AI risks creating a ‘demand machine’ for governments, report warns
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By
Chris Teale
Instead of making public-sector employees’ lives easier, the tech could create even more work, unless leaders rethink agency processes and workflows, researchers at New America said.
For several years, state and local leaders have argued that artificial intelligence will make work smoother for their government employees by taking away the menial jobs and allowing them to focus on more rewarding tasks.
But a recent report from nonprofit New America argued that, in fact, AI will increase demand for government services by making it easier for residents to interact with their governments, ramping up their service requests and overwhelming existing systems and processes with those requests.
“In practice, AI acts less like a labor-saving device and more like a demand machine,” the report says. “It lowers barriers for residents to request services, apply for benefits, file complaints, and seek help, thereby surfacing needs that were previously hidden by friction, time, or bureaucratic complexity. The result is not less work for governments, but more and often different work.”
The report comes as states and localities have turned to AI for all manner of tasks, notably in their nonemergency lines like 311 that are used to answer resident questions and fix any issues they may experience. Conceivably, according to the research, if governments do not have processes in place to deal with extra demand, they could face a situation where a resident reports a pothole on a Monday, expects it to be done quicker as their interaction with government has less friction, then is disappointed when it is not completed quickly.
While government leaders have talked up how AI will augment, rather than replace, employees’ work, researchers argued they must think more about how to support those employees in what might be a tough transition to a technology-reliant future.
“We hear so many people talking about how it's going to resolve all our worries, it's going to erase our problems,” said Mai-Ling Garcia, a senior fellow for technology and democracy at New America and a co-author of the report. “We're going to need less staff. We're going to need to figure out what to do with the staff that we have, because they're not going to be doing as much work. I think we're losing sight of the immediate impacts.”
There are even parallels to previous technological revolutions, Garcia said, that indicate how the use of AI will change demand for government services.
“We have washing machines that wash our clothes, and I think maybe there was a thought that we'd somehow be doing less domestic labor,” she said. “But what happened? People bought more clothes. Our closets are bigger.”
The warning for the public sector also comes on the heels of a separate warning to the private sector in the Harvard Business Review, which argued that, rather than reduce work, AI “intensifies” it. Neil Kleiman, a report co-author and a senior fellow and professor at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, said the move towards AI has echoes of the “smart cities” movement a decade ago, when local officials would buy the newest piece of technology to try to help their government services, only to find that it could not keep up with demand.
“There was a period of time during that smart cities era where I can't tell you how many chiefs of staff and [chief information officers] I would run into and say, ‘Our mayor just went to this conference and got caught up with [311 management platform] SeeClickFix, or whatever the new tech thing is,’” Kleiman said. “We were crushed before, and now we're further crushed.”
Kleiman and Garcia said hope is not lost for the public sector as they prepare for the expected onslaught of AI-driven government services, but they need to start planning now. That means rethinking internal processes in the short-term, as well as doing the kind of multiyear strategic planning to plan for a longer term where AI and technology is even more dominant.
“What we're calling on local governments to do is something that doesn't come naturally or they have the bandwidth to do, which is strategic planning and adaptation planning,” Kleiman said.
And that strategic planning could be made even more challenging by the pace of change in technology, which has seen AI accelerate in an industry expected to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years. The consequences of inaction could be tremendous, the pair warned.
“I see the development of AI generally as just another fork in the road for government, where it's either going to get worse or it could actually get a lot better,” Kleiman said. “We're AI optimists in the sense of, if you approach it with your eyes open, there's a lot of benefits that can come from it. If we do nothing and let AI run amok, you're going to further erode trust. Your services are going to be even poorer, and the response rate is going to be even poorer.”