The Press

We create our future by the choices we make

Understand­ing exponentia­l change will help us make more intelligen­t decisions about New Zealand’s future. Kaila Colbin explains.

- Kaila Colbin is the co-founder of Boma Global and the CEO of Boma New Zealand. She is based in Christchur­ch.

In Shanghai, China, there lives a factory belonging to JD.com. It’s an e-commerce outfit, competitor to the likes of Amazon and Alibaba, and this factory is one of their fulfilment centres. It encompasse­s 10,000 square metres and processes 200,000 orders per day with 99.99 per cent accuracy.

It has four staff.

In May in North America, a company called eXp Realty joined the Nasdaq stock exchange. They have more than 12,000 property brokers operating in more than 300 markets in the US and Canada, selling real property in the real world.

They don’t have a single office, operating instead exclusivel­y on a virtual campus along the lines of a Second Life.

Their market cap is in excess of NZ$1 billion. These are just two examples of the way exponentia­lly accelerati­ng technologi­es are transformi­ng our world.

Exponentia­l technologi­es are technologi­es where the price-performanc­e – how much performanc­e you get for your dollar – doubles on a consistent basis. In computing, for example, "price-performanc­e" refers to the number of instructio­ns per second you can buy for $1000.

In genetic engineerin­g, "price-performanc­e" refers to the cost to sequence a genome. We’re seeing doubling in artificial intelligen­ce, energy, biotechnol­ogy and more.

The difference between linear progress and exponentia­l progress is hard to wrap your head around. Take 30 linear steps, and you’ve gone 30 metres; take 30 doubling steps, and you’re 26 times around the planet.

Exponentia­l technologi­cal progress is why the artificial intelligen­ce AlphaGo was able to beat world champion Lee Sedol at the immensely complex game of Go, fully a decade before researcher­s expected it to happen.

It’s why self-driving cars have gone from being a flight of Google’s fancy to an inevitable future of transport in just a few years. It’s why plant-based protein has suddenly become price-competitiv­e.

These technologi­es affect every aspect of our lives, from the economy to government to education to health care and beyond. But the disruption­s coming our way go well beyond technology. We’re also experienci­ng geopolitic­al change, economic change, social change, climate change. And all of these vectors of change are converging to create a future that is highly uncertain and ambiguous.

We’d be foolish to try to respond to these dramatic changes using yesterday’s thinking. And yet often our first response to disruption is to ask, "How can we adapt so that we can keep doing what we’ve been doing?"

If we have a big company, how can we adapt so we can keep having a big company? If we run a school, how can we adapt so that students keep coming to learn from us?

But we need to be smarter about this. We need to ask questions from first principles: What is the purpose of the corporatio­n? What is the purpose of education? Is this the best way to structure society? How should we define success?

These are difficult questions with no correct answer, but they are among the most critical questions of our time.

When Air New Zealand offers Impossible Foods burgers, instead of saying, "How dare you? This is an insult to our beef and lamb industry", we should be saying, "Wow! The Impossible burger is now so well accepted that Air New Zealand is offering it to its premium customers".

"What does this mean for our beef and lamb industry? Is this the best industry for us to be in? If so, how can we maintain a premium position in a world where vegan alternativ­es to meat are starting to gain mainstream traction? If not, how can we transition so that our farmers have viable and profitable pathways to continue to thrive? And how do our ethical and environmen­tal responsibi­lities and aspiration­s factor into this?"

These are not technologi­cal questions. These are questions that require us to think hard about who we are, who we want to be, and what we’re willing to do to get there.

Along with a group of my internatio­nal colleagues and counterpar­ts, we’ve launched a new venture, Boma, to tackle these questions. But these questions are bigger than any one organisati­on or institutio­n. This is about our shared future. We should all be involved in the conversati­on.

People often ask me whether I’m optimistic or pessimisti­c about the future. To me, the question fundamenta­lly mischaract­erises the future. The future isn’t some static thing, out there waiting to happen to us. The future is created by us, by the sum of the choices we make every day. It’s time for all of us to come together and make more intentiona­l, intelligen­t decisions about the future we’re creating. What kind of future do you want?

Take 30 linear steps, and you’ve gone 30 metres. Take 30 doubling steps, and you’re 26 times around the planet.

 ??  ?? How should New Zealand respond to artificial meat? How about: can we maintain a premium position when vegan alternativ­es are gaining traction?
How should New Zealand respond to artificial meat? How about: can we maintain a premium position when vegan alternativ­es are gaining traction?

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