Automated Government

Peter Denning

By Peter Denning

Futurists have historically been better at describing the present than the future. Fortunately, I have been blessed with a set of communications from one of my descendants, whose eyewitness accounts of events around 2100 are far more reliable than any such speculations I can offer.

My descendant is a young girl named Ancath, who is about 9 years old in 2103. Every Christmas, starting in 2103, she sends recordings of her conversations with her great-grandmother (my granddaughter) about that it was like to live in the age of computers. You see, computers are gone in 2103. Only a few elderly people, like great-grandma, remember anything about them.

I have collected these recordings into my “Ancath Chronicles.” From them, I learned that in about 2025 the U.S. Congress decides to fully automate the government as a move for dramatic efficiency. The process is well under way by that point anyway, since robots running large databases staff most government offices.

The automated government, “Ag” as they call it, is so successful that Congress disbands itself a few years later. Its last act is to pass authority to a set of artificial intelligences simulating senators and representatives. This enables an automated Congress to respond to problems by passing laws that are quickly implemented by the automated bureaucracy.

But within a few years Ag exhibits amazing feats of artificial stupidity:

• The automated Drug Enforcement Agency closes down pharmaceutical companies, saying they are dealing drugs.
• The automated Federal Trade Commission closes down the Hormel Meat Company, saying it purveys spam.
• The automated Department of Justice ships Microsoft 500,000 pinstriped pants and jackets, saying it is filing suits.
• The automated Army replaces all its troops with a single robot, saying it has achieved the Army of One.
• The automated TSA flies its own explosives on jetliners, citing data that the probability of two bombs on an airplane is exceedingly small.
• The automated election commission registers every child at birth as “red” or “blue,” depending DNA patterns that are previously correlated with how people voted. Elections became unnecessary, and longstanding ills like voter fraud are eliminated.

Around 2035, Ag discovers that simulations are much less costly than real things, like transportation. It ends 30 years of airline crises by banning flights and instead simulating planes flying simulated passengers. No real airplanes, no pilots, no airports, no cost! Former air travels do not complain because they get to know their neighbors, and like them.

Soon Ag does the same for the medical system to end the health crisis: Simulated doctors treat simulated diseases in simulated hospitals. Since people now never have to go to a hospital, everyone is much healthier and life expectancy surges.

By 2040, Ag has bankrupted nearly all businesses. A deep depression grips the world. Finally, in 2050, a group of graybeard programmers create a solution: They build an Automated Citizen, programming it to be helpless and adoring, and install a copy on every Internet port. Soon, the automated government is completely occupied with taking care of the automated citizens, and it leaves all the real people alone. People forge a new, free society. Everyone prospers.

Around 2090, the automated Department of Energy declares that an obscure cloud farm in Iowa is consuming too much electricity, and it pulls the plug. This shuts off the Ag. But no one notices.

Peter J. Denning is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and director of the Cebrowski Institute for information innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is editor in chief of ACM Ubiquity, and is a past president of ACM. Email pjd@nps.edu.

This essay draws from his series, “Ancath Chronicles,” which is available at http://denninginstitute.com/pjd/chronicles2011.pdf.