Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Many people may have experienced the situation of asking for leave for three days for a certificate and running several departments that have not yet been done. Whenever we are queuing around with materials, our first thought is, if only these things could be handled with mobile phones like takeout!

Now the digitization of government is in full swing around the world, and efforts are being made in this direction. Save time for citizens at the front end so that they can complete most of their applications online. In the back end, through cloud computing, AI, data mining and other technologies to reduce government official labor expenditure, and through the data aggregation to achieve a better understanding of people's livelihood. Just as social security can be run with the flick of a finger, government departments can also be informed of the flow and growth of employment.

But all this is ideal, and the government's digital policy is really implemented, which may not be as good as people think.

Can the government digitally fill the hole dug by Beveridge?

In the national camp of government digitization, Britain is one of the earlier and more profound ones. In 2012, the British government promulgated the Government Digitalization Strategy, and in 2015, the British government launched the very high-end-sounding DGaP program-digital government as a platform. In other words, all government departments can develop applications and share code and data on this platform, and there will no longer be the problem that the policy of this department is unknown to that department, or that a department has been restructured and its successors do not know how to take over.

For developed countries like Britain, which has a small population and a strong technological base, does it feel particularly suitable for experimenting with government digitization? Do you also want our executives to take a small notebook to the UK for research and study? Yes, the digitization of British government has been a learning sample for various countries for a long time, and the British government also ranked first in the 2016 United Nations e-government survey.

However, after a recent visit to the UK to conduct research, United Nations investigators warned that we should be vigilant against the impact of government digitization on human rights, especially for vulnerable groups.

Why does the digitization of government, which is convenient for people to handle affairs, have anything to do with human rights? This also starts with the British Beveridge social security model. The Beveridge model is what we often say about the welfare state social security system. To put it simply, it means high taxes and high welfare, preferring to pursue fairness at the expense of efficiency and implement the fiscal policy of redistribution of national income.

This legendary situation in which the government pays for everything from birth to death seems good, but in fact it also creates a lot of hidden dangers. For example, high taxes and high benefits make young people unmotivated to work and prefer to stay at home to get the minimum security; and the burden of massive welfare + tax collection on government work; and even the risk of welfare fraud.

At this time, the digitization of the government can not only reduce the government's investment in manpower, but also calculate the amount of welfare more scientifically and reduce the risk of fraud. And this is exactly where the contradiction happened.

The Triple contradiction between efficiency and Fairness: the pits through which Britain helped the world

According to the investigation report of the United Nations, the digitization of the British government has caused the following three contradictions.

I. the contradiction between the digital system and the Internet application conditions of the poor

It sounds convenient for us to solve everything on mobile phones and computers, but we should know that many of the people who are most in need of welfare assistance are the elderly, the disabled and the illiterate. some can't even afford computers, mobile phones and the Internet at home. Only 47 per cent of low-income earners use broadband Internet at home, according to data from Ofcom, a survey agency in 2017. Only 42% of the unemployed and 43% of low-income earners do banking online. Due to the reduction of civil servants, people often face AI customer service robots and long waiting times when they consult on the phone, which does not provide enough help to vulnerable groups.

Coupled with the fact that Britain has closed many public libraries in recent years, the United Nations survey said that were it not for the actions of charities and volunteers, many vulnerable groups would not have been able to receive government benefits on their own.

Second, the contradiction between government efficiency and personal efficiency

In order to improve efficiency and facilitate the public, the British government uses the backend of the tax system, Employment and Retirement Protection system (DWP) and so on to share information. In this way, it seems that the efficiency of the government has improved, but employers as ordinary users will still make mistakes in the submission of the tax system, which will affect the payment of DWP benefits. But manual handling of errors is so inefficient that 50 full-time civil servants can only handle 2% of errors a month, according to a United Nations survey. Even sometimes the errors that can be quickly discovered and solved by manual workers have to wait for the complex processing of the system.

As a result, many people do not receive welfare payments until five or more weeks after submitting their applications, and many of them are waiting for the money to pay rent and buy food.

Third, the contradiction between technical privacy and algorithmic fairness.

In order to prevent fraud and monitoring errors, the UK has also launched a risk analysis and intelligence system based on artificial intelligence data matching. It is used to determine whether the person applying for benefits has falsified the tax payment status and debts, and can also verify the identity of the applicant. This part of the work is often outsourced to private IT service companies, and it turns out that they are not doing well.

In the survey, the United Nations found that because they do not understand the evaluation criteria of the algorithm, many people are inexplicably classified as high-risk people, but they do not know how to reduce their risk index, which finally brings a lot of trouble to their lives. However, the British government believes that if a clear algorithm evaluation reference is given, on the one hand, it will damage the intellectual property rights of IT service companies, on the other hand, it may lead to targeted loopholes to deceive the system.

Under these three contradictions, the outside world's evaluation of the British government's digital work is also half sea water and half fire.

Many people celebrate the British government's in-depth application and enforcement of new technologies. For example, the DWP department has now applied blockchain technology to credit checks and recovered a total of 930 million pounds in losses due to welfare fraud, application errors, official errors and so on. And taking the lead in digitalization has trained more relevant talents for the British government.

On the other hand, some people severely criticize the British government. Data show that in England, the number of homeless has increased by 60% since 2010, there are 1.2 million people on the waiting list for guaranteed housing, and the demand for food banks used to help the poor has increased nearly fourfold. They believe that this situation has something to do with the digital campaign carried out by the British government, and more and more vulnerable groups are excluded from the welfare system. In the end, he got deeper and deeper in poverty.

After a survey, the United Nations pointed out that judging from the current situation in the United Kingdom, government digitization is essentially a political orientation. The government gives benefits to those who have the ability to read and write and can operate electronic devices to make online declarations to help them out of poverty and return to society to create value because these people are more likely to adapt to society. As for those who do not know how to access the Internet and cannot fill out the forms themselves, it is more difficult for them to return to society, so the government chooses to put their needs further behind. This is the main reason why the United Nations played the "human rights card" warning.

However, social problems are complex, and hunger and poverty cannot be fully linked to a policy. But we have to admit that it is not easy to balance efficiency and fairness on the road of government digitization.

Before the outbreak of contradictions: the characteristics and Hidden dangers of Chinese Government Digitalization

So for us who are moving towards the digitization of government, can we find some local guidance from the imported experience of the United Kingdom?

It is said that Britain has imported experience because there are great differences in the national conditions of the two countries. For example, as a welfare state, the main task of the British government may be how to redistribute wealth efficiently, while China needs to create wealth through in-depth understanding of different industries and giving targeted support. For example, from the people's point of view, the British people may be more concerned about how to complete the whole process from filing tax to receiving subsidies through a clear and simple system, while the Chinese may be more concerned about how to easily and quickly complete various documents, applications and formalities in different places.

The digitization of our current government also has the following remarkable characteristics:

1. China's government digitization work is more decentralized. Especially in the front end of the application shown to the public, almost every province and city has its own tricks. For example, some provinces can query the amount of provident fund on WeChat, but some provinces have to query on a certain App, and even many provinces cannot query online.

2. Some new cities that seem to have a poor foundation are actually easier to carry out digital work. It is not difficult to find that, compared with Beijing and Shanghai, some new cities can build databases from scratch and build digital systems on various infrastructure to thoroughly implement government digitization. Xiongan is a good example.

3. The population corresponding to government digitization is more of the "mainstream crowd". The mainstream population here refers to the urban people who are engaged in work and production, in their teens and fifties. It is not difficult to find that different provinces and cities launched online cross-provincial and municipal household registration, industrial and commercial tax issues, or the annual inspection declaration of car products, and so on, are faced with this group of people. Subsidies for vulnerable groups, minimum living allowances, or accurate poverty alleviation in rural areas, although there is also a certain degree of digital infiltration, but often not summarized into the government digital system.

In this way, compared with Britain, where contradictions have broken out, it may be because government digitization has not been widely implemented, so we have not yet faced these conflicts directly.

Even so, we can find a lot of hidden dangers with reference to the current situation in the UK. For example, how to uniformly integrate the digital policies of different provinces and cities, rather than bring trouble to the public because of the gap between technology platforms? For example, cities with large population mobility and good digital foundation, such as Beijing and Shanghai, how to balance the coupling of new and old platforms when the government is digitized? And, as in the UK, how to lower the threshold of government digitization for vulnerable groups so that they do not become exclusive to mainstream groups?

Is it the icing on the cake for mainstream groups or the last straw for vulnerable groups?

In fact, to be honest, of all the advanced technologies we have introduced, there will be a handful of technologies that we hope will come more slowly, and government digitization is one of them.

The security of data, the training reserve of technical personnel, including the popularization of digital skills in society as a whole, all take time to complete. If the government digitization is carried out on a large scale, the result is likely to be like that in Britain today: from civil servants to the general public, they have little knowledge of the system. A phone call will also lead to customer service with artificial intellectual disabilities who do not understand people. What is more exasperating is that other countries will come to proclaim how advanced your government digitalization is.

But what we are more afraid of is that the digitization of government will lead to greater fragmentation of societies that already have stratification.

It seems to be a good thing for us to handle all affairs on the Internet, but for those old people and people with disabilities who do not know how to access the Internet, it may be the last straw for them to break away from society. The high degree of digitization of government business will almost certainly lead to massive cuts in front-line business personnel. When these vulnerable groups can not express their needs offline, will we completely ignore their existence and indulge in a kind of hypocritical happiness?

This is now happening in the UK, where people who do not have the ability to authenticate and apply for benefits have almost completely disappeared from the welfare system. It seems that the government has reduced welfare spending, but poverty has not been reduced, or even intensified.

No matter how powerful machine vision is, it can't compete with human eyes. No matter what form our government digitalization will take in the future, the most important thing is to find out the needs of every circle and listen to the voices of every group. It doesn't matter whether through the eyes and ears of machines or through human eyes and ears, it's just a different means of transportation on our way to happiness.

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