Going digital today is no more a “nice to have” feature for any organization that means business. Rather, it’s a “must have” attribute, because of the time-effective, cost-friendly, and high accessibility of digital platforms. But the one most important reason behind the increasing popularity of digital mediums is the high level of accuracy that it entails.
This accuracy is the direct result of the algorithms that play the strings behind the curtains of every digital venture. In fact, not just accuracy alone, but the entire digital experience of a visitor is in direct consonance with the algorithm that works behind the scenes.
The use of algorithms in platforms across a good mix of industries such as retail, hospitality, healthcare, banking and financial services, entertainment, and many more, has taken the definition of algorithms way beyond the standard. No more are algorithms only about being encoded procedures to transform input data into a desired output. Algorithms today are entities that are powerful enough to regulate, shape, and govern everything, most of which is interdisciplinary.
What is the need for Algorithmic Government?
- The growth of millennials and digital natives as the dominant component of the global population means that soon no one alive will have any memory of a segregated, disconnected society. The norms and expectations will irrevocably change — for the better.
- The growing diversity of a global society — with greater commingling of people with linguistic, cultural, racial and religious differences — has also created a sense of isolation and disconnectedness as the disparate populations struggled to achieve full integration. Such populations have consequently become unknown, distrusted, marginalized, overlooked, friendless and alone. The assimilation of this segment of population is government’s prime concern.
- Omnipresent electronic evidence enables evidence-based governmence — based on data available, such as financial transactions, social media, public transit data, traffic data, video, surveillance cameras etc.
Algorithmic Government can offer a better future
- An algorithm evades the subjectivity, inefficiency, corruption, and greed of the manual workforce generally engaged in delivering government services. This ensures an undeniably better, fairer, more transparent version of government than the human-administered version of the past several centuries.
- More effective, timely and relevant intervention in people’s lives — by being better targeted, less intrusive, and more efficient. An algorithmic government will be using pattern recognition for identification of impending needs, applying behavioral science for reinforcement of positive behaviors and using intervention to prevent negative behaviors.
- Citizens will be free to spend more time on their productive and leisure pursuits. Life expectancy will skyrocket.
- The connected economy and society will further blur the boundaries between government and private sector, achieving a continuum of service delivery across the spectrum of service providers, although with greater transparency and regulation of greed.
- Through direct democracy, citizens will be able to vote on modifications to services and choose their form, nature, and content through a popular vote or allocation of their taxes — all within algorithmically determined limits, of course.
Algorithmic Government could become the new digital big brother
In order to offer algorithmic governance as a boon to citizens, these algorithms need to be strictly evidence based, free of emotional appeals, political vendetta, and regressive elements. Algorithmic governance should be about a broader, cross-functional perspective — and approaching it from a citizen viewpoint – helping to resolve some of the thorniest issues (including misalignment or misapplication of government resources to citizen needs).
Nevertheless, it is undebatable that, at some point, algorithms will be very powerful, correct most of the time, and superior to human judgment. We will have to learn and decide how we can peacefully and happily coexist with that.
Broken Algorithms: When public administration, service delivery and resource allocation are almost entirely dependent on algorithms, they become prime targets for hacker organizations and terrorists.
Excessive Surveillance: Rebirth of an authoritarian regime to detect suspicious activity, and ill-founded assumptions about intentions, without due process can be a major threat. This is quite possible in the wake of terrorism, and globalization, and the disruptive effects of the 21st century.
Unintentional Bias: Hidden or unspoken dangers such as bigotry or racism may creep in. These biases can propagate into algorithmic form, risking the perpetuation of institutional injustices or inequities and continuing (or worsening) disenfranchisement or alienation of populations.
Unethical Behaviour: Violation of digital ethics is still an unknown territory, whose implications are still evolving, and are still being coded.
With unclear impacts and underexplored avenues for recourse, in the end, the hard work is still left for humans to achieve consensus on the common understanding of ethics. Machines will be able to determine the “best” solution, once humans are able to tell them what “best” is.
