The Victoria University of Wellington policy journal Policy Quarterly has just published a theme issue examining COVID-19 and the New Zealand context. Articles cover: government, law, globalisation, health, lockdown, the economy and much more.

Matt Boyd, Nick Wilson “Governments routinely ignore seemingly far-out risks. Rocked by a global pandemic, they need to up their game” ( The Economist , 27 June 2020). It is not clear whether risks that threaten human extinction have received appropriate attention at the level of international governance. We systematically searched the documents of the UN Digital Library and concluded that they have not.

A new paper explains how the GHSI can be used to guide preparations in New Zealand and the Pacific New Zealand has done well to date in managing and eliminating (for now) COVID-19 disease. However, there have been sensible calls for an inquiry into New Zealand’s response. An inquiry could help determine what worked and what didn’t, what went well, and how we could do better next time.

Following a recent post on the University of Otago’s Public Health Expert blog, Matt from Adapt Research discusses COVID-19 with Radio New Zealand’s ‘The Panel’ Read the Blog here: https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/pubhealthexpert/2020/04/12/changes-in-mobility-in-response-to-the-covid-19-pandemic-nz-vs-other-countries-and-the-stories-it-suggests/ Listen to the discussion here (6min):

The only way to contain coronavirus cases in NZ is to go to Alert Level 4 for a brief period.

New Zealand has just shut its borders to foreign visitors for the first time in history in an attempt to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. In what follows, I outline the case for border closure, the conditions under which it is rational, and then note that this is merely one measure against one catastrophe. Moving forward, we should get used to analysing and preparing responses to such large-scale risks.

I’ve just spent the last three days reading Stuart Russell’s new book on AI safety, ‘Human Compatible’. To be fair I didn’t read continuously for three days, this is because the book rewards thoughtful pauses to walk or drink coffee, because it nurtures reflection about what really matters.

The Global Health Security Index which considers pandemic threats has just been published. Unfortunately NZ scores approximately half marks (54/100), coming in 35 ^th in the world rankings – far behind Australia.

The AI Forum of New Zealand has just published a report on AI and Health in the New Zealand context. The report trumpets some of the potential cost savings and efficiencies that AI will no doubt bring to the sector over the next few years. However, there are other interesting findings in the research report worth highlighting.

I recently published an academic paper about island refuges in extreme pandemics with my co-author Nick Wilson. The paper has become the focus of media attention, including articles by Newsweek, Fox News and IFLScience. Unfortunately, the key argument of the paper has been misconstrued in several reports.

In this post I aim to describe some of the ethical issues around the use of algorithms to make or assist decisions in recruitment and for managing gig employment. When discussing ethics we are trying to deduce the right thing to do (not the permissible thing, or the profitable thing, or the legal thing). AI in recruitment Consider Usha, who is a software engineer specialising in machine learning.