Gigaom AI Minute – June 15

Transcript

How do you think that artificial intelligence is going to affect government? And I don't mean an artificial general intelligence, I just mean the kind of narrow AI we have today. Imagine when it gets better and better and better. I doubt, actually, that it's going to affect government all that much. Government is structured to be relatively unchanging. And therefore, it seems that it will be immune to the efficiencies that artificial intelligence will bring.

If, as the cynics say, government is the art of taking money from people who didn't vote for you and giving it to people who did vote for you, AI may help them do this a little bit better. If government is simply theater, if it's simply bread and circuses designed to keep us entertained and doesn't really impact our lives in dramatic ways, then artificial intelligence probably won't affect it very much. If your an optimist and believe that government in the end is about statesmanship, it's about good governance, then again artificial intelligence probably won't change it all that much. It hasn't changed all that much in the past. Government, however, will struggle to keep up in a world that changes ever faster because of AI.