Public Service Access Is Still Broken
The gap today
Applying for a permit, checking benefit eligibility, or renewing a document often means navigating a maze of separate agencies, forms, and logins, each with its own rules and its own interface. For someone working multiple jobs or caring for family, that maze can cost hours or days that simply aren't available.
Language compounds the problem. In the United States, most public-service portals exist only in English; the same pattern repeats elsewhere, wherever a system was designed around the assumptions of the people who built it rather than the people who use it.
And the systems that work best tend to work best for people who already have the least trouble: reliable devices, steady connectivity, and the digital fluency to figure out an unfamiliar interface. Everyone else pays a tax in time, confusion, and missed benefits.
Who Owns the Agent Owns the Data
AI agents that can act on someone's behalf will end up knowing more about that person than any social network ever has.
That is an extraordinary amount of trust to place in a single system: their health conditions, their finances, their family situation, their standing with the government.
The last time a new layer of infrastructure this intimate emerged, it was social media, and the public interest lost that fight before most people understood there was one to have. Governments now have a narrow window to set the terms for agents before the terms set themselves.
This isn't a uniquely American or uniquely local problem. Every government that wants its residents to benefit from this technology, rather than be shaped by it, faces the same choice, on its own timeline.