The Minister of Digitization, Bogdan Ivan, declared on Wednesday that, in the next three years, according to the data of the National Institute of Statistics, approximately one third of the public servants in Romania will retire. Ivan claims that a large part of their work is to be taken over by artificial intelligence following the country’s digital transformation process.
Minister of Digitization, Bogdan Ivan PHOTO: Video capture The truth
The Minister of Digitalization presented, in a press conference at the Victoria Palace, data regarding Romania’s National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2024 – 2027, a document recently adopted by the Government, writes Agerpres.
“Regarding Romania’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy, (…) after more than eight months of debates, both with the Romanian university environment, with private companies, with research institutes, with the ecosystem in Europe and other Western countries , in particular, the one in the USA, we finally arrived at a strategy that includes two extremely important elements. Once – centering on the human being, namely the principle by which his rights are respected when we talk about the use of new artificial intelligence technologies, which today are in more than seven billion applications. Two – risk classification, when we talk about content that can come and be critical for public information or societal impact”said the minister.
According to him, through this strategy, the way in which emerging technologies will be able to be anchored in the national and European funding from the National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation was profiled.
“Regarding, punctually, Romania’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy, I profiled the way in which everything that means emerging technologies will be able to be anchored in the national and European funding from the National Research Development and Innovation Plan, precisely to create the context in which those entities, whether we are talking about companies, whether we are talking about public entities in Romania or research organizations, when they apply for European or governmental funding, to be anchored in this strategic framework through which both Artificial Intelligence and, more recently , a new technology (Quantum computing – no) will be able to be financed directly and with priority”, Ivan explained.
He mentioned that, currently, there are projects in the public administration that use Artificial Intelligence.
“At the moment, we have projects that use this new technology. And I can give the most recent example – an automated data processing project that we opened about two months ago through which 18 government ministries and agencies will be able to automatically process huge data sets, through a funding of 20 million euros. And, moreover, we are talking about a statistic published by the INS, according to which, in the next three years, approximately 30% of the public servants in Romania are going to retire. It is obvious that the work of these officials, a large part of their work will be able to be replaced by these new technologies through the digital transformation of the Romanian state“, added Bogdan Ivan.
According to it, the Romanian state is ready. “We have the latest regulations worldwide, it’s the most up-to-date strategy for applying an emerging technology, and we’re ready to put it into practice.”the minister claimed.
He emphasized that for the application of these technologies, projects regarding digital skills are already being developed.
“To make sure that civil servants in Romania will know how to use this technology, we have prepared two extremely important projects. A 10 million euro project at the National Agency of Civil Servants, through which over 30,000 civil servants will acquire digital skills. And, two, because we don’t leave the private sector behind either, we signed a contract two days ago for the National E-Learning Platform for SMEs, through which they will have access to the latest technologies, they will be able to prepare employees to find what those basic needs are in their companies. We will profile that platform in such a way that, using the largest technology companies worldwide, we can bring courses for civil servants in Romania, but also for companies in our country, to know how to work with these new technologies: artificial intelligence, cloud computing and so on,” Ivan further explained.
The Minister highlighted the multiple fields of applicability of Artificial Intelligence: “From the point of view of the use of these data, it is obvious that they have applicability from the level of public administration to the medical level, from telemedicine systems to the discovery of certain medicines or certain vaccines, to the way we balance the national energy system”.
