Policy for responsible use of AI in government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Policy by the Australian Government: “The Policy for the responsible use of AI in government ensures that government plays a leadership role in embracing AI for the benefit of Australians while ensuring its safe, ethical and responsible use, in line with community expectations. The policy:

  • provides a unified approach for government to engage with AI confidently, safely and responsibly, and realise its benefits
  • aims to strengthen public trust in government’s use of AI by providing enhanced transparency, governance and risk assurance
  • aims to embed a forward leaning, adaptive approach for government’s use of AI that is designed to evolve and develop over time…(More)”.

Policy Fit for the Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Primer by the Australian Government: “The Futures Primer is part of the “Policy Fit for the Future” project, building Australian Public Service capability to use futures techniques in policymaking through horizon scanning, visioning and scenario planning. These tools help anticipate and navigate future risks and opportunities.

The tools and advice can be adapted to any policy challenge, and reflect the views of global experts in futures and strategic foresight, both within and outside the APS…The Futures Primer offers a range of flexible tools and advice that can be adapted to any policy challenge. It reflects the views of global experts in futures and strategic foresight, both within and outside the APS…(More)”.

Data Protection Law and Emotion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Damian Clifford: “Data protection law is often positioned as a regulatory solution to the risks posed by computational systems. Despite the widespread adoption of data protection laws, however, there are those who remain sceptical as to their capacity to engender change. Much of this criticism focuses on our role as ‘data subjects’. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that we lack the capacity to act in our own best interests and, what is more, that our decisions have negative impacts on others. Our decision-making limitations seem to be the inevitable by-product of the technological, social, and economic reality. Data protection law bakes in these limitations by providing frameworks for notions such as consent and subjective control rights and by relying on those who process our data to do so fairly.

Despite these valid concerns, Data Protection Law and Emotion argues that the (in)effectiveness of these laws are often more difficult to discern than the critical literature would suggest, while also emphasizing the importance of the conceptual value of subjective control. These points are explored (and indeed, exposed) by investigating data protection law through the lens of the insights provided by law and emotion scholarship and demonstrating the role emotions play in our decision-making. The book uses the development of Emotional Artificial Intelligence, a particularly controversial technology, as a case study to analyse these issues.

Original and insightful, Data Protection Law and Emotion offers a unique contribution to a contentious debate that will appeal to students and academics in data protection and privacy, policymakers, practitioners, and regulators…(More)”.

Governing mediation in the data ecosystem: lessons from media governance for overcoming data asymmetries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Stefaan Verhulst in Handbook of Media and Communication Governance edited by Manuel Puppis , Robin Mansell , and Hilde Van den Bulck: “The internet and the accompanying datafication were heralded to usher in a golden era of disintermediation. Instead, the modern data ecology witnessed a process of remediation, or ‘hyper-mediation’, resulting in governance challenges, many of which underlie broader socioeconomic difficulties. Particularly, the rise of data asymmetries and silos create new forms of scarcity and dominance with deleterious political, economic and cultural consequences. Responding to these challenges requires a new data governance framework, focused on unlocking data and developing a more data pluralistic ecosystem. We argue for regulation and policy focused on promoting data collaboratives, an emerging form of cross-sectoral partnership; and on the establishment of data stewards, individuals/groups tasked with managing and responsibly sharing organizations’ data assets. Some regulatory steps are discussed, along with the various ways in which these two emerging stakeholders can help alleviate data scarcities and their associated problems…(More)”

Visualization for Public Involvement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Visualization methods have long been integral to the public involvement process for transportation planning and project development. From well-established methods such as conceptual sketches or photo simulations to the latest immersive technologies, state departments of transportation (DOTs) recognize that visualizations can significantly increase public understanding of a project’s appearance and physical impacts. Emerging methods such as interactive three-dimensional environments, virtual reality, and augmented reality can dramatically enhance public understanding of transportation options and design concepts…(More)”.

Citizens should be asked to do more

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Martin Wolf: “In an excellent “Citizens’ White Paper”, in partnership with participation charity Involve, Demos describes the needed revolution as follows, “We don’t just need new policies for these challenging times. We need new ways to tackle the policy challenges we face — from national missions to everyday policymaking. We need new ways to understand and negotiate what the public will tolerate. We need new ways to build back trust in politicians”. In sum, it states, “if government wants to be trusted by the people, it must itself start to trust the people.”

Bar chart of agreement that public should be involved in decision making on these issues (%) showing the public has clear ideas on where it should be most involved

The fundamental aim is to change the perception of government from something that politicians and bureaucrats do to us into an activity that involves not everyone, which is impossible, but ordinary people selected by lot. This, as I have noted, would be the principle of the jury imported into public life.

How might this work? The idea is to select representative groups of ordinary people affected by policies into official discussion on problems and solutions. This could be at the level of central, devolved or local government. The participants would not just be asked for opinions, but be actively engaged in considering issues and shaping (though not making) decisions upon them. The paper details a number of different approaches — panels, assemblies, juries, workshops and wider community conversations. Which would be appropriate would depend on the task…(More)”.

Policy fit for the future: the Australian Government Futures primer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Primer by Will Hartigan and Arthur Horobin: “Futures is a systematic exploration of probable, possible and preferable future developments to inform present-day policy, strategy and decision-making. It uses multiple plausible scenarios of the future to anticipate and make sense of disruptive change. It is also known as strategic foresight...

This primer provides an overview of Futures methodologies and their practical application to policy development and advice. It is a first step for policy teams and officers interested in Futures: providing you with a range of flexible tools, ideas and advice you can adapt to your own policy challenges and environments.

This primer was developed by the Policy Projects and Taskforce Office in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. We have drawn on expertise from inside and outside of government –including through our project partners, the Futures Hub at the National Security College in the Australian National University. 

This primer has been written by policy officers, for policy officers –with a focus on practical and tested approaches that can support you to create policy fit for the future…(More)”.

Training LLMs to Draft Replies to Parliamentary Questions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Watson Chua: “In Singapore, the government is answerable to Parliament and Members of Parliament (MPs) may raise queries to any Minister on any matter in his portfolio. These questions can be answered orally during the Parliament sitting or through a written reply. Regardless of the medium, public servants in the ministries must gather materials to answer the question and prepare a response.

Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) have already been applied to help public servants do this more effectively and efficiently. For example, Pair Search (publicly accessible) and the Hansard Analysis Tool (only accessible to public servants) help public servants search for relevant information in past Parliamentary Sittings relevant to the question and synthesise a response to it.

The existing systems draft the responses using prompt engineering and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). To recap, RAG consists of two main parts:

  • Retriever: A search engine that finds documents relevant to the question
  • Generator: A text generation model (LLM) that takes in the instruction, the question, and the search results from the retriever to respond to the question
A typical RAG system. Illustration by Hrishi Olickel, taken from here.

Using a pre-trained instruction-tuned LLM like GPT-4o, the generator can usually generate a good response. However, it might not be exactly what is desired in terms of verbosity, style and writing prose, and additional human post-processing might be needed. Extensive prompt engineering or few-shot learning can be done to mold the response at the expense of incurring higher costs from using additional tokens in the prompt…(More)”

Automating public services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Anna Dent: “…Public bodies, under financial stress and looking for effective solutions, are at risk of jumping on the automation bandwagon without critically assessing whether it’s actually appropriate for their needs, and whether the potential benefits outweigh the risks. To realise the benefits of automation and minimise problems for communities and public bodies themselves, a clear-eyed approach which really gets to grips with the risks is needed. 

The temptation to introduce automation to tackle complex social challenges is strong; they are often deep-rooted and expensive to deal with, and can have life-long implications for individuals and communities. But precisely because of their complex nature they are not the best fit for rules-based automated processes, which may fail to deliver what they set out to achieve. 

Bias is increasingly recognised as a critical challenge with automation in the public sector. Bias can be introduced through training data, and can occur when automated tools are disproportionately used on a particular community. In either case, the effectiveness of the tool or process is undermined, and citizens are at risk of discrimination, unfair targeting and exclusion from services. 

Automated tools and processes rely on huge amounts of data; in public services this will often mean personal information and data about us and our lives which we may or may not feel comfortable being used. Balancing everyone’s right to privacy with the desire for efficiency and better outcomes is rarely straightforward, and if done badly can lead to a breakdown in trust…(More)”.

The Tech Coup

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Marietje Schaake: “Over the past decades, under the cover of “innovation,” technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality—where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world—is terrible news for democracies and citizens.
In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies—from social media to artificial intelligence—have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can—and must—resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world.

Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world—and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late…(More)”.