Have you ever been to an old library, or a used book store full of old books? It’s great. The musty smell, the feel of the yellowed pages that crinkle slightly as you turn them, there really is nothing like it. It evokes a sense of depth, wisdom, permanence.
That’s exactly the feeling I hoped to have when I visited the National Archives in Washington D.C. I was looking forward to rows upon rows of filing cabinets full of the personal writings of Washington, Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and more. However, I was disappointed. Instead of archives, it was full of TVs everywhere. Nearly everything was digital. Now, for many reasons this was a bit of a letdown. I was really looking forward to those poorly lit rooms full of dusty documents. Yet, looked at from another angle, this was actually hopeful.
The United States has the goal of having all of its documents completely digitized by 2022. As of this writing in the fall of 2020, this is really right around the corner and if a recent meeting of all the alphabet soup agencies on the matter is any indication, it would be wise not to hold your breath. When it comes to any significant change, all bureaucracies tend to move at a pace that would embarrass a glacier. Why might that be?
As beneficial as digitizing all the information at the government’s disposal is (which we’ll get to that shortly), the fact is that it’s difficult. While technology has improved greatly in recent years, including software from Google that will automatically strip the text from a photographed document, that technology isn’t necessarily available to everyone. In some cases, it might be expensive, there may be security concerns, and of course there is training. Think of when you first started introducing your older friends and family to email, but much, much harder. Addressing all of these issues takes both time and money.
There are also incentives to slowing down the process. One is simply money. The government of course doesn’t directly have the resources and know how to do this entirely on their own. That means contracting with major software companies, companies that are more than willing to offer their expertise for a government-sized paycheck. Anyone who has followed NASA for more than a few years knows that virtually every government-related project comes in behind schedule and over budget. Sometimes, that’s because the project in question is genuinely more difficult than expected. Other times, it’s because the contractor draws it out, getting as much money as they can.
Another incentive to delay the process of digitization lies in one of the benefits. The main purpose of putting that information in a digital format is to make it searchable, to be able to run it through an Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) program to find connections between different sets of data, to find patterns that would not be able to be identified any other way. It would also find inefficiencies, something government is infamous for. Needless to say, there may be a few people in government eager to make use of an inefficiency or two in order to keep the rest of the inefficiencies from being discovered.
Finally, there is a fear that the government would come to be run by machines, that those AI/ML programs would be doing more than just analyzing data, they’d be setting policy. In truth, the goal is simply what was said above, it will be used to analyze data and find correlations, not come to conclusions about what to do with that data. And even if that were the case, such software is limited by its programing.
Think of the old, trench coat wearing detective. He is typically shown with a wall of pictures, newspaper clippings, and scribbled notes, all connected by red strings, showing the different connections. AI/ML programs will do the same thing, yet they won’t replace the detective. He (just like the policy maker) still has to ask the questions and draw the conclusions and make the decisions. The data is only as good as the questions asked and the decisions made with it.
So, given all of these difficulties and fears, is it worth going to all the trouble just to be able to crunch data faster? The answer is clearly yes. While those musty rooms of old books are great, they have one key weakness – they are stagnant. They are full of information that just sits there, not doing anything. Digitization makes it much easier to access and make use of all that information. And information, data, is only valuable, only useful when it is used, when it is moving. To keep that data inert in a vault deprives us all of important insights and advances that can only be made through the movement of data. With data moving, its true power is unleashed through faster and better decisions.
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