Mōrena ITP members and supporters, I spent some time with my nephew this week who is in his first year of Computer Science at Victoria University and not loving it. It was disappointing to hear how small the year is, how few women are enrolled and how boring he’s finding the course - so boring he is casting around for what to switch to degree wise.

There is a widely held rumour that falling enrolments across all tertiary and vocational education has hit digital technology course numbers for a range of reasons. I’ve said it before, it’s easy to choose a trade right now, and not easy to choose digital technology with too much choice and a confusing landscape, so it feels like we are missing a trick if a motivated 18 year old who chose this path is finding his degree too boring to stick with it. We as an industry own this, we need to find a way to make it as easy to choose us as it is a trade, to ensure our education system is engaging, modern and reflects the vibrant creative mahi we all enjoy. Who’s with me on getting organised and making this change? 

Peter’s editorial this week considers whether our Privacy Act is fit for purpose in the times of generative AI, he finds the Privacy Commissioner’s claims he has enough powers is at odds with the EU who are drafting the AI Act, but in line with the USA who are not pursuing new legislation amid significant lobbying from big Tech. He concludes however our Privacy Act is weak, quoting new advice published by the University of Auckland this week. Griffin on Tech: Amid generative AI frenzy, Privacy Commissioner sounds a warning 

Brendan's cartoon was inspired this week by the news of the equally hilarious and scary event that was Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch on Twitter Spaces. Wondering what this is all about? Here are a couple of articles from The Atlantic on how twitter is now the far right's social network and The Guardian on who DeSantis is.

AI wrap up 

The Ministry of Education has issued sector advice on generative AI and large language models. It’s commonsense and should be useful as a guide for schools.  

It seems the National party are also embracing AI this election to generate images for their adverts. Are we impressed? I did love this Spinoff article and it’s AI generated splash image. The Spinoff also draws our attention to the US bill introduced this month requiring political groups and campaigns to disclose the use of AI created content. Agree or not with this approach - the upshot is we need discourse on the use of emerging technologies. 

To this end OpenAI the makers of ChatGPT, have written this week on “Governance of superintelligence - now is a good time to start thinking about the governance of superintelligence, future AI systems dramatically more capable than even AGI.” 

More new products are emerging every week leveraging large language models - this week I’ve come across a Job interview coaching app, Pathfinder a personalised goal setting app (try it it’s fun), an app to help you hatch ideas Glasp (haven’t tried it),  

If you are in the SAAS space have a read of this post from Fillout the form builder product, How not to add AI to your product. It’s interesting. 

Our guest post this week is “What is a black box? A computer scientist explains what it means when the inner workings of AIs are hidden” an explanation on why it matters what’s behind the scenes with AI products and explores the tension between obscuring the code base from hackers and espionage yet being transparent on the algorithms so the decisions this software makes can be understood by humans. 

Other reading

The article of the week for me this week was Ngapera Riley of FigureNZ’s post on Māori data sovereignty. She walks us through why Māori data is important, the Māori data sovereignty movement, our current state and what comes next and concludes with why we should all care about this topic. Her conclusion is nothing less than inspiring “Data is a taonga. It’s something that people gift us, and that we gift to others as we go about our daily lives. It’s valuable information that evolves, grows, and will change over time, and it is of strategic importance for everyone. It’s my dream that one day we’ll be able to use it to build the best possible future for all of us in Aotearoa.” Ka pai.  

Spark Foundation commissioned research recently in the digital equity space, its a good read and adds to the picture a range of other recent research is building up. A key highlight from this report is “Using the estimated 130,320 digitally excluded households in New Zealand, the per household benefit studies gives an estimate of the total benefit of digital equity of approximately $464 - $737 million per year.”

You can find links to other research in this space on the DECA website.

Want to oVRcome a phobia? Well there is an Ōtautahi Christchurch based company who has built a VR app for that. I don’t know anything about this but was intrigued when reading this article on Newsroom. 

Peter wrote this article earlier in the week "Microsoft Build: Software giant continues its march towards AI-everything", and their unveiling of more new features where they will be integrating OpenAI’s product set. 

Cyber Security news

There has been a bit of Cyber Security news this week. The Five Eyes nations issued advice on China state sponsored cyber activity, how to hunt for for the activity on systems and includes mitigations. This came about after Microsoft claims to have caught the hackers who were found to be targeting critical infrastructure in Guam and elsewhere in the USA. 

I’m always looking out for insights into cyber insurance and where this industry is headed, so was interested to read the stats in this post on a recent ransomware report. 

Don’t you love a good collaboration and open source story - this one on a new AI model which has “knitted together three large databases of information about computer vulnerabilities, weaknesses and likely attack patterns” is brought to us by a team of scientists across universities and research centres. Their physical key analogy reminds me of one of the CSUnplugged activities to teach tamariki about public key encryption. 

Think you might want to become a penetration tester? Here is a great resource from ZX Security on how to get started. 

Finally, something I missed from my budget wrap up blog - GCSB had a small budget uplift to focus on protections for critical infrastructure. 

Events and awards

Nominations are open for the Mahihiko Awards - a celebration of Māori contribution to digital technologies. If there is anyone you would like to celebrate then check out the categories here and get nominating. 

There are ITP events in Dunedin on the 31st, Nelson on the 1st and Tech Chat Tuesday on the 6th. 

If you enjoyed my fireside chat with JD he is doing another webinar specifically on AI, you can register here. 

Te Reo Māori and Digital Technology terms

Thanks for the great feedback on the segment introducing Te Reo Māori digital technology terms. Each pānui new terms will be added to this running document so you can reference them at a later date. I haven’t said before but there are terms in this space with differing translations, I am using the common one that appear in a range of Māori dictionaries. 

This week, since we’ve had so much AI related news, here are a range of terms from the data space. 

• Algorithm = hātepe
• Calculate = tatau
• Data = raraunga
• Time series data = raraunga houanga 
• Qualitative data = raraunga kounga 
• Quantitive data = raraunga tatau 

Finally

I was listening to Nicki Chamberlain from Auckland University on Morning Report speaking on targeted advertising, mis, dis and malformation and the impact technology has on election results as I wrote this. It got me thinking we need some public debate on this here in Aotearoa NZ - there is plenty of noise, expert statements and acknowledgement we have a problem, but is there enough discussion on how we move forward from here. There is also a cognitive disidence issue, election interference seems like a problem that happens in the USA not here. Again this is something we as an industry need to take leadership on, no this is not of our making, but it's hard for anyone else to really understand.

So like my call to action on how we as an industry can present ourselves to attract a future workforce above,  If you are keen to participate in this kōrero let me know. Ngā mihi Vic