The Automated State: New Boss, Same Old Game
What's actually happening: The conversation around AI in government is less about the technology itself and more about who controls its deployment, and to what end. The 'fears' expressed in the mainstream are often a thinly veiled prelude to justifying massive public expenditure on private AI solutions, creating a new dependency dynamic. FIRST INSTANCE: The Technocratic Promise (1950s-1960s) The
post-WWII era saw a similar rhetoric surrounding the rise of computing and automation. The promise was always increased efficiency and better governance, but the reality was often the consolidation of power within technocratic elites and large corporations. Think of the early mainframe era, where companies like IBM became indispensable to government operations, creating proprietary systems that
locked in dependencies. The 1960 launch of COBOL, a programming language heavily pushed by the US Department of Defense, epitomizes this early government-corporate synergy, creating a standard that then cemented specific private sector players as essential partners (General Services Administration, 1960). REPETITIONS: Digital Transformation and Surveillance Creep (1990s-2000s) The internet boom of
the 1990s and later the 'digital transformation' initiatives of the 2000s repeated this pattern. Governments were urged to 'modernize' by outsourcing IT infrastructure to companies like Microsoft and Oracle. The post-9/11 period further accelerated this, with the Patriot Act (2001) creating a massive demand for surveillance technologies from private contractors, often with little public oversight