PARIS/LJUBLJANA, Slovenia ¨C This year, the United Arab Emirates announced a plan to have half of its government services run on agentic AI within the next two years.
Under the program, AI is supposed to serve as an ¡°executive partner¡± that ¡°analyzes, decides, executes and improves in real time¡± without human intervention. Having spent our careers at the intersection of entrepreneurship, research and digital policy, we can confidently pronounce this plan reckless. And because the UAE presents itself as a global digital model, other governments will feel pressure to follow suit.
That is a danger we must not ignore. We already know what happens when governments delegate decision-making to algorithms. In 2021, a self-learning system in the Netherlands wrongly accused roughly 35,000 families of child care benefit fraud. Parents were ordered to repay tens of thousands of euros they never owed; homes were lost; and more than 2,000 children were taken into state care.
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