The advent of technology progressively challenging the need for humans in the performance of mundane tasks is a reality that has not only impacted the necessity of humans in certain of production functions, but their necessity in the delivery of 'public services'.
In a 1997 strategic planning workshop of the department of Home Affairs in South Africa, this breaking the ice question was asked to the then senior leadership, "if President Nelson Mandela were to announce the closure of the department of Home Affairs, what would you tell him as reasons not to close the department". The aim of the facilitator was to derive the purpose objectives of the department, what defined it's right of existence. The question was asked at a time being 'deployed' in the public service was a prestigious career move for new black bureaucrats that have just been employed as the 'post-apartheid mind of the new South African State'.
The capacity to think of the state without humans was as remote an activity as the reality of it happening. The question was not entertained for its inquest into the deeper strategic search for answers beyond those in the session, instead it was addressed for its threat to the livelihood of those employed in the department. After a 25 minutes remonstration, an agreement was reached to continue with the session without factoring in the possibility of a closure of the department by then President Nelson Mandela or any President in the future.
In the discussion though, a number of facilitative questions were allowed to stay as ventilated. One such question interrogated 'why should citizens have to be physically at the home affairs department for the services the department is providing?'. As answers were given, the facilitator probed into the possibility of the entire process of issuing 'citizen identity products' being streamlined to create citizen contact with the department at convenient service points that might require less to no human involvement. At the time, the 'service delivery science' had not developed to levels where 'the value of what citizens receive mattered more than how they get the service'.
Because science is 'less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that humans often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty, the migration to the centre of citizen value as a driver of prudent public service can no longer be ignored. During an epidemic, people gather as much information as they can, but misinformation may give way to active disinformation. In conditions of transition such as the one South Africa was undergoing, people gather as much information as they can, but misinformation may give way to active disinformation, and thus wrong trajectories might be the order of the day. Unmitigated, the transition length generally traps people in a liminal space,
It is a known fact that the growth in importance of the strategic imperative of being accountable to the needs of citizens, as opposed to being accountable to the means to meet the needs, could have only meant the re-engineering of decision journeys in the public administration of the state. Fast track to 2007, the department evolved to a point where the issuing of identity documents is done in collaboration with some banks. It is only a matter of time, and the extent to which the trust deficit between the state and potential private providers of the 'citizen identity products' is reduced that we might see the closure of certain of the service points by the department.
Whilst this discussion was about the shifts in how the 'public service' would be rendered, it was at the time not about the automation of the service to levels where machines could literally be 'the actual public service'. The advancement to the provision of the ID issuance service outside the physical buildings of the home affairs department represents the first jump of the many psychological jumps required to entrench the ethos of 'valuing what the citizen gets out of the Public Service that how it is obtained'. The potential integration of at birth data capturing procedures as a 'Home Affairs' service in hospitals and clinics, with the mid-human growth-course data capturing in the schooling system as a in-school 'Home Affairs' service, might automate the citizen identity issuance process to render irrelevant the many service points characterised by long queueing.
The simulation of human activities required to capture data, including collection of fingerprints, into machine intelligence is an innovation only delayed by the preparedness of governments to surrender the perceived power that goes with being in control of identifying humans and giving them citizenship. As this perceived power shifts in real terms into the realm of machine control and management, the value chain streamlining possibilities will unleash the productive capacity of the state to levels where identity as a citizen becomes the new facilitator of access to data-delay induced and otherwise available services. The productivity time savings and value as a percentage of GDP leakages can be reinvested into society in ways that might ignite a productivity and work ethic culture whose outputs and outcomes are yet to be computed.
The knowledge engineering (which is the application of rules to data in order to imitate the ultimate in human thought process) advantages of streamlining the 'citizen identity issuance' process would create machine generatable scenarios and permutations with limitless uses for planning and statistical, including advanced analytics, purposes. In public service terms this will create data and information pools whose accessibility will promote the intensity of non-rivalry in many a bureaucracies. Knowledge engineered from artificial public service portals and data sets will create exponentiality in the bureaucracy as the mind of the state never experienced before. The data mining opportunities to propel a analytics based 'new economy' creation, may spawn employment opportunities only a data and Informatiom exposed human mind can create.
The COVID19 enforced shifts in how we do business and government have upped the ante in all aspects of public service as no longer being the exclusive domain of government. The publicness of a service does no longer translate into the governmentness of the provider. In fact, it is now clear that it is the value of what citizens receive that matters than who provides it. The disruptions that followed society's response to COVID19 have decimated the notions of what is public about the public service that cannot be executed by those in the public who are not in the Public Service. The acceleration of online livelihoods to avoid physical contacts as restricted by the public health response imposing social distancing, has made the search for goods and services, including traditional public goods, to be vulnerable to the algorithms of search engines that have 'othered' service providers as a function of programming. Services that would traditionally be available to persons at specific geographical spaces have all of a sudden found access to users beyond physical borders.
It will be societies that embrace the shifts in livelihood opportunities created by artificial intelligence as a key driver of the fourth industrial revolution which will determine the competitiveness of the mind of their state. Traditionally the mind of the state has been thought of only in government terms, AI will aggregate the most of this mind into machines, and access will determine who can best provide value that matters to the needs of citizens. The social character of the public service will congregate around on what matters to citizens, including the possibility of citizens volunteering themselves to being governed in a virtual space. It will be the trust in the service and how that is encrypted to give an acceptable modicum of safety, security and privacy that will determine the new publicness or publics.
Public Administration and Public Service as we know them have fundamentally changed. What has not changed is public administration and public service. Organs of State are fast fizzling into a collaborative realm of citizen engagement that the boundaries are blurring to a level the necessity of government is becoming more and more political that for functionality reasons.
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
Comments
Post a Comment