How far ahead do you try to look when considering investments and the outcomes? Our advisers often ask if we are conservative, moderate or aggressive investors, which is usually correlated to time.

What might our investments look like and our decisions be if we thought much further ahead – if we had a guide to the future?

This goes beyond the familiar ESG concepts of thinking about investment through the lens of environmental, social and governance criteria or the even more controversial DEI diversity, equity and inclusion.

How might we invest if we really thought about the future – the future of Aotearoa New Zealand and its place in the world – and not just horizons defined by what we believe our needs might be in three to five years.

One answer might lie in the remarkably long-term investment philosophies of the increasingly wealthy and frequently successful iwi investment vehicles that have come out of Treaty of Waitangi settlements and created what amount to sovereign wealth funds.

The Nelson region iwi, Wakatū, for example, says it has a 500-year outlook in its investment strategy. Its chief executive officer, Kerensa Johnston, reckons that is the Māori way, saying: “We tend to think of our grandchildren and future generations”.

Ngāi Tahu, arguably the most successful and best-known iwi conglomerate, has an investment strategy called Mō Kā Ur which embodies what it calls a “collective tribal agreement” out to 2050 – essentially one generation but within an investment ethos that is dedicated to generational wealth.

Interesting formula

Futurist Ben Reid has written a new book with a formula to think about the future that while not strictly speaking an investment strategy might offer clues on how an investor might think about the future: risks and opportunities, responsibilities, and the position descendants might inherit.

To be clear, it is not a guide to what to invest in, and nor is this article making recommendations, but it might just offer some ideas or even provocations that are outside the realm of your normal adviser or your do-it-yourself approach to how you might invest for the future.

In a clever approach to the book and the likelihood of various types of reader – distracted, focused, engaged – Ben breaks it down into a sentence, a 1,000-word summary, and a single essay.

Here’s the book in a sentence (his not mine): “Rapidly advancing technologies are completely reshaping the future of Aotearoa - our country needs to invest NOW in a national-scale, open-source technology strategy to ensure we retain sovereignty and agency to maximise the potential wellbeing of future generations.”

Ben describes a world facing a “poly-crisis”, a multiplicity of immense challenges from climate change to artificial intelligence. He urges NZ to grab the “poly-opportunity” in that turmoil.

Talking to Informed Investor, Ben acknowledged the scale of crisis and change had big impacts for investment and investors.

“The upshot of that (poly-crisis) is that the future looks a lot more unstable and unpredictable. So, from an investment perspective the expectation of a predictable environment and linear returns has a lot more chaos in it than at any other time in our lives.”

NZ, he suggests, has the distance and assets to allow it to thrive in a world riven by climate change, fast-paced technology change, and global power and wealth imbalances, but only if it invests in genuine national strategic planning to make the most of its opportunities.

“There is a necessity for a significant transformation in the economy, underscored by the urgent need for increased diversification and value-add in exports, a reduction in emissions and an enhancement in productivity through building and deploying new technology,” he writes.

Four key elements

The book suggests four essential elements for a national strategy that:
- Is aligned towards maximising national wellbeing, not just profits and GDP growth.
- Supports long-term national and individual technological sovereignty and resilience.
- Invests in rebuilding frontier technological capability and skills throughout our economy.
- Is open source and internationally collaborative to mitigate against enclosure by giant technology company “moats”.

Ben sees a need for government direction and intervention in many areas but it’s clear his long-term vision is also about corporate innovation. He lists 100 potential technology solutions to problems and to seize those opportunities in the natural environment, financial and physical capital, promote resilience in the economy and among our people.

The idea is to create a long-termism economy and society built on high-value exports, take advantage of the tyranny of distance, and truly commit to a highly educated and healthy population.

It is all about the pace of change, environmental and technological, and thinking faster.

“My background is as a technologist, I used to architect software and my interest is very much on the cutting edge. The primary mover there is artificial intelligence. I am very aware of this ambient acceleration in the rate of technology change where there are compounding effects of better software, better automation, better AI, at an ever-faster pace,” he says.

Tech solution

“If you relate that back to New Zealand, and I have always been a tech-optimist … and so that’s really the cognitive dissonance or tension behind the book that everything is going to s... really quickly, but also technology can be used to solve that. You could ask GPT7 next year to ‘solve climate change’ and it will just automate that,” he suggests, tongue in cheek.

It may be fascinating to think about what individual investment decision might emerge if one were to accept the Ben Reid view.

Investments in environmental mediation expertise; low-impact agriculture/horticulture/aquaculture; local cloud computing providers; resilient software and network developers; space and aerospace (including Rocket Lab and beyond, for example), networked with like-minded partners overseas, especially in similar smaller states; indigenous artificial intelligence and large language models; drone and other cost-effective coastal patrol and defence capacity; tele-medicine; medical research; data-driven research of all kinds including “digital twins”.

He says we can change our place as a “technology taker” and find strategic alternatives.

“We’ve got a small and vibrant software and tech scene, the space scene, the aerospace scene … but most of our businesses run off Amazon or Microsoft cloud data centres, especially the government. I think there’s definitely a national conversation and a strategic question of how much more dependent, you know, as a country do we want to get?

Fascinating read

“The alternatives, as I see them, are to invest in open-source development capability. Maybe it’s the role of the state in the future to contribute to open source and not just software, but also AI, and hardware.”

Fast Forward Aotearoa is a fascinating read in its own right. It’s also an interesting thought experiment to think about the kinds of investments one might choose if you were to accept its premise about the importance of NZ seizing what he says should be its natural advantages: the environment, relative isolation, a vast exclusive economic zone, relatively stable politics, relative social cohesion and an innovative spirit.

However, it requires a major rethink about our economic and social direction and a commitment to a level of planning and expertise we have repeatedly failed to develop. It might require, Ben suggests, a level of plain curiosity about possibilities and a level of collectivism or collective agreement at least to get there.