The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.
Mauricio Cobalbias
September 12, 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) has entered public life with transformative power. Around the world, governments deploy algorithmic systems to enhance services, optimize decision-making, and predict social needs. In fact, AI grants institutions, and those leading them are leading a kind of technical “superpower.” It is the ability to process huge amounts of data in seconds, automate complex tasks, predict citizen behavior, and detect invisible patterns of human beings.
These capabilities are especially valuable in times of uncertainty and institutional stress. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, some governments will use AI models to track transmission chains, allocate healthcare resources and predict outbreaks. Beyond health, AI is applied to the irregularity of procurement flags, predicting infrastructure failures and personalizing public services.
In this context, several authors have explained how these technological superpowers are applied in the public sector. In my previous column, Superpower for civil servants in the age of artificial intelligence, Part I and Part III proposed a framework of seven AI-enabled capabilities that can empower civil servants in this new era.
- Expanding your vision – Recognize risks, opportunities and needs through real-time analysis.
- No mistake decision making – A decision support system that allows for faster and more accurate choices.
- An omnipresent existence – Expand the scope and responsiveness of public institutions.
- Empathetic communication – Adjust messaging for a diverse audience using AI tools.
- Superhuman efficiency – Automation of everyday bureaucratic tasks.
- The righteousness of the algorithm – Detection system bias detection and response.
- Predictive Governance – Predict social trends to guide positive policy design.
These capabilities reshape how public services are organized and delivered. But the subtle risk lies in today's enthusiasm for technology. Assuming these capabilities can replace deep human powers such as long-guided public services, empathy, ethical judgment, political imagination, positive imagination, and a steady commitment to public goods. These are human superpowers and are remarkable qualities that algorithms cannot replicate.
As Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Hattenrocker argue The Age of AI: And our human futureAI doesn't just accelerate knowledge. It forms a way of understanding causality, reality, and truth. We can support more informed decisions, but we cannot envision moral responsibility that underpins public choices. Equality, dignity, and justice must be actively interpreted and defended by humans.
This point is reflected in the Standards Committee of the UK Public Life Report. Artificial Intelligence and Public Standardsnotes that trust in public institutions depends not only on technical accuracy, but also on transparency, accountability and ethical standards of the people who deploy the technology. The algorithm does not provide validity. People do that.
The tension between technology and humans is nothing new, but it is even more urgent. In administration, where legitimacy is derived not only from efficiency, but also from perceived fairness and citizen trust, danger is the judgment of excessive decisions on machines. Civil servants remain essential as ethical agents. It balances complexity interpretation, ambiguity navigation, and competing interests to feel justice and responsibility.
This challenge is not a replacement for AI, but also an opportunity to integrate AI in ways that enhance human strength. AI may bring efficiency and foresight, but when laws and values are in tension, only community forums, community forums facing injustice or prudence, or civil servants who can exercise empathy with compassion can exercise empathy.
These are human superpowers that will strengthen the digital age. They are not just technical skills, they are moral, emotional and civic abilities that shape the way we use the tools we create. With wider access to AI, what distinguishes superior public services is the judgment, purpose, and ethics that guide its deployment.
The goal is not to choose between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, but to combine both wisely. As the World Economic Forum Tomorrow's Work: Mapping Opportunities in the New Economy Highlight, the most valuable skill in the economy of the future is hybrids. Systems thinking, creative problem solving, emotional intelligence, and co-leadership.
Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger create similar cases GuardRails: guiding human decisions in the age of AI: Governance should go beyond technical standards and include institutional mechanisms and a democratic culture that enhances reflection and ethical deliberation. Without this, innovation risks moving away from the public interest that it claims to be useful.
In short, AI can provide speed, scale and accuracy. Our human superpowers alone provide purpose, moral direction, and citizen legitimacy. The future of public institutions depends not only on how well they employ emerging technologies, but also on how wisely they combine the strengths of human judgment.
Technology should not replace what makes us human. It needs to be amplified. In a world where algorithms can predict, it is still up to the civil servants to decide. More and more, they must do so in wisdom, empathy, sincerity, the true superpower of our time.
author: Mauricio Covarrubias He is a professor at the National Institute of Government in Mexico. He holds a PhD. He completed a postdoc fellowship in government and public policy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He is the co-founder of the International Academy of Politics and Politics and Sciences.IAPAS). He can reach with [email protected] Continued on X (formerly Twitter). @omcovarrubias.
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