Digitise, Slowly

All that glitters is not gold. Artificial intelligence, digitisation, automation and increased productivity have become the favoured slogans of the global startup machine. Governments across the world repeat them with almost religious enthusiasm, often treating technological adoption as an achievement in itself rather than a means to improve governance. Pakistan, while pursuing its own digitisation journey, must be far more careful. The launch of an AI-powered system at the Prime Minister’s Office could improve record-keeping, directive tracking and institutional accountability. Replacing cumbersome paper files with searchable digital records is a sensible objective. However, the decision to immediately abandon traditional processes and extend the platform across government departments appears premature. Electrical Storm Government records are not ordinary corporate data. They may include sensitive policy discussions, administrative decisions and information affecting national security. Much of the global AI infrastructure is controlled by a small number of American technology companies, with extensive Indian and Israeli participation across the wider technology ecosystem. Pakistan cannot entrust its most sensitive institutional records to foreign-controlled systems, particularly those linked to countries whose interests may conflict with its own. Cost is another concern. AI systems are expensive to operate, maintain and secure. Across the corporate world, companies have rushed into automation, dismissed experienced staff and later discovered that enormous computing bills and unreliable outputs made the experiment unsustainable. By then, the personnel capable of performing the work manually were often gone. Pakistan’s Polio Workers AI can mimic intelligence, but it cannot replace human judgement. It can classify, summarise and organise information, yet it also makes clerical, analytical and data-management errors with remarkable confidence. Within government, such mistakes could distort decisions, misclassify directives or create false records of implementation. Pakistan should therefore adopt AI gradually and only within clearly defined limits. Sensitive data must remain on locally controlled infrastructure, human verification must be mandatory and paper or conventional digital backups should remain available during the transition. Water Wisdom Digitisation should strengthen the state, not make it dependent on opaque foreign technology.

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