The power of artificial intelligence is extraordinary. It helps diagnose illness, invest in it, and create photos, songs, novels, and university essays, among many others.
It's no wonder UAE authorities want to capitalize on that potential through a wide range of deployments.
As reported last week, Dubai Prime Minister and ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid said from January that the National Artificial Intelligence System will become an advisory committee of the UAE Cabinet, Ministerial Development Council and the board of government companies and federal organizations.
It's the latest move to promote AI. In 2017, the UAE became the world's first country to serve as Minister of State for AI for AI, and also has a national AI strategy and AI University.
The new era of AI
Ashley Braganza, professor of organizational transformation at Brunel University in London, says the government is “grasping at the threshold” globally when it comes to AI adoption.
“Many governments of countries are talking about the use of AI to serve their citizens,” he says. “If we were to have this conversation in a year or 18 months now, we would be talking about AI across a wide range of public sector services in different parts of the world.”
Professor Braganza hosting AI Recruitment Podcastsays the technology changes how public sector employees interact and how citizens engage in public services. It's “transformative,” he says.
“If you're a civil servant, you can say, 'In this situation, what should be done, or what form should be completed, or what information should be obtained from this individual, along with this kind of citizen I'm dealing with?” ” he says.
“It brings this all together and I think it's a place where transformation can be seen. It will change labor practices within the public sector.”
“It should not be surprising as widespread adoption by governments around the world in the future is a 'very general purpose technology',” said Professor Mark Daly, chief AI officer at Western University in Canada.
“This is a technology that allows for some degree of cognitive offload,” he says. “Tasks that require direct human supervision can be offloaded to more and more machine assistants as the model gets better.
“It still has to be verified by humans, but it enhances the individual human ability to perform the task. Its precise nature depends entirely on the work function and the preferences of those individual human beings.”
He says that doing “intellectual drudgery” can make people “more productive and happy” by going through 500 emails to find mentions on a particular topic.
Completion for not replacing
For now, Professor Daley says that AI can perform things that could be considered more routine intellectual tasks, such as answering everyday emails, but it is not ready to completely replace many job functions.
“We're not there yet,” he says. “The technology is amazing and great when it works, but it's still very vulnerable and there are still many failure modes that require human monitoring.”
Using the words he created, Professor Braganza believes that AI will likely cause a “gig” of work, taking out less demanding tasks within a particular job, and ensuring people take on the most difficult functions.
“What you've finished is that people are employed for the past 20-30%. [of a job]people can see that very complicated problem and deal with it,” he says.
“In contrast to AI coming in and the collapse of the entire organization's workforce, we can reduce the role we work over time.”
The technology is rapidly advancing, and Professor Daly says it's not difficult to imagine a future in which agent AI, a form of technology in which AI “agents” function independently, will ultimately take over the roles of many human beings.
AI is more than just a technology for governments in high-income countries. It is also possible to advance in developing countries.
African countries say they can rapidly increase the penetration of mobile phones and “fly” broad reliance on landlines and can be paralleled and paralleled.
“We'll probably see the same thing unfold here,” he says. “Agile and fast-moving developing countries say, “Let's integrate AI into our processes when we are evolving.” ”
Maintenance of protection measures
In AI, like people, there may be concerns about bias, and it may not be clear that such biases are hidden in the algorithm, says Professor Braganza.
“If you're talking about AI used by police, health, social security, childcare, in these circumstances, some of those decisions can have a very deep, very significant impact if they're wrong,” he says.
Professor Braganza points out that human caseworkers or call center employees can deal with dozens of customers in a day, but in the same period, AI models may arbitrate thousands of cases.
“For example, if someone applying for a loan, if their algorithm is biased, 10,000 applications could have been affected in the last hour,” he says.
But Professor Daily says that when the technology becomes more refined, bias can be removed.
“We now have a reasoning model when we use the frontier AI we have. In fact, we can explain in English the criteria you are looking for, which biases to monitor, and we can build a system that is essentially less biased than humans,” he said.
“We can request that to explicitly state how we are making decisions against all these possible sources of bias,” he says.
“There is a possibility that these models will actually be used in ways that will increase procedural fairness, but you have to be really careful about how you use them.”
Technology adoption continues for all AI-related concerns in government or business. Its use can be existential for businesses.
“If a productivity enhancer is invented and you refuse to adopt it, you won't compete by the people who are adopting it. I have little doubts. [that] AI is a productivity enhancer across a wide range of domains,” says Professor Daley.
