Shane Te Pou – My 18-year-old thinks I’m a technological dinosaur

There are moments as a dad when you realise your kids have overtaken you. Not in the obvious ways — I’d call myself reasonably practical. But hand me a new phone and I’m the one asking for help.

My kōtiro finds this hilarious. She watches me hunt for a setting that was easy to find yesterday. “Dad, just press that.” “I am pressing it.” “No, the other one. Like I’m an old Jedi who’s wandered onto the wrong spaceship.

Every now and then I get one back. For thirty seconds I’m explaining something to her instead. Nice while it lasts.

We were talking recently about how much technology has changed in my lifetime. When I was growing up there was no internet, no smartphone, no Google. If you had an argument around the whare, you either knew the answer or you didn’t. Actually we had a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica our Google .

She wasn’t impressed. “Dad, the tech’s changed more in my eighteen years than in your sixty.” Rude. Also true.

For her generation, a phone isn’t really a phone. It’s a camera, a bank, a shop, a map, a social life, and increasingly a doorway into AI. AI isn’t just another gadget — it can change how we work, learn, and how government deals with us.

Then she said the line that’s stuck with me. “Dad, the next five years are going to make the last eighteen look slow.” She’s probably right. That’s why I think Labour’s AI plan deserves more attention than it’s getting.

Most people aren’t lying awake worrying about AI. They’ve got rent to pay. Kai is expensive. Getting a doctor’s appointment is a near impossible .
AI feels like something happening somewhere else over there.
That’s exactly why government needs to think about it now.

I like that Labour’s plan doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Nobody does. Anyone who says they know exactly what AI looks like in five years is selling you something. What we can do is decide what kind of country we want to be when it arrives. That’s why the proposed Office of AI, sitting in the Prime Minister’s department, matters — AI will touch mahi, health, education, business, and our creative industries. Someone needs to see the whole picture.

Here’s the bit we forget: we get a say. AI could free workers from boring, repetitive mahi and give them time back. Or it could cut jobs and squeeze wages while a handful of companies get richer Uber whealthey
Both are possible. So the real question isn’t whether AI makes us more productive. It’s who benefits when it does.

If a worker becomes twice as productive, some of that gain should land in their pay packet, not just in a company’s profit line. That’s why the skills and training part of the plan matters. We can’t tell people AI is coming and leave them to figure it out alone.

There are real upsides to government using AI too: faster services, less paperwork, fewer forms. But there’s a line we shouldn’t cross. If an AI system has a hand in a decision about your life, a human still needs to be accountable for it. “Sorry, the algorithm said no” isn’t accountability. People still need people..

Honestly, the bit that worries me most isn’t robots taking jobs. It’s privacy. Think about what’s sitting in your phone: bank details, medical information, messages, photos of your tamariki, your whole digital life. Add powerful AI and sophisticated scammers, and it’s not hard to see where this goes. They’re already using AI to fake voices, faces and emails.

We treat online security like an annoying chore. We lock our front doors and cars, but plenty of people are still using a password from 2015 — the same one on every account.The fix isn’t complicated: a password manager does the hard part for you. Sometimes the best fix for a scary problem is a simple one. Nobody needs to smash a window to get into your bank account. They just need the right laptop.

That should be part of any serious AI strategy — not just rules for big tech companies, but practical protection for ordinary people. When companies don’t protect people’s information properly, there need to be real consequences.

Our writers, musicians, photographers and filmmakers deserve a mention too all of this a personal or collective taonga, often years in the making.

AI companies are hungry for content to train their systems on, and much of that content took people years to create. Progress doesn’t mean taking someone’s life’s work just because you’ve worked out how to.

None of this makes me anti-technology. I wrote this on a my phone ( at the Pub, how’s that for efficiency ) not a stone tablet. I just don’t want us so excited about what technology can do that we forget to ask what it should do. Thats really the most important point what AI should do for the betterment of humanity.
How do we make AI work for people, not the other way round? How do we make sure the gains are shared, and government stays accountable once the robots get a seat at the table?

Labour’s job is to make sure Aotearoa doesn’t wander into this future with nothing more than good intentions and a shiny new app. We need the skills to use the technology, rules that keep it honest, and security that protects ordinary people.

I’m still going to complain when someone moves the settings on my phone. Some things never change. But I’d rather be a tech wannabe who knows roughly where we’re going than a country that wakes up five years from now and finds the future happened without us.