Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about a bunch of changes going on with the US Government. You may not know the specifics, but the point is something is happening, and with all the buzzwords about “efficiency” and “headcount reductions,” you might be getting nervous. You give the government a lot of your private data. What if someone bad got ahold of it?
I hear you loud and clear because I have the same concerns. The difference is I may also have some of the answers. See, I’m an expert in AI, and because integrating AI into the government is also part of the plan for the Department of Government Efficiency, I have an idea of how to make sure your data stays yours.
The Basics of AI Today
Right now, many AI systems are what we call LLMs, or Large Language Models. To simplify it greatly, basically, these LLMs suck up as much data as they can get and then use that information to output a response to a question by predicting which word should come after the next until the answer is produced.
This is a huge oversimplification, and there are other ways of getting this done, too. But right now, today, we don’t have what is now called Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which is to say we don’t have C-3PO or HAL wandering around telling us he’s definitely not opening those pod bay doors.
This is to say that any effective AI system built today uses a whole ton of data. Fortunately for us, the U.S. Government has decades of that sitting on servers or in filing cabinets. Imagine what we would get if we could feed all that into an AI, right?
You’re Going to Need Permission
Well, the problem is your data is going to be part of that data dump, and if you’re like me, you might not be too keen on some machine you know nothing about having your tax returns for the past X decades.
The solution is pretty simple. You need to keep everything private, period, end of story. But that also means nobody can use the AI, right? Well, no. Not if you anonymize the data and use the right ecosystem.
Let’s use me as an example. The U.S. Government may have my height, weight, eye color, etc. on file because of my passport, tax forms, and so on. But if I wanted to ask an AI something like, “How many men in the US have brown hair and are over six feet tall?”
Well, you wouldn’t need to know my name, just my stats.
My data is anonymized therefore, it’s not connected to me. And anything that’s too personal—say, my Social Security number—could require special clearance to access. That way, no bad actors could get involved.
Then you make sure everything is in the right kind of setup. In this case, it’s called a permissioned ecosystem. It keeps the right people in and the wrong ones out. Now, only the right people have access to the data they could need. A worker for the FBI might need information from the CIA if there was an international connection or the NOAA if there was some kind of weather situation that could interfere with a scheduled event.
By building these permissioned ecosystems, we can keep your information yours yet still allow people to ask questions about it. This can make things even clearer for all involved.
Keeping Things Open
Think about the added transparency. Today, we don’t know what the government does because everything is so opaque. Part of that is security, but we’ve already solved that problem. Imagine if we could have a public portal right to that AI where you could ask it anything.
“What post office near me is open at the latest?” “What do I need to prep for before I get my driver’s license renewed?” “How many men in New Jersey wear glasses?” You know, the obvious questions everyone wants to know.
And why not?
There are already agencies that get their data straight from the government today. If they had access to this AI system, they also could use it to find inefficiencies and potentially root them out. It’s a pretty great way to pair AI and government.
It’s All About Balance
That’s the key to this whole endeavor: Balance.
As an AI advocate, I want AI to shine on a national platform. It could solve some of our inefficiency problems without breaking everything in the process. The key is personal privacy. It’s a must-have, for sure.
Speaking of must-haves, you know I have a book coming out, right? It’s called The AI Ecosystems Revolution and is available for preorder on Amazon right now.
The book comes out on April 29, 2025, and in it, we talk all about ecosystems like the one I spoke about today. It’s good stuff, and I can’t wait for you to read it.
