Clarita Carlos (Facebook)

Former national security adviser Clarita Carlos has floated the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to help government in its anti-poverty or poverty-alleviation efforts. 

"Can AI sift thru ALL our attempts to solve poverty since 1946? Identify the successes/ failures," Carlos asked in a Facebook post Sunday, Sept. 17. 

Carlos, who is currently House Speaker Martin Romualdez's chief policy adviser on security and defense concerns, gave as a start date the year after American troops liberated the Philippines from Japan in World War II. 

In recent months, the professor has been equal parts worried and hopeful about the impact of AI on Filipinos' lives as its applications an usage become more and more commonplace. 

As for Carlos' pitch to have AI assess decades worth of the country’s poverty-alleviation measures, the netizens have had mixed reactions. 

"Of course it can! This is a simple task for AI. I doesn't even require in-depth analyses, just basic data gathering. Although it spans 77 years, it'll be fast and easy for AI," confidently said one commenter in Bert Quibuyen. 

Netizen Do Prime wasn't as optimistic. "It cant solve it. It can only do theoretical calculations. Poverty is man-made cause[d] by some greedy Western culture," Prime wrote. 

For one Cythia Diaz, tapping AI to help government address the problem of poverty was an "Interesting thought.".