI readiness ranking], he said.
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