Elon Musk Pushes To Use AI In Running The Government? (image @elonmusk)
Reportedly, Elon Musk is planning to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to run the US government, which experts believe is a “very bad idea”. Recently, the tech-giant has fired tens of thousands of federal government employees through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was assigned to him by US President Donald Trump. As per the report, he requires the remaining workers to send the department a weekly email featuring five bullet points describing what they accomplished that week.
And since the emailing will no doubt flood DOGE with hundreds of thousands of these types of emails, Musk is relying on AI to process responses and help determine who should remain employed. The part of the plan also include to replace many government workers with AI systems, said the report.
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It is not clarified yet on how the said AI systems look like or work. The Democrats are demanding to be filled in on the matter. Experts warn that the use of AI in the federal government without robust testing and verification of these tools could have disastrous consequences.
“To use AI tools responsibly, they need to be designed with a particular purpose in mind. They need to be tested and validated. It’s not clear whether any of that is being done here”, Cary Coglianese, a professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania told Al Jazeera.
According to Coglianese, if AI is being used to make decisions about who should be terminated from their job, he’d be “very sceptical” of that approach. He said there is high possibility for the AI to be make mistakes, to be biased, and for other potential problems.
“It’s a very bad idea. We don’t know anything about how an AI would make such decisions [including how it was trained and the underlying algorithms], the data on which such decisions would be based, or why we should believe it is trustworthy”, the report quotes Shobita Parthasarathy, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.
It appears that none of these matters to the current US government. The US Department of State, for instance, is planning on using AI to scan the social media accounts of foreign nationals to identify anyone who may be a Hamas supporter in an effort to revoke their visas. The lack of transparency in the process has also raised concerns.
AI experts believe that the use of technology in running government duties can go wrong in many ways, and needs to be adopted carefully and conscientiously.
Reportedly, the governments around the world, including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have had problems with poorly executed AI that can make mistakes or show bias and as a result have wrongfully denied residents welfare benefits they are in need of.
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In US, the state of Michigan came across a problem with AI which was used to find fraud in its unemployment system. Several of the people who were denied benefits were treated harshly, including being hit with multiple penalties. They were also accused of fraud. Reportedly, some were were arrested and even filed for bankruptcy. It took five years for the state to admit that the system was faulty. A year later, it ended up refunding $21m to residents wrongly accused of fraud.
Entrusting duties to AI can be catastrophic, as each kind of jobs in the federal government requires different specific skills and knowledge. For instance, an IT person in the Department of Justice might have a very different job from one in the Department of Agriculture, even if both have the same job title. AI must have to be complex and highly trained to even do a mediocre job at replacing a human worker.
The administration of former US President Joe Biden issued an executive order in 2023,which focused on the responsible use of AI in government. The executive order also focused on how AI would be tested and verified. However, Trump administration rescinded the order in January this year. This has caused the fear that it less likely that AI will be used responsibly in government or that researchers will be able to understand how AI is being utilised.
(With inputs from agencies)
