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Bureaucracies & Artificial Intelligence
Depending on ones experience with them, bureaucracies are either one of humanity’s greatest innovations, or one of our worst. They exist in all corporations and governments of all political systems around the world. Oddly enough, while we think of the headwinds Artificial Intelligence (AI) faces such as regulations, laws and the massive energy requirements, it may be bureaucracy that becomes a huge headwind. Including your ability to get a fishing license.
Bureaucracies have been around for a rather long period of time, dating back to when humans started to live in larger communities as we became agrarian. As we built cities, we needed administrations to run them. Both the Romans and the Egyptians were stellar bureaucracies. It is believed the first bureaucracy came out of ancient Sumer, around 3,500 B.C. Over time, they have evolved to become a core element of all societies.
While we might like to think that as we learned to write and record things, we first wrote lovely sonnets, poems and such. The reality is a bit more mundane. We kept records of things in warehouses and administrations recorded the minutiae of debts owed, fines and so on. Fascinating to archeologists and historians, a cure for insomnia for most. In modern societies, much the same happens, except we use Information Technologies and massive databases. As is said, the more something…