We are going to see our government run by smart machines long before businesses do the same, and it looks like the transformation will be ugly.
Elon Musk’s DOGE squads aren’t waiting for management consultants to draft complicated slide presentations on process flow or some other blather that normally makes them rich; they’re dismantling Federal departments and agencies whole-scale, then waiting to see how the destruction 1) Reveals what needs to happen, and 2) Shows how things used to get done, so a computer program can be trained to do it.
It will occasionally require calling back some fired workers to do stuff, like control air traffic so planes don’t crash into each other, but generally tolerates a fair amount of disruption and pain. The only lasting relief will come from automation.
Processing Social Security or IRS refund checks? Identifying the next pandemic or impending hurricane? Preventing another mid-air plane collision?
It might take some missed payments or a dose of another plague for the DOGE experts to identify what needs their attention, but then lucrative development contracts to be writ for tech companies to address it.
People who excuse what’s happening are mostly missing the point, whether they’re using the worn caveat that “well, there’s certainly bloat in government staffing and budgets” to loudly kvelling that “they’re sticking it to the libtards.”
The transformation isn’t about politics. It’s about replacing people with machines, regardless of their political persuasion or the purposes of their funding and work.
In fact, nobody voted for it. There were no “replace our government with AI” or “resist the AI takeover” promises in the planks of either party. We had no robust public debate about if, why, how, or when we should evict humans from their jobs and either replace them with automation or simply leave their work undone.
Our government has never functioned as a well-oiled machine. It wasn’t designed to be one from the get-go, and the balancing of citizens’ competing and often incompatible needs and desires is going to yield inefficient solutions, by design.
It’s called COMPROMISE, and its goal is to make everyone at least somewhat happy with its outcomes. More importantly, it leaves open our ability and right to readjust things to yield a differently imperfect but nominally satisfying arrangement.
What’s happening now to our government is an effort to end that arrangement and quite literally hardwire not only how things get done but what gets done in the first place.
This is where the nonsense about “a deep state” comes into play.
DOGE’s carte blanche ticket for destruction is based on the assumption that the government is staffed by people whose political beliefs bias their decision-making, which makes them not just inefficient but wrong. We should be freed from their oversight and impact to be inefficient and wrong on our own.
Let’s assume for chuckles that the ideology is absolutely correct. Won’t replacing people with AI will simply replace one set of biases for another, a compromise codified into an algorithm still a compromise (just someone else’s)?
Worse, we voters won’t have visibility into the criteria those coders use to program AIs to make decisions (beyond getting fed some pablum about “efficiency”) and, worse yet, it’ll mean we won’t have the capacity to change it. AI will belong to its owners and, over time, will likely develop biases unanticipated by their coders, too.
Every Federal employee walking out of an office with their belongings in a file box is a reminder of the blunt and brutal transformation that’s underway, and the fact that we’ve not been told nor participated in a conversation about what we’re going to get from it.
What could possibly go wrong?
[This essay appeared originally at Spiritual Telegraph]
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