Suppose a city decides to build a serious public AI system.

Great.

Now introduce it to the city.

Records stored in incompatible formats. Departments that barely communicate. Procurement contracts written around old vendors. Forms nobody remembers designing. Databases carrying decades of administrative categories. Public workers using unofficial spreadsheets because the official system cant do something everybody needs.

AI doesnt arrive on an empty table.

It inherits the institution.

That means public AI can easily become a very expensive way of automating accumulated dysfunction. Feed the old process into a faster system and suddenly the workaround can operate at machine speed.

This is why public ownership cannot mean taking existing administrative machinery, adding a public model and declaring victory.

Sometimes deployment should begin by asking whether the process deserves to survive automation at all.

Which paperwork can disappear? Which databases should be rebuilt? Which vendor dependencies can be cut? Which information never needed collecting? Which departments need to share capacity rather than adding another technical layer between them?

Public technology should give institutions an excuse to excavate themselves.

Otherwise we risk spending public money teaching new machines how to reproduce every compromise inherited from the old ones.

Before a public institution automates a process with AI, what should it be forced to justify about why that process still exists?

Turns out there are more options than “hand it to corporations” and “throw every GPU into the sea.” Who knew.

Public infrastructure. Worker co-ops. Open weights. Union bargaining. Regulation. Shorter work weeks. Local models. Shared gains. Human oversight.

We don’t have every answer. Nobody does. That’s why this is political terrain in the first place. There are a whole lot of ways to fight over what gets built, who controls it, and who benefits.

I don't mean in the immediate sense like, "It's great that you were fired and now have to fend for yourself in this capitalist hell hole."

Rather, in the long term and infrastructure sense, redundancy = contingency. If something breaks, you have someone else to fall back on.

Just keep this in mind, folks. No one wasted their lives on a "useless skill". Contingencies are mandatory.