Over time, AI will spawn massive changes in the public sector, transforming how government employees get work done. It’s likely to eliminate some jobs, lead to the redesign of countless others, and create entirely new professions.
AI-assisted cognitive technologies in government
Cognitive technologies are already having a profound impact on government work, AI-based applications could potentially reduce backlogs, cut costs, overcome resource constraints, free workers from mundane tasks, improve the accuracy of projections, inject intelligence into scores of processes and systems, and handle many other tasks humans can’t easily do on our own, such as predicting fraudulent transactions, identifying criminal suspects via facial recognition, and sifting millions of documents in real time for the most relevant content.
Political ethics of AI
Throughout modern history, political candidates have had only a limited number of tools to take the temperature of the electorate. More often than not, they’ve had to rely on instinct rather than insight when running for office.
This, of course, raises ethical questions. There is evidence, for example, to suggest that AI-powered technologies were used to manipulate citizens in recent election campaigns. Some even claim these tools were decisive in the outcome of the vote.
The rise of the AI politician?
Scientists have been developing an artificial intelligence politician that can answer a person’s queries regarding local issues such as policies around housing, education and immigration.
While the system is not perfect, it may still help bridge the growing political and cultural divide in many countries,
We may or may not be ready for an AI Candidate, but perhaps the next logical step is electing politicians that understand artificial intelligence who are open to bringing AI into action in a variety of ways. Thus, executing their job to a higher degree using automation.
The pacing problem
Existing regulatory structures are often slow to adapt to changing societal and economic circumstances, and regulatory agencies generally are risk-averse. Rapid adaptation to emerging technology, therefore, poses significant hurdles and, in turn, to the technology industries, where change occurs at a rapid rate.
This problem is compounded by the ever-increasing speed by which technological change occurs, further hampering our ability to find a solution to this problem.
Decentralised autonomous political systems
E-government system has greatly improved the efficiency and transparency of daily operations of a government. However, most of the existing e-government services are provided in a centralized manner and heavily rely on human individuals to control.
This highly centralized infrastructure is more vulnerable to attacks as it is relatively easy to compromise the data integrity. Furthermore, relying on individuals to monitor and control some of the working flows makes the system error-prone and leaves room for corruption.
To address these challenges, we could implement blockchain technology and the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to improve the e-government system. The blockchain-based DAO system works in a fully decentralized way and is immune to these and many other issues that plague the ability for governments to be effective.
We will spend the next two weeks discussing these important issues in detail, we warmly welcome you to take part in our #AGICHAT theme #futureofpolitics.