HERE COMES THE FUTURE, READY OR NOT
In life, and business, emerging technologies centred on AI are set to have a profound impact on all of us. Technology futurist Ben Reid’s new book Fast uncovers a whole new world of possibilities and opportunities.
For Ben Reid, technology and science fiction have always held a special fascination. Right from when he was a young teenager teaching himself to write code on his Apple IIe, he admits to always living “more in the future, less in the past”.
Ben’s career has mirrored the cutting edge of technology’s progress over the past three decades. He has been a software developer, architect, and consultant – and is now a technology futurist who ‘eats, sleeps and breathes’ emerging technologies and their impact on both business and the wider society.
In his long-running Memia weekly newsletter on Substack he scans the frontier of new technology, informing audiences worldwide on the potential impact of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
“I’ve always been an innovator,” Ben explains. “And I’ve always been very interested in what’s happening at the very frontier of technological development.”
The sudden arrival, and rapid adoption of AI around the world, as well as other technologies such as virtual reality, robotics, nanotech, biological, and space exploration technologies, has caught many by surprise. However, it is AI that has arguably the most potential to impact and influence our lives.
For a new technology, AI’s rate of acceleration has amazed Ben. “Since late 2022 when ChatGPT first came out we’ve seen this relentless pace of new releases with improved functionality, new startups, and new AI models that are just way better than the previous generation only a few months old.”
Ben says the genesis for his book Fast Forward Aotearoa, published this month, was witnessing the speed at which AI and other emerging applied and generalpurpose technologies were being adopted worldwide.
“I looked around New Zealand and saw how slow we were to respond to these technologies, and to adopt them in our economy,” he says. “As a country we also missed that AI investment opportunity five years ago. The country just didn’t see it coming.”
Although Kiwis have earned a narrative around Number 8 wire and punching above our weight, New Zealand is still in danger of becoming a technological backwater, fears Ben.
“This is particularly highlighted in the slow pace that we are absorbing new technologies into our mainstream economy, and into our government.”
Not surprisingly he wants to see large parts of government service delivery completely automated. “That’s what every other business on the planet is doing with their digital transformation programme, so why doesn’t the public sector? One thought experiment I’ve had is ‘what if you completely re-engineered government services using software and AI? What would it look like and how much would it cost?”
UNCERTAIN TIMES
Fast Forward Aotearoa basically translates what Ben is seeing happening at the forefront of global technology and putting it into a New Zealand context. He also sounds the alarm on increasing volatility and uncertainty around the planet. In Ben’s view there is a high probability that mainstream New Zealand is massively underestimating the impacts of climate change and geopolitical uncertainty.
“Also, we may not be in a unipolar1 world any more, but instead moving into a multipolar one with large states like China, India and others having a bigger impact on global affairs to rival the US,” he says. “New Zealand needs to start having conversations around how an independent foreign policy would actually operate in that multipolar scenario.”
1 When most of the world is dominated by a single state or nation’s military and economic power