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PoliticsJuly 30, 2018

NZ’s public sector needs to get on board with AI, or the future is bleak

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Trusting machines to predict citizens’ need for targeted resources can be damaging and increase bias. New Zealand has no choice but to get onboard.

When you think about it, a lot of the services the state provides are ones that you might not wish to be party to: criminal prosecution, incarceration, tax investigation, deportation, and child protection services all come to mind. Being on the receiving end of these services when you really don’t qualify can be harmful – perhaps an example of that puzzling phrase “unnecessary harm”. Even the process of establishing that you are not in “need” of such services can be unpleasant, expensive, and stigmatising.

Most people are law abiding, so directing these services where they are needed is like finding a needle in a haystack. Relying on human expertise entirely can introduce bias or blind spots and doesn’t allow scarce resources to be directed to best effect since you don’t have a view of the totality of any issue, nor necessarily what combination of policies and actions most usefully address it.

Using algorithms to target resources can and has caused harm.

Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we are more aware than ever that the information which comes to us via social media or internet search is selected by algorithms trained on our past behaviour and the behaviour of those like us. Generally, the data upon which such algorithms are trained are biased, and if the creators of the algorithms aren’t diligent, such bias will get built into the algorithm. The algorithm then becomes an instrument to perpetuate bias or prejudice. In the Facebook and Microsoft image libraries, it’s more common for people to be labelled as women in images containing kitchen objects; this builds in a propensity to identify men as women when they are next to stoves. In the US, Google searches for African-American sounding names such as Trevon, Lakisha, and Darnell are 25 percent more likely to return arrest-related advertisements than for those with white-sounding names.

NZ is too small to not use this technology.

It’d be tempting to ban all use of algorithms for targeting “services” where a false positive or false negative is harmful. That wouldn’t get rid of bias and prejudice, but it would reduce the scale of the impact and not systematise this prejudice. Unfortunately, New Zealand does not have that luxury. Because of our small size and relative lack of wealth, our future relative standard of living depends on the effective adoption of algorithms for resource allocation.

A surprisingly realistic stock image of a teacher and students

Government resource expenditure falls into two categories.  It’s either expenditure on things that scale with population, such as front-line delivery (police, teachers, firefighters etc); or expenditure on things that scale with the complexity of the society, such as whether we have a regulated currency, a legislature, social support programmes, economic development policy etc.

Unfortunately for us, government resources (money) more or less scales with population (though Singapore or the OPEC countries buck that trend, for example).

We are a complex society, at least as complex as much larger or wealthier countries – think Japan, Australia, UK, even Singapore – so we have just as much need for the stuff that scales with complexity as those bigger countries. Except we have much less money to spend or people to do the work.

Something has to give. If we don’t find smart ways of efficiently delivering services and making decisions, we won’t be able to attend to all the needs of people living in a healthy, prosperous and happy society. And over time this relative lack will result in other countries having better standards of living, all other things being equal.

Which means our young people will leave for places with better jobs, education, and healthcare, and we’ll be less attractive to immigrants. It’s a downward spiral from there.

That’s the downside of not using AI and the like to do things smarter. But there is an additional upside if we do adopt this technology. Large countries have to struggle with issues that we don’t, at least not to the same degree: coordination and communication, physical distance or multiple time zones, jurisdictional issues, or extreme societal heterogeneity. These issues can be a real drag on efficiency and effectiveness. Perhaps the judicious and effective use of algorithms in the public sector will level the playing field, or even allow our small size to become an advantage.

While there are justified concerns about using algorithms for the targeted delivery of government services, we really have no choice in the matter. We just need to figure out how to do it well and ensure that the public servants responsible have sufficient maturity and expertise to do the job.

We need fewer generalists and more specialists in public sector leadership.

The public service is largely led by generalists, so it’s rare for specialist skills to be present when they’re needed. It’s harder to take measured risks when you need to rely entirely on someone else for your information. The State Services Commission has a deliberate policy of selecting generalists for public sector leadership, ostensibly to promote stability in the public service by forming a large pool of experienced leaders able to be parachuted into vacancies as needed.

This policy, while directed at chief executives and their direct reports, will have an effect on every layer of management, and lead to specialists feeling discouraged from pursuing leadership careers. We expect hospitals to be led by doctors, universities to be led by academics, laboratories to be led by scientists – why should positions in the public service, accountable for technical work such as building machine learning tools, be led by generalists?

Whether we call it AI, neural networks, algorithmic decision support, machine learning models, or predictive analytics, the public sector must adopt this technology if we are to flourish as a nation. But there’s great risk if it’s done poorly. To ensure that it’s done well we need appropriate checks, balances and ethics frameworks – which, to their credit, the public sector is already creating –  and we need those responsible for this technology to understand it at a level that they can provide effective oversight while pushing forwards.

Editor’s note: This article was edited on September 25 2018 to remove reference to the Allegheny Family Screening Tool and research by NZ academics, following correspondence with the researchers involved

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Simon Bridges addresses the party faithful
Simon Bridges addresses the party faithful

PoliticsJuly 29, 2018

Simon Bridges’ big conference speech: did he drum up a new National vision?

Simon Bridges addresses the party faithful
Simon Bridges addresses the party faithful

In presenting himself with a new, softer image, the National leader’s conference speech sought to move beyond relitigating the fights of the past, writes Ben Thomas

Simon Bridges is keen to avoid the mistakes of the past.

The video warming up his speech to the National Party conference today showed a montage of his life, including still photos of police cars and press reports from his time as a prosecutor, held together by cut shots of the National leader drumming diagetically along to the score in a studio, all as if to say: this soundtrack is extremely legal.

As the opposition leader less than one year into a new government headed by a popular prime minister, Bridges main task is to move on from relitigating the fights of the past.

He wasn’t helped by the conference special guest, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who yesterday called the 2017 election result “unjust and unfair”, with the party finding itself out of power after nine years despite a large plurality of votes.

That sense of grievance represents an ongoing danger for such a uniquely large opposition: rather than styling itself as a keen and fresh government in waiting, there could be a temptation to act more like a government in exile; the Antipodean equivalent of mid-20th century Europeans gathering in upstairs London flats, dressed in epaulettes and brocade, to hold mock cabinet meetings for far away lands from which they had been driven by revolution or war.

That was the thinking behind his release of a rival medicinal cannabis bill this week that policy watchers declared better than the government’s attempt – an unexpected and largely successful raid into Labour territory. Far from being an obstructive “opposition from hell” as some had worried, Bridges seems intent on getting National ready to take the reins again in 2020.

Bridges said he didn’t want to be in government “just because Labour are incompetent”, but because National had a compelling vision for the future.

That’s just as well. It’s easy to identify the gap between Phil Twyford’s ambition and the reality of being able to build 100,000 new Kiwibuild homes in the face of land use, infrastructure and construction capacity constraints. It’s harder to explain what the National government would done to help the housing crisis it spent years denying existed. As Bridges himself said in his speech, there’s a perception the left “cares” more than the right does, and even if its not true as a general rule, National didn’t help its cause on housing or mental health.

If the recent regional tour has had any effect, his public speaking seems more fluent and confident. If his style has become slightly more hokey, as if he has been presenting It’s In The Bag dozens of times rather than National’s vision of the future, it’s also more sincere and missing the perpetual hint of a smirk that used to be a trademark.

The bulk of Bridges’ speech was recognisable from the past ten years: talk of New Zealand as a “confident” nation, trumpeting the reversal in Trans-Tasman immigration during the National years, and boosting the importance of the economy. Doing the crime if you do the time, and no free lunches for beneficiaries.

But the speech was setting up a softer public image for the opposition leader. He was joined onstage by his wife Natalie, who he described as a “leftie”, and – after they were rounded up – his sons and new daughter. The new policy announcement was about children.

Bridges said the young need “less Facebook, and more facetime”. Without seeing the capitalisation in Bridges’ speech notes, it wasn’t clear whether he meant more personal attention for children, or that National planned a bold pivot-to-video strategy for our primary schools.

It turned out to be the former:  Bridges promising smaller class sizes for primary schools. The details will be filled in by education spokesperson Nikki Kaye through discussion documents and policy papers in time for a comprehensive platform at the 2020 election. It will require significantly more teachers than the 1500 new positions pledged by the Labour government in this year’s budget; it will allow National to contrast payrises for possibly striking teachers with better teaching standards for kids. And it shows off Simon Bridges, young father, talking about the opportunities he wants all kids to have.

It’s all about stressing the positive for National for now: restoring charter schools, more teachers. There’s no talk yet of whether the significant big ticket items of identified waste, such as free tertiary fees, would be rolled back under National. Those are tougher questions, the necessary trade-offs the government is finding after years of casual promises.


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