I was on a panel at the AI for Good forum this week. And there is genuinely good stuff happening. People across this country are finding creative, generous, surprising uses for these tools – my own 12-year-old daughter is building an app to help school kids who are being bullied. That energy is worth celebrating – people empowered to solve our world’s problems from their own unique vantage point. 

Building with AI feels like flying. You can simply do so much more, so much faster. That acceleration is intoxicating – and it's exactly why we need to pause, just for a moment, and look at what's underneath it.

We have never had this level of self-understanding to bring to our technological development. It is up to us to use it.

The questions underneath all this activity are of fundamental importance – to our human flourishing and our environmental flourishing. We know what happens when we don't ask them. Models built on extraction, on externalising cost and risk, on growth without edges – they create harm. They create unintended consequences. Capital, like water, flows best when it's well-contained. A river without banks isn't freedom. It's a flood.

So: is AI good or bad? That's the wrong question. The technology itself is a tool. What matters is what we use it for, and what guardrails we build around it – the safety catches, the regulations, the principles embedded at the foundation. Get those wrong and the harm comes fast, and at scale.

AI isn't the crisis. Our collective failure to decide about AI's guardrails and founding principles is the crisis. The gap between the speed of building and the pace of deciding is where the real action needs to be right now – while we're still dazzled, marvelling at what we made in a weekend, not yet asking the bigger questions.

The public isn't deciding. Government isn't deciding. Big tech and their shareholders are deciding – what form it takes, who benefits, and who bears the cost.

It is not a done deal. But the window is closing. We've seen what's possible when communities move with intention. San Francisco looked at facial recognition and said: not here. Not because it didn't work – but because surveillance of public space wasn't the kind of city they wanted to be. That's democratic imagination in action, a community writing its own story.

We need that here. We need to inform, consult, and legislate – with the same urgency that the technology is being built.

Our greatest asset is our Treaty framework coupled with a belief, still alive in this country, that technology should serve the public good. If Te Tiriti were properly embedded in how we regulate AI, we'd be forced to ask the hard questions every time: who benefits? Who bears the cost? Are we thinking seven generations forward, or just to the next quarter? What does genuine AI reciprocity look like? 

That's not soft. That's rigorous. The Māori economy consistently outperforms the rest of the New Zealand economy. These relational frameworks aren't romantic – they produce results. What Te Tiriti offers is a set of values with teeth: care for te taiao, responsibility to future generations, reciprocity, mana.

Build AI from those values and you get something genuinely different from what Silicon Valley is building. Reciprocal rather than extractive. Servant to our collective goals, not just whoever can afford the subscription. That's a competitive advantage. And it's ours to champion.

Right now the loudest AI stories are apocalypse and overlords. Compelling science fiction. And very useful to capitalistic empires, because a public that's either terrified or resigned doesn't show up to shape what gets built.

We need to reclaim the story. The narratives worth fighting for are the ones where AI is a genuine partner in solving the problems we've failed to solve alone. Where it helps us navigate toward economies that are regenerative, systems that are equitable, communities that are actually connected. Where the question isn't "how do we process more data faster?" – but "how do we strengthen the relationships that make communities safe, productive, and thriving?"

The future of AI isn't inevitable. It's a story still being written. And we're the ones who should be writing it.

Whoever controls the vision controls what gets built. I want us – this beautiful nation – to hold that vision. Not wait for it to arrive from somewhere else and then decide whether we like it.

If there is a fire in your belly around AI, charge yourself up with well-informed opinions before the upcoming election. Insert yourself into the spaces where these decisions are being made – or start making those spaces : )

The story of AI in Aotearoa is not written. That means you - just by virtue of reading an article like this -  can begin to take a role in writing it. Perhaps start by replying or putting a comment on this post.

With great hope and a fire in my belly,

x Megan