It is often said that Artificial Intelligence could destroy the job market. Some professions are more vulnerable than others. Goldman Sachs, the Investment Banking firm estimates that 360 million jobs are at risk globally from AI, and eighty percent of jobs in the United States.

At particular risk are jobs dealing with routine tasks, those of clerks, data entry operators and such like, but the threat is across the spectrum. Para legals and Junior Legal Associates, Financial Advisors and Financial Analysts Journalists, Content Creators, Creative Artists, Music Composers, no one seems exempt.

Which government jobs could one expect to be safe in an age of automated government delivery of services controlled and run by artificial intelligence? Very few, I am afraid. Government jobs are by the very nature routine and repetitive, fit for automation, with little or no creative input, and operating under a rigid rule bound system allowing no scope for discretion and choice.

The premise of representative governance is fundamental to our political system. What is governance? Broadly speaking it consists of two main activities – making policy and implementing policy. Artificial Intelligence can be a knowledgeable assistant in making policy. It comes into its own in implementing that policy i.e., in administration. When government gets a bad reputation, it is bad administration that is responsible. No amount of good policy making can work if the administration of that policy is faulty.

Representative government means that citizens chose to decide who will rule them. These representatives, the MLAs of the ruling party, frame the policies that underlie governance and oversee and supervise the implementation of those policies through elected ministers and Legislative oversight committees. Good governance presumably comprises not only good policies but also their effective implementation.

Governance usually fails at the cutting edge – at the point where the citizen is to be delivered the services government policy promised, and for which Governments maintain an army of civil servants.

What the citizens get from the elected government is a bad experience from discourteous and arrogant employees of that government, who appear deliberately incompetent, and are often corrupt.

AI promises to fix that. It should........

© Greater Kashmir