Majid Nili Ahmadabadi, a member of the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, in the specialized meeting “Foreign Relations in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” organized by the Strategic Council of Foreign Relations, talked about “Artificial Intelligence and Data-driven Governance; As a requirement for the development of artificial intelligence.”

He stated that until the government is not turned into the all-around customer of data-oriented governance and does not change its view on governance, artificial intelligence and new data-oriented tools will not grow in the country and will not create the native environment that we expect.

Ahmadabadi added that the ruler in the traditional model generally sees the society’s delayed economic and social behavior, for example, by changing the consumption patterns or the emergence of some deep social dissatisfactions, and tries to get information about the society by interacting with limited individuals and institutions. Here the role of biases is also important in taking the pulse of society.

He said the traditional ruler uses his tools with delay and does not act actively toward society. Therefore, to compensate for the mistakes and lack of information for governance, most traditional rulers secure some issues, the spectrum we see in the world.

This member of the Faculty of Electrical and Computers Faculty of Tehran University emphasized that a good ruler tries to make society observable and predictable and to diversify the points through which information can be obtained from society to know the characteristics of society better in the sense that it lives in a physical space and a digital space. In this situation, the possibility of observability and predictability of society has increased compared to before.

Ahmadabadi continued, “When the society becomes bi-biological, it leaves many traces in the digital space. At the same time, there is inherent diversity in obtaining first-hand information from society. In this situation, we do not necessarily rely on people with special biases around the government. More importantly, the wisdom created by the government in the first life is generally ineffective in the second life.”

He pointed to the concept of rationality in accordance with the environment. He explained that self-bias, non-self bias, confirmation bias, and bias of habitual behaviors have emerged and grown in our evolution and learning so that we can live a better life, and it is narrated that it relies on the logic of optimization. This attitude has been created since our ancestors were cave dwellers, But this amphibiousness destroys the optimality of these biases. In other words, self and non-self do not have the same meaning. Now people in digital environments feel that people on the other side of the world are closer to them than their brother or neighbor. Therefore, some issues are changing and collapsing.

This faculty member of Tehran University emphasized that “what will happen is that if the ruler does not live two lives and does not pay attention to the second life, from the point of view of bias, he will have a different view of the society and this will create a serious gap between people and government, which of course has been already created.”

Stating that considerable data is being created in the second world, Ahmadabadi said this massive data cannot be analyzed with mental, traditional, and manual models. This is where artificial intelligence plays a serious role in partially compensating for traditional governance’s shortcomings.

Emphasizing that data-driven governance is necessary for the development and comprehensive use of artificial intelligence, he continued that learning, along with genes and evolution, has been the foundation of human intelligence. We have sensor systems that rely on observations. These observations are beyond the power of our analysis and memory, revealing the differences between people, and we learn what information to process. These sensors we have are quantitative and not qualitative. In addition, these sensors are slow. As a result, our art has been to evolve and learn how to process the correct data with a small volume so that we can make the right decisions when the observations are significant.

Pointing to the automation revolution as a serious revolution after the industrial revolution in which analytical analysis and automation control tools were created, Ahmadabadi added that it was here that humankind was able to remove itself from the control loop and put the machine in the control loop of complex tools and can achieve great things.

This member of the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, reminded us that now that we are amphibians and humans are becoming a circle, we can have huge quantitative and qualitative information about human society’s complex and fast dynamics. Our data processing is limited, and our human sensors are also qualitative. The ruler is also the one who can process information less and, of course, acts slowly. With this identifier of knowledge that society has created in its second living space, to be able to analyze it, things like automation, AI, and data-driven control tools have been created.

He continued that, therefore, with simulation, data science is a new model of modeling and control than before, with the difference that man-made tools, relying on physical rules known by humans, could be modeled mathematically. Humans have the motion model of the airplane and can make a mathematical model from it. But it does not have clear models for social interactions. Therefore, it creates other models in its brain and relies on them to interact with and control society. In fact, AI and data science are the symbiosis of these things.

Stating that AI and data science are serious economic, social, and behavioral issues, Ahmadabadi said, “We had three serious developments in artificial intelligence. One is that the machine beat Kasparov in chess and showed that the machine wins over humans in deterministic environments when we have a lot of memory and processing. The second step was when it happened that it defeated humanity in uncertain criteria. The machine recognizes thousands of faces with high accuracy. So it defeats man in scale. The third development is that we can now talk to it in human language and perform data analysis directly. This means that artificial intelligence is no longer a tool, but a collaborator”.

This university professor stated that now in the proposal to adjust the arrangement and management of companies, it is said that artificial intelligence should be present in every element of the organization and not create an artificial intelligence department. He added that since we are now collaborating with a machine, the interaction model will change, and this equation will be moved and messed up.

Emphasizing the effect of creating data-driven indicators of society for the policy maker on its agility and data-driven decision-making, he continued: The ruler’s behavior has also changed, and now it can change the behavior and change of the society in the digital space. Of course, it does not mean negative behaviors and beatings, but it is a platform for development, not for negative behaviors. Everyone believes that if artificial intelligence is to enter an organization, the most important obstacle is its ruler because it thinks it will lose authority. The organization can easily replace this ruler with another ruler because its godliness will be lost at the hands of the organization’s manager.

“With artificial intelligence, while increasing agility and realism, the bias effect of the circles around the ruler is reduced. The ruler’s need for correct data and artificial intelligence becomes serious in this situation. There is no place in the world where artificial intelligence has been developed unless the ruler was its serious client. Businesses that collect data with all national considerations should be created, and the government should use their results. We must have serious and strong platforms in the country. Fortunately, we live in an area where these platforms can go beyond our borders, provided that we remove this negative and security view from them.”