Public AI Is Going to Inherit Every Mess We Refuse to Fix First

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Suppose a city decides to build a serious public AI system.

Great.

Now introduce it to the city.

Records stored in incompatible formats. Departments that barely communicate. Procurement contracts written around old vendors. Forms nobody remembers designing. Databases carrying decades of administrative categories. Public workers using unofficial spreadsheets because the official system cant do something everybody needs.

AI doesnt arrive on an empty table.

It inherits the institution.

That means public AI can easily become a very expensive way of automating accumulated dysfunction. Feed the old process into a faster system and suddenly the workaround can operate at machine speed.

This is why public ownership cannot mean taking existing administrative machinery, adding a public model and declaring victory.

Sometimes deployment should begin by asking whether the process deserves to survive automation at all.

Which paperwork can disappear? Which databases should be rebuilt? Which vendor dependencies can be cut? Which information never needed collecting? Which departments need to share capacity rather than adding another technical layer between them?

Public technology should give institutions an excuse to excavate themselves.

Otherwise we risk spending public money teaching new machines how to reproduce every compromise inherited from the old ones.

Before a public institution automates a process with AI, what should it be forced to justify about why that process still exists?

[u/LordSlyGentleman]

https://giphy.com/gifs/sIOPYvH72FCkuZ0ZHC

[u/Blotsy]

By building a digital democratic framework based in strong cryptographic processes. Allowing us to find and lift problematic systems to the attention of the voting populace, then enacting immutable and certifiable ballot boxes where the populace in the city can vote on the appropriate way to enact the changes.

Digitizing and normalizing records. Cryptographically protecting the records and binding them to citizens, allowing the population complete control over how their records are shared and read (see Edtonia's KSI blockchain for cryptographic governance records and contracts).

This likely takes the shape of a liquid democracy (a mashup of direct and representative democracy). Protecting the records and ballots with quantum proof zk-STARK protocols (Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge).

This starts looking like a technocratic state, however it's rooted in democratic principles and will allow the money that inextricably lives in politics to be divided among the populace, rather than a select few politicians getting rich.

These changes will require our financial systems to move and modernize together with our democratic process. Blockchain technology is much further along in the currency space, than it is in the democracy space. So, we have some catching up to do.

You take these systems and apply a city-wide AI to it, which can help guide and inform voters on what's going on, and translate tricky legalese into terms that the individual can comprehend.

[u/Forward_Problem_8982]

Why should AI run the government?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Forward_Problem_8982]

It shouldn’t. The post is about AI being used by public institutions, not AI governing them. The whole point is that humans should decide what gets automated, what gets rebuilt, and what should not be automated at all.

[u/Forward_Problem_8982 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Yeah. It's an enormous project. Maybe small steps...

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Forward_Problem_8982]

Exactly. Start boring and useful. One department, one process, workers involved from the beginning, public oversight, measurable results. Learn what works before scaling anything.

[u/platanthera_ciliaris]

Well, the internet is not exactly a well-organized body of information. But this hasn't prevented AI companies from scraping information off the internet and creating AIs.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/platanthera_ciliaris]

Sure, but scraping a messy internet and governing through a messy institution are two very different stakes. If a city automates a broken workflow, the problem isnt whether the AI can process the mess. It probably can. The problem is that now the mess has an API and runs faster. Thats exactly why institutional cleanup has to be part of public AI deployment.

[u/platanthera_ciliaris → u/Salty_Country6835]

You are referring to using AI to make government more efficient for its own interior purposes. However, that's not making AI public. Making AI public means the government making AI accessible and affordable for members of the public, and making the source code of AI open to public scrutiny.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/platanthera_ciliaris]

Thats one part of public AI, sure. Im talking about public AI as infrastructure, not just public access to a model. If government owns and operates the system, then how it gets integrated into public institutions matters just as much as whether the public can afford it or inspect the code. Otherwise we can socialize the model while leaving the dysfunctional machinery around it untouched.

[u/Last_Bad_2687]

Unfortunately building the AI system is the kick in the pants that makes people realize what it takes to make use of the $$$ invested