Issue #943

by Paul Taylor

The year is 2044. You arrive at your Lakeview Queenstown hotel in an autonomous taxicab. It doesn’t fly. It doesn’t need to. Like all vehicles, its route is managed by an AI network, which has made traffic a thing of the past. The cab door opens automatically, as robot dog butlers carry your luggage off to the room. There’s still a friendly face to greet you at the reception, but who knows these days whether she’s actually a ‘real’ person. Uncanny valley.

Standing in your room, you look out of the windows down onto Queenstown bay, where electric jet boats and ferries buzz about. Over the long weekend break, you’ll experience the wind-rush thrill of bungy jumping, ski through The Remarks tunnel down into The Doolans, enjoy lamb at dinner with your friends. When it’s time to leave, you’ll simply take off your headset and your immersion suit, or turn off your neural chip. You’re still in your apartment in Beijing. Virtual / augmented reality is so good these days, you don’t actually have to fly to your destination to go on holiday there.

I attended a talk with futurists Ben Reid and Sam Ragnarrson, hosted by Queenstown’s Liger Academy, last week. Reid has just published his book ‘Fast Forward Aotearoa: How emerging technology is defining the future of New Zealand… and what we can do about it’. He was also the keynote speaker at Tourism Industry Aotearoa (TIA) summit, talking about the opportunities and impacts for tourism operators. And he writes a technology blog (www.memia.com), keeping his readers up to speed with the breakneck pace of technological advances.

As a small example, for tourism, he showed us a video of him speaking in English, French, Mandarin and German. It had been produced by AI in a couple of minutes. You could tell it was artificial, something about the way his mouth moved, but within a year I bet you won’t be able to tell the difference. Reaching out to overseas markets, tourism businesses won’t have a language barrier anymore.

It was a fascinating, hopeful and scary discussion. Like the printing press, steam engine, electricity, computers, the internet, and iPhone (launched just 16 years ago), AI is one of those paradigm shifting advances which make the future somewhat unknowable. We are at the edge a technological precipice and, with AI’s exponential learning rate, the pace of change will spin our heads around.

Queenstown Resort College now runs a course in AI, or ‘machine learning’, and businessman Roger Sharp has recently launched Technology Queenstown to grow the sector. It’s clear, though, with AI development centered on the US west coast, neither Queenstown nor New Zealand are economically or socially prepared for what’s coming. But I’m not sure anywhere or anyone else is either.