Georgie 

Hello, and welcome to In the Blink of AI, where I talk to the brightest AI startups and innovators each week. This week I am speaking to Laura McClure. She’s a member of Parliament in New Zealand for the ACT Party and actively advocates for technology and innovation as well as business, manufacturing, education, mental health, seniors and disability. On the show, we talk about the rise of deep fakes and her personal experiences after she went viral when sharing a draft for Parliament, um, with her member’s bill. I’m sure you saw the photos, guys. They were literally everywhere. We talk about safeguards and guardrails, but we also talk about her being not anti-innovation. She’s actually anti-regulation and pro supporting people and businesses to adopt technology. So what would it take for Australia and New Zealand to support technology and encourage startups to build and to stay here? A huge thank you to Laura for being on the show. I would’ve happily chatted for another three hours. Let’s dive in.

Adam Spencer 

You’re listening to a Day One FM show.

Georgie 

Hi, Laura. Thank you so much for joining In the Blink of AI. For those that are a little bit ignorant and don’t know who you are and what party you are a member of Parliament for, can you give us a bit of a background about you, please?

Laura McClure 

Yeah, sure. Hey, Georgie. Um, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I’m really excited. Um, so my name is Laura McClure. I’m an ACT List MP. Basically that means I don’t look after an area or an electorate here in New Zealand, but I am based out of Christchurch. I am with the ACT Party, which is a libertarian party here in New Zealand. Our key core values are those of less government — so a smaller government that’s highly efficient, less rules and regulation, less tax overall, and enabling communities to honestly thrive at their own level. So it’s about that devolution of services and things back down to community level.

Georgie 

I think the listeners of the show, that are for the most part in tech and startups and business and finance, they’ll probably be a lot of fans of yours. But, you know, I would love to know, because not many of us are in politics — what does an average day look like for you?

Laura McClure 

Yeah, so it depends where I am, but we’ll go with a sitting day. So when I’m here in Parliament, New Zealand Parliament sits on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for three weeks of the month. And then we have one week recess where we’re out back in our communities, basically seeing constituents. So an average day for me is getting out of bed, needing to get ready, using to put on a game face. As you can tell, the game face is good. Generally, I grab a cup of coffee, which will probably be one or four. Although I’m trying to cut back on that ’cause it seems to be a bit of a problem. And then I’m heading off into Parliament. So I have an apartment when I’m here in Wellington and it’s about 400 metres from work, which is nice. So my day starts anywhere between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM. The House actually sits at about 2:00 PM which we call question time here in New Zealand. It’s one hour where non-executive MPs can ask the executive, like the ministers, questions. That is split evenly amongst the parties. So there’ll be some opposition members and there’ll be some government members. Usually the goal of the opposition is to try and catch ministers out for certain things. So it can be quite theatrical and really spicy. That’s a fun part of the day at two to three. And then after that, we debate the government’s bills that we have on the agenda. They can be anything on any given day, and we sit to  PM.

Georgie 

Wow. On those days that work. Yeah. That’s a long day. And it —

Laura McClure 

It’s a really long day. And the following morning, I might have a select committee, so I sit on two select committees here at work.

Georgie 

Wow.

Laura McClure 

Which is —

Georgie 

Yeah, pretty, pretty busy. Busy. ’Cause see why you need the four coffees normally, I’d say. Yeah. You know, I’m with you — health is wealth, but four seems the minimum to get through one of those days. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. What’s your coffee of choice? I must know.

Laura McClure 

What? I’m just a regular flat white girl. Nothing fancy, you know, fancy milks, no —

Georgie 

Sugar. Yeah, just flat white. Sounds like you’re quite no-nonsense in many aspects of your life, Laura. Yeah. One more background question before we dive into more of the regular segments of the show. I’m actually the daughter of two political scientists. They met in Canberra, you know, working for Parliament, and it actually put me off politics because they were always talking about politics in the house, and I just was like — Put me off. But I read on your Wiki page that you also had significant political discourse in your household. So why? What made you lean in more where it made me just think, I’m out, I’m doing engineering?

Laura McClure 

I love it. And that actually sounds like a really smart idea from where I’m sitting. Look, I think the political chat between my parents — the banter tended to be quite diverse because they had quite opposing views, which meant that I got to form my own opinions, which is sometimes quite different to both of theirs. But I like to say that nowadays we all seem to be on a similar political spectrum. It didn’t put me off per se. It kind of encouraged me. I did political science at uni in year one. But for the most part, honestly, I didn’t think that I was going to be an MP. I had my own business. I was happy, successful, had the kids. And this is kind of like the thing that I ended up landing into when I saw what government debt we had here in New Zealand. It was a real concern for me and a concern for my kids’ future. And same with the education that they were getting taught here. I had just some serious concerns. So once I got involved, the ball started rolling and lo and behold, I’m actually now sitting here in Parliament. So I call myself a little bit of an accidental politician. It wasn’t a plan as per se.

Georgie 

And you said with debt in particular, maybe just give me some context on what really spurred you to be like, no, I’m going to get involved. This, you know, I’m really passionate about this.

Laura McClure 

I guess it’s just the government spending here in New Zealand and we’ve got a huge deficit. We’re talking into the like, you know, 80, $90 billion deficits. And it’s really outrageous and a lot of this lending was happening over COVID, which was fine and somewhat understandable. But it just continued from there. And the government themselves, like government agencies have really grown. We’re talking about 67 per cent growth from 2017 to now. And I don’t think New Zealanders are seeing better outcomes from their government and their government agencies. So that was the thing that really was worrying me and I thought, gosh, how are we going to pay down this debt? For starters, we’ve got a couple of options. As a government, you can tax people more, which ACT Party do not believe in. Or you can be more productive or the government can provide less services, but deliver them well. So there are varying different things that led me to the party that I’m in now. But I would say that concern about government debt was a real worry and it’s still a worry here in New Zealand. We’re chipping away at it. We’re part of the government this time as a bit opposed to being in opposition. That is a bit more fiscally concerned and conservative, I would say, at the same time. But there is a long way for us to go to reach where we need to be as a country.

Georgie 

Thank you so much for sharing. That’s really great context. This is a recurring segment of the show and I’m really excited to get your take on this with a slightly different background to an AI founder that’s often on the show, which is an AI hack of the week. You and I each share an AI hack. It doesn’t have to be a specific tool or it can just be something that we’ve encountered or even a prompt. Laura, what is your hack of the week?

Laura McClure 

So I’d say some of the cool stuff that I’m starting to see in the education space, and not singling out a specific product, but there is some awesome innovation coming through, the likes of tablets or iPads that can read a child’s face and they can pick up certain things to do with their learning and can tailor the learning for them. Or having an AI teacher on a tablet, and we all know classrooms are really busy. Teachers try and get around as many kids as they can. But having that AI one-on-one to fill in the gaps between the classroom, I think is really cool. It’s an awesome, positive change I think will be a huge benefit for our kids in the future.

Georgie 

That’s amazing. Not to make this too much about me, but there’s a story that’s in like the family law about when I was in grade two, so only like seven or eight years old, the teacher said Georgina’s really bad at maths. She needs a lot of support and my parents were like, oh no, that’s terrible. They realised he had just got me mixed up with another student.

Laura McClure 

That’s funny. So funny. You’re an engineer now, so —

Georgie 

You kind of been too mess. Maybe spurred me on to really try hard. Maybe I did. Yeah, it could have been. They always like refer to that now as like, remember when that teacher thought you were really bad at maths? And it’s like the one thing that I think I might be okay at. Okay, so my AI tool of the week, look, it’s a bit of a silly one but useful in my opinion. You know, I’ve become quite prolific on LinkedIn lately and it’s done wonders for my personal brand. We’re going to talk about being out there on social media soon in the show. Something that gets a lot of attraction and a lot of views and a lot of exposure is the one-minute vertically filmed video and there is a product or tool or app called Captions AI. It’s better than the LinkedIn auto AI transcript. Yeah, it’s brilliant. And apparently it’s better for the algorithm if you just upload the video with the captions already in it, so can strongly recommend. Sometimes people don’t want to listen to the video so they’ll just scroll past, but if they can read the text —

Laura McClure 

I totally do that. Like if I’m on a plane and I’m getting ready to take off before I’m in flight mode. Of course. Or just in a meeting and you’re having a quick scroll through while you’re waiting for somebody and it’s like you don’t want the noise on so you really —

Georgie 

Don’t. But the video is compelling but the noise isn’t right so it’s kind of a way around that.

Laura McClure 

Keep it under a minute ’cause that’s the sweet spot, apparently. And vertical.

Georgie 

Ooh, okay. Don’t do horizontal, always do vertical. I don’t know why. Probably ’cause the way people scroll on their phones. I’m guessing that the vertical — I’m sure you’re right. And apparently don’t put any filters. The more candid the better. That’s good to know. We’re social media influencers now. I love it. I’ll definitely be taking this to our social state. Yeah, yeah, tag me. Okay, I’m really excited for this part of the interview. The rise and risk of deep fakes and when I first encountered you and something very brave and compelling you did recently that we’ll talk about. After I had already realised that deep fakes are prevalent, I was just wondering what’s going to be the next headline in this because it’s going to be bad. I wished that I could have someone on the show with a political background and expertise to talk about it but it’s kind of hard if someone’s not already passionate about this topic to get the right person. Laura, I’m dodging around this question. Tell me what happened two weeks ago when you went viral online about something you bravely shared in Parliament. Can you set the scene for us please?

Laura McClure 

Yeah. So, a couple of weeks ago in Parliament, I held up a nude, but the nude wasn’t real. It looked like me. It was blurred, but it was actually an AI-generated deep fake of myself and I made that deep fake under five minutes. I Google searched with the filter of just deep fake nude and there were hundreds of sites that popped up. The first actual site that popped up was a blog with the top 60 websites to do this without an account. So I was like, oh, perfect for what I was needing. This is the best and worst day of my life. I was like, this is so easy. It’s working great, but also absolutely terrifying when I put my headshot into one of these websites and I had 10 or so images pop up of me to an extremely good likeness. There were a couple that weren’t a little bit off, but for the most part, you would not be able to tell unless you had physically seen me naked before. Oh my gosh. And it looked like it could have been in my home, or it was like in the bathroom, the kitchen — all these kinds of places that could be in your home. So it was really terrifying. And I was doing that as part of a research project because I had a member’s bill that I’d been drafting around deep fakes. That kind of idea had come about because of the schools, the principals here, a concern parents were coming to me telling me about things that are happening to their kids at school to do with deep fakes. And we’ve got that gap in our legislation here in New Zealand. So it became something that I thought, look, this is something we can fix. It’s actually quite simple here because we already have the framework for revenge porn or for sharing somebody’s naked image without their consent. It just adds synthetics or deep fakes to the exact likeness of a person into that piece of legislation. So I wanted to get some attention in Parliament because this bill is just a member’s bill at this point. It means it goes into what we call the biscuit tin. It’s a literal biscuit tin. Are you serious? I am. I’m serious. It’s like an arm, it’s a tin pitcher. A tin. If people want to know what it looks like, you can Google the New Zealand biscuit tin and the numbers go into that ’cause your bill gets numbered. And then on a member’s day, which is usually one of the Wednesdays in the sitting weeks, there’ll be a draw at midday and your bill may get pulled out of that 10. So that’s how the member’s bill works. It’s basically a ballot. And I wanted to draw attention to this issue because I believe that it’s not that political and I believe it’s something that all of the political parties here can actually agree with. It’s something I think that’s becoming more urgent and that we could look at making it a government bill. We could look at bypassing the government and doing what we call essentially passing the ballot by having the house support. So that’s kind of where I’m working at. So it needed to be dramatic. Yes, I needed to get attention. You don’t just want it to be another number in amongst the biscuit tin. That’s right. I was really concerned about the people, the stories that I was hearing from people. At some point, there was a 13-year-old girl who attempted suicide here in New Zealand at school. Thankfully it didn’t work, but will it take somebody in New Zealand, Australia or anywhere actually killing themselves over this for action to occur? I don’t believe that we should be waiting for that.

Georgie 

I think high school’s hard enough, right? Being a teenager is hard enough. I think you and I briefly spoke about it’s an uncomfortable stage in that adolescent period, the idea of having fake images shared around and not being able to escape it when you get home. It’s just horrifying. Were you surprised with how easy it was to do as well? Because if parents came to me, I’d be like, oh, some really good hackers in school. But perhaps not.

Laura McClure 

No, I think it was so easy to do. You could do it if you’re a kid, you could do it on the web browser. So it’s not like you need to download an app. There are all the notify apps, for example, which can do this really quickly for you. But actually what I’ve found is the Apple Store and the Play Store block a lot of those anyway, which is quite good. But these websites you can just do on your web browser. You could be sitting on the bus, for example, you could create this image. You just have to tick a box to say you’re 18 and that the person is consented to use the image. There’s no handles or checks on that. And then, lo and behold, the images are made and you could airdrop that around to a busload of kids or share it on some sort of server. There are all kinds of things that you could do and it’s not limited to just an app or downloading an app. Because I think as a parent sometimes you think, oh, you know, I’ve got one of those family apps on mine where I can see what my kids are downloading. But they could have just done this on their phone without that. Yeah. And it’s not on the deep dark web or anything like that.

Georgie 

No, and you pose a very serious risk to the mental health implications of this. Are there any other risks? Like I think even outside of the teenage age, this is a huge career risk and things like that, right? Yeah.

Laura McClure 

Oh, it’s a huge — yeah, like outside the teenager side. I think for anybody to have an image, even if you know it’s not real, it’s not actually you, but if that was circulated, imagine around your workplace or to your clients on a database. If you’re a politician or a celebrity of some sort, it seems that though they are targeted more often. But what is scary is that because it’s so easy to do now, it’s becoming a form of bullying. And it seems to be that it’s being misused more and more just on the everyday person, which is really terrifying. It is.

Georgie 

Terrifying. As I said, you went viral with your image. I’m curious, what the feedback was. Was it positive, was it negative? How did you find the results in the comments section?

Laura McClure 

So it depends on which post it was linked to. Some of the news stories say MP shares nude, which is really quite clickbait. And if people don’t click on the story, the comments can be quite rude. But quite a lot of them can be your attention seeking. I want attention for this issue, so sure, I’m happy to say that if that’s what it’s for. It’s definitely not to bring attention to myself — that’s deeply uncomfortable and not a great thing to have to do. But if it brings attention to the issue, I’m all for that. Some of the other comments were the old misogynistic “send me the BLR”. I know it’s like, okay, the DMs have gone off on that — quite out there. Can I have a look at the BLR? But for the most part, there have been some concerns from people around like, will this limit creativity? Will it stop the technology? Which I believe it definitely won’t because it’s just criminalising behaviour when you use it to harm other people, essentially. But for the most part, beyond all those concerns and kind of funny things, people have been really supportive. It’s actually shone a light on the issue for a lot of people that this has happened to and they didn’t know who to talk to or where to go. So I’ve been inundated by messages from people, whether it’s happened to them or it’s happened to their partners before or their kids, for example. While that is really positive that they’re supportive, it’s also really scary that it’s more prolific than I thought it was and it’s a bigger issue. So it’s only empowering me to get this across the line as quickly as possible.

Georgie 

100%. And you doing it about yourself though, you know, a figure of the media for sure being a member of Parliament — it does bring it back to home a little bit more how easy it is. And that this isn’t just something that happens to celebrities. Exactly. And this is something that could happen to your family member, someone in your home. Yep. What about globally? Has it managed to cross the oceans? Has anyone seen it outside of Australia and New Zealand?

Laura McClure 

Yeah, look, absolutely. It kind of almost went off globally before it even came around here in New Zealand because when I did this speech, it was also the budget week here in New Zealand. I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but the budget’s a huge deal. So the journalists were all running the budget news and like, oh my gosh, did you do that? We’ll come back to you. So it’s been quite funny. There was a couple of things that popped up in New Zealand, but it mostly went viral overseas first. And countries like the UK, India — I’ve seen different pop-ups now all over X coming from the EU countries, which is quite interesting. Wow. So in Australia, I did a Sky News interview yesterday, which was great. Oh my gosh. Yeah, there’s been a lot of exposure and I think this issue is resonating throughout the world at the moment because of the rise of AI. For how amazing it is, there are these risks and there are these people, these bad actors essentially, that may use it inappropriately. And so I think a lot of countries are deciding how to deal with this at the moment. It has become quite a hot topic, I’d say. 100%. Yeah.

Georgie 

Yeah. It’s something that is quite a tangible thing too ’cause AI can sometimes feel a bit black box and this is like, no, this is definitely something very real. Speaking of which, the member’s bill enables the prosecution of those who generate and share sexually explicit deep fakes without consent. Incredible member’s bill, Laura. But why did you do it in this way instead of just going after the apps themselves, the tech companies themselves?

Laura McClure 

A lot. There’s a couple of reasons there. Mainly the first reason is we live in New Zealand, so we’re a tiny island nation at the bottom of the planet. A little bit close to you, but I’ll say that we are at the bottom of the planet, and trying to restrict the tech is extremely challenging from our position. A lot of these sites are hosted overseas. They’re not anywhere in New Zealand. A lot of the technology is developed elsewhere. It’s not here in New Zealand. A lot of the good technology already actually has filters and things in place, for example, Photoshop, in order for it not to be used in this way. So it would be like playing whack-a-mole if we went after the tech and there was some kind of restriction on it — a site would come down, another one would pop up. How would we even get these international sites to pull things down? It could become actually really challenging. So that was one of the main reasons. The second reason is actually it’s not the AI’s fault that it is able to do all of these incredible things. It’s the people that are using the AI in the wrong kind of way in order to harm people. So it’s a behavioural thing. And I think with the rise of AI, we need to think about the behaviours of humans and how we use this technology. So it’s around setting a kind of like a good best practice around how to use this technology when it comes to deep fakes and those that can be obviously really harmful to people. So it’s more about setting up the standards, telling our kids, particularly educating them on why it’s actually really harmful rather than actually trying to just manage the technology aspect of it. But I can see the potential benefit to that if you are in — I know the EU has come out and they’re putting some bits of legislation in, for example, and I’ll be watching those closely, but I do think that there’s going to be quite a lot of challenges with it.

Georgie 

Yeah. And if you wait for that to happen, maybe the toothpaste is out of the tube by then. Like there’s so many deep fakes out by then that it’s like, well, it’s outrageous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And intent is a really important thing, right? And teaching values, and it is bullying like — just because the technology can doesn’t mean that makes it okay.

Laura McClure 

A hundred per cent. Yeah. It’s the same as, you know, if somebody sent you a nude image and then you break up and you share it. We all know that’s not okay. So it is kind of like this is also not okay. And in some ways it’s worse because they can put you in far more sinister kind of situations as well. That’s true. And often that is, so often it’s not just like a nude that I held up, it’s actually usually them doing some kind of really sexually explicit act. Oh, that’s a great way to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s more graphic than anyone would ever have of themselves anyway. So it’s, yeah, it’s easy work, taking it a lot further than just a selfie.

Georgie 

Yes. Exactly. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. Yuck. Ew. Yes, gross. This brings me to my next section though, because those who might not be familiar with ACT and with yourself and your policies might think, oh, she’s anti-tech, she’s anti-innovation. Are you anti-tech and innovation, Laura? Do you just hate technology? Absolutely not.

Laura McClure 

I would say being a libertarian party, one of our key core values is obviously free markets and technology, finding efficiencies. So I would say definitely not. We love technology. We like to support those that are wanting to innovate and grow because I do think that that is part of the ticket to success whether it’s here in New Zealand or abroad. I do think that we need to make sure we foster this so a hundred per cent definitely not against the tech at all. And that’s why this is about behaviour of individuals. And one thing that ACT is really firm on is the rights of victims and being quite tough on crime as opposed to being quite lax in that area. So I think this really aligns quite nicely with where we’re heading. We’d rather do that than go out and ban a whole bunch of apps and tech and things like that.

Georgie 

Yes. And so, like what could happen, say if you were just clamping down really hard on tech and creating guardrails sort of incredibly high when it comes to AI adoption. What’s the downside risk of the people that are just anti-tech altogether? Ban it all.

Adam Spencer 

Hmm.

Laura McClure 

I think the major downside risk is that we will miss out on the opportunities that it presents, and if you overregulate something or you make it too hard, then you’re just going to miss out. I mean, this tech is here now. It’s well and truly embedded. It’s still in its thing. And if countries like New Zealand, Australia want to be prosperous and successful in the new digital world, we need to be on board with that. And we can’t be stifling any growth. We need to make sure that we’ve got our settings correct and that when people develop things and they want to develop things, they want to base themselves out of our countries. And in order to do that, ’cause that’s part of the big success story, right? So I think it’s really important that governments do consider where their positioning is on this. Because there are so many positives, I think that we really need to be really specific about how we use the tech, of course, but we need to be really specific about the laws that we put in place and the regulations have to be well and truly tested and make sure there’s no unintended consequences, for example.

Georgie 

Yeah. ’Cause if I see the headlines and there’s just deep fakes everywhere and it’s a disaster and revolting out there, I don’t want to use the tech anyway. So it’s almost like how do, if you prevent the horrific examples from happening, people might want to adopt it even more, perhaps.

Laura McClure 

Yeah, look, I think if we have some safeguards in place that are sensible. So I think it is sensible to expect individuals to not abuse other individuals with the tech. So if you have those kind of things in place, it means that everybody else that is using it for good feels more open and they’re wanting to use it because they realise that there are actually a lot of safe and cool things that we can do with it, and it actually takes away any of those conspiracies that might pop up. So you’re absolutely right. I think if we know that that’s illegal here in New Zealand, so you see less of that activity, then you are more likely to be able to use that technology for other things that are really cool. Agreed. Like creating an AI teacher or an AI instructor, for example.

Georgie 

And your daughter’s not seen as like a complete maths terrible student. We had the CTO of EY on the show a couple of weeks ago, and she was really upset to see that globally Australia and New Zealand was kind of lagging at the back when it came to AI adoption. So this is something that you’re probably very aware of. I’m curious if there’s any country or nation or just policies that you really look to when you think there’s anyone doing it well or on the path to doing it? Well, Laura,

Laura McClure 

Look, I think that this is all so new and moving so fast that I don’t believe one particular country or place or policy has it a hundred per cent right. Because it is moving so quickly. I do think there are some countries that are far better than us and are quicker to adopt these policies and adopt the technology in itself. Quite often those societies tend to have booming economies. They’re trying to find efficiencies in manufacturing, for example. And if I was to look at specific countries, it’d probably be places like Singapore, for example. We know that they’re really efficient. They like to find efficiencies, they like to digitise a lot of things there, whether it’s their shipping for example, or whether it’s on the factory floor. So I think that there are, I am concerned that New Zealand and Australia are lagging behind, and I think that there is an apprehension, people don’t want to potentially take up the tech, like there’s a concern there that it might take jobs, for example. Or there’s that slight fear around it. But once people see the benefits, I think that they will soon switch over, especially business wise. I mean, it is a no brainer really.

Georgie 

Yeah. One of the things she said was, yes, there’s the fear and the AI taking jobs is a recurring echo chamber of news articles. Right? But also the fact that, at least in Australia, historically, we’ve taken a few years before we’re like, oh yeah, I’ll figure out X technology within the next five to ten years. And as an industry or business standpoint, yeah, we’ll adopt it eventually, but I don’t think we have that kind of time and like perhaps we will be left really archaic in the dark ages if we wait ten years to really take this seriously.

Laura McClure 

I agree with you. Sometimes there are pros and cons to that, because we are slow at adopting things, we get to see what mistakes people make so we don’t have to make those, which is good. But with something like this, the technology is moving so quick that governments and policies are so slow that there needs to be some sort of matchup. And I’m not sure about some of the Australian parliament, whether they’ve got a similar setup, but we now have an AI working group here, cross-party members of Parliament, and that’s started up this year, which has been really cool. There’s a group of people from across different political parties that meet every couple of months and either have some new tech come in and talk to us about it, or we have people working in the policy side, people working within regulation or education for example, and they’re coming and talking to us around what we should be doing. And I think that’s a real positive first step because it means that it’s politically neutral. Everybody understands the benefits and we can try and come up with something so it doesn’t become a political issue. ’Cause when that happens, it can be kicked around back and forth, which can be quite challenging and that just slows everything down as well. So there is hope there, I think. And it’s something that I think hopefully Australia is doing at this point too, and I believe you probably are, but there does need to be some pretty swift action even from —

Georgie 

Yeah, yeah. And clearly there is the willingness and the awareness if you guys already had this group together and you are actively trying and championing change, which is brilliant. We have one more question. We get to the rapid fire part at the end of the interview. Say I gave you a magic wand and said, here you go, you can now adopt AI at scale. Is there any underlying infrastructure or anything that would prevent that from happening even if I was like, you can change all the policies tomorrow?

Laura McClure 

Absolutely. Like here in New Zealand, we don’t actually have enough electricity to power a new AI generation, which is a very big concern. The factors here that we have had a very slow growing economy when it comes to our electricity sector. So there’s what we call the Resource Management Act. I’m not sure what your version of this is, but it’s basically the body that consents things to be made. So think of like wind farms or a power station of some sort. The Resource Management Act is the guiding body that consents all this. And in New Zealand it’s been very broken for quite some time. It takes an awful lot of time to get anything through or anything passed. So we’re doing a massive reform at the moment as a government. It’s a huge priority because we actually need more electricity generated before we can look at even having another data hub or data centre here. And a lot of people want to come here. There’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of people that want to come to New Zealand and set up their data centres, their AI data hubs, but we do not have the current infrastructure to do so. So I think yes, there’s lots of movement going to be happening on that front, and if you could wave your AI wand tomorrow, it would be fantastic. But it wouldn’t actually work like that. We would need to make sure that infrastructure is up to spec and that we can actually handle the speeds and the things that we actually need on our electricity grid.

Georgie 

You just reminded me. I got a phone notification while getting coffee this morning. I don’t know if it was the US but somewhere was like, we need nuclear power in order to embrace the advancements of AI tech in terms of powering it and it’s very energy intensive, right? So yeah, that’s a whole other kettle of worms.

Laura McClure 

So it’s like if we even see nuclear power here in New Zealand, oh my gosh. They would freak out. But it is a good question around there are some technologies with nuclear fusion now that’s different to what it used to be. Maybe those conversations need to be had around how do we do this? How do we become like a clean energy state and make sure that we can do it efficiently and affordably. Because the price of electricity here in New Zealand is outrageous. It’s the biggest, I would say, contributing factor to the cost of living here in New Zealand is the price of power. A lot of that is just because we don’t have enough of it and we do need to think about things. But in saying that, we also are on a giant fault line and we have earthquakes and things like that. So maybe nuclear power wouldn’t be the thing that we need, but something needs to happen and it’s a very valid discussion. I see that there’s been a couple of discussions in Australia. I was in Brisbane recently and I noticed an article about potential nuclear power. And you’d think the country —

Georgie 

That’s lived off coal for so many years wouldn’t be so adverse to nuclear power.

Laura McClure 

I know.

Georgie 

Right? Yeah. Wild, wild.

Laura McClure 

Lori, you don’t seem to strike me as the person that shies away from spicy questions. You’re used to doing them at what, 2:00 PM every day anyway. We are at the rapid fire part of the chat, so number one. If you could redirect a portion of New Zealand’s federal budget that you’ve been talking about recently to one initiative, what would that be?

Laura McClure 

I was umming and ing about what to say at this point. But I think there’s a couple of things. The part of me wants to say paying down the government core debt. But realistically, in New Zealand, we have just had a bit of a boost in our defence sector. I think we need more of that because there is a changing geopolitical kind of sphere out there. There are a lot of bad actors that are potentially out within the Pacific. I think New Zealand really needs to keep up pace with the likes of Australia, for example. We are quite behind you in our spending and how much we put into defence. But also I think it’s a reason that I would pick defence because it’s a huge opportunity for New Zealand because we’re quite niche. We’re very specific in our roles. We’ve got amazing technology that comes out of New Zealand in the defence space, whether it’s drone tech, whether it’s all kinds of different, not just AI, but intelligence programmes. The defence sector here could really do with an innovation boost, which I think would actually boost the whole tech sector in general here in New Zealand. So yeah, that’s why I’m going with Defence Force so we can protect our sovereignty, we can align with our partners, and also so that we can grow our local defence economy.

Georgie 

You and I both have children. What skills do you think are critical for the jobs of the future in this AI crazy fast pace we’re going in?

Laura McClure 

Look, maybe IR will actually tell them what they need to know, which you would be fantastic. You tell them. Oh no, I know. I think what is going to be coming more and more important is actually having the skills that you require to critically think, because we do have AI and it’s great, but it can be wrong sometimes. I think the youngest generation, whether it’s a Google search for something or throwing something into chat GPT, all of this learning is coming from a wider pool of information that may not be accurate. So I think what is going to be a really important skill for our kids is how to think critically, how to spot things that might not be right and how to check if that’s right or not. Whether it’s fact checking. This could be for news and media. It could be for what they see on social media when they’re older. It could be just researching for a project at school. So I think that critical thinking piece is really important and it’s something that they should hopefully be learning at pace. They’re already incredible with technology and they will adapt so fast. I think we don’t have to worry about that part. It’s like they come

Georgie 

Out of the womb like knowing how to use a touchscreen these days. I know. Is it scary? It’s scary, right? It’s so scary. I didn’t even have Facebook until I was at university. It is wild. Yeah. That’s amazing because critical thinking is a brilliant one. Probably a good thing that they’re not just doing rote memorisation like I did for all of my tests and then forgot it the next day anyway.

Absolutely. Can early stage startups become financially successful in New Zealand with the current policies and regulations in place, Laura?

Laura McClure 

Look, I think it is challenging here. I do think that we have a lot of burdensome regulation. One of the good things that this government has done, and it was an ACT party initiative, was to set up a ministry for regulation. Basically that goes out and finds bad regulation. People can send a tip-off into a tip-off line around things that are hindering them or they’re struggling with, whatever they’re doing. It could be anything. It could be on the tech side, it could be in agriculture, it could be building and construction. They will investigate whether a rule or regulation is actually having the intended purpose and whether it’s actually adding value and benefit as opposed to wrapping people down and telling them no all the time. So I feel like it is challenging here. We are small. We don’t have a huge market. Sometimes when people want to take a product to a wider market, they need more people for starters, but they also need more capital, which we don’t have an awful lot of here in New Zealand as well. So we do see a lot of startups moving on from New Zealand, which is sad. It would be great if we could keep them here, but often in order for them to grow and be a real success, they tend to move offshore to capitalise on that. So believe

Georgie 

Me, we see that here too. It’s quite common after series A stage once they’ve got enough funding, we kind of don’t see them again. It’s really sad. And maybe if they get so successful that they could buy yachts and islands, then they come back anyway. Fair. And there’s only like, you

Laura McClure 

Know, the small handful of them. But I definitely think there does need to be something in that space around — and this is for actually quite a lot of business in general — scaling from small to medium to big is a massive gap as to how you do that and how you access that next part. A lot of that is rules and regulations becoming too hard and people are like, whoa, that’s far too hard to do here in New Zealand or Australia. I don’t have to adhere to those rules over in the UAE, for example, or Singapore or something like that. So they look at these opportunities. It could be our tax settings, like a corporate tax rate. You look to somewhere like Ireland where Google and that are based — no corporate tax rates, which is an incentive to keep business there. So look, I do think there are things that we all should be doing and thinking about, but I don’t blame these businesses for wanting to go off and it would be great if we could harness them. Like some kind of environment where they stay here would be great.

Georgie 

You’ve — this has been the most fun interview ever. I have one more question for you though. Let’s stay on for another three hours. If you were to look five to ten years out, what does a truly AI-powered New Zealand look like according to you?

Laura McClure 

It’s really hard to even say what five to ten years will look like. Five years ago —

Georgie 

I know. It’s crazy. I think we are seeing some sectors. Some sectors that are adopting it and are doing really well here are places like agriculture, for example. We’re quite a big farming nation.

Laura McClure 

You’re seeing things like automated tractors, all kinds of different fertilisation and sprinklers that are automated, can check soil for certain nutrients and add or take away things. You’re seeing things like automated drones that will go and check on stock rather than the farmer having to go out and wrangle some sheep. They can do that. Check where they are with a drone before they head on out. You’ve got things like automated collars on livestock to the cows. I’ve got a collar and it just vibrates at their milking time and they head off to their shed. But it also GPS tracks them so you can see where they are at all times. There’s loads of things like that. I also see a manufacturing sector getting more efficient, faster and more productive. When we become a more productive society it leads to higher paid jobs and more revenue for the government to spend on all the nice-to-haves, the things that we want to be able to have. I see the future being amazing, but we’ve got to get that infrastructure right and have that in place. Hopefully we can make sure we’ve got the policy settings correct so we can foster businesses to come here and help industries grow and move on into using the tech.

Georgie 

Thank you so much for joining In the Blink of AI. Laura, before I let you go, what would you like to shout out to the listeners? Where can they follow you? What would you like them to check out that you are passionate about?

Laura McClure 

Yeah, if you want to follow me, feel free to on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. You can see what I’m up to with my deep fake bill and what will be coming — I thought you were going to say with my —

Georgie 

Deep fake? I was like —

Laura McClure 

Hopefully, if you’re passionate about it, you love the tech but you don’t want to see these bad behaviours increasingly, you can come along and share the love on that. But I guess also just a bit of a plug to New Zealand. Despite me saying that we are overregulated and we might not be the best place to have a business, we also have this thing called a digital nomad visa, which means people that work remotely can come and actually work remotely in New Zealand and live here, which is really cool for a set period of time. I think that’s really nice because their business may be online and may be elsewhere but they’re spending their money in our shops, out in our tourism businesses and stuff like that. So it’s a real cool opportunity for anyone, especially in the tech base industry that wants to come in and spend some time in New Zealand. They should check out the digital nomad visa. I reckon it’s a really cool idea that we have. That’s major.

Georgie 

Oh my gosh. Now I want to go work from New Zealand. I’ll send you an email. Thank you so much, Laura. I had the best afternoon. Thank you. Thank you for listening to In the Blink of AI. You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week’s episode and we will be back next week. This podcast was produced by Day One with music by Dan Hansen and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell. If you loved the episode, please tell your mates and I love AI news. Please share your thoughts and suggestions to Georgina Rose Healy@gmail.com.