The Long-term Insights Briefings
This is the first in an enduring series of public service-led Long-term Insights Briefings. The Long-term Insights Briefings are an initiative under Priority Two of the APS Reform Agenda: An APS that puts people and business at the centre of policy and services. They will strengthen policy development and planning in the APS by:
- Bringing together and helping the APS to understand the evidence and implications of long-term, strategic policy challenges.
- Building the capability and institutional knowledge of the APS for long-term thinking, and position the APS to support the public interest now and into the future, by understanding the long-term impacts of what the APS does.
The purpose of the briefings is not to make recommendations or predictions about what will happen in the future. Instead, they will provide a base to underpin future policy thinking and decision making on specific policy challenges that may affect Australia and the Australian community in the medium and long term. It is anticipated they will form part of the evidence base for policy and decision making.
Importantly, the briefings will be developed through a process of genuine engagement with the Australian community on issues affecting them, as well as with experts from the APS, academia, industry and the not-for-profit sector.
The first Long-term Insights Briefing
The first Long-term Insights Briefing explores how the APS could integrate AI into public service delivery in the future, and how this might affect the trustworthiness of public service delivery (Box 1). It complements Australian Government policy work on AI that is currently developing advice on how AI is best governed in the public service and the broader economy so that its many benefits can be realised while maintaining public trust. This includes the AI use in Government Taskforce, jointly led by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR), and the Government’s Safe and Responsible AI in Australia public consultation.
Rapid developments in the capabilities of AI applications such as ChatGPT[4] (and the speed and scale of adoption since its launch in November 2022) are provoking public conversations about the role that AI will have in Australian society.[5] Given the potential for AI to transform public service delivery in ways that deliver a better experience and outcomes for the whole community, it will be important for the APS to implement AI in public service delivery in ways that demonstrate and build trustworthiness. This is because implementing AI poorly – such as by failing to address known risks of the technology, or failing to understand and respond to the concerns of different cohorts in the community – could erode the trustworthiness of the public service. This could result in the APS and the community as a whole failing to capture the benefits of AI.
Box 1: Key concepts in this Long-term Insights Briefing
This briefing explores how AI could change government decision-making systems and processes, what is needed to ensure AI leads to more effective service delivery, and the potential impacts of these changes on the trustworthiness of public services.
Artificial intelligence
There is no single agreed definition of AI. For example, the DISR discussion paper on Safe and responsible AI in Australia, defines AI as “an engineered system that generates predictive outputs such as content, forecasts, recommendations or decisions for a given set of human-defined objectives or parameters without explicit programming. AI systems are designed to operate with varying levels of automation.”[6]
The Australian Government Architecture defines AI as a catch-all term for a “family of technologies that can bring together computing power, scalability, networking, connected devices and interfaces, and data. AI systems can be programmed to perform specific tasks such as reasoning, planning, natural language processing, computer vision, audio processing, interaction, prediction and more. With machine learning, AI systems can improve on tasks over time according to a set of human-defined objectives and can operate with varying levels of autonomy.”[7]
In referring to AI, this briefing is consistent with both of these definitions.
Given how rapidly AI is evolving, this Long-term Insights Briefing does not make predictions about the future potential of AI technologies. Instead, it considers the broader factors likely to influence the APS as it considers how to adopt and use AI in the next five to 10 years (and successive waves of the technology).
Trustworthiness
In contrast to the concept of ‘trust’, which is an attitude taken by an individual towards someone or an organisation or institution (like the APS), trustworthiness centres on the attributes of an organisation itself. In the context of this briefing, those attributes are:
- Integrity: adhering to a set of principles that the community finds acceptable, in terms of both words and actions.
- Competence: the ability to provide public services as promised.
- Performance: meeting public expectations and delivering reliable and consistent services.
- Empathy: identifying, understanding and responding to individuals’ needs, contexts and experiences.
This reflects both existing frameworks of trust (including the Mayer ABI (Ability, Benevolence and Integrity) Framework[8] and the OECD Framework on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions[9] and views expressed by community representatives in workshops held over the course of the briefing, and by respondents to surveys.
The long-term insights in this report were informed by community engagement, input from AI and service delivery experts, and research and survey evidence. This included:
- workshops and focus groups involving people from 15 organisations representing community voices, 9 organisations representing academia, industry and youth, and 16 APS Agencies[10]
- a scenario-based workshop facilitated by the Australian National University’s National Security College Futures Hub, which brought together community representatives, AI experts and APS service delivery staff to consider and respond to various scenarios of plausible futures and identify their likely impact on the trustworthiness of public service delivery
- over 5000 responses to 2 different surveys
- a Rapid Evidence Assessment of available literature and research conducted by the ANU.