Crypto, AI, and Bureaucracy

Something we humans seem to be experts at is... bureaucracy. Like weeds, it can grow almost everywhere and you need to regularly weed or it becomes a problem.

In our country, and I'm sure in other places too, the biggest bureaucracy can be found in the public sector, and whenever you can avoid it by doing things online or even via the old-school post office, it's a visible improvement.

This way you can avoid lines, and contact with one or perhaps multiple grumpy employees, but you don't avoid unreasonably long terms to resolve various issues, to move through the system from one department to another, get some signatures, or whatever else is needed, and so on. We are talking about 30 days deadlines. Or, for example, the building permit was a few months of waiting. Both times we needed them recently.

I wonder if many of these bureaucrats understand what's coming for them.

We already see clear signs of the reduction of redundant jobs in society, but mostly in the private sector so far. The public sector is still more human-centric, with an excess of jobs, at least in our country.

I don't have a problem humans are employed in the public sector, although I prefer not to interact with them if I have an alternative. I do have a problem when they take so long to solve issues. Will AIs eventually replace most of them? I have no doubt about that. AI for processing + NFTs for tokenizing + eventually crypto payments would make most of these processes much smoother.

Source

Let's tell you about something fresh in my mind, although it happened in a private company, not in a public one.

I needed to make a contract with the electricity company. The contract was all drafted, all details were completed, so it was just a matter of finding the contract in the system and making the payment. Or at least, that's how I see things as a customer. I tried the first time on Monday, not because I am the kind of person that storms into an office when it first opens for business in the morning and on Monday morning nonetheless, but because I have a slower Monday in general, and I could have afforded some dead time.

The problem was the office was full of people, especially at the service I needed to go to, so the dead time would have been at least 2h30m until I got there, so something like 3h with my time too. I wasn't going to wait that long, so I left.

I returned yesterday, not before checking online (at someone's advice) and seeing I could have made a reservation (which I did for yesterday). Even yesterday, there were two counters where I could go with this contract. At one of them, the employee was most of the time on the phone so practically only one worked for a while. There were only a few people in front of me, but entering contract details takes time, especially if you don't have type very well. When my turn came, I realized what some of the holdback was. When they tried to access my contract, which was pre-filled, it didn't show in their system. They called technical support, nobody answered. They called again, same result. At some point I think they called someone else to "clear" the contract, or something like that. Then it took a couple of minutes until they were able to access it at their end. All this needed both employees to consult each other, so again, only one counter worked.

It's not always the person in front of you's fault. It can be a buggy system or a antique process that hasn't been significantly updated in ages. In this case it wan't the direct human interaction that was lacking, although it often is, at least in the public sector. But improved technology and AI, and in some cases crypto, would fix many of these issues. However, the older generations would still have a very tough time adapting, and I understand them too.

Things are changing rapidly... I am readier than many others, I'm sure of that. You too, since you read this. But many will not see it coming...

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