A while ago, some asshole with a blog noted that we have a resource–a human resource–allocation problem that goes far beyond the question of ‘AI–Yes or no?’:

I haven’t figured out a pithy way to put this, but we need to redeploy tech workers to do useful things, such as moving the technological level of local, state, and the federal government into the 21st century, never mind 2024. Remember how, during the pandemic, unemployment benefits in D.C. (and other localities) had to be accessed through Internet Explorer (really), which most people don’t have on their phones–and D.C. libraries which do have terminals with were closed due to the pandemic, so people couldn’t file for benefits.

Admittedly, working for various branches of government is much less lucrative–and no possibility for vesting shares and so on. But somehow we need to deploy resources–which includes people–away from tech titans who are fascinated with Smell-o-vision and towards areas that desperately need this expertise.

Saahil Desai describes some babysteps in that direction:

In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act shook loose $15 million for the IRS to study the feasibility of creating its own program—and so began Direct File. The program could have been contracted out, as much of the government’s technology is. (The original, disastrous healthcare.gov was the end result of 60 contracts involving 33 outside vendors.) Instead it was made almost entirely by the government’s own programmers, product managers, and designers, Bridget Roberts, the head of the Direct File team, told me.

The government could not have made something like this even 10 years ago. Unlike in the pre-healthcare.gov days, “now there is a generation of civic-tech innovators who want to go into government or want to work with the government,” Donald Moynihan, a public-policy professor at Georgetown, told me. In the past decade, attention given to the government’s technological deficiencies has led to the creation of agencies such as the United States Digital Service and 18F—both of which hire tech workers for temporary stints in the public sector. Other agencies, such as Veterans Affairs, have hired more than 1,000 of their own tech workers. The salaries are nowhere near as good as in Silicon Valley, but surely a government gig can be more fulfilling than tinkering with the user experience for Instagram share buttons all day. Amid the tech layoffs in 2023, the government launched a tech-jobs board and endeavored to hire 22,000 tech workers. Last month, the federal government began pushing to hire AI talent by boosting salaries and introducing incentives such as student-loan repayment.

Ultimately, the fundamental reasons the government is bad at tech haven’t changed much. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, Dickerson told me: Too often, the government operates under a model of collecting a list of everything it wants in a tech product—a months-long endeavor in itself—enlisting a company that can check them all off, and then testing it only when basically all the code has been written. The government is “not capable of keeping up with the crushing wave of complex systems that are becoming more and more obsolete,” he said. Hiring processes remain a problem too. Because the government doesn’t have a good way to evaluate a candidate’s technical skills, it can take nine months or longer to wade through the applicant pool and make a hire, Jen Pahlka, the author of Recoding America, told me. “There’s more people who want to work in government than we can absorb,” she said.

Outside of some scientific applications, we probably don’t need AI, but I’m absolutely certain that making government accessible to people online would be a massive improvement in our quality of life, far better than giving the Mona Lisa six fingers and a big rack.