In 2017, What Next started a national conversation. We need to come up with some big plans, and we need to do that now. We asked you what you wanted for the future of New Zealand in 20 years ` the technology, the economy, the environment, and how we live. Should we continue with Plan A ` keep doing what we're doing, making small changes? Or do we need some big new ideas ` a Plan B? The answer was loud and clear. Overwhelmingly, we're a Plan B country ` at least, as reflected in the more than 200,000 votes that we have received. Now we're gonna look at Plan B in action. We'll meet New Zealanders with big radical ideas ` people who are passionate, innovative, and maybe just the right amount of crazy. Hemp will be mainstream if we make it mainstream. They're showing us a path to future-proof New Zealand, so what does a Plan B look like? Over four episodes, four different visions for our future. We'll address the most important issues facing New Zealand in the next 20 years. (MAJESTIC MUSIC) www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019 Carolyn Robinson discovers how we get the environment in good shape for the future. Nigel Latta asks if there's a way the economy can be fair for everyone. Jehan Casinader explores how science could extend and improve our lives, and Miriama Kamo examines the impact of AI and technology on the next generation. (THOUGHTFUL MUSIC) In 2017, What Next asked if you thought a robot could do your job better than you. 74% of us said no, but what if we're wrong? In the two years since, even more jobs have been replaced. We can't continue with Plan A, thinking that automation won't affect us; we need to have a Plan B. In this episode, we'll meet remote controlled cows, giant robot cranes, and an avatar called Rachel, who can respond to you as if she's human. All of this is happening in New Zealand right now, and we'll meet the Kiwis harnessing technology ` people who believe technology's here to free us, not replace us. Can New Zealand catch the automation wave or should we kill the robots? (PONDERING MUSIC) We're about to take the biggest step forward in human history since the Industrial Revolution. The Automation Revolution could see 800 million jobs under threat worldwide. The owners of the robots will get richer, while mass unemployment could lead to riots in the streets. Technology is evolving so fast, it's plausible. Google built DeepMind ` software that taught itself how to play Go, considered the hardest game in the world. People thought it could never beat the best human player, but it's done it, and Boston Dynamics have made a robot that can do what was once thought impossible ` open doors. The robots are gaining on us, and if this is happening now, what's gonna be left for humans to do 20 years from now? What's the job market going to be like for the next generation? AI may be in its infancy, but how much has automation already changed the way we work? If you think about the last 10 or 20 years, there's been so many jobs that have completely disappeared. You go to the airport, you put your bag on a conveyor belt; that's taken away the bag handler. Or you're self-checking in ` the check-in person's no longer there, or the supermarket self-checking out. What we're seeing is a transition of skills, so the mechanic no longer opens up the bonnet to test your oil, but instead plugs the car into a computer that does the diagnostics. If we look across all careers, we're morphing so rapidly. (TRUCK WHIRS, RUBBISH CLATTERS) (MACHINE WHIRS) The Industrial Revolution did change everything, you know. It broke all of our work down into the smallest pieces possible and then divided up all the tasks amongst people and machines, and each of those machines was, in effect, dumb; it just did one thing. Now we're moving into a world where the machines have gotta be smart and hopefully learn from themselves and their own experience. What's possible when a machine or a piece of software starts to learn how to improve, I think at the moment, we can only, kind of, you know, imagine. The new age of smart technology is already here for New Zealand's agriculture industry, and it's helping to solve a big problem in the job market. Tauranga Bays company Robotics Plus has created a kiwi fruit harvesting robot. It moves through an orchard and on its own, identifies kiwi fruit ready for harvest and then picks them gently with its robotic arms. But rather than a robot taking our job, this one seems harmless enough; it's here to help with the industry's human labour shortage. The kiwi fruit industry with their projected growth over the next 10 years, or something, they're gonna need 20,000 extra staff, or something staggering. Where are we going to get these people from to allow these industries to grow? So, creating the technology to support people, make people more efficient, so we can actually sustain these growth cycles, and I think that's gonna be really important for New Zealand. (COWS LOW) The dairy industry also faces chronic labour shortages. Halter, a technology company in the heart of the Waikato, has a smart invention that will make cow management a lot less labour intensive. There we go. Physically putting a device on a cow is nothing, like, too new. The classic thing, like, a cow wears a bell. And so she would wear that collar 24/7? Yep, and it would never come off. It's solar-powered; you don't replace batteries... Halter has created a device using algorithms, or what they call 'Cowgorithms', to monitor and move cows all from a desktop computer or phone. It can see where a cow is through GPS, tell if a cow is lame or on heat. It can set up virtual fences. But it's the ability to get cows on the move to a specific schedule, individually or in a herd, that's the company's biggest breakthrough, and, like Pavlov's Dog, it's all done through audio cues. (UPBEAT MUSIC) That's the biggest question to start with ` can you train a cow to listen to audio cues, and the answer's yes. If you open all your gates on a farm, we're able to steer cows and guide cows out of one paddock and into the next. If you're a farmer, we call that 'drafting'. It's probably one of the hardest things you can do with cows, because it's going against, like, thousands of years of evolution. That's really the ultimate test for, like, our technology, and that's something which, like, you show a farmer of you sitting there being like, 'Choose a cow,' and then you pull that cow out of a herd, and it's mind-blowing. (COMPUTER BEEPS, COW LOWS) Growing up on a farm, Craig saw first-hand the long hours farmers put in. Like, I'm an engineer. I try to be very logical, but` but on the emotional side of things, and how this all started, was, really, coming home and seeing people on a farm work 80, 100-hour weeks. Doing that for 30, 40-plus years ` like, that's tough; and that's why you see a lot of mental health issues in farming, and as an industry, it's very tough. So if you take those 80-hour weeks and you start to do things like` Well, you don't wake up at 4.30 any more because your cow is, with Halter, come to the shed, so you wake up an hour later, and the cows are already at the milking shed for you. Craig sees Halter not as a replacement for farmers, but as a tool to help free up their time for other things. You go to any farmer, they have this massive to-do list, and it just never gets done. So when you give farmer time back, it's not that they're just gonna, like, go sit on the couch and watch TV and not worry about, like, hiring extra people; it's that you're actually able to run a farm properly and in a sustainable manner. Halter have already received millions of dollars of investment from American companies to take the device to market. This makes so much sense from a farmer's point of view. This is, like, game changing. This is` When someone, back in` a hundred years ago, or however long, invented the milking machine, you had no option but to use a milking machine to stay competitive. You couldn't milk a cow by hand any more. This is what we see as exactly the same thing. I, sort of, wonder what's going to happen to that old story of the farmer, up against the elements, you know, battling against... (LAUGHS) ...all the odds to bring, you know, the cows in and to get the milk on the table, and that sort of thing. I think there's still gonna be an element of it. Like, we're still standing in gumboots. I think, as it needs to, it'll become` it'll become easier. Automation may be here to help farmers, but what happens when AI becomes more human than humans? (CROWD MURMURS) (APPLAUSE) Genius ` it doesn't need Silicon Valley. Hutt Valley is just fine. (LIGHT, UPBEAT MUSIC) It doesn't need Wall Street, experience, or to follow a traditional path. All genius really needs is opportunity,... * Technology is moving faster than at any other point in history. It's hard to keep up with all the changes. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone, then we got a push-button one ` ugh, so fancy. I got my first cell phone when I was 22, which replaced my pager. Now, we have the smart phone, which has pretty much replaced all the things. In the '80s, I watched a fictional show about a talking car called KITT. Now, in real life, I can talk with a thing on my phone called Siri. How are you, Siri? SIRI: I'm fine. Thanks for asking. Siri, will robots take over the world? SIRI: That may be beyond my abilities at the moment. In the meantime, a New Zealand company is helping advance Artificial Intelligence even further. Soul Machines is combining their own cutting-edge technology with the question answering software of IBM's Watson. They're putting a human face on AI. Um, we're heading into a decade where, as people, as human beings, we're going to spend a lot more of our time interacting with machines ` machines that are increasingly gonna be driven by artificial intelligence. We have this view that these machines can actually be more helpful to us if they're more like us. Soul Machines sees potential for digital humans to be used as virtual tutors and doctor bots. AI: Hello. My name is Rachel... But Rachel, a virtual assistant, is their first avatar with a job. She's not just a computer graphic. She can actually see you and respond to your emotions. I am brought to life using a virtual nervous system, which is driven by many different neural networks. This allows me to react and learn in real time. AI: Kia ora. I'm Jamie. Do you have a question... In New Zealand, under different names, Rachel has been a face for ANZ and Air New Zealand. She's already been deployed worldwide for the Bank of Scotland and Mercedes. Hi, there. AI: Hello, welcome to Mercedes-Benz. I'm here to help you with your new car... The AI takeover of the world has a New Zealand accent. Have a great day. We certainly don't buy into the 'robots are coming; they're gonna steal all of our jobs; 'they're going to rule over us.' I mean, that's a very, very dystopian view of the future and of the world. It's not a risk? Um` No` Well, we certainly don't see it as a risk at this point in time. I mean` At this point in time, Greg? That's not very reassuring. At the end of the day, these are our creations, you know? I actually believe in the goodness of human beings in the fact that we build technology; we build tools that are ultimately to the benefit of mankind. At the end of the day, you know, fundamental human goodness, you know, to date has always won out. But while Rachel is a threat to the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who make a living in customer service, something even bigger is brewing which could take out entire sectors of our workforce. So I think one of the most visible changes that we might see in your everyday life is driverless vehicles. The disruption, or the downside of the driverless cars would be that whoever makes a living driving will probably, eventually, be phased out, in terms of their role in society. Taxi drivers? We have 5500 of them. Bus drivers? 7500; and truck driving is a huge employer. Overseas, autonomous trucks are already on the road. Drivers are on the way out. (COMPUTER THUNKS, STATIC CRACKLES) (CONTAINERS THUD) Workers at the Ports of Auckland are already facing this change. Ports of Auckland is in the process of automating their straddle fleet. The yellow straddles are driven by humans, but the blue straddles are driverless and fully automated. German company Kone Cranes is putting the automated machines through a huge testing phase before some of the manned fleet is gone forever. Automation, instead of human drivers, has some obvious selling points. And of course if it's all automated, you're going 24/7, right? Yeah, this is absolutely 24/7. That is one of the benefits of this automatic type of equipment is really going 24/7, 365 days a year. There is no big interruptions, except the planned maintenance, of course. For the human straddle drivers, the writing is on the wall. Rob Powley has been working at the ports for 50 years, and has been driving straddles for 15. So you've seen a lot in your time. Now we're looking at automation. How do you feel about the changes? Change is just a normal part of, well, everything, innit? I've literally seen thousands of people come and go. When I was first on the wharf, there'd have been 4000 people in the immediate part working on the wharf and another couple of thousand if you look at the railways and things like that. Now we're down to hundreds. (CONTAINER THUDS, CRANE WHIRS) Do people need to be worried about job losses? Finally, it's changing of the jobs. So there will be more higher skilled, higher educated jobs around this type of automation. We're anticipating that we would lose probably somewhere between 40 and 50 jobs at least initially. That represents around about 20% of the stevedoring workforce. As you lose jobs, you also create jobs, and what we've noticed, even just in the last few years, our cybersecurity unit has sprung up. We've also got now quite a large datacentre. The port is giving their workers a chance to retrain into other areas. At the moment, there's a great shortage of truck drivers, so it makes sense to retrain people into truck-driving roles, but they still need to be adaptable because there will come a time when even truck driving may become obsolete. A sign-making company from South Auckland has a project that may minimise the need for human drivers, but in doing so, they're creating an entirely new set of job opportunities for the New Zealand workforce. While it doesn't look like much, the Ohmio HOP is at the forefront of vehicle automation. There's a scale of automation up to level five, which is the holy grail ` a self-driving vehicle, in any situation. Ohmio has reached level four. Level four is the first level where you don't need a steering wheel in the vehicle any more. So that's autonomous in every situation in an expected environment. What is 'expected environment'? So, for us, an expected environment would be pre-defined tracks. So, we are trying to create a shuttle, or ` let's call it a tram ` that follows virtual tracks. How does it work? We've got this tablet here,... Uh-huh. ...so if you push the green button on there. OK. Yep. Press it. (TABLET BEEPS) There we go. Ooh! (SHUTTLE WHIRS QUIETLY) (LAUGHS) Oh my gosh, this is awesome! (LAUGHS) Ooh, there we go! So, there's no steering wheels; there's no pedals. It's all driving by itself. Oh, it's quiet weird, isn't it? You, sort of, wanna have a steering wheel. Like, 'Oh, just turn now, turn now.' Yeah, so that's one of the areas where we're looking into how to make people feel like this is totally normal. It takes a while to get used to not having a driver there. Yeah. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. With the use of virtual tracks, Ohmio can lay out new environments where they want without having the huge cost of building infrastructure. Boss of the company, Mohammed Hikmet, says there's no stopping the arrival of automated vehicles, and, yes, it will affect jobs. We might lose some jobs from one side, but we are also going to gain a lot of other jobs from the other side. Mohammed compares it to when the ice industry came up against the invention of the home refrigerator. There were huge businesses that depends on that, but, in time, the society and everyone just reacted to that and realised that there are other businesses; so, we started to service their refrigerators, sell refrigerators. That created a lot of other kind of jobs and moved the society from focusing on a primitive way of delivering ice to homes to more advanced jobs. I believe the same thing is gonna happen there, and we're going to respond to those requirements. This is our R & D space. Ohmio itself employs 30 staff in its autonomous vehicle engineering and AR department. So, yeah, you can see some buildings there on the right-hand side. You'll see there's that camera on the desk there. Oh! It's recognised` Aw, look at that! ...um, yeah. Wow! So that's... us? (LAUGHS) Yep. Everything in red is a` is what the machine thinks is a person. New Zealand is really known for being a dairying nation, but can you see a future where we're known for being an innovation hub? We could be the hub here to do it, and we could be the source of this technology to the rest of the world and start the flow of technology from New Zealand, rather than to New Zealand. And it's not just talk. Ohmio has signed an agreement with South Korea worth $150 million for delivery of a fleet of a new, much larger autonomous vehicle they're developing. But that's one deal for one company. Can the new jobs that come from innovation outweigh the jobs lost to automation? Can we get to a place where robots are our colleagues, not our competition? * It seems inevitable there are gonna be huge disruptions to the transport industry, but what about other industries? A study by Oxford University in 2013 actually had a go at calculating the probability of a job being automated in the next 20 years. If you think about tradespeople, they're in a really good position because, actually, they're very technical. According to the study, plumbers have a 49% probability of being replaced, electricians 15%, and builders and construction workers are holding up well against the robots, with a 7% probability of being replaced in the next 20 years. But what about jobs that require university degrees? Anything that can be reliably automated, or done better by an AI, will be. In the first series of What Next in 2017, 55% of you said you would not trust a robot with your life. I think as soon as people in society can become comfortable that computers and machines and AI are actually far better and more efficient and more accurate at diagnosing medical conditions, then, all of a sudden, they'll be comfortable with, you know, interacting with those kinds of 'doctors'. AI can actually make processes very, very fast. It can find data. It can look through it. You know, it can analyse information so much more rapidly than a human, so if you're in a health diagnostic situation, it could be a matter of life or death ` the AI decides quickly. An AI could even replace humans by performing robotic surgery, but this is unlikely to happen in the next two decades. So the study has the likelihood of doctors being replaced in that time at just 2% ` for now. But other traditional careers are facing immediate threat. In the next 20 years, lawyers have a 35% probability of having their job replaced. The news isn't great for accountants either. The study gives their work a 95% probability of being computerised. But is that what's happening in the real world? Xero is a New Zealand company working on the global stage. Xero is beautiful accounting software that millions of people love using to run their small business. If any company is going to put an end to accounting as a profession, it's probably going to be Xero. Will we have accountants in 20 years time? Well, absolutely, we will have accountants in 20 years time. Like any role in any industry, it will continue to evolve. You know, we're in this age where technology will change many industries. It's not about annihilation; it's about evolving your industry. Aren't you a lone voice on this? There's a lot of sentiment that, actually, there are going to be fewer accountants. A robot will never walk through a factory floor and pick up that the vibe on the floor isn't right and that's impacting on the business. The gift that our accountants give to our small businesses is really, really valuable, because they are human. (LAUGHS) The types of conversations that accountants will have ` they might even change their name, they might become small business advisors, because essentially, that's what a lot of accountants and bookkeepers are now, and, so, if you take any job that exists today and say, 'That will be exactly like it is today 'in 10, 20, 30 years,' you know, collectively, we're dreaming. (LAUGHS) Every role and every job will continue to evolve. What automation will do is take away the things that we imposed on us, that really we weren't designed to do ` things like manual data entry, lots of repetitive tasks that are prone to error. So if we can free ourselves from those things that really came from that industrial era, to help us become more human, have better conversations, better insights into our businesses, our relationships, our health; then that's gotta be a great thing. Don't be afraid? Don't be afraid. The robots aren't coming to kill us? The robots are our friends. (BOTH LAUGH) If robots are our friends, can they offer a better work-life balance so we work less and play more? Perpetual Guardian, a wills and trust firm, may have the answer. They have offices all over New Zealand and employ 250 people. Like most companies, everyone worked a five-day week until their boss, Andrew Barnes, called a meeting that would change the lives of everyone that worked there. Juggling life and juggling work can actually be quite tricky, so we've decided to try something reasonably radical, and the radical thing is we're going to do a trial where you will be working four days a week and you will be paid for five. WHISPERS: Wow. What was the reaction from your staff? It was a little bit of a drop the mic moment; it sounded too good to be true. In 2018, they conducted a four-day working week trial that lasted for six weeks. When I first heard about the trial, when Andrew made the announcement, it was` it was amazing, just couldn't believe it. It was almost like a gift that we were being given. If I can get better output, then I should be completely indifferent as to how many hours anybody works. So if the debate is about productivity, and a machine can be more productive than a human being, as a businessman, wouldn't you wanna go down that route? If you assume that the machine can deliver all the outputs that you need. So in my particular business, we have some of the world's leading software for the production of wills and estate plans. Now, that means that it's much quicker for me to produce that document than I could do before without it. But that means I've actually got more time for an individual to be sitting down with a client and absolutely understanding their intention, and it also, interestingly, is changing the skillset. I need less highly technical staff and more empathic staff. With Andrew believing that human workers are important for his business, the trial wasn't about cramming five days down to four. A study he read convinced him that the problem came down to how productive we actually are in the time we have. And it said that, in this particular study, people were only productive for 2� hours a day. 2� hours? 2� hours, and I` and I thought, 'Well, if they're only productive for 2� hours a day, there's a nice little trade off here ` 'if I could get people to be more productive for 45 minutes each day, I could give them a day off, 'and actually everything would be square in terms of productivity,' but it would mean that they would have more time with their families, and able to be the best they can be outside of the office, as well as the best they could be in the office. So what was the goal? Was it productivity or work-life balance? Well, as a businessman I wanted more productivity. You know, the modern life is hard enough as it is, so I figure if people have got more time to do the things that they need to do, then actually when they are in the office, they will give me more of their best; and if there's one thing that came out of the four-day week trial, it was about working smarter, and that then leads to better productivity. It was all new for the staff, but motivation wasn't lacking. Definitely had us scratching our heads, and really thinking about, 'Well, how can we achieve this?' We continue to deliver for the business, but also actually get that work-life balance. I think at work, we were more focused. We really, really focused on getting all of our jobs done, so that we could take the opportunity to have that day. And the extra day off had huge benefits for their families. I've got two young kids at home. It's really, really important to me, as a person, as a father, as a husband, It's really, really important to so that ability to do that is just` I mean, it's nearly priceless. For my days off, I wanted to make it meaningful, but I wanted to spend some time with my family, with my daughter; we've got a really close relationship. It was great, I mean, why wouldn't you like that? An academic study of the trial, before and after, revealed that job performance was maintained in the four days, stress levels were down, and work-life balance was improved. Perpetual Guardian have now officially implemented the four-day week on an opt-in basis. This is the utopian vision of our future ` the robots carry some of our workload, we work less and get paid the same. But how do we know this is where the future is headed? BREEZY SONG: # Wake up, it's a beautiful morning # Sun is shining bright for your eyes # Wake up, it's so beautiful # Wake up # Wake up, it's a beautiful morning # Wake up # Sun is shining bright for your eyes # Wake up, it's so beautiful # Wake up. # * The younger generation have an amazing gift. They have the world at their fingertips. As a kid, I didn't have a computer, let alone access to the internet. I want my daughter to embrace technology and innovation. I'm determined she'll learn to code. She's more of a tech expert than me, but I'm mindful about her access to screens. I have a deathly fear of screen time consuming her imagination and ability to play. In 2017, when asked whether your kids should prepare for traditional- or technology-based careers, 85% of you said our children should be training for tech. But how do we prepare our kids for a world that is changing so fast? If you look back 20 years from where we are now, a lot of the jobs that exist today, in some form, existed then; it just would've been there were far fewer, you know, computer engineers or designers required back then than there are today. A report published two years ago by Dell Technologies estimates that in 2030, 85% of the jobs that will exist haven't been invented yet. And the new jobs that are created, I think a large number of them will be evolutions of existing jobs. Just like, you know, we've talked about software and computers changing the world for the last 30 years. Well, it's created an enormous number of jobs around, you know, 'Well, who's gonna write the software? Who's an architect? Who's a designer? 'Who's the person that's gonna interpret, well, what does it need to do?' All those jobs, I think there's gonna be more and more and more of them that hopefully will replace and outnumber the jobs that disappear through the boring mundane things that we're able to eliminate. While we can guess, the future is still a huge unknown. How can the education system keep up? Our education system's going through a difficult transition. We've gone from a legacy system, which is analogue, and we're going increasingly into a digital world, and so if you think about the system, we're caught between two spaces. Fundamentally, I think our primary schools are doing an incredible job. They've already worked through this whole issue around these young digital kids who think differently. We've got better research-informed; it hasn't trickled through to high school yet for the most part. Right now, the assessment system is the same system I went through. We still literally put people in three-hour exams in a certain age year and lock them in and say, 'Everything you remember, you need to now, basically, put down on paper with a pen.' So there's gonna be, what, a generation of kids that are gonna be disadvantaged by this? I think it's fair to say there is a generation who are increasingly self-educating. They're finding solutions online. They're going to YouTube and figuring out how to do things, so we need parents to think differently about what their kids do, how they're assessed. We need people to stop obsessing about exams and about homework, and, actually, worrying about how much digital time they have; and start thinking about the skillsets that employers are saying they need. (DUOLINGO APP BEEPS) Absolutely nobody can have fixed knowledge today and be successful, because we have got so much information at our fingertips that's constantly changing with better information. And universities might not be the end goal for everyone in the future. In 2017, Frances, and an initiative led by ASB and KPMG, created an open letter for New Zealand businesses to sign, removing the emphasis placed on qualifications. The open letter was really to get people thinking about why are we obsessed with a piece of paper. We all develop new skills. We don't have a qualification for the evolution of skills, and yet we fall back on a piece of paper that we may have earned when we were 22 years old. The industry that we worked with across these companies were saying, 'We don't care about these qualifications, 'so why do we make such a big deal of them in our job ads?' So it's not saying, 'Don't get qualified.' It's saying to companies looking for great staff, who are not attracting the right people or the diversity of people, 'Take that line away.' While this may be a goal rather than an industry-wide reality just yet, examples do exist. Westpac found this out when they hired Hiria seven years ago. Hiria joined our team without a formal qualification, but with absolute passion, fire, and demonstrable technical skills, so it didn't take very long for us to realise that not everybody needs a degree to be a fantastically productive and creative part of our workforce and of our team. Hiria hasn't had the easiest road to success in the IT industry. Well, I'm a gang kid. My birth father, my biological father, he's Bernard Hana. He's also known as 'the Blanketman'. And my stepfathers... both came from the Mongrel Mob, and, so, a lot of my early life,... well, it was dysfunctional and violent. How did you end up in this industry? When I was 20, well, 19, I got pregnant. I had the twins, (LAUGHS) at 20, and so, when you're 20 years old and you have two little boys, you don't know anything, you're very young. The best thing that you can think of is 'earn money', and, so, back then, I went through the newspapers looking for jobs; looking for jobs that paid a lot, because I figured if I had to be away from them, then I should earn as much as I possibly can, and the jobs that I found were all in tech. But every job she rang, she got the same answer ` no one can teach you what we need. And, so, from there, I took out a loan for $3000 and bought my first computer, and I got myself on the internet; and I didn't get off for a very long time. Online, Hiria taught herself everything she needed to know to get a high-paying job in tech. Now working for Westpac, she knows first-hand that qualifications have their limitations. Yes, you can learn the theory, but the practice is grey, so it's very` Yeah, good luck to trying to learn that. Is Hiria a glimpse of the future of employment? While there will be many career pathways, a qualification might not be the only road to success, as self-teaching and on-the-job learning become more and more credible. With her achievements in the tech world, Hiria sees herself as a role model. It's not normal or easy being Maori and female in IT, (LAUGHS) let alone having four kids, and having my kind of background, but someone has to do it. You can't show other people what is possible if you haven't done it yourself. They need an example, and why not me? Being Maori, I worry about what the future will bring for my people. Already over-represented in too many of our negative stats ` health, pay, justice ` job losses in low-paying roles will hit Maori hard. If society is only as strong as its most vulnerable, how do we stop people being left behind? We have disparities and inequality now. The other thing we have is a rapid and faster growing Maori youth population. Our Pakeha population will grow by 10% by 2040, our Maori population will grow by 80%, so if we don't turn around these trends, then basically all of those inequalities grow. Maori communities have been saying for a long time, 'What's good for Maori is good for everyone.' There are gonna be new opportunities, absolutely. But, I think, what's key is, here, how do we use those new opportunities and make sure that there's equitable access to them? Cos what we know is if we continue our historic patterns, then we're not going to unlock that collective prosperity. If we can find a way to bring all New Zealanders along for the ride, just how bright could our future be? BREEZY SONG: # Wake up, it's a beautiful morning # Wake up # Sun is shining bright for your eyes # Wake up, it's so beautiful # Wake up. # VOICEOVER: Hey, Auckland, which of the Youi 40 ways to save would work best for where you live? Grey Lynn, close to the city, is where Ava lives, so number 1 of 40 - "Don't drive to work" - could be best for her. Do a car insurance quote at youi.co.nz. * Technology is going to change the future, and while there will be sunset industries, new ones will rise. We only need to visit a warehouse in South Auckland to see how far New Zealand has come. Rocket Lab is a space company started in New Zealand. It's not global, with headquarters in America. It exists because Kiwi CEO, Peter Beck, had a dream as a child to launch rockets. His determination has never wavered. There was no boxes to tick for what I wanted to do. When I was at high school, they called in the careers advisors and they called in my parents because I was totally unrealistic. What did you say? Well, I told them I was gonna build rockets, and I was going to go to space, and, you know, laid out my plan basically. For me, school was always just that thing I had to do to be able to do the things I wanted to do, so, you know, I needed to learn maths so that I could build rockets. You know, everything was always about, 'I need this skill to be able to do this project.' After leaving school, Peter was employed by Fisher & Paykel and worked on super yachts, but he never lost sight of his goal to build rockets, and so he started Rocket Lab. When we first started out, there was a lot of scepticism in the industry, that, 'Can you 3D-print a rocket engine? That sounds crazy. 'Can you even build a rocket that small? And can you build your own launch site?' Cos all these things have never been done before. So we took the technology when it was quite embryonic and said, 'OK, we're gonna build the most highly stressed, most complex thing you can build,' which is a rocket engine. The game-changing 3D-printed engine is named after New Zealand physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford. He had a very, very famous saying that distinguished him amongst all of his colleagues, and it was, 'We don't have all the money, so we have to think.' This rocket that's here in Auckland... Yep. ...is actually going to launch from Mahia. Exactly, yep. That's quite an amazing thought, really, isn't it? That we have rockets launching from New Zealand. This is not part of our cultural history. No, no, but I think that's what's exciting about where we are today. You can launch a rocket from Mahia. This is perfectly fine. We live in a pretty exciting, you know, next generation. All the things that were inconceivable in the last generation are now... quite normal. You know, I've got two children myself, and I just think the opportunities that they're gonna have, and the things that they're gonna be able to do are even better than the opportunities that I had. With space opening up, Rocket Lab is attracting some of the best and brightest in New Zealand. They have a Kiwi staff of over 300 and bring on three to four people weekly as they head toward their big goal of launching a rocket every week. (SYNTH MUSIC) It's a great project for the country. I mean, milk powder's great, but it's not going to space, and if you want to demonstrate to the world your level of technical competence as a country, the thing you do is you go to space. It is, kind of, the ultimate hard thing to do. What I would personally like is New Zealand to be recognised on the world stage ` not just for sport, not just for agriculture, but actually for the entrepreneurs, the engineers and the scientists that actually have come out of this country. So, I can touch this, right? Yep. But if you really wanna go to space, there's your DNA. You can go to space. I can put my DNA on the rocket? Yep. (INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC) So should we be afraid of AI and automation taking our jobs? No, I think we should reverse the question, and we should say, 'How many jobs are we gonna create?' Because when you create a new disruptive technology, it offshoots and creates a whole raft of jobs and opportunities that didn't exist before. You know, Rocket Lab is a prime example of that. There was no space industry in New Zealand, you know, and we created this organisation and this industry, and New Zealand, per population, has one of the highest rocket scientists per capita in the world. So I just think it's a natural evolution as a human species is that we` you know, we develop new technologies, displace old ones, and in doing so, we create a whole lot of new opportunities. We just need to keep moving and put faith in the human race. When the Model T4 rolled off the line and Henry Ford said, 'Everybody's gonna own an automobile,' it was the same mass hysteria. I don't know about you, but I would much prefer a car than a horse. There's no pausing time. AI and automation are here already, and as their use becomes ubiquitous, we'll have no choice but to keep up with the pace of change we have created. The good news is it's not going to be an overnight switch. There will be time to adapt. It'll be a slow wave, and if we're on board and always learning, we can catch it. I am so optimistic about the future in terms of work. I imagine a world where we'll work alongside robots, and automation and algorithms that do our job, but I think that we will have the ability and the time to do things of a higher order thinking, more complex ideas, more creative outputs, and no part of my future is in an imagined world where the robots take over and we're all unemployed. But this is one of my biggest worries ` what happens if there's less work? What happens to those of us who get left behind? There's a concern about the growing gap between rich and poor, that captains of industry are going to use automation instead of using people. Is that a risk here? I think it's a risk, and certainly, you know, I believe that we have an obligation to look wider than just, you know, the bottom-line profit. Why? (SIGHS) Because as a businessman, it's too easy to be dispassionate. At the end of the day, I have shareholders to look after; I've got to have responsibilities in terms of making sure that the business ticks over, that we're dealing, and sometimes you can forget the human side of it. It's nice when, actually, you come back, and you actually say, 'This is not just about business. 'This is about putting food on the table for family, and it's giving them an environment in which they can be the best they can possibly be,' and I think that's great. Thinking about the human element is the most important part of how we move forward. Maybe it's a little sentimental, but it's reassuring to think that the automated straddles at the Ports of Auckland will never understand what it means to be human. They're all on their own. They ain't gonna miss that lovely view of the Waitemata, you know, the sunrises, and the sunsets, the fetch on the water and the sailboats. It's wasted on the automatics, aren't they? Yeah, that's right. Whereas you're up there on the straddler, it's beautiful. You know, you watch it all ` one of the best parts of the job. Being human has advantages. There'll still be a lot of roles for humans, and that's anything to do with creativity or innovation or thinking about different ways to do things. My personal hope is that robots and AI never get close to understanding the essence of what it means to be human. You know, we all have, whatever you call it ` a soul, or something that's not attached to your body, which is who we are. So if robots and machines and AI enable themselves to understand all of that, then, to be honest, I think that's probably the time that we should bow out as a race. This is a distant future we hope will never come. I hope technology will give society more choices, that inequality will be reduced and we all enjoy the benefits. I can imagine New Zealand as an innovation hub. It could happen if we give the robots a chance `