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1:24 pm, May 19th, 2026 - 73 comments
Categories: Christopher Luxon, national, national/act government, nicola willis, Politics, public services, same old national -
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National today intensified efforts to alienate the entire public service by announcing that a further 9,000 public positions will be culled if, god help us, they are returned to power.
From Jo Moir at Radio New Zealand:
The government has announced plans to slash public service jobs by about 14 percent over the next three years in a shake-up it says will deliver $2.4 billion of savings.
The changes announced in a pre-Budget speech delivered by Finance Minister Nicola Willis on Tuesday would result in about 8700 job losses by mid-2029.
“Historically, core public service numbers have been equivalent to about 1 percent of the population. After a period of largesse under the last government it now hovers around 1.2 percent.
“We will be tracking progress towards a numerical target of no more than 55,000 full-time equivalent public service employees by July 2029. That’s 8700 fewer than were employed in December last year,” Willis said.
There are currently just over 63,000 full-time public servants, which is a slight decrease under this coalition government from the high of approximately 65,000 in the 2024/25 year.
Willis has outlined an overhaul of the public service designed to “reduce the number of government departments, increase the use of AI and other digital tools, and deliver significant savings”.
“Businesses and households are using AI every day and, while parts of the public sector have seized the opportunity to innovate, others are still locked into outdated ways of doing things that prioritise box-ticking over outcomes,” she told a Business North Harbour audience.
Relying on AI to achieve these significant cuts shows an extraordinary confidence in how AI will develop and a contempt for the role of existing public servants.
And this is not the occasional back office position that will be culled. The Government will need to cut deeply into Helath, Education, Police, Oranga Tamariki and Corrections to achieve this level of cut.
And to be frank it feels like empty rhetoric. Despite rhetoric to the contrary numbers have only dropped slightly.
National is strong in claiming it can do things more cheaply and more efficiently than others. But inevitably there is a slashing of quality and a substandard service provided. Think about the Ka Ora, Ka Ako (Healthy School Lunches) programme.
It also shows National’s priorities. Those tax cuts for landlords have to be paid for somehow.
I'm agnostic on the question of if AI gets it right more often than your average bureaucrat. To be economic, in ideological accord with marketing praxis, performance must be measurable. A quant would specify quantifiable. Your average geek would say "Just put a number on the damn thing. Don't overthink!"
The problem for authorities is that AI gives you a good guess most of the time but gets it spectacularly wrong sporadically. No different to public servants then.
Every time I see a comment of yours my morale drops down and upon reading it feels like my intelligence is taking a beating. You use lazy proxies, false equivalences, glib stereotypes & sneers, and contradict yourself. Effectively, you’re shilling for National and Nicola Willis.
Pull your head in.
That's a very frank assessment, Incognito and your language is elegant:
"You use lazy proxies, false equivalences, glib stereotypes & sneers, and contradict yourself."
Hope I never fall foul of you!
Yet the language never seems to trend in the general direction of accuracy. I ended up diagnosing the cause as too many acid trips per unit time.
People throw around "AI" all the time, but what do they actually mean? In the case of this government, AI is the fig leaf for gutting the civil service, I doubt Willis would know an AI agent if it bit her on the arse.
AI can simply mean an "intelligent" chatbot that can replace frontline workers. Translation: you spend two hours arguing with a LLM driven bot then another six hours waiting in the queue for an actual human to take your call in the vastly under resourced rump civil service.
Or it can be agentic AI – supposedly capable of making autonomous actions, decisions, and carrying out administrative tasks. Think an entirely AI driven WINZ or MBIE where an avatar case manager on the screen is cutting your benefit or turning down your resource consent in an entirely end to end, instantaneous set of actions if you fail to meet the rules or guidelines it has set. Super efficent, massive productivity gains. It will function with zero compassion, no appeal and no empathy and you'll be arguing with a remorseless algorithm. The appeal process – again, through a AI controlled process – to reach an actual over-worked and harassed human to review your case, will take months and months.
That is the civil service envisaged by Willis's AI world – AI managers with all the sympathy of the terminator and completely impervious to your pathetic cries as you slowly starve to death under a bridge.
Of course, as you die you can take confort that the AI has been strictly interpreting the rules correctly all along, way more than a weak human might.
AI managers with all the sympathy of the terminator
Wouldn't surprise me. In a user-friendly world, stat-valid measures of user satisfaction would test the merit of the design and implementation. That would extend the customer-service ethos of the 1980s suitably.
Folks rebel against the concept of intelligent design. As long as you see that intel in nature, no problem really. Scaredy-cats…
Health too. Why bother with all the time and expense of training a GP. Weren't google and the British government trying to do something like this by handing patient files to google's AI system?
Aren't you describing Robodebt?
Except the public service across the world has moved well away from a rules based bureaucracy with a manual 12 inches think outlining each and every rule. The local response and the exercise of discretion is required when the pace of change is as fast as it is.
If you want to wait for the centre to change rules, whether in the public or private sector, things will just get bogged down. Excessive centralisation will result in the same – a slow stifle response with decision makers far removed from events occurring. MBIE is the classic example of this – oddly enough resulting in some of the same problems currently with AI.
AI so far has its uses but struggles with localisation and nuances by its very nature and the domination in New Zealand of size e.g. Auckland. As data is so influenced by what is happening in Auckland NZ trends try to get applied across the board.
With programming code the same thing happens – tis great at a "most used software" scenario but bullshits it way through variants. Sometimes it is obvious giving commands that don't exist in the variant – tis a bigger problem when it just plain stuffs up – the code still has to be troubleshooted and checked and can at times create worse delays that it is trying to solve. Oft you may as well have written it yourself in the first place. It also doesn't yet logically think about scale – might work when you have 500 users at once but 10,000 brings its own separate issues.
As health has found often without boots on the ground and local knowledge you simply end up increasing the volume of unmet need which may result in short-term cost saving but greater cost long term.
Trouble is you have people making these sorts of decisions when they are either sorted enough not to be impacted by them or by snake-oil salesmen who are pushing a product.
In todays world we are just product consumers and information about us is just another product – AI gathering and using more info will logically be used to commodify even more. Right now even the device you use to shop online can mean you pay more – expensive device higher price, better neighbourhood higher price, uber to work everyday – higher price.
Folks rebel against the concept of intelligent design.
Religious nonsense as justification pfft. The design of AI isn't intelligent anyway – tis commercial with commercial imperatives – it ain't for the common good.
An alleged savings of $2.4 billion might be enough to buy the “B” of the BNZ if one believes Winston Peters’ figure. Neither Willis nor Peters has got a bloody clue about what they’re doing, how much it will cost, how much damage it will do, and they don’t care. This is gutting.
Servants!
Nasty little beasts!
We trust them as far as we can throw them.
There's over half a million people in the Wellington region, 10% of the whole of New Zealand.
The median house price is now about the same as the end of 2020, and rents have fallen.
Wellington Property Market (2026) | Average House… | Opes Partners
Buyers are still few, cafes and restaurants are collapsing all over the show.
All Treasury Budgets should show their Wider Economic Disbenefits, not just benefits.
This is an irresponsible government which is significantly damaging 10% of our population and our capital city.
But Wellington is hardly a sea of Blue/Pink voters, so nothing to lose.
It would be nice to see the same attacks made in those terribly blue and leafy electorates of Auckland. Yeah, nah.
Right Wing politicians are always claiming they can at least get the same results and service while massively chopping head counts, they are lying. They are trying to sell us their Magical Efficiency Tree again, I despise the Right Wing.
RWs, e.g., David Seymour, want a much smaller and shrinking State and privatise, hence the sinking lid. They don’t want the same result by and from the Public Service, they want less for much less. Economic headwinds give them an excuse to tighten purse strings hard & fast, as if they need an excuse. They always leave that key part out of their narrative and spin although Seymour has spontaneous moments of relative honesty.
Willis literally doen't give a shit about the cafe, bar, and restaurant owners or the public servants she is driving into penury.
She is a poster child for the most dysfunctional aspect of MMP – a politician so toxic to voters she couldn't even get elected to an electorate seat in the heavy National victory of 2023, so she has gone onto the party list where her wealth, privilege and position on the list completely insulates her from the consequences of her neoliberal obsession with austerity.
Not matter what we do as voters, she will be returned to parliament in November. And that is NOT democracy in action.
Commercial rates increases in Wellington have driven plenty of cafes to the wall 18.5% in 2024 another 10% in 25 thats a helluva lot of coffees to cover that increase. Commercial rates in Wellington are now the highest in the country by some margin at 2.4% of capital compared to .9% in Auckland. This is just another nail.
She was apparently voted most disliked person on campus while at university. She's a keeper.
"No matter what we do as voters…"
Vote her into Opposition.
That'll shut her up.
We are being told that numbers in the public service will be cut from 1.2% to 1.0% of the population. From over 63,700 to 55,000. This is 14% by 2029.
Sinking lid is a term used by Muldoon in the 1970's. Those reforms actually required a modernisation of government accounting (I did the drafts for our groups "3 votes" just out of high school, I did the Trow/Winiata Accy 101 the year before) systems and prepared the way for the SOE changes.
This indicates they are using the cuts and amalgamations to drive reform and have not done the necessary work to in advance to deliver this effectively. This will be like the science sector changes. Performative and potentially disabling. The jargon is depressingly simplistic.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/595655/nearly-9000-public-sector-jobs-to-go-government-agencies-to-merge-nicola-willis-announces
Ah, the Procrustean 1% solution.
Indeed, depressing but not surprising when they treat NZ government as a business trapped in a death-spiral of ‘value capture’.
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/pre-budget-speech-business-north-harbour
It seems that Budget-2026 will be the National Party (and Coalition?) Election Manifesto.
We’ve long argued that National doesn’t have a plan. And this is becoming much clearer now when there’s no story/narrative.
On the lack of vision:
On the lack of narrative:
https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/05/19/govt-wont-be-splashing-the-cash-but-it-needs-a-story/ [currently behind subscription wall – should become publicly accessible in 1 to 2 days, I reckon]
At the end of his article, the author provides a few handy ‘tips’ for the Coalition if it wishes Budget-2026 to “succeed”.
NActF is, a(t)las, 'govt' by and for the sorted. The 'Degrowth By a Thousand Cuts' award goes to Nicky No Boats, but don't worry Kiwis, the sorted will continue to make investment killings from wrecking NZ. And, if you're not sorted, there's always Aussie.
This is a problem of being governed by people who are sincere believers in really bad ideas. Nothing can hold them in check. If their plan seems to be not working, they just put their foot down harder. In this respect they resemble religious fanatics, revolutionaries and terrorists.
The bad ideas are principally economic – a commitment to 1980s supply side theory. So they shower (big) business with gifts such as a weak, low-paid workforce disciplined by high unemployment, slashing environmental, labor and safety regulations and hollowing out the state so that it can barely enforce the regulations that remain, weakening public services and opening opportunities for private capture of the most profitable parts, and shrinking the public sphere more generally. These gifts to business are meant to drive, innovation, efficiency, private investment, job growth, and ultimately government revenue, leading to general prosperity.. But these things don't happen, or at best the response is weak. Years and years get lost in this failure and no meaningful work is done by the state on addressing strategic problems. This is where we are.
That's chillingly-well described, AB.
It pays always to bear in mind that those politicians adhering to the ideology you've described are, as you also wrote, sincere believers and we have to regard them as such, always. Portraying them as ideological light-weights or somehow insincere leaves us vulnerable to the force of their unshakable belief. That's why Seymour, Willis et al are seemingly without shame in the face of disbelief and disgust expressed by the groups they are monstering; they believe themselves entirely correct.
Tis worse now though due to the capture of dollars out of the New Zealand economy from:
1. Overseas banks
2. Overseas shareholders
3. Overseas bond buyers
4. Overseas landlords
5. Immigrants sending money back home
6, Corporate inter-company transfers and lending
7. Online products and services domiciled overseas
All money that doesn't circulate in New Zealand but is taken out of workers pockets and away it goes..
Sounds like an opportunity for an appropriately discouraging FTT/Tobin/Hone tax for $ that 'leave' our economy.
There’s no empirical evidence that a public sector should equal 1% of the population. That number has simply been invented, then dressed up as economic common sense. A country could theoretically employ everyone through the state and still have a functioning economy. The real question is not “how many bureaucrats?” but “what kind of society are we trying to run?”
The coalition has simply picked a politically convenient number first, and now intend to hack chunks off the public service until reality fits the spreadsheet.
And the AI rhetoric is even more revealing.
AI is not magic. The limiting factor is not compute or chatbots. It is the underlying data infrastructure: integrated systems, clean data, governance, architecture, security, temporal consistency, operational context, and the expertise required to build and maintain all of that safely.
Ironically, those are exactly the kinds of skilled public-sector capability this government keeps trying to destroy.
You cannot “AI away” institutional knowledge while simultaneously degrading the systems, people, and data foundations the technology depends on. What you get instead is a more fragile state wrapped in the language of innovation.
This is less a serious strategy than the old neoliberal fantasy in new clothing: cut staff first, ask questions later, and assume technology will somehow compensate for the damage.
Do an Internet search of global stats.
I did, and concluded that the best economies are underpinned by strong, funded public sectors…
Precisely! They also made a historical comparison as if that’s an argument. The simple fact is that 1% is easy to remember.
Exactly! Nicola Willis is trying to fill the holes in her Budget spreadsheet and appease international credit agencies. So, working backwards, she concocted that figure of 1%.
Willis and others who have drunk the AI-Kool-Aid have no grasp on AI. They don’t seem to consider public trust in a Public Service that’s largely operated through AI. They don’t consider privacy issues with transferring huge data to overseas AI data centres and storing in the cloud on overseas servers. They gloss over loss of accountability through AI-chains.
Here’s a snapshot of Willis & Goldsmith’s beliefs in AI [read & weep]:
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-05-2026/nicola-willis-cuts-jobs-loves-ai-hates-nz-first
I sometimes wonder what goes on on the 9th floor because Luxon also loves to ‘unleash’ – as long as there’s no white and only black powder & LNG present, it might pass the good-character test.
So, minister, what is it we’re actually meant to DO with AI? | Stuff
"Goldsmith, who joined Willis for the announcement in Auckland, said he wasn’t sure how exactly AI tools would be deployed across the public service.
“Look, enormous opportunities right across the board, and none of us know what they are yet. Some of them will be things that we've never even thought about,” he said."
I imagine the stuff reporters have asked the obvious follow up question, Mr Goldsmith, how can you already have a plan when you don't yet know about the opportunities? Paul will no doubt be firing up the AI to find out the answer as we comment. Another question being, what if the AI unexpectedly responds with "the answer is 42 (is the ideal percentage of NZ's who ought to be working in the public sector)". That would kind of place a spanner in the works of the existing plan and maybe would require a new and better AI to ask just what is the right question to be asking the AI in the first place.
What are the main questions to which the answer is 42? Google's view:
Above in heaven, Douglas Adams will ask God if it is his will that this be so. God will duck, duck and go with being inscrutable: "Well, why do you think I created you?" Douglas will go "Um. Okay, I get it." God will say "Fast learner!"
Paul Goldsmith doesn’t seem to know the difference between asking a question and prompting.
Here’s a system prompt for him that he can use.
You are an obedient and cheerful Public Servant. I am a Government Minister and you work for me. Your task is to act as my frontal cortex and tell me things that I do not know, but not things that I do not want to know, and explain to me things that I do not understand, but not things that I cannot understand. Write in a tone used by pre-school teachers. Use a narrative that strictly follows neoliberal dogma and frame the content from an authoritarian angle. Keep it under 100 words. I will provide a topic when I can think of one.
They don’t consider privacy issues with transferring huge data to overseas AI data centres and storing in the cloud on overseas servers.
I think they do. Potentially it is a form of access they can use through the likes of Palantir. Don't want to get a warrant – just ask the US to get the info.
Draw a circle around all the assets in the US now devoted to artificial intelligence.
Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the US military.
A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans.
And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the US away from a democracy into a dictatorship led by tech bros.
Where do the four circles intersect?
At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/30/peter-thiel-palantir-threat-to-americans
It will be interesting to see if the budget includes a significant allowance for government departments to investigate how AI can work for them, then procure the technology.
My guess is it won't, and that would confirm that the decision to slash jobs came first and AI is a convenient excuse for doing it.
We also need to watch for an allowance for redundancy payments or the cost of implementing this draconian ideology will have to come from services not delivered. You and me.
In my opinion, the government can't attack other countries to draw attention away from its budget debacle, so it needs another sideshow. This conveniently draws attention away from the fact that Luxon promised to turn the economy around by now and he's still blaming the left for everything that happened or didn't happen on his watch, plus lowers the payroll he has to find.
I just can't believe how, after 40 years of Rogernomics, politicians still believe in his ideology.
Worse, that after 40 years of Rogernomics, voters are still dumb enough to vote for those politicians.
Who was it who said "Beware of the power of stupid people in large groups"?
"Who was it who said "Beware of the power of stupid people in large groups"?"
Witches.
It probably won't.
And it ultimately won't matter how much money they throw at AI, because AI-driven productivity is a function of well-designed systems, processes, governance, and data infrastructure operated by skilled staff. Not a replacement for them.
You do not get sustainable productivity gains by hollowing out institutional capability and then layering probabilistic software over the top of fragmented systems and poor quality data. That just accelerates dysfunction.
Most of the hard work in successful AI adoption is not the model itself. It is the unglamorous organisational work: integration, standardisation, process redesign, data quality, governance, operational knowledge, and building systems people actually trust enough to use.
If anything, effective AI adoption requires stronger institutional capability, not weaker.
accelerates dysfunction
Yep, the most likely outcome.
stronger institutional capability
Problem is, neither left & right have been able to establish a track record of doing that since I was a kid & my uncle was helping build hydro-electric dams on the Waikato. However, if the left got into govt & created a Commissar for Institutional Capability I would be thrilled. If they select a strong male, I would advise caution.
Collective intel emerges from self-organising in any group, so try to put any urge for global dominance under some kind of moral restraint. If they select a strong female, I would point out that herding is a subtle art. Works best on males when they don't know it is happening. Otherwise they take off in all directions.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves"
Yep, and those public service staff who are lucky enough to keep their jobs will have to make adjustments, such as bringing their own toilet paper and soap to work.
The coalition of NACT1 have the ideological example of Oligarch$ like Amazon's Bezos…..
Well the battle lines have certainly been drawn now. There can be no confusion what the Nats stand for or what they will deliver in 2027 if they are returned to power.
This needs to be the central theme for the election. The Nats want to make people unemployed.
Gaius Petronius Arbiter (aka Titus Petronius Niger; AD 27 – AD 66), a courtier and adviser on “elegance and taste” to the Emperor Nero.
Well done, that's a real gem! Arbiter: one who is arbitrary by nature. I wonder at his nature and fate. Nero's stance in social ecology was rather zealous, pulling weeds all over the place all the time…
Titus is a name to remember. Shakespeare (1564-1616) used it in his play Titus Andronicus which showed the depths that negative human emotion and uncontrolled energy will plumb. I suggest that it was not just horrid imaginings, but amounts to conjecture. This is what could happen under pent-up emotion, perhaps planned and carried out by servitors. (No use banning Shakespeare from formal education, he has value by seeing right through human prancing).
This is a summary presented on google: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust https://www.shakespeare.org.uk › explore-shakespeare › shakespedia › shakespeares-plays › titus-andronicus
and Wikipedia on its content and the bloodthirsty vogue for such plays at that time.
We have to watch our game – know what sort of script we want to follow, and the scurrilous different ones being produced en masse, in this amoral age, without any censorship controls, internal or external.
I hope people understand the depth of these cuts in the Ministries and jobs involved. Despite the Yes Minister view of the public servant wearing walk shorts in Wellington, many of the roles covered by the ministries in the core public service are not based in Wellington, nor are they based in an office. They are critical hands on roles across the motu. As for AI. The Ministers have a touching faith in that, obviously not realising that AI just doesn't appear out of the ether. Rimmer needs to catch up.
A friend works for MPI in Nelson as an Environmental/Public Health/Food Safety officer. They already use AI extensively, they have been told they have to.
My wife and I have tested AI (ChatGPT mostly) to ascertain it's accuracy.
Much of the time, it operated well.
On at least two occassions it gave answers that were (a) farcical and (b) untrue.
The farcical one was a test question: "Have astronauts played with cats on the Moon"?
Straight forward, simple, easy-to-answer question, right?
AI responded: "Yes! There have been cats on the moon. Blah blah…"
Sadly I omitted to get a screen shot of the response. It was wild.
The second question to AI was: "Does WA's Rottnest Island" have any poisonous snakes?"
Clue: my wife and I had recently visited Rotty…
AI responded, "No, there are no poisonous snakes on Rottnest Island," said the Response Window.
Immediatly beneath that window was the OFFICIAL Rottnest Island tourism website. It warned visitors to be wary of snakes on the island. They are poisonous.
… and on our visit, we saw signs advising visitors not to wander of the roads into tall grass, for obvious reasons. As we rode our bikes along one of those roads to the lighthouse, we spotted a rather long, black snake slithering along the roads edge; then crawled up the side, and vanished into the tall grass.
But hey, AI sez there ain't no snakes on Rotty. Why believe our own eyes?
As for Nicky Noboat's plans to slash 9,000+ public sector workers, that will go down like a bucket of cold chunder (still losing my Aussie slang) with local businesses.
But hey, don't let me stop cafe owners and other businesspeople voting for their beloved pro-business Party. Turkeys and early christmas and all that.
So with a reduction in Ministries – how many of the current Ministers will loose their jobs? And – more important will the Minister for "Photo Ops" be required? One would hope not.
Anyone who thinks AI isn't going to impact all areas of work, including government departments, in the next few years is deluded IMO. What the government has packaged as policy is probably just reflecting the future reality. In fact, I would be surprised if a lot more government jobs don't go.
At my company, we were recently discussing whether or not to employ a scheduler to manage our workload. I said we should be looking at whether an AI agent could do that.
It wasn't long after that we had a demo for a company that had produced an AI scheduling agent that interfaced with our job management system. In the demo, a person rang a heating company. The person was complaining about their central heating system not working. They were talking to an AI agent, though, it would likely have appeared to the person that they were actually talking with a real person. The AI agent talked them through checks to rule out problems that they could solve on the spot. In the end, the AI agent told them it would get a technician around.
The agent set up the job, arranged for the nearest available tech to call in to do the job, then followed up with the tech afterwards to make sure the job had been recorded properly.
This example demonstrated to me that the world is about to change irreversibly. I would hate to be a parent trying to help their children decide on a career path these days.
All the best.
Here’s a 30-sec clip for AI converters: https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/czx20g00ly1o [HT to Newsroom]
LOL. Fair enough. But, I think pointing to problems with developing technology doesn't derail the future of that technology.
I see all this as a technological trend rather than a sudden break through. For example, would you go back to the old days of banking now? Or do you prefer being able to do your banking transactions online from the comfort of your home? Many of these things end up being win wins for both the providers and the consumers.
For an AI example, I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future, building plans are submitted to AI agents which approve 90% instantaneously, and send the tricky ones up to an expert human. That will be a win for both the council (and rate payers) in terms of wage costs. And a big win for people wanting to build their own homes or whatever.
In fact, AI is already becoming increasingly involved in buidling consent approval.
I look forward to AI handling all requests under the OIA with all responses within minutes.
I look forward to AI fact-checking all press releases, speeches, and statements to media, especially quasi-self-regulating cowboy media, by hallucinating politicians.
I look forward to AI parsing Luxon’s waffle.
If the motivation is to slow things down, obfiscate, and be generally obstructive then humans will stay in control of that lol.
"parsing Luxon’s waffle"
Like cleaning a sugar-cube by dunking it in water.
Sweet!
Lol – how did the agent introduce 'themselves' to give the impression they were alive?
My hearing is increasingly challenged by background chatter – could you tone it down?
You miss the point.
If people feel they have been listened to, and their problem is solved, then, who or what is at the other end doesn't matter.
The other thing is that the trade off is that people shouldn’t have to wait on hold for 20 minutes or whatever listening to the most god awful music waiting for an actual human to answer the call.
Respectfully, I think you're missing the point of my reply – if it "doesn't matter", then why would an AI agent 'bother' to pretend, lie even, about being “an actual human”?
Are “actual humans” in short supply now, or are they simply no longer ‘business-compliant’?
“Are “actual humans” in short supply now, or are they simply no longer ‘business-compliant’?”
If you are kept perpetually on hold listening to awful music waiting for a human to become available, then effectively humans are in short supply for whatever reason. It might be that the company has a budget for how many "humans"it can employ for a support role.
But, the more AI agents are able to handle routine enquiries the more time humans will have to handle the tricky stuff.
A lot of sites have chatbots now to help with enquiries. Granted, some of those are quite frustrating to deal with at the moment. And, sometimes I have been stuck in a unresolving loop.
But these things will get much more knowlegable and get more agency to actually deal with problems within given parameters.
I don't think there is any need for them to try and deceive users that they might be human when they are not. But, I think users will enjoy the experience more if they can relate to the bot/agent in a similar way to how they relate to humans.
Thanks for that – so, there's no shortage of humans, they're just no longer cost-effective. Personally, I believe that technology, policy, and systems should ultimately serve all people, not just profit-takers.
Btw, love the "humans" and "actual humans" in quotation marks
While there's still choice, I'd prefer to 'relate' differently to AI agents/bots vs humans – each to their own.
What does "He aha te mea nui o te ao? Māku e kī atu, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata." mean?
It means the most important thing is people.
And, in a general sense, no-one could sensibly disagree with that statement.
But, there is a much wider context to that. For example, consumers are also people who have to interact with cumbersome, inefficient call systems. People being stuck in boring or stressful jobs isn't great either.
And people are benefiting from advances medications and and such through AI.
And, we would still have typing pools and an army of people writing up hand-written ledgers if the value of people keeping in their jobs trumps technological progress at any cost.
So, I think you need to think a bit more deeply.
P.S. Acknowledge the potential contributions of A.I. in medicine, research etc.; just hope governments don’t use that as an excuse to shrink funding.
That’s a dated article – I wonder if you got it through Google AI – and doesn’t distinguish between ‘old-school’ machine learning algorithms that have been utilised in (biomedical) research for years and more recent LLM-based multi-agent AI systems.
https://theconversation.com/new-ai-scientists-are-improving-but-reveal-their-fundamental-limits-283281
It depends on what you consider ‘progress’. People still type and it’s highly likely more people type more than in the past. In addition, people fill large multi-tab spreadsheets, move files to folders, read & write copious e-mails, zoom in & out, have Teams meetings galore, read & write longwinded PDFs full of managerial jargon, prepare snazzy PowerPoint presentations loaded with bullet points & skewed graphs, etc. If you were to believe Willis & Goldsmith, Public Servants are inefficient costly ‘box-tickers’.
I think that employees who can function at a higher level will find AI liberating. It will take a lot of the grunt work away, and free them for more high level tasks that they will probably find a lot more fulfilling.
I think the job risk is for people who perform very dedicated roles that don't have much in the way of higher level component to them. The old school typing pool would be a good example of that.
I also think people are at risk if they are in an age group where it is difficult for them to upskill in time. I am not really concerned about kids growing up now. They will grow up with AI and it will be second nature to them.
But, people in their 40s and 50s might be in real trouble if they can't adapt quickly enough.
This isn't just for the public service, but jobs generally. And, I think it is going to create some major social issues, and will probably reframe how we look at work.
I might even end up on your side of the fence yet, because I am not sure if the old school capitalist ideas are going to work in this environment.
AI has certainly opened new doors for me, but it has also created new ‘grunt work’, i.e., always having to critically read & check AI outputs. Thinking of liberation & fulfilment, the analogy came to mind of being able to get a driver’s licence, buy my own motorised transport, and gain more independence to go where-ever and when-ever I wanted to go. All that came with hooks, costs, responsibilities, limitations (no DIU), and it took considerable time to become a good driver.
Agreed, I commented on this recently (https://thestandard.nz/daily-review-18-05-2026/#comment-2062602).
Because so much hype & hope around AI is focussing on quantitative measures, e.g., speed & time, cost & savings, efficiency, etc., but much less on qualitative aspects. I think that in general, younger people will do better with the quantitative measures and AI capacities but they lack the foundation to use the augmentative capabilities of AI optimally. See these two links:
https://theconversation.com/ai-is-inherently-ageist-thats-not-just-unethical-it-can-be-costly-for-workers-and-businesses-254220
https://theconversation.com/are-you-in-a-mid-career-to-senior-job-dont-fear-ai-you-could-have-this-important-advantage-262347
Arguably, they’ve never worked. It also depends on what you mean: work for whom or what?
By "not working" I am thinking of the tension that could arise when businesses aim to save money by employing AI rather than people. So, unemployment rises.
But, on the other hand, those businesses need consumers with money to be able to sell their goods. But, if large swathes of the population is unemployed, then how does that work?
The businesses that are saving money on one hand will be losing their market on the other.
And, there will be an increasing burden on the state to support those people, but a shrinking tax base.
So, not just capatilism, but will require a complete rethink of how things work if things actually go this way.
In previous generations new technology has created new jobs to replace the ones that have become redundant. Not so sure it will be like that this time.
So. No different from calling "customer help" now.
Ironic that, apparently, HR and recruiting will be the first occupations to be replaced by AI, as most are indistinguishable from a robot, already!
so do this lot think about the economy or just about their own purse?
to be a bit simplistic, one important function of the government is to put money into the economy when needed, and to take money out via taxes when needed to keep inflation under control.
unemployment is one measure of things and putting large numbers of people out of work is destructive as well as heartless.
austerity is often counter productive, keeping money in circulation benefits all the hands it passes through.
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https://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2026/05/austerity-iis-political-choice.html
[Quoted text must be distinguished from your commentary by using quote marks (block quote) – don’t bold whole sentences. Your mish-mash lacked that distinction – Incognito]
Mod note
Oh, the NActF CoC ('govt' by & for the sorted) have vision alright – what are they drinking?