Picture this: an agency of the federal government tasked with a vital public service considers adopting a radical new technology that proponents claim will change the world as we know it. This new technology is still not fully proven, some people doubt it will ever be truly viable, and many risks to its use exist.
If you think this sounds like the moment we are in now, where government agencies evaluate cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and consider adopting them to improve public services, you’d be right. But what I’m actually referring to is the inception of the U.S Airmail Service — then operated by the Post Office — which occurred over 100 years ago.
In 1918, when the Airmail Service was started, airplanes were a radical new technology that some people believed would change the world. At the time, airplanes were thought to be less advanced than hydrogen-filled airships like those developed by the Zeppelin company, which around this time were already capable of making flights across the Atlantic. Airplanes were still in their infancy, but a small (and growing) contingent of people, including Otto Praeger, the Second Assistant United States Postmaster General, believed in the promise of this new technology.
While the government is often thought of as lagging in adopting new technology, the example of the Airmail Service is one where a government agency was on the bleeding edge of technology adoption. There are lessons from the creation of the Airmail Service that can be used today as contemporary technologies advance and governments must decide whether to adopt them and how to use them.
Flying a plane in the Airmail Service was among the most dangerous jobs in the world. And there were a number of issues encountered along the way to making this service successful. Otto Praeger believed in airplanes as a technology, and could see their potential for improving a vital public service. He was driven by both his belief in the future of mail delivery by planes (as opposed to by airships), and his commitment to improving service to the public.
There were risks: that airplanes would become obsolete in the face of competition from airships, that pilots could be lost, and that mail delivery would be impacted and confidence in the Post Office would be compromised. But these risks were acknowledged and managed. And the decision to adopt airplane technology to support mail delivery was grounded in the ultimate goal of improving an important public service, one people relied on immensely while the nation was at war.
We can borrow lessons from the example of the Airmail Service when evaluating new AI technologies today, and thinking about how they might be used to improve the services people rely on. Which kind of AI technology is most suitable to the needs of government agencies? Though we often use the term “AI” as shorthand for generative AI, there are other kinds of AI tools and platforms. Which ones will go on to change the world, and which will go the way of the Zeppelin?
And most importantly, we should emulate the goals of Otto Praeger in considering how AI can be used by governments. Our focus should always be on how we can use it to improve the experience of people that use government services.
Though more than 100 years separates the inception of the U.S. Airmail Service and the launch of ChatGPT, we can learn many lessons from the former when deciding how to use the latter.
Mark Headd is a Government Technology SME at Ad Hoc. He is the former Chief Data Officer for Philadelphia, serving as one of the first municipal chief data officers in the United States. He holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, and is a former adjunct instructor at the University of Delaware’s Institute for Public Administration. He spent 6 years with the General Service Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), serving on the leadership team for 18F and leading customer success efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.
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