If AI was your Mayor or MLA
Kalicharan Mahasivabhattu
Director -Data Assets || Pharma || Data Management Professional|| 22+ Yrs
If you dig deep into the origins of democracy, the reason we have a hierarchical system like this is mainly because there was no way for one person to process all the citizen data and derive meaningful outputs from it. Hence we got into the mode of distributed data processing also known as democracy.
The local MLA is given the responsibility of understanding the grievances in a local area and make decisions for that particular area.These decisions, in general are expected to satisfy the majority of population and hence secure his next term.Hence a set of individual MLA's represent their areas to the representative of state and so on.
In other words your MLA is acting as a data processing unit reviewing the local grievance data and hence making decisions.
But unfortunately, that is not what is happening. The chosen Mayor or MLA's are people and not algorithms. They are conscious, the problem with consciousness is their decisions are driven by greed and individual motivations, not really by data.
In a shocking announcement last December (2017), former Minister for Planning MR Seetharam stated that since 2002 an incredible Rs 1,009 crore of the Karnataka Legislators Local Area Development Scheme’s (KLLADS) fund has remained underutilized
Even if there are exceptions, the data that a mayor or an MLA could process is only a small subset of who he engages with. That's because, human mind just does not have the vast data processing capability and this is the reason, majority of the public remains disconnected with politics or the government. We don't care because they just cannot process our individual data. If at all they process data, that is for elections and once in 5 years.
But, algorithms can.
Algorithms can process data every second.That's how the complex stock markets are run.
Imagine an AI or algorithm is elected to be your local MLA. It creates a twitter account and is available to every citizen in its area. Thousands of people will start communicating with it and it will listen to all of them, analyses what is their collective demand and based on the collective feedback it makes a decision.
It can respond back to people individually if they have any specific questions on why their work has not be prioritized. It can analyse the satisfaction rate of people based on the decisions it is making and can learn to improve its performance in future.
It will act according to its job responsibilities and will be a perfect representative of the problems its people have and fight for securing the required budget.
If conscious people not able able to provide you with a better governance, it is better to leave the governing to unconscious algorithms whose only motivation is to do well to the society.
Associate Director, Accenture IX Capital Projects Capability
6 年Good Article, at the end we need a person or a team to implement the best suggestions by AI. But in Government governance such AI does not really give us what exactly is needed. People must change, MLAs and MPs should not get funds, we should have local bodies and these local bodies should get funds and MLAs & MPs should work like Project Managers with KPIs, these local bodies should use AI or Block Chain, etc to achieve the goal. Basically we citizens do not take responsibility and take accountability for our mistakes and ignorance. According to me we have to change first then every other situation will be under control. If you agree with me then we do not need AI, Block Chain and Robots in Indian governance model. But we need AI in many other domains to control our economy and growth.
Technical Leader | Driving Innovation and Growth in Product and Strategy Management
6 年Your idea to eliminate the “conflict of interest” is good but prime challenges include 1. authenticity of data reported! 2. Implementation, This was always the biggest failure in democracy.