I think this topic is important and many of your recommendations sound like great ideas, but they also involve a lot of “we should” where it’s not clear who “we” is. I would like to see, for some of these, targeting to a specific audience: who actually has the capability to help streamline government procurement processes for AI, and how? What organizations might be well positioned to audit agency needs and bottlenecks? I’m left with the sense that these things would be good in the abstract, but that there’s little I personally (or most other readers, unless they work high up in the administration) can realistically contribute to them.
I’m also skeptical about doing preparation outside government for rushed adoption. There probably is some opportunity here, but any solution prepared externally would itself have to be adopted during a crisis, and that will take time, maybe just as much time as the government developing its own tools, plans, and protocols. Much of what makes government slow to adopt new systems is the need to get multiple levels of approval, go through a procurement process, and train existing government workers to work with the new system.
I think this topic is important and many of your recommendations sound like great ideas, but they also involve a lot of “we should” where it’s not clear who “we” is. I would like to see, for some of these, targeting to a specific audience: who actually has the capability to help streamline government procurement processes for AI, and how? What organizations might be well positioned to audit agency needs and bottlenecks? I’m left with the sense that these things would be good in the abstract, but that there’s little I personally (or most other readers, unless they work high up in the administration) can realistically contribute to them.
I’m also skeptical about doing preparation outside government for rushed adoption. There probably is some opportunity here, but any solution prepared externally would itself have to be adopted during a crisis, and that will take time, maybe just as much time as the government developing its own tools, plans, and protocols. Much of what makes government slow to adopt new systems is the need to get multiple levels of approval, go through a procurement process, and train existing government workers to work with the new system.