Jennifer Pahlka: prediction

Transcript context

…As you know, government does not typically have its own AI, not in the United States. As AI becomes more important, will that lead to a de facto mass privatization through procurement? The government will contract out services to the major AI companies. That will be done privately. Procurement will become far more important. The government itself — it won’t quite vanish, but it will be fundamentally different than what we’ve all grown up with. Is that just going to happen? I think that there is a world in which you get a government with enough technical competence to procure AI and manage AI well. The problem with our procurement today is that we buy software the way we buy pencils and cars. We’ve bought a thing. AI isn’t like that, and actually, software isn’t like that. This is a lesson we should have learned in the Internet era, and now we need to learn even better in this AI era, is that you can’t spend five years developing requirements and sending it out for bid, and then having it come back, and then say, “Okay, I bought this thing.” You need the internal competence to do that process far better, far faster, and then to actually own and run that software. It has to be yours. I think we could do that. There are rumors that DOGE is actually pro-insourcing more tech talent in government. I know you’re not hearing about that now. It may just be a rumor, and it may not be true, so don’t quote me on this. I certainly think that folks in Musk’s world came in and looked at government, and said, “How do you even operate with so little technical competence in-house? That’s crazy.” And it is crazy. They’re right about that. We’ll either end up, I think, even further privatizing not just the software, but the whole operations as the software and the operations are increasingly melded — again, this is not new — or we’ll be forced finally to gain the internal competence that we have always needed and start to do this a little bit better. Let’s say you’re the nation of Peru, and AI becomes more important. You run a lot of your education system through American AI, a lot of your military, your cybersecurity, processing of social services. At the end of all that, after, I don’t know, 15 years, are you even a sovereign nation still? Are we seeing this fundamental shift in what a government is? If the US government does something, at least it’s US AI. Other than the US and China, it’s far from clear how many countries will have their own AI. What’s going to become of Peru?…

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