Government by algorithm
[18][19] Nello Cristianini and Teresa Scantamburlo argued that the combination of a human society and certain regulation algorithms (such as reputation-based scoring) forms a social machine.
[24] In particular, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. warned that "by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers".
[25][2] Elements of the project were used in 1972 to successfully overcome the traffic collapse caused by a CIA-sponsored strike of forty thousand truck drivers.
This invisible hand, pushed by government and by commerce, is constructing an architecture that will perfect control and make highly efficient regulation possible[33]Since the 2000s, algorithms have been designed and used to automatically analyze surveillance videos.
[34] In his 2006 book Virtual Migration, A. Aneesh developed the concept of algocracy — information technologies constrain human participation in public decision making.
Gordon Bruce, the former CIO of the city of Honolulu, explained to me that when he entered government from the private sector and tried to make changes, he was told, "That's against the law."
[38]In 2017, Ukraine's Ministry of Justice ran experimental government auctions using blockchain technology to ensure transparency and hinder corruption in governmental transactions.
[45] Berns bought 67,000 acres (271 km2) in Nevada's rural Storey County (population 4,104) for $170,000,000 (£121,000,000) in 2018 in order to develop a smart city with more than 36,000 residents that could generate an annual output of $4,600,000,000.
[20] China's Social Credit System was said to be a mass surveillance effort with a centralized numerical score for each citizen given for their actions, though newer reports say that this is a widespread misconception.
[51][52][53] Smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized autonomous organization are mentioned as means to replace traditional ways of governance.
[64][65][66][67] Some countries such as Georgia and Sweden have already launched blockchain programs focusing on property (land titles and real estate ownership)[39][68][69][70] Ukraine is also looking at other areas too such as state registers.
It scanned more than 16.5 million records of naturalized Americans and flagged approximately 124,000 of them for manual analysis and review by USCIS officers regarding denaturalization.
The paper discussing this possibility mentions that the use of ICT in procurement has several benefits such as increasing transparency, facilitating digital access to public tenders, reducing direct interaction between procurement officials and companies at moments of high integrity risk, increasing outreach and competition, and easier detection of irregularities.
One such technology used by US law firms to assist in legal research is from ROSS Intelligence,[102] and others vary in sophistication and dependence on scripted algorithms.
[109] In 2018, an activist named Michihito Matsuda ran for mayor in the Tama city area of Tokyo as a human proxy for an artificial intelligence program.
[110] While election posters and campaign material used the term robot, and displayed stock images of a feminine android, the "AI mayor" was in fact a machine learning algorithm trained using Tama city datasets.
[113] Organisers claimed that the 'AI mayor' was programmed to analyze citizen petitions put forward to the city council in a more 'fair and balanced' way than human politicians.
[119] Leader Lars differed from earlier virtual politicians by leading a political party and by not pretending to be an objective candidate.
[121] In 2023, In the Japanese town of Manazuru, a mayoral candidate called "AI Mayer" hopes to be the first AI-powered officeholder in Japan in November 2023.
The app is able to detect "close contact" using surveillance data (i.e. using public transport records, including trains and flights)[128] and therefore a potential risk of infection.
This system generates a QR code in one of three colors (green, yellow, or red) after users fill in a form on Alipay with personal details.
The algorithms used by the monitoring software can be incorporated into existing surveillance systems in public spaces (hospitals, stations, airports, shopping centres, ...) [132] Cellphone data is used to locate infected patients in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and other countries.
[133][134] In March 2020, the Israeli government enabled security agencies to track mobile phone data of people supposed to have coronavirus.
[135] Also in March 2020, Deutsche Telekom shared private cellphone data with the federal government agency, Robert Koch Institute, in order to research and prevent the spread of the virus.
[137] Italian regional health commissioner Giulio Gallera said that "40% of people are continuing to move around anyway", as he has been informed by mobile phone operators.
[149][150][151] Earthquake monitoring, phase picking, and seismic signal detection have developed through AI algorithms of deep-learning, analysis, and computational models.
[158] According to a 2016's book Weapons of Math Destruction, algorithms and big data are suspected to increase inequality due to opacity, scale and damage.
[160] In 2018, the Netherlands employed an algorithmic system SyRI (Systeem Risico Indicatie) to detect citizens perceived as being high risk for committing welfare fraud, which quietly flagged thousands of people to investigators.
[163] Due to public criticism, the Australian government announced the suspension of Robodebt scheme key functions in 2019, and a review of all debts raised using the programme.
[169] The following table lists the results by country: Researchers found some evidence that when citizens perceive their political leaders or security providers to be untrustworthy, disappointing, or immoral, they prefer to replace them by artificial agents, whom they consider to be more reliable.
