Artificial Intelligence for Government: Beware of the shiny new typewriter

Just last month on 22 and 23 June, the United Nations Public Service Forum 2017 took place in The Hague to celebrate public service delivery and to discuss how innovation is shaping the government of the future as well as how to accelerate such innovation. One of the technologies considered to be fundamental in shaping the government of the future is Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the ever-increasing amount of data collected through a wide variety of sources and sensors, the potential for computers to learn from this data and take over certain tasks is increasing. Although the potential of technological innovation is often overrated in the short term and underrated in the long term, it seems that AI is treated as the'shiny new typewriter' that we should all be a bit careful of. AI is seen as having the potential to do a lot of valuable work currently done by humans, specifically routine work.