Philip Wallach writes about one European government’s embrace of artificial intelligence.
The future is already here, just not evenly distributed. So the cliché goes. But who among us expected it to arrive in Albania first? In September, the Balkan nation of 2.4 million citizens became the first country to include an artificial intelligence as a minister in its government.
Read that again. Lara Jakes’s New York Times coverage of the brief but eventful career of Diella—yes, “she” has a name and a visual persona—really must be read (and the pictures gawked at) to be believed. Diella’s portfolio is government procurement and contracting, and “her” mission (I’ll drop the quotation marks from here on out, although I acknowledge this is a pronoun problem as thorny as they come) is to reduce corruption. …
… This being reality rather than science fiction (barely), in practice, Diella suffers from both human foibles and serious lapses of judgment. One small but amusing challenge arises from the Albanian actress on whom Diella’s image is based, who is suing for the alleged abuse of her likeness. She says that she was never told that Diella would go from a humble public helper to “minister,” and she asks Albania’s administrative court to block further use of her image. One imagines that Diella will, like any self-respecting un-bodied intelligence, find it easy enough to change her visage if necessary.
More seriously, there are now accusations that, far from solving Albania’s corruption problem, Diella and the humans responsible for programming her are guilty of bid-rigging. Jakes’s article reports that Albanian prosecutors have now placed several leaders of the National Information Agency, which created Diella, under pretrial house arrest ahead of likely criminal prosecution. Prime Minister Rama is not directly implicated, but it is easy to imagine that if Diella’s creation helped raise the salience of his anti-corruption campaign, her presence (or disappearance!) would also raise the salience of any ongoing corruption brought to light.
