Elon Musk has fired thousands of United States government employees, and plans to rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to do those jobs [File: Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo] Is Elon Musk planning to use artificial intelligence to run the US government? That seems to be his plan, but experts say it is a “very bad idea”.
Musk has fired tens of thousands of federal government employees through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and he reportedly requires the remaining workers to send the department a weekly email featuring five bullet points describing what they accomplished that week. Recommended Stories
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Since that will no doubt flood DOGE with hundreds of thousands of these types of emails, Musk is relying on artificial intelligence to process responses and help determine who should remain employed. Part of that plan reportedly is also to replace many government workers with AI systems.
It’s not yet clear what any of these AI systems look like or how they work—something Democrats in the United States Congress are demanding to be filled in on—but experts warn that utilising AI in the federal government without robust testing and verification of these tools could have disastrous consequences.“To use AI tools responsibly, they need to be designed with a particular purpose in mind. They need to be tested and validated. It’s not clear whether any of that is being done here,” says Cary Coglianese, a professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania.Coglianese says that if AI is being used to make decisions about who should be terminated from their job, he’d be “very sceptical” of that approach. He says there is a very real potential for mistakes to be made, for the AI to be biased […]
Elon Musk wants to use AI to run US gov’t, but experts say ‘very bad’ idea
