BY GENC POLLO
When a fool throws a stone into the river and the men of the village dive into the water to retrieve it, do the latter also become a little foolish? The answer to this question remains unclear, but the following note may help the debate around it.
1-THE TENDER INTELLIGENCE WITH PHYSICAL AND ELECTRONIC PAPERS
On June 23, 2010, then Minister for Information and Communication Technology, I was in Barcelona at the head of a government delegation invited by the Secretary General of the UN, Mr. Ban KiMoon, to receive the United Nations Public Service Award. For many years, the UN organized this ceremony to emphasize and encourage the obligation of states to provide their populations with quality and appropriate services.
That year for the region, Europe, the first prize was taken by Germany, namely the “Paul Ehrlich” Federal Agency of vaccines and “Biomedicine” for the integration of scientific projects. The second award was given to the Albanian government, namely the Public Procurement Agency (APP), for the implementation of electronic procurement. In our case, the innovation of electronic procurement had concrete and massive effects. Until then, tenders with the physical delivery of the bid file had shortcomings; they are illustrated by the anecdote of the mayor who, on the day of the tender, sent the security guard to the entrance of the village to repel unwanted bidders. With the application of the electronic method, each company could submit the offer ‘online’ through an “upload” in the APP electronic system from its office computer.
The statistics of the budget years 2010-2013 show that after the implementation of electronic procurement, the number of bidders for each tender increased, but also the savings of the state increased substantially. Specifically, the winning bid in relation to the “limit fund” (calculated in total) was reduced by 5-6%. This percentage translates into several hundreds of millions of euros saved by the taxpayer. With this, no one can claim that the problems with tenders have disappeared; I even fear that day will hardly ever come. But with electronic procurement, we can say without shame that we marked a solid achievement for good governance, a measurable achievement with international appreciation.
In the following years, neither the public procurement law nor electronic bidding changed. But it is interesting to read APP’s bulletins for the budget years 2014-2017 (of the Rama government). According to them, the winning offer had reached the stable level of 99.6% of the limit fund (in total), marking a significant increase compared to the previous period. As a rule, the number of bidders was minimal, almost all had the bid close to 100% of the limit fund, the lowest bids were disqualified (arbitrarily) and the most expensive bid remained the only one and therefore was declared the winner.
The reality was that the government pre-determined the winner by 99.6% and asked several other companies to formally bid (the latter either returning the favor of previous tenders or obtaining promises for future ones). A separate aspect is the limit fund, which in these years is set without any relation to the market offer, contrary to the legal methodology and super inflated so that it becomes excessive for the whole. A striking example remains one of the lots of the New Ring, Tirana, where it was discovered that the winning company had submitted false documents allegedly from a firm in Delaware, USA, and as a result the tender was repeated, the companies momentarily got out of control and submitted offers according to the market .
Those bids proved that the cap fund was nearly 300% of what it should have been; without forgetting here that the “Delaware” offer as well as the winning offers in the other two lots were, of course, 99.6% of the limit fund. Such practices can also be found in the sterilization incinerator concessions that are being clarified thanks to the investigation of the denunciation of the opposition, the media and recently the criminal investigation. Other cases such as the concession of hospital laboratories remain in the shadows even though the High State Control concludes that in this case the abuse and damage exceed those of sterilization. But such practices are endless until the budget year 2023. The above serves as a background to better understand Edi Rama’s idea to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in public procurement.
In fact, it is already a concrete proposal that the government project/law submitted to the Assembly refers to IA, even though it lacks a legal definition, which experts see with concern. Another concern is the transfer of public procurement through concession to private companies. We will explain about Artificial Intelligence below, but so far AI helps humans by implementing their orders. So, if we look at things in context, if the future procurements will be made according to the idea of the prime minister, the political opposition and the investigative media will have to in the future not to investigate the governors and their directors, but to roam after the shells. off-shore’, which will have designated the winning companies for the “incinerators” and “sterilizers” of the coming years.
And if any prosecutor wants to investigate the violence, it will be much more difficult to find the defendant. In the worst case, he will take a subpoena to San Francisco, California to Mrs. Mira Murati. This prominent Vlonian in the field of AI, Edi Rama says that he has convinced her to help the government in the use of artificial intelligence!
2-INTELLIGENCE OF THE TRANSLATION OF BRUSSELS PAPERS
In 2010, the Albanian government was working on completing the questionnaire given by the European Commission, which was a step towards obtaining candidate status. I was the minister responsible for chapter 10 “Information Society” of this questionnaire. The rule was that we sent the completed answers in Albanian to the Ministry of European Integration, where licensed translators translated them into English. The working group informed me that the English version of chapter 10 was too loud. They later discovered that it had been translated with “Google Translate” without any human editing.
In conclusion, we prepared the English version ourselves and I signaled the colleagues of Justice and Integration to consider any measure towards the license of the “convenient” translator. The episode above is significant for the limitations of Artificial Intelligence, the initial precursor of which is the translation algorithm of “Google” (which is considered the best). Even today, 13 years after the questionnaire, after an impressive progress in translation applications, this algorithm is not perfect: not even for languages widely used on the Internet such as English and Spanish where “Google” invests more and even less for ” the small languages” which includes Albanian and all the languages of the Balkans. The example for this is given by AKSHI, which a few weeks ago on its website announced a tender for IA, referring to the acts for the European “Single Market”.
This term, which in the official Albanian versions of the agreements with Brussels is marked as “Tregu i Përbashkët” or “Tregu Unik” (in English: “Common Market” or “Single Market”) seems like the next mistake in translations with IA. The above needs to be taken into consideration when we hear from Prime Minister Rama that he will use IA to translate the legislation of the European Union to transpose it into the Albanian one after having identified the loopholes in this field with IA.
First, the ‘screening’ process completed years ago by the European Commission was a fine check of our legislation to find where it needed to be supplemented or changed in order to align with European directives. Applying AI to the same thing seems an unnecessary duplication even if it turns out to be effective. Second, and more important even if the limitations of IA in English-Albanian translation were not what they are: what is the use of a computer translation that is completed in, say, 24 hours and their publication in the Official Gazette in 24 day? The first need of a law is to be recognized and internalized by the users, whether they are citizens, businesses or bureaucrats. And for state administration bureaucrats, this is achieved when they are directly involved in translation and editing. Otherwise, the real image of a state that approves laws without bothering to implement them will be reaffirmed once again.
3-THE DEVIL’S STUPID-FOOL
Prime Minister Rama’s statement that he would use IA assisted by Mira Murati for EU acts was echoed in the European media. German MEP Timo Wölken, coordinator for the rule of law of the Social Democratic Group in the European Parliament, when asked in December by the German media RND about this initiative, said that, “especially when it comes to sensitive documents such as legal texts, standards of confidentiality must be applied high. That is, for the translated texts to be checked by people who are experts and lawyers.
Artificial intelligence can be a tool to help, but it should never have the last word. Besides, I doubt that AI like ‘ChatGPT’ can reliably handle the translation of complex legal texts.” Perhaps Mr. Wölken (as well as the author of these lines) took Prime Minister Rama’s statements seriously.
It didn’t occur to him that the goal was just the next media sensation. It seems that Wölken and the others are included among the village men, who appear no wiser than the devil-fool who throws stones into the river. So far so good. If it wasn’t for the public procurement issue.
