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Speakers:
Snezana Antonievic, NAPA, Serbia
Tiina Jukić, University of Ljubjana, Slovenia
András Nemeslaki, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
Gianluca Misuraca, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
NISPAcee’s
2023 Conference deals with emerging technologies such as digitalization impacting
wide-ranging aspects of public administration and becoming mainstream in
practice and theory. Looking into the future however, there are other elements
of technological development such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), which
are becoming more and more widespread and accessible to a broad range of stakeholders,
including citizens. The proliferation of such technologies requires continued
scrutiny of both the existing lingering topics in PA as well as their
reimagination through the prism of the imminent impact of AI on public
administration.
The existing
nascent but growing public administration academic literature on AI identifies
three broad areas where AI is likely to have a significant impact:
- jobs;
- decision-making and governance,
especially in such sectors as education, energy, defense and security, public
relations, healthcare and job safety; and
- ethics, privacy, trust and
satisfaction.
These areas
are, at the same time, essential pillars of democratic societies and their
governance, which underpins our intention to scrutinize the actual and possible
ways, in which AI is or may be incorporated in public governance and
administration, as well as the actual or possible impacts of this process.
Looking
ahead, PA specialists, experts and practitioners alike, should envision the
areas of opportunities and red lines, strengths and weaknesses before the
full-fledged onset of the use of AI technologies in public administration and
governance. As AI instruments frequently reflect the biases of their creators
and, even more, of the societal practice in which they are embedded, it is
important to reimagine lingering issues in public administration from
philosophical, theoretical or ontological perspectives to contribute to the
minimization of malignant biases and preclude their institutionalization. It is
especially important to envision ways in which technological advancements are
not used to strengthen authoritarianism and limit personal freedoms, including
privacy issues.
We can
already sense that AI rapid advancements make it hard for public or private
sector to keep up with the pace. This promises the future to be full of
challenges at the level of political leadership and public administrators as
well as private sector corporate managers.
This
roundtable provides an opportunity to compound and amalgamate the findings of
the Nispacee Annual Conferences in Beograd (2023) into theoretical and
practical perspectives for the PA in the looming age of AI.
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