Clark Hiddleston Analyzes AI’s Potential to Transform Governance

Author Chats

Clark Hiddleston Analyzes AI's Potential to Transform Governance

November 26, 2024

By Jeremy Conrad

Given the proliferation of artificial intelligence, it was only a matter of time before scholars considered the intersection of politics and technology. In A Political Paradigm of Rapid Change: A Description and Prescription for the Future, Clark A. Hiddleston describes an emerging social context in which political power comes from the democratization of knowledge and being the first to develop and exploit new technology. Hiddleston, who was a prosecutor and defense attorney for many years, has a degree in political science and worked as an intern in the U.S. Senate. His first book, a legal thriller titled The Court Watchers, grappled with the new technologies increasingly used by the government to spy on the innocent and guilty alike. Here, Hiddleston provides some insights into his latest work, a foray into nonfiction.

What are the rapid changes referred to in your book's title?

Old forms of running bureaucracies are passing, and new forms of operating are taking their place. Take the Department of Veterans Affairs. The secretary of this department is appointed by the president [and confirmed by] the Senate. What happens when one day a new president nominates BOT124, Model D as secretary? Will the Senate approve the nomination with enhancements to the AI's programming or parameters?

The head of Veterans Affairs oversees a mission to provide health, education, disability, funerary, and financial benefits to veterans. AI will use massive amounts of data to assess the needs of every veteran in the United States and automatically dispense benefits based on an individualized computerized evaluation, instead of general rules and regulations. AI will be able to find veterans needing benefits and help, including homeless vets living on the streets, from police reports and facial recognition and from tax returns, social media posts, health records of the department, credit sources, etc.

Critics would call this random, but others would see it as harnessing data to make a personal decision about each vet. Wouldn't this individualized assessment be better? Wouldn't this eliminate the need for Veterans Affairs employees to fill out forms and engage in a complicated fitting of each vet into a numerous set of staid rules and regulations? Is this randomly ad hoc or is this individualized tailoring?

How did you approach writing about the topic?

In writing this book, I shuffled the [sections] around to deliver the unexpected and variety to the reader, so the experience can be like my son scrolling TikTok or Instagram. This allowed me to express imaginative thoughts about the future - some shocking, even satirical, such as how young people today can replace their physical identity with an online persona, or [how] old people … can live forever through what they've shared online, and physically be able to enhance themselves with new skin and artificial muscles.

The crucial point of the book, however, is how our governing structures will intersect with technology and AI, and how bureaucrats will interact with AI machines. What sort of working relationship does a bureaucrat have with AI? Is AI there to assist, or will we find [it] can just make better decisions than humans? Will there be a merging of the human decision-maker with the machine somehow? In any event, technology is making government more efficient, and we need the right kind of technology for every task. In the past, contractors didn't provide the best technology to governmental organizations, and that needs to change.

Government workers need to embrace the technology, become close to the technology, to make sure human goals are being pursued and efficiently directed. I don't want to say we need to give AI a human personality, but there needs to be a human aspect to this endeavor, and that is why the book has a certain playfulness now and then, to open up the communication necessary to see the positive possibilities.

What kinds of problems do you perceive for law and government in the emerging tech landscape? What kinds of solutions are available?

A major point of the book is how unregulatable new technology has been to date, and how government seems to catch up a decade later to the implications. We need more public-private partnerships like Operation Warp Speed [to facilitate COVID-19 vaccines], where representatives of the people within the government are helping to make the decisions about the direction of the innovative technology. In that instance, we were in the middle of a national emergency and that's why this rare collaboration occurred - giving us a safe vaccine within months rather than years. The question remains: Should government be the driving force behind new technologies? The Manhattan Project to produce atomic weapons was another example of collaboration.

A further point of the book is how we bring together a relationship between citizens and government, like in a Greek polis. In a true democracy, all the people make all the decisions. In a dictatorship, citizens don't concern themselves with government but go about their private lives leaving decision making to others. I refer to [government studies professor] David Schuman in the book, who wants to bring everyone into the political system. It's part of a healthy identity, he believes. The internet and social media help this along, creating those relationships.

Where can readers find your book?

A Political Paradigm of Rapid Change is available for purchase for the Kindle on Amazon.

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