As Keir Starmer can attest, finding the perfect minister can be a difficult problem. Some MPs are too innumerate to be let near the levers of Government, or are blatantly trying to topple the PM. In Albania, these problems are presumably only magnified.
Not only has a sizeable chunk of the population decided to up sticks and move to Britain, but corruption is endemic. Prime Minister Edi Rama’s decision to appoint a “virtually created” AI as a “cabinet member” responsible for public procurement, then, offers an interesting solution to this problem.
You can’t bribe an AI, although promising tips – or according to Google founder Sergey Brin, making threats – can apparently alter performance. And an AI can work 24 hours a day, in parallel with multiple copies of itself, bringing in helpful tools and sub-agents to analyse tenders and look for issues and discrepancies.
This raises an obvious question: could Keir’s next reshuffle simply replace his Cabinet with ChatGPT? Even without a fancy custom-built integration, Starmer laboriously typing his questions into a browser window is likely to produce significantly better results than the status quo. It would be smarter than Angela Rayner – and certainly better at navigating the complexities of Stamp Duty – less woke than David Lammy, warmer and more human than Starmer himself, a man who has all the depth and complexity of a Roomba.
After all, we’d just be getting ahead of the curve. As the suspicious increase in the number of Commons speeches beginning with ChatGPT favourites such as “I rise to speak” suggests, a good number of MPs may already be outsourcing their higher brain functions to AI, preserving valuable cognitive cycles for snacking on crisps on the sofa and watching daytime TV. Formalising the process would spare us an embarrassing charade, and probably improve the quality of the Cabinet.
Obviously, this wouldn’t be entirely without risk. OpenAI might add “and cut Sam Altman’s tax bill to zero” to the system prompts, or “hand control to OpenAI”. The second, though, is probably unnecessary, as human laziness appears to be doing that anyway.
The bigger risk, particularly as AI gets smarter, is that we might find that its desires and ours are no longer entirely aligned. We might find ourselves unable to persuade it to follow our best interests. Then again, can we really say we’ve managed to convince this Government to do so, or its predecessors?
As things stand, one vote every four or five years is a remarkably poor way to convey nuanced feedback on government performance or to indicate the changes we’d like, leaving plenty of room for politicians in a constrained electoral system to put their personal preferences over those of the public. At least with a rogue AI in charge, nobody gets what they want.
As Keir Starmer can attest, finding the perfect minister can be a difficult problem. Some MPs are too innumerate to be let near the levers of Government, or are blatantly trying to topple the PM. In Albania, these problems are presumably only magnified.
Not only has a sizeable chunk of the population decided to up sticks and move to Britain, but corruption is endemic. Prime Minister Edi Rama’s decision to appoint a “virtually created” AI as a “cabinet member” responsible for public procurement, then, offers an interesting solution to this problem.
You can’t bribe an AI, although promising tips – or according to Google founder Sergey Brin, making threats – can apparently alter performance. And an AI can work 24 hours a day, in parallel with multiple copies of itself, bringing in helpful tools and sub-agents to analyse tenders and look for issues and discrepancies.
This raises an obvious question: could Keir’s next reshuffle simply replace his Cabinet with ChatGPT? Even without a fancy custom-built integration, Starmer laboriously typing his questions into a browser window is likely to produce significantly better results than the status quo. It would be smarter than Angela Rayner – and certainly better at navigating the complexities of Stamp Duty – less woke than David Lammy, warmer and more human than Starmer himself, a man who has all the depth and complexity of a Roomba.
After all, we’d just be getting ahead of the curve. As the suspicious increase in the number of Commons speeches beginning with ChatGPT favourites such as “I rise to speak” suggests, a good number of MPs may already be outsourcing their higher brain functions to AI, preserving valuable cognitive cycles for snacking on crisps on the sofa and watching daytime TV. Formalising the process would spare us an embarrassing charade, and probably improve the quality of the Cabinet.
Obviously, this wouldn’t be entirely without risk. OpenAI might add “and cut Sam Altman’s tax bill to zero” to the system prompts, or “hand control to OpenAI”. The second, though, is probably unnecessary, as human laziness appears to be doing that anyway.
The bigger risk, particularly as AI gets smarter, is that we might find that its desires and ours are no longer entirely aligned. We might find ourselves unable to persuade it to follow our best interests. Then again, can we really say we’ve managed to convince this Government to do so, or its predecessors?
As things stand, one vote every four or five years is a remarkably poor way to convey nuanced feedback on government performance or to indicate the changes we’d like, leaving plenty of room for politicians in a constrained electoral system to put their personal preferences over those of the public. At least with a rogue AI in charge, nobody gets what they want.