AI and bureaucratic productivity

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The August 6 Economist discussed AI threats to government bureaucracy:

"How AI is breaking the British state: Equipped with models and agents, citizens could bring government to a halt"
"From parking tickets to planning, the state is under siege by AI: The people-versus-state arms race"
"The tragedy of the commons, AI edition: Britain’s employment courts are clogged with AI cases"

On August 7, Henry Farrell weighed in, with "The downside of robot solutionism: Mapping the Abelard Snazz feedback loop" (see here for an Abelard Snazz summary). And on August 10, Cory Doctorow added "The bureaucratic arms-race is mutually assured destruction".

These articles are about how new kinds of automation can paradoxically decrease the productivity of bureaucracy by increasing the productivity of submissions, denials, and appeals.

I discussed a different dimension of the problem in "What AI is (not) good for?" (8/4/2024):

[T]he main effect of several such out-sourced innovations in my own workplace has been to force many departments and centers to hire new human employees to deal with the bureaucratic "help" thus provided, which semi-automatically monitors lots of newly-tracked details through badly-designed interfaces to ill-fitting data models. Which is not a very good imitation of the 19th-century successes of industrial automation…

This seems to be a problem with the people designing, selling, and buying such systems, rather than with the underlying technologies. But as long as administrative productivity is defined by bureaucrats, I don't think it will be easy to fix the problems.

From David Segal, "So, Human Resources Is Making You Miserable?", NYT 8/3/2024:

A recent Business Insider story, titled “Everyone Hates Workday,” asked why half of the Fortune 500 uses this particular piece of software — which handles benefits and recruiting and facilitates pay equity analysis — despite creating “mountains of busywork for everyone.”

WorkDay's web site boasts

At Workday, AI is at the core of our platform. And as part of your workflow, it powers intelligent predictions and automation like no one else can.

As the Business Insider story explains — and as everyone I know with WorkDay Experience can testify — it also creates layers of counter-productive frustration.