Minister will discuss with Tony Blair about using AI to measure reforms

O deputy Minister and State Reform, Gonçalo Matias, said today that the Government is interested in expanding and improving the measurement of the results of legislative reforms and that it will discuss the use of Artificial Intelligence with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Matias has planned a visit on Wednesday in London to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which works with artificial intelligence in governance matters.

The Minister recalled that during the Blair Executives, delivery units were created, support structures for the Prime Minister to monitor the implementation of government priorities in areas such as health, education or crime, and to measure whether they were fulfilled.

“ For state reform it is essential to measure the starting point and the point of arrival and know exactly what a reform has produced,” the minister stressed to the Lusa Agency, explaining that the success of a reform is assessed by comparing the situation before and after its implementation.

According to Matias, “more important than presenting the [legislative] codes is to ensure that they are implemented, that they produce effects and that these effects actually reach people.”.

Gonçalo Matias said that there are already measurement and evaluation units in the centre of the Portuguese Government, such as Planapp in the General Secretariat and the OECD Committee which is monitoring the reform of the Ministry of Education.

Also on Wednesday, the minister is meeting with the Parliamentary Secretary of the British Government Office, Mark Ferguson, with whom he intends to exchange experiences on the development of artificial intelligence.

The three-day visit to the British capital program included contacts in the British Government’s digital service and the Open Data Institute, a non-profit organization founded by the “Internet inventor, Tim-Berners-Lee.

On the latter, he considered the meeting “very interesting” to anticipate practical difficulties in implementing the future interoperability law, under consideration in the Portuguese Parliament and with the assent of the National Data Protection Commission.

The law aims to allow the sharing of documents of citizens and companies between different services of the State, a measure will involve moving from 124 entities currently linked to the interoperability platform to about five thousand.

“They acknowledged that our project was ambitious and that we had the right mechanisms, but they warned of practical difficulties, often related to the resistance of the services that hold the information,” the minister said, stressing that sharing experience allows better preparation of implementation.