Elon Musk's DOGE may have lessons to learn from Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur is not secretive about adopting AI for governance

- Catherine Thorbecke

Would you trust artificial intelligence to help run your country? Malaysia is doing just that. The Southeast Asian nation announced a plan to roll out Google's Gemini AI tools to nearly half a million civil servants as part of a broader top-down push to make its workforce more efficient and help with the more tedious parts of governing. The stakes are higher when it comes to relying on AI to help run a democracy, since people never elected machines to office. There are many examples of AI messing up or going rogue, but the reality is that AI is likely coming for swathes of repetitive office work, including within government.

Malaysia is not alone in seeking ways to automate some of these tasks. Yet it still seems like quite a bit could go wrong. Within days of Kuala Lumpur's announcement, Google launched a Super Bowl ad touting how Gemini could help a cheese-shop owner in the US grow its business online. However, its AI program spit out an inaccurate statistic about Gouda consumption. If these tools are getting elementary cheese data wrong, it's hard to imagine them drafting public policies.