Looking to the future
AA: What excites you the most about the future of AI in the APS?
MM: Like I said at the start, the ability to make a genuine difference in our nation is phenomenal, and we are just at the start of seeing the potential for it. I’ve been in government now for 12-and-a-half years, and in that time we’ve gone from small, bespoke projects (at a few different organizations in narrow areas) to everybody understanding the value of data and AI and trying to do it. I’m so excited about the potential, but I’m also nervous about people charging in without actually understanding how to do it well and without understanding what might be solvable. I have definitely seen AI done badly. I’ve seen AI being used for what I would consider to just be a plain math problem. 2 + 2 is always 4. It’s not somewhere between 3.8 and 4.2. It is always 4. If it’s math, please use math. Just use a normal algorithm.
I’ve also seen...