AI Could Lead to a Golden Era of Government Transparency
Peter Thiel says that holding back artificial intelligence (AI) invites the Anti-Christ. AI critics warn that government adoption invites the Surveillance State. Between techno-mysticism and techno-paranoia, the public is told it must choose between damnation and dystopia. That’s a false choice. The real question isn’t whether our government should use AI, but how—whether these tools deepen opacity or make the machinery of the state radically visible to citizens.
The federal government is already knee-deep in AI. Late last year, the Office of Management and Budget catalogued more than two thousand active AI systems across forty-one federal agencies—from cybersecurity and finance to health services and law enforcement. Most of these aren’t the stuff of science fiction; they’re administrative workhorses designed to process paperwork faster, flag anomalies, or predict where resources are most needed. In short, AI is being adopted in government for the same reason private firms adopted it years ago: efficiency.
Of course, it only takes one secret algorithm buried in the FBI—or one undisclosed system in a sister agency—to justify fears of a surveillance state. But the answer isn’t to ban technology from government. It’s to demand that technology make government visible. Every new tool should clear public sightlines, not cloud them.
Generative AI excels at one thing governments chronically fail at: sorting through oceans of information and making it usable. The biggest divide between citizens and the officials who serve them isn’t ideology—it’s access. Civil servants swim in data while the public drowns in paperwork. The right kind of AI can close that gap by letting any citizen ask a question and get the type of answer once reserved for insiders with a badge or a staff credential.
Start with the money. Every budget fight, every backroom deal, ultimately traces back to where tax dollars come from and where they go. Yet, citizens still see only the blur of billion-dollar categories (e.g., education, defense, infrastructure) instead of line-by-line decisions. AI could change that. Imagine being able to trace a dollar from your paycheck to the program it funds and then seeing how well that program performs. Transparency at that level wouldn’t just expose waste, it would rebuild trust by letting voters verify, in real time, whether government is doing what it promised.
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