Danny Crichton in City Journal: Digital quantification determines Americans’ quality of life. Algorithms select job applicants for interviews and employees for performance bonuses. They aggregate stories and products as we shop for news and goods, matching our preferences to the infinite bounty on offer. And they determine which homes we can buy, purchases we can make, and investments we can pursue. In love, the whims of Hinge’s matching algorithms will determine our romantic fate; in health, a nonprofit network will use its algorithm to allocate a kidney or liver donation—saving one life over another.
Algorithms dominate our lives because commerce dominates our lives. Competitive companies have a strong economic incentive to replace expensive and inattentive human decision-makers with reliable and cheap computational ones. For most, the weeks-long work of securing a mortgage, for example, has been replaced by faster digital approvals available through a website or app. The transition is so complete that the rapturous wonder of these new technologies has mostly subsided, replaced by astonishment when we stumble upon the old ways such things used to be done.
Government, ironically, is one place where direction by algorithm has barely made a dent. Even after decades of digitalization and “Government 2.0” initiatives, the plodding ways of yesteryear remain the ponderous processes of today. Examples abound. Social Security disability decisions take three to six months, with more than 1 million people waiting in the queue. Applying for a passport takes six to eight weeks, which the State Department recently described as returning to “our pre-pandemic norm”—as if that were cause for celebration. Immigration decisions frequently take a year or longer to process, while Americans applying for the Global Entry travel program have experienced wait times expanding to almost a year. Potential defense and intelligence professionals have seen security-clearance approvals extend to 170 days in 2023, almost double from the year before.
The yawning performance gap between the private and public spheres represents a crisis. State incapacity wastes taxpayer funds and time, while deepening pessimism about the U.S. government’s basic competence. Companies and governments have transitioned to digital record systems over the past few decades, but only the private sector has taken advantage of the speed and efficiency offered by artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Yet, despite the success of algorithms across the private sector, critics would all but ban their entry into government decision-making, worried that their “black box” nature makes them incompatible with democratic transparency.
Rather than enter a technological cul-de-sac, federal, state, and local governments must stay competitive with the private sector’s best practices. That means taking more humans out of the decision-making loop. Humans and machines are both ultimately black boxes; decision systems can be intentionally designed for optimal transparency and due process. Far from a computational dictator usurping the powers of free citizens, AI, properly implemented, is just another extension of a well-functioning republic.
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