13 Aug 2019

New Zealand 'guinea pig' for Silicon Valley - tech commentator

From Morning Report, 6:38 am on 13 August 2019

A commentator on tech companies says New Zealand has been used as a guinea pig by Silicon Valley.

This comes after a partnership between the NZ Transport Agency and one-time high-tech darling Machine Zone quickly faltered and failed.

The company, now called MZ, put out videos claiming New Zealand would be a testing round for running an entire country using autonomous programmes called bots.

But the NZTA has pulled the plug having tested only two transport apps on MZ's data processing platform Satori. The agency has not revealed what all this cost.

Tech journalist Jon Jordan says public agencies aren't designed to cope with Silicon Valley's freewheeling ways.