Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence are two of the hottest technology trends right now. Even though the two technologies have highly different developing parties and applications, researchers have been discussing and exploring their combination.

 

By definition, a blockchain is a distributed, decentralized, immutable ledger used to store encrypted data. On the other hand, AI is the engine or the “brain” that will enable analytics and decision making from the data collected.

 

In Governmental Technologies these two tools are one the most important things that can be used in near future. Its nothing more than innovations GovTech consist of. 

 

This chapter is going to show how AI and Blockchain are connected with the GovTech, the reason why those two technologies will shape the GovTech industry in the nearest future.

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AI may be used in many ways, as for improving the lives of citizens and governmental efficiency, and as for tyranny, like the one Orwell described once.

 

One of the simple examples of employing AI is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s chatbot called Emma. The basis of this work was regular English used in official documents. The result of the work was about 500 000 answered questions per month. This kind of using AI is how employed by other agencies, local authorities, etc.

 

Another case of employing AI was in Michigan. There was a problem with evaluating the material of the city’s pipes because of the lack of paper documentation. Instead of digging up the pipe, AI analyzed 55 000 reports of households about the age of houses and properness of sewage system work. As a result, time and money were saved gradually.

 

Another example is less positive. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security proposed to use AI to evaluate if a person who seeks asylum in the US will be a proper member of a community. Face-detecting technology was crucial for this plan. AI was wanted to be used also as the detector of potential terrorists. However, technology was not employed in case of public protests.

 

So, AI is a great power, which results depend on the moral values, principles, and purposes of an employer. 

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AI-Augmented Government

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Now AI has a great space for action in case of the global technological advancement. Cognitive technologies are already having a profound impact on government work, with more dramatic effects to come. AI-based applications could potentially reduce backlogs, cut costs, overcome resource constraints, free workers from mundane tasks, improve the accuracy of projections, inject intelligence into scores of processes and systems, and handle many other tasks humans can’t easily do on our own, such as predicting fraudulent transactions, identifying criminal suspects via facial recognition, and sifting millions of documents in real time for the most relevant content. 

 

AI presents governments with new choices about how to get work done, with some work fully automated, some divided among people and machines, and some performed by people but enhanced by machines.

 

Government areas in which AI can be used:

 

• Health care. Replacing human customer care executive is chatbots that are faster and intelligent to provide appropriate help to both healthcare professionals and patients. The UK launched medical bot that communicates with patients and answers basic question. It helps doctors to save time by avoiding talking to patients who actually do not need the medical care. 

• Transportation. Singapore uses AI for the support of intelligent transportation system to avoid traffic jams and other issues that helps to do work without unnecessary time expenditures. Pittsburg employs intelligent streetlights to promote energy saving and secure the cut of travel times by 25 percent and idling times by 40 percent.

• Law enforcement. The city of Chicago is attempting to prevent violent crimes before they happen. The city’s predictive analytics unit runs spatial algorithms on 911 call data to identify where and when violent crimes or robberies are most likely to happen.

• Defense and national security. The United Kingdom’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue has developed a natural-language-based solution to monitor the internet for signs of radicalization. Of the total sample of 42,000 individuals identified online, nearly 800 were found to indicate signs of extremism.

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Using Cognitive Technologies to Redesign Public Sector

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Decades ago, many sci-fi masterpieces were created and showed us a mystified world of science and technology. In recent years, technology has moved from science fiction into real life: AI programs can play games, recognize faces and speech, learn, and make informed decisions.

 

New technology means new opportunities for state services. For instance, robotic process automation (RPA) represents an excellent near-term opportunity for the government. RPA involves software, often called “bots,” that automate the kinds of tasks you would usually do on your own, mimicking the steps we would take to complete various digital tasks—filling out forms or purchase orders, cutting and pasting information from one spreadsheet to another, accessing multiple databases—accurately and rapidly. It’s relatively easy to realize significant productivity gains with bots without a fundamental process redesign.

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Key functions replaced by bots

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Innovations also change health security methods. The Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) oversees public health matters in Clark County. In 2014, SNHD randomly selected establishments for inspection. To improve its effectiveness, the health department has turned to AI applications. The department uses data from Twitter: an app employs geotagging and natural language processing to identify Twitter users reporting food poisoning and flag the restaurants they visited, generating a list of eateries for investigation. As a result, burden-era of inefficiency and dull paper-work is going to the past. AI, robots, and machines change our world gradually.