On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one published in the final year of the Biden administration, and includes many disturbing-seeming plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI.
Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and wellbeing, nuclear reactor safety and more.
Consider these examples. The Health and Human Services’ (HHS) office of administration for children and families hired the world’s “scariest AI company”, Palantir – notorious for its work on behalf of the military, the CIA and ICE – to scan all grant applications to flag those not ideologically aligned with the administration’s dictates. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is developing an AI system to assess the “potential for misconduct for newly admitted inmates”, routing people into high-security confinement before they have actually done anything wrong in their custody. These read like programs fit for a Philip K Dick or George Orwell novel.
Other use cases insert AI into life-and-death decision making. The Department of Veterans Affairs is developing an AI that will listen in on calls to the veterans crisis line, and then gather information from external databases to assess the mental state and suicide risk of the caller.
The Department of Energy is testing the use of AI to control nuclear reactors, targeting a way to autonomously respond to potential nuclear safety incidents. Here’s one that’s disturbing for its retirement, rather than its deployment: the state department has ended a program to use AI to forecast mass civilian killings, which had been intended to aid conflict prevention.
While it’s easy to raise questions about these and similar uses of AI, the reality is that any of these programs could be implemented responsibly. In some cases, like the HHS system, the AI might be enforcing alignment to a policy prescription that opponents abhor. But that concern is more about the policy itself rather than the idea that agencies should comply with executive orders.
In other cases, there may even be bipartisan agreement on the goal, like taking urgent action to help veterans at risk of self-harm. Lots of work and validation is needed to prove AI safe and effective for these use cases and convince the public it is appropriate, but the idea is plausible.
In other cases, a scary-sounding AI use may not even be new. The use of predictive methods and statistics to assign prisoner security classifications goes back decades, even if such systems are often biased and ineffective.
Using autonomous systems for model predictive control (MPC) of…
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