DIGITAL SOCIETY AND AI PROGRESS IN 30 COUNTRIES
By Frank A McDonough | Published on October 11, 2018
Governments today are transforming from electronic government to
digital government (from E to D). What can we learn from their progress?
The ICA (https://ica-it.org) supported by GoV2u (http://gov2u.org/ ) convened ninety delegates representing thirty-one countries, plus the European Commission, OECD, and the World Bank to discuss their progress with AI and the digital society. The delegates met in Helsinki, Finland in early September, 2018 for meetings and workgroups.
The discussions focused in three areas.
1. Organizing for AI.
Can governments manage today’s opportunities with organizations developed in the past for legacy systems and e-government? The answer seem to be “no.” In Helsinki, governments reported they are creating new positions, organizations, and ministries for the Digital Society.
Sweden has a new agency for digital innovation.
New Zealand has a Minister for Government Digital Services.
In Finland, a new Digital Service Agency will begin operation in 2020.
Mexico has a sub commission on AI.
Canada has a new minister for Digital Government.
Finland has the D9 AI Service Assistance team that helps organizations to launch and manage AI projects.
Currently the team has 66 ongoing projects.
2. Governance of AI.
Governments are edgy about the activities and business practices of Google and Facebook and others in the social media industry. Canada, for example, reports that only 33% of the population is comfortable with AI.
While countries in the European Union plan to co-create and collaborate with the EU, OECD, other governments, and the private sector in AI and the Digital Society, they will do so in a controlled and regulated environment. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), March 2018, provides the overall governance framework for many
attending countries in Helsinki giving consumers control of their data, and the right to be forgotten by the Googles and the Facebooks and related companies that thrive on consumer data. This regulation affects companies located in and outside the European Union including U.S. companies doing business in the EU.
Individual countries are augmenting the GDPR with country specific regulations. One example is Finland’s “Ethical Information Policy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" that will govern secondary use of health data.
3. Applications.
Nations reported on many second stage AI applications involving data mining and predictive analytics.
Predict heath care outbreaks (Canada)
Predict former inmates likely to return to jail (Canada)
Using a biometric passport (Kyrgyzstan)
Responding to panicked elders living alone (Singapore)
Monitoring agricultural grant compliance using satellite image data (Estonia)
Advancing from forms to conversation with users (Finland)
Predicting the probability of committing suicide (Denmark)
Screening for cancer (Denmark)
Canada reported on a major document analysis project conducted using IBM’s Watson technology. The task was to determine if each of 65,000 files has value and should be preserved or tossed. Doing the job manually could take about180 person years with a probable accuracy in the low 80 percent category. After training, Watson completed the task in six months with an estimated 95% accuracy.
Conclusion. ICA’s 52 nd annual conference in Helsinki, Finland attended by 90 officials representing 31 countries featured numerous examples of policies, applications, and organizational approaches to AI and the digital society.