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How technology redefines the role of government

Technology has always been a driver of industrial growth — from wheels and looms to the steam engine, electricity and the Internet. Today, we envision a future where robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and genomics can transform manufacturing, finance and medicine.

With evolving technology and the world of big data, one challenge for governments is whether they may increasingly become sidelined or displaced. PHOTO: REUTERS

With evolving technology and the world of big data, one challenge for governments is whether they may increasingly become sidelined or displaced. PHOTO: REUTERS

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Technology has always been a driver of industrial growth — from wheels and looms to the steam engine, electricity and the Internet. Today, we envision a future where robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and genomics can transform manufacturing, finance and medicine.

Less is said about how technology might transform the public sector — in particular, the information technologies enabled by software, the Web, computational techniques and the harnessing of data.

The business of government has always required the harnessing of information in some way. The earliest form of the state machinery or bureaucracy arose when kingdoms needed the means to collect taxes in order to raise armies to fight wars.

Egyptians and Babylonians developed their own information technology to sustain the business of government: Hieroglyphics to enable book-keeping and maintaining a catalogue of information on who paid taxes; and a complex network of towers with fire-lamps within line of sight of each other to transmit information about military troop movements.

The presence or absence of lit lamps provided what was effectively an information technology system with a one-bit communications channel (compare that with fibre networks today that effectively transmit a billion bits a second).

Today, much of the machinery of taxation and redistribution relies on such systems. The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore has “no-filing” services because connected IT systems pull in data on your income and calculate your tax automatically.

One of the great things about Singapore’s welfare and social grants is that, once decided, they are disbursed automatically based on means-tested criteria applied against the government’s administrative data.

Contrast this to Obamacare in the United States, where a massive mobilisation and registration exercise was necessary just to get the scheme off the ground.

But the future of information technology for the public good has much more potential than just easing the bureaucracy and machinery of government.

It poses opportunities for reshaping the very role of government as the central actor providing public goods. I explore two areas below.

TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS TO CREATE MARKETS

Information technology makes it easier to discover potential opportunities for the exchange of goods and services.

eBay and Amazon began connecting buyers and sellers globally for goods that were not time-sensitive — when you bought a book it was not essential that you received that book at a specific time and place.

With mobile phones that are also personal devices, services such as Uber that require matching based on time and location (a ride at eight in the morning that starts at your home is a significantly different product from one that starts in Bukit Brown at midnight) now open up a whole new set of possibilities.

But we can extend that further into a “mobility marketplace” — rather than having each household own cars and bicycles or commit to the same routine mode of transport to work each day, the vision would be a marketplace where you can buy rides at a snap, or even sign up for a mobility subscription that satisfies all your mobility needs for a month.

You just push a button when you need a ride and the mobility operator sends the taxi, shared ride or bus on demand.

At the Government Technology Agency, we have been experimenting with a proto-version of such a mobility platform called Beeline — in Finland it is called “mobility as a service”.

We could also imagine a more generic “volunteer-matching” application — Tinder for Good, if you like —that matches busy professionals like lawyers and accountants to charities that need a few hours of professional advice on a weekend, or to housewives who might be able to offer a ride to an elderly and sick neighbour for her hospital appointment.

Rather than govern as a funder or provider of public goods and services, governments that embrace technology now need to create market platforms that are open and competitive to private sector players to plug into them.

As we all know, when it comes to markets where network effects predominate, the risk of natural monopolies is high.

PERSONALISATION OF GOVERNMENT SERVICES

Rules are silly without the right data. Some developing countries use the length of the facade of a property as the basis for property tax because it provides the best proxy for the property’s value.

With more complete data, the government can more appropriately deliver policies that are suitable and customised to individual citizens’ needs. In healthcare, predictive analytics allow doctors to risk-classify patients and to identify those at greater risk and who might need more attention.

The next generation of government digital services will not just obviate the need to visit a government agency in person to submit forms, but will also be a platform that pushes you relevant information such as a suggestion to visit the doctor for a check-up if you have not been in a long time, or a recommendation for a business grant that is suited to the new business that you have just registered.

Your identity card and Central Provident Fund accounts will be carried with you on your phone. You will hardly have to visit a government agency, and instead will carry government services around with you.

One challenge for governments with evolving technology and the world of big data is whether they may increasingly become sidelined or displaced.

Governments have traditionally been distinguished from private corporations in that they had control over information, afforded by centralised administration.

Today, Google, Facebook, banks and your telco probably hold vastly more information about any individual than governments do. In a world where Google captures your emails, messages and calendar, where a wearable device captures your heart-rate and Google Glass records what you see, Google could capture and record a historical record of a person’s life in greater fidelity than even the person might remember.

Facebook could probably swing an election by selectively filtering posts onto a users’ feed about a candidate. The threat of capitalism overtaking politics is most real in the realm of information technology because it is through information and its communication that power in politics is exercised and wielded.

What is clear is that technology is the next big thing, not just for economies but also for governments — not just in the business of government, but in redefining the role of governments vis-a-vis large corporates. Governments should take heed to keep themselves at the forefront of technology.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Liu Feng-Yuan is Director of the Data Science Division at the Government Technology Agency. This piece first appeared in The Birthday Book 2016, a book of essays by 51 different authors on Singapore’s Next Big Thing. TODAY will be publishing other essays from the book in the coming weeks

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