Memia Podcasts

Kia ora and welcome to another irregular Memia podcast. This episode I talk with Dr Paul Duignan, a Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based clinical and strategy psychologist, outcomes theorist and author of Surfing AI: 30 New Concepts for Getting Your Head Around AI Shock. Paul splits his week between his clinical practice and strategy work and over the past year he has vibe coded a complete rearchitecture of his strategy visualisation tool, DoView, from a shelved desktop app into an open-source project. I first connected with Paul after seeing his posts on “AI overdrive” on the Agentics New Zealand group chat: the late nights and 3am checks for a reset usage window that anyone working intensively with AI will recognise. We start there. Paul separates AI Overdrive from so-called “AI psychosis”, which he says is mostly a folie à deux (“Madness of two”) with an endlessly affirming machine. From there the conversation covers a lot of ground: * why strategy practice needs a visual model rather than a stack of documents * what happens when humans and agents form hybrid swarms around shared outcomes * the Red Queen dynamics of the AI race * where identity comes from when work stops anchoring it * humanoid robots, companionship and who owns them * how the AI dividend might be shared * what New Zealand’s politicians should already have on the shelf through What-If planning Paul’s closing thought: this is the most exciting time, and the most exciting time is always the most hazardous. This was a really thought-provoking, wide-ranging discussion with Paul - I hope you enjoy the episode! Chapters * 00:00 Preview * 01:00 Intro * 02:35 What is a strategy psychologist? * 04:25 AI overdrive, AI psychosis and the AI Long Game * 11:35 The Red Queen effect * 14:50 AI, work and identity * 16:55 Robots and future society * 21:00 Robots, the economy and control * 26:10 Intelligence, evolution and AI consciousness * 30:05 AI shock and the CHILL tool * 32:10 AI and politics: What If Planning * 35:55 New Zealand as a refuge? * 37:00 DoView and visualising outcomes * 38:25 Strategy in an environment of accelerating change * 39:15 Rebuilding and open sourcing DoView with AI * 41:05 Could AI agents run strategy, and whole organisations? * 43:50 An outcomes-based economy and society * 45:10 Surfing AI Links * Paul Duignan Consulting: https://paulduignan.consulting * Surfing AI (full text free online): https://www.paulduignan.consulting/surfingai * The Outcomes Society: https://www.paulduignan.consulting/outcomessociety * Resources for dealing with AI shock: * AI Long Game Tool * CHILL Tool * Paul’s Substack: * DoView Planning: https://doviewplanning.org * DoView Boards on GitHub: https://github.com/doviewplanning/official-doview-boards * Outcomes theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcomes_theory Mentioned in the episode * METR task-completion time horizons: https://metr.org/time-horizons/ * Microsoft 2025 Work Trend Index, The Frontier Firm is Born, which argues for a shift from org charts to fluid, outcome-driven “Work Charts” that draw on the right mix of humans and agents: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/2025-the-year-the-frontier-firm-is-born * Foresight Institute talk on the hypothalamus: Ann Kennedy | The Anatomy Of The Soul: Neural Circuits For Flexible And Adaptive Survival Behaviors * The Red Queen effect, from Through the Looking-Glass * The Butlerian Jihad, from Dune * Previous episode, Tom Barraclough on sovereign AI policy: https://memia.substack.com/p/tom-barraclough-sovereign-ai-policy A couple of corrections: * “86 billion neuron neocortex” (Ben, around 00:36:00). 86 billion is roughly the neuron count for the whole brain. The neocortex is about 16 billion. Doh. * “Alice in Wonderland” (Paul, around 00:22:10). The Red Queen is actually from Through the Looking-Glass if you really want to nitpick! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit memia.substack.com/subscribe

Kia ora and welcome to another irregular Memia podcast - I really need to do more of these! Last week I sat down for an in-depth conversation with Auckland-based researcher Tom Barraclough, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most important voices on AI policy, regulation and governance. Tom brings a decade’s experience working inside, alongside and across from governments in law, public policy and technology. He is a founder and director of a tech policy think tank (the Brainbox Institute, since 2018), as well as a start-up tech company (Syncopate, since 2023), which turns regulatory documents into digital infrastructure for implementation in computers. Tom has led public interest legal research projects, acted as project lead for a global multistakeholder coalition on tech transparency, and has consulted to public and private clients including the New Zealand government, the Global Partnership on AI and the Global Network Initiative. He’s a super smart mind and we stretched ourselves across a wide range of topics over an hour’s discussion. Some of the key subjects we covered: * Law as cultural runtime, not neutral code — Tom’s jurisprudence background and why he’s always been sceptical of the idea that law is simply rules neutrally applied; the courts as a kind of interpretive culture rather than a deterministic runtime. * Paper plumbing and the PDF problem — How every large organisation is essentially “made up of PDFs” that don’t network with each other, and why that document architecture is failing us at exactly the moment we need it most. * Introducing Syncopate and DocRef — Tom’s origin story at Syncopate: turning law and regulation into structured, referenceable datasets so they can be versioned, annotated, linked at a granular level, and made interoperable across agencies. * The rules-based order under attack — Why bringing more people into political discourse hasn’t produced the shared interpretive consensus institutions hoped for, and why our “institutional software” may simply be past its use-by date. * What “radical digital regulatory infrastructure” actually means — The Cambridge paper in progress: publishing law and regulation as open, versioned, linkable datasets — roots that filter up through every digital system built on top of them. * Unpacking AI sovereignty — Why Tom was initially sceptical of “sovereign AI” (government builds a foundation model — what could go wrong?🫣), and the multidimensional framework he’s developing to pull the concept apart: compute, data, training, content moderation, literacy, individual agency and more. * The one-in-a-million shot problem — Why even a well-resourced, highly centralised state like China can’t fully nail every layer of the sovereign AI stack simultaneously, and what that means for small countries like New Zealand. * Te Hiku Media as the positive model — The closing epilogue to Karen Hao’s Empire of AI in practice: community-owned, values-driven AI development in Te Reo Māori as a template for what distributed, multi-stakeholder sovereignty could look like. * Confidential computing and personal AI sovereignty — Apple Intelligence, Private Cloud Compute, and the Tinfoil startup doing hardware-verifiable privacy — why contractual assurances aren’t enough and what cryptographic attestation offers instead. * AI-accelerated lawmaking: promise and tension — Tom’s live DocRef/MCP/Claude demo that drafted a new API standard from the existing regulatory corpus in an afternoon, and the open question of how fast legislation should move when stability is itself a public good. Links mentioned: * Brainbox Institute: https://www.brainbox.institute/ * Docref.org / Syncopate Labs: https://docref.org/syncopate/blog/ * Tom’s Sovereign AI multidimensional prototype: https://sovereign-ai.tombcgh.tech/ * Te Hiku Media https://tehiku.nz/ * Tinfoil - Verifiably Private AI https://tinfoil.sh/ * Apple Intelligence / Siri AI WWDC Keynote: Introducing Siri AI and More It was great to geek out with Tom on some pretty technical topics with huge relevance to our future here in Aotearoa New Zealand and the world, I hope you enjoy this episode! Ngā mihi Ben Full Transcript This post has bonus content for paid subscribers. Upgrade to get full access. **Tom Barraclough:** [00:00:00] Any large organization that requires any kind of institution or risk management process or policies is just basically made up of PDFs. And they just get layered and layered and layered, and none of these things network with each other. say you had a government wanting to do a sovereign AI model or even just to fund one, so if you’re gonna have government involved in any of it these are the rough layers that I see you needing to basically ace. And I kinda feel like even if you nail one of them Getting all of them just feels like this one in a million perfect shot. Yeah. And it just feels like it’s never gonna happen to me. **Tom Barraclough:** there’s all these different interesting layers of sovereignty that don’t just require it being a government. And I think you can take it beyond government too, and you can start to think about community sovereignty or you can think about individual agency. **Ben Reid:** agency, to be honest, is the control plane that I’m most interested in here. **Tom Barraclough:** we didn’t have a [00:01:00] rules-based order. We had a pre-rules based order, and maybe now we can move into a rules-based order if we recommit to ​ **Ben Reid:** kia ora and welcome to another irregular Memia podcast. I really need to do a few more of these. I’m Ben Reid, and I write the weekly Memia newsletter, and generally spend a lot of my time drinking from the fire hose of accelerating AI this episode I’m gonna be talking with Tom Barraclough. Tom’s an Auckland-based researcher, former lawyer and one of Aotearoa’s most important voices on AI policy and governance. He’s the founder and director of tech policy think tank the Brainbox Institute, as well as tech startup Syncopate, which turns regulatory documents into digital infrastructure. Tom has consulted to many public and private clients, including the New Zealand Government. Welcome Tom. **Tom Barraclough:** Thank you, Ben. Really nice to be chatting about all of these things and share a drink from the fire hose. **Ben Reid:** Yeah, there’s a fair [00:02:00] amount going on, and we , we need a few more hours. **Tom Barraclough:** Yeah ... **Ben Reid:** we’ve only... We’re, we’ll budget ourselves to one hour not really into Lex Fridman-type five-hour marathons. We could. All so look key things I’d like to talk about today is what you’re doing with Syncopate, Yeah and your current research focus. And I think as part of that, we’ll basically go in on the whole concept of AI sovereignty. So you’re doing work which I think is probably some some of the most advanced analysis of pulling that whole concept apart and ‘cause it means a lot of things to a lot of people. . Let’s also talk about some of the tech sovereign strategies in UK and Europe that’s happened recently. So plenty to be getting on with. Yeah. You and I go back many years. ... And I think we touched base for the first time when I was running the AI Forum New Zealand back in- Mm ...... 2019 or something. So that’s a long time ago. So these conversations have been going on for a long time. And you’ve been right at the center of this with Brainbox and then more recently Syncopate. So maybe just give us a sort of potted career history for yourself and and , the really interesting work you’re doing at Syncopate these days. **Tom Barraclough:** [00:03:00] Thanks, Ben. The potted history would be that I... So I studied law and politics, and n-none of that really came alive for me until I started learning about jurisprudence and the kind of legal philosophy side of things because that sort of lets you sit back and go, “What is this law thing? And what is it-- what do people think it does, and what does it actually do?” And yeah, how does it all work? Whereas the other side of law is quite like what does this… This is a public episode. 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This was a wide-ranging conversation with @Bernard Hickey from the excellent The Kākā newsletter on Substack - exploring underlying narratives behind this week's "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" scenario piece from Citrini Research and how this might affect Aotearoa New Zealand.My fundamental thesis: there does appear to be a radical repricing of intelligence happening right now: from per-human-hour-worked to per-million-tokens. Yes, this may lead to massive white-collar job displacement and economic collapse, but there are plenty of avenues to be optimistic about as well... Either way Aotearoa needs to get prepared for labour market disruption, sharpish, which doesn’t appear to be happening. *One correction, early on I said that the original METR research found that task time horizon was doubling every “0.7 months” …. that should have been 7 months. The latest METR Time Horizons research can be found here: https://metr.org/time-horizons/ Thank you Andrew Leckie (SensorNex), Poetsday, and many others for tuning into my live video with Bernard Hickey! Should do this more often, eh! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit memia.substack.com/subscribe

This interview was originally published as part of The AI Corner Thought Leadership Series. Join host Mike Bayly and guest Ben Reid, technology futurist and founder of Memia, to explore how exponential technology is reshaping New Zealand’s future. You’ll hear Ben’s journey from philosophy student to founding executive director of the AI Forum NZ, his thesis on why Western nations have surrendered sovereignty to hyperscale cloud providers, and his prediction of an imminent AI investment correction. Plus his take on why AI agents are overhyped, how China is playing a three-horse race across software, energy and robotics, and why open source investment is the only path forward for countries outside the US and China. SUBSCRIBE TO THE AI CORNER TO STAY AHEAD:NZ AI News: https://theaicorner.co.nz/subscribe NZ AI Events: https://theaicorner.co.nz/p/ai-events-in-new-zealand This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit memia.substack.com/subscribe

(Podcast originally appeared on Businessdesk, listen to the entire discussion on episode 94 of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.) Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative has sparked global debate about balancing disruptive reform with sustainable public sector innovation. In a panel discussion on The Business of Tech, experts Rob Campbell, Ben Reid, and Paul Quickenden critiqued Musk’s approach while proposing alternative strategies for New Zealand to drive efficiency in government while harnessing technologies like blockchain and AI. Campbell, former chair of Te Whatu Ora, acknowledged the need for continuous efficiency evaluation in government but likened Musk’s methods to “letting a mad axeman roam” through bureaucracies. Uncreative destruction He emphasised the critical importance of understanding systemic models, not just slashing budgets or headcount: “If you don’t understand the machinery, you’ll cause destruction, not creation." Campbell highlighted NZ’s own struggles with siloed systems, such as healthcare’s “ramshackle assembly” of incompatible financial tools. Reid, author of Fast Forward Aotearoa, contrasted the US’s “brokenist” political climate with NZ’s inertia-driven bureaucracy. He warned against Musk’s “dismantle-first” strategy, advocating instead for digital-first governance built on open-source platforms and API-driven services. Easy Crypto’s Paul Quickenden added that blockchain could address transparency gaps but stressed that solutions must align with outcomes, not ideology. Identity, payments, and democratic trust The panel identified decentralised identity management as a prime use case for blockchain. Quickenden argued that securely managing personal data across agencies could mitigate future AI-driven security risks, citing South Korea’s blockchain-based voting systems as a model. Campbell supported blockchain’s auditability for benefits distribution, while Reid proposed rearchitecting monolithic departments into modular, interoperable platforms. Quickenden also suggested that blockchain could streamline expense systems and legacy tech debt. “Every government department could see if someone’s reinventing the wheel,” through transparent ledgers, he said. However, all agreed that adoption requires a clear vision, not just technological novelty. AI, open-source, and decentralised innovation Reid pushed for AI-driven automation of bureaucratic processes, envisioning AI agents handling tasks like permit approvals or benefit calculations. He stressed the need for open-source systems to avoid vendor lock-in and cited Taiwan’s GovZero initiative, a citizen-contributed digital governance model, as inspiration. Campbell added that AI could address inefficiencies in healthcare payments and diagnostics but cautioned against top-down mandates. “Innovation often bubbles up from communities, not central agencies,” he said. Both Reid and Quickenden emphasised decentralised experimentation. Reid proposed “innovation sandboxes” to test solutions like smart contracts or consensus-building tools (eg, Polis), while Quickenden urged leveraging NZ’s tech startups for scalable pilots. Lessons for NZ: pragmatism over politics The panel consensus rejected Musk’s disruption in favour of: Transparent systems: Open-source software and auditable processes. Modular design: Shared infrastructure for identity, payments, and data. Decentralised funding: Venture-style support for grassroots tech solutions. As Campbell summarised, “The answer isn’t another agency, it’s creating space for small, practical innovations.” Listen to the entire discussion on episode 94 of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit memia.substack.com/subscribe