Mexico’s national AI strategy
Mexico finds itself realising it needs an artificial intelligence plan.
The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.
Speaking to The Mexico Political Economist, a public servant in the fledgling universal public healthcare service, known as IMSS-Bienestar, recounted the story of a state functionary who found that his power resided in controlling the physical ledger he wrote down patient’s names in. Part of the IMSS-Bienestar public servant’s job was to figuratively wrestle the book out of the local functionary’s grip and in order to finally digitise its contents.
It is a story that illustrates the country’s dire need to digitise. A task that in large part falls on the recently created Digital and Telecommunications Transformation Agency. The Digital Agency—as it is more widely known—has its sights on more lofty targets that it hopes will aid in and go far beyond the basic digitalisation of Mexico’s bureaucracy.
Last week saw the publication of the National Plan for Artificial Intelligence, which is simultaneously ambitious and desperately lagging. In it it becomes clear that Mexico is just catching up to the likes of Egypt, India, and Vietnam when it comes to artificial intelligence.
The Plan decrees that “AI must be at the service of the people and the public interest”—which often with the ruling Morena government should be read as ‘aligned with the interests of the State.’ The latter comes across clearly in the plan, whether or not the Digital Agency will be able to pull this off is another matter. Here is a breakdown of its AI Plan’s main policies:
