Civil servant robot ‘commits suicide’! Implications of AI for public service codes of practice

In June 2024, and in the Gumi City Council of South Korea, a service robot—or Robot Supervisor—was alleged to have committed “suicide.” In the same South Korea in November 2023, another robot deployed in a vegetable plant fatally crushed a man to death because it could not differentiate between the man and the boxes of vegetables. Some seven years earlier, in 2017, Sophia—the first humanoid robot—became the first robot citizen of Saudi Arabia and an innovation ambassador for the United Nations Development Program. All over the world, and due to the increasing deployment of AI and robotics in various professional fields—from engineering to surgery and the public service—we will never know the statistics of fatalities that might have resulted due to robotic malfunctions.

South Korea has the highest robot density in the whole world, with at least one robot for every 10 people in the country. Two, South Korea has the unenviable record of being one of Asia’s most overworked countries. South Koreans work 52 hours per week, from 9am to 9pm every day. The total of 1,915 hours per year is 200 hours more than the average clocked by any country within the OECD nations. It is therefore no surprise that even a service robot would “feel” the fatal pressure of the overworked workplace, and develop a glitch that plunged it to its death.

There is a similarity between the workplace pressure in Asia and in Africa. Ranked by an average weekly work hour, Nigeria, at 39.6 hours per week, does not qualify as a hardworking nation. This plays into the overall fabric of institutional dysfunction, especially in the over-bloated and ineffective public service, where too many people doing nothing, too many doing too little, and too few people doing too much.

Given the furious development in AI and robotics, and the demonstration of their efficiency in assisting government to achieve their administrative goals, we can say that Nigeria is grossly behind in creating an efficient workplace where the robotic and human civil servants can work side by side in energising the public service workplace for efficient and effective service. And yet, the level of our anxiety with being behind in the AI deployment race must be directly proportional to the level of our carefulness in learning from the technological experiences of other countries. The Gumi City Council AI incident says and teaches significant lessons.

The worries about AI are critical ones. There is the worry about the increasing autonomy of AI and the challenges that poses for how humans perceive themselves and their worth. But more immediate is the worry about the societal disruptions of the deployment of AI, especially in the workplace—displacement, alienation, security, death. Is it enough to automate, computerise or digitise when the system and processes being improved have not been mapped, reprofiled for reengineering; does it not amount to engrafting technology on a challenged system and what results should we expect? And it calls for a critical pause for reflection. Two issues are fundamental for resolution. The first is: Can the AI efficiency dynamic be tacked on to a deficient system to achieve efficiency and effectiveness? Yes, it can; but then it becomes another supposedly “innovative” recipe for deepening existing inefficiencies and deficits. First consideration: we need to start the reflection from the perspective of the self-motivated, hardworking but extremely frazzled and demotivated Nigerian public servant who is compelled by so many factors to work within a highly toxic, inefficient and highly politicised workplace. This is the first and most significant context that AI is to be deployed. How will this pan out in practice? What regulatory frameworks can such a system deploy? What safety measures can the system afford that will not compromise the human well-being?

Second, if the existing public service is flawed in mediating human-to-human ethical relations, how do we hope to situate the human-AI component and achieve even a measure of success? What accountability structures and standards are then in place to safeguard human self-worth? This also goes beyond the workplace to, for example, the sanctity of data collected by AI. How is the system to ensure data privacy? How about the ethical oversight function of the system to monitor AI autonomy and deployment for critical use?

A challenged system does not need more innovation; rather, it needs a moment to rethink and reengineer and get right the institutional basics. The effectiveness of AI in the workplace is not in doubt; it has been demonstrated all across the world as the harbinger of efficiencies and productivity if properly managed and grafted effectively into a functional system. AI is meant to enhance an already functioning system rather than serving as an instigator for a deficient one. This implies that to adopt, adapt and deploy AI into the Nigerian administrative workplace must be preceded by an urgent imperative of reflecting on, rethinking and reengineering the administrative and institutional basics that can make the public service genuinely and efficiently worldclass. And the most fundamental question in this regard is: what change management mechanism can yield a government business model that is efficient?

Prof Olaopa is the Chairman Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja

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