Steven Joyce: Tech from the future, bureaucracy from the past

Not content with controlling when schools open, officials want more control over what the kids eat. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

One evening this week I decided to give ChatGPT a go. ChatGPT is a new form of artificial intelligence that combines the power of online search with, so far, impressive collation ability and relatively rudimentary writing skills.

The bot is in its infancy, but already formidable. In very short order it reeled off essays on pop band The Cure, the history of Cambodia, the distribution of the kea through New Zealand, a guide to growing onions in Auckland, a timeline of the New Zealand Wars, and the break-up of the old federal Yugoslavia. Then my daughter got hold of it and we received a precis of New Zealand’s top middle-distance runners. All this in just half an hour, where probably the biggest delay was trying to decide what to ask ChatGPT to write.

We don’t realise it yet, but the arrival of ChatGPT heralds probably one of the bigger technology leaps of our time.

While we are dealing with the storms in Auckland, the drought in the south, and the vague discomfort that we should be taking more notice of the calamitous earthquake in Turkey and Syria, ChatGPT has arrived. It and its mates threaten to up-end professions which rely on research, collation and dissemination of information.

The concept of artificial intelligence writing essays on anything for you in the blink of the eye is challenging, but also exciting. At a stroke you can skip all that trawling through Google search links to find the articles with the information you want. It is all done for you and it’s all free. You can learn a lot in a short time. There are limits to the depth and breadth of ChatGPT’s knowledge and ability to write, but then this is version 1.0.

ChatGPT and its ilk bring some obvious challenges to the world of education. In much the same way as calculators made some arcane maths skills redundant, what is the purpose of learning screeds of facts if they are always available to you, in a neatly summarised form and from a hundred different angles, at the touch of a button?

If the writing of essays is automated, how then to test whether students understand the concepts they are being taught sufficiently that they can make a coherent argument?

Even going on just the last couple of weeks, New Zealand’s creaking education system seems uniquely unsuited to dealing with these sorts of disruptive challenges. The idea that its hapless top-down, one-size-fits-all culture could respond quickly and effectively to take advantage of new technologies is laughable.

The latest unsettling evidence of the ridiculous rigidity within education was the debacle that was Auckland’s return to school this year. On the back of the freak rainfall event on Anniversary Weekend, the lumbering Wellington-based education ministry decided on Monday it should close every school in Auckland for the first week of the school year. All 600-odd, plus another 1200 or so pre-schools.

There were some that needed to be closed as a result of flooding, or slips in the vicinity. At most this was a small proportion of the total. In a sign the bureaucrats are still drunk on the power they took for themselves during the pandemic, they decided individual principals and boards of trustees could not be trusted to make the decision about when it was safe to open their doors. And this despite the fact that these same people are nominally in charge of the education of hundreds of children every day.

The ministry panicked and pulled the pin just as schools were looking forward to their first non-disrupted year since 2019. Once again we demonstrated to a generation of impressionable school-age children that, despite our protestations to the contrary, schooling isn’t really that important. No wonder they can’t be bothered going.

It got worse. About a day later, the officials were apparently having second thoughts. Maybe early childcare centres could open, and then possibly some schools. And then yes, they should open on the Thursday, except for those that couldn’t. It was appalling and cringeworthy. Principals, teachers and parents suffered daily whiplash as bureaucrats and their political masters in Wellington micro-managed Auckland’s schools to within an inch of their lives, trusting no one but themselves despite their all too obvious limitations.

Then the push was on to further standardise even what school students eat. The public health wallahs we became so heartily sick of during the pandemic were back to tell us that fully half of all schools should be given government-provided school lunches, and eating a government-provided lunch should be compulsory at those schools so as to not offend anyone.

The airwaves immediately filled with stories about unappetising government-supplied lunches, huge wastage, and parents affronted that only officials in Wellington can tell them what is healthy for their kids. Arguments raged over the lack of choice in government-sanctioned menus.

The contrast is apposite. The bureaucratic machine takes more and more power from schools and parents at the same time as a new piece of technology threatens to literally eat their lunch. We have poorer and poorer academic results in our schools, students are staying away in droves and out-of-control officialdom is busy dumbing us down even further, taking responsibility for the food our kids eat and deciding whether it is safe to open the gates.

It’s not just education of course. Health officials in Wellington took decisions to leave hospitals empty for long stretches during the pandemic and in doing so created the longest waiting lists of unnecessarily suffering people of all time. They are apparently going to solve this mess by taking even more power for themselves to micro-manage every public hospital in the country.

Our politicians need to lift their sights. Squashing an ill-advised merger of old-media companies is all very well, but they are missing the main game.

Centralised monopolistic public services have surely reached their limits. Its time to de-power the civil service in Wellington and encourage innovation, experimentation and great teaching in our education system. Yes, even pay more for top performance. Where is the fresh thinking from both sides of politics about how we can get away from the bureaucratic dead hand that is stifling us?

Clever new technologies like ChatGPT are more evidence the revolution is coming. The question is whether our kids will be ready to participate in it, or will even more of them be passed by in the interests of an overweening bureaucracy?

- Steven Joyce is a former National Minister of Finance. He is director at Joyce Advisory.