Artificial Intelligence has a big future with tasks like helping kids to learn and assessing medical results, says Cabinet Minister Judith Collins.

Cabinet Minister Judith Collins wants the government to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI), starting with the health and education sectors where it could be used to assess mammogram results and provide AI tutors for children.

“It doesn’t do the work for them. It says some things like ‘go back, rethink that one, look at that number,’ those sorts of things. What an exciting way to do your homework if you’re a child.”

Deploying AI in education and health would be seen as high risk uses under new legislation passed by the European Union regulating AI.

Using AI in those settings in EU countries must include high levels of transparency, accuracy and human oversight.

But New Zealand has no specific AI regulation and Collins is keen to get productivity gains from extending its use across government, including using it to process Official Information Act requests.

An OIA request by RNZ for a government Cabinet paper on AI was turned down (by a human) on the grounds that the policy is under live consideration.

  • @[email protected]English
    4•5 months ago

    I also love/hate excel. It is great for a lot of simple jobs where writing code would take to much time, it is terrible because you can’t audit your code* easily or at all. You get these hideously complex sheets referencing who knows what with no documentation…

    • By “code” I mean shitty formula hidden in cells.
    • @[email protected]
      3•5 months ago

      That’s what excel is; code for people who don’t know they’re writing code - and its clearly a bad way of doing most of the things people do with it.

      But on the flipside you have to give it props for getting people a foot into programming, even if they don’t realise that’s what they’re doing (and folks who use actual languages and lines of text to achieve the same thing don’t accept it for what it kinda is).

      I think you could make an argument that Excel is the world’s most used/successful IDE ;)

    • @[email protected]OPM
      2•5 months ago

      Haha oh boy, if there’s one eternal rule with complex excel sheets it’s that no one other than the person who made it will ever truely understand it 😆. But you can write VBA functions and throw them in the formulas to make them a bit tidier.