KAREN K BURNS: Estonia Deserves Better Than This AI Advisory Committee
Last week, the Estonian Prime Minister announced the formation of an AI advisory committee to guide government policy on artificial intelligence.
The composition? Five men: three entrepreneurs, one venture capitalist, and one IT figure whose relevance peaked years ago. No member has deep experience in building or researching AI systems. Not one woman. Not one ethicist, sociologist, legal scholar, or representative from the vulnerable communities this technology will profoundly affect.
This isn’t just tone-deaf for 2026; it’s dangerous policy-making that threatens to squander Estonia’s hard-won digital advantage.
Our Data Deserves Better Protection
This isn’t just taxpayer money being misspent on another advisory board. This is about Estonia’s most valuable asset: our digitised public data. Decades of digital transformation have given us an enviable position, but that advantage evaporates if we hand over policy authority to a narrow group that lacks the expertise to steward it responsibly.
Ironically, one of the committee members, Sten Tamkivi, recently co-authored a piece in Fomo.Observer, identifying exactly the kind of complex societal questions that demand ethical and multidisciplinary oversight. Writing about Estonia 2030, he outlines three scenarios for how AI could reshape our economy and social contract: the “super-efficiency paradox” where automation decimates the tax base; the “10X elite paradox” where a tiny group of AI-enabled workers hold the entire economy hostage; and the more hopeful “AI enlightenment” where the technology lifts all productivity.
These aren’t technical questions about model architecture or computational efficiency. They’re fundamental questions about taxation, inequality, social stability, and our economic model. Tamkivi himself writes: “AI integration isn’t just an IT project, but a question of our new economic model... We’re at a crossroads where these numbers will start moving in directions our current state structure and social contract aren’t prepared for.”
Public data requires robust ethical and legal oversight. It demands experts who understand not just how to deploy AI for efficiency gains, but how to ensure fairness, protect privacy, maintain security, and preserve human agency. The goal cannot simply be “double Estonia’s output by 2035” when we have an aging population and already vast existing skills gaps in technological knowledge. Who benefits from this efficiency? Who bears the risks? How do we prevent the “10X elite paradox” from becoming reality? These questions require diverse perspectives, not groupthink.
So why doesn’t the committee advising the government on these exact questions include anyone equipped to grapple with them? Where are the economists, sociologists, education experts, and ethicists? The legal scholars who understand how to build frameworks for taxing machine-generated value? The AI researchers who started working in machine learning and data science before ChatGPT was released? The academics studying algorithmic bias? The healthcare professionals who can speak to medical AI applications? The social scientists who can assess impact on vulnerable populations?
They exist. We have them. The Prime Minister’s office simply chose not to include them.
The Global Standard Estonia is Ignoring
Countries taking AI governance seriously understand that effective oversight requires multidisciplinary expertise. The US National AI Advisory Committee includes 27 members spanning academia, civil society, industry, and non-profits, with explicit focus on civil rights, ethics, and workforce impacts. Singapore’s Advisory Council on Ethical Use of AI brings together technologists, consumer advocates, and legal experts. The UK’s approach incorporated input from the Alan Turing Institute, ethicists, and researchers examining fairness, transparency, and societal impact.
Even these models aren’t perfect, but they recognise a fundamental truth: AI governance requires voices beyond the tech industry’s usual suspects.
Why Multidisciplinary Matters
AI is not synonymous with “tech entrepreneurship,” nor is it interchangeable with large language models -though you wouldn’t know it from the reductive framing in this committee’s announcement. When one committee member described AI as equivalent to “your village IT man (sic!),” it revealed just how limited this group’s conception of the technology really is.
True AI governance must grapple with computer vision systems that could help detect child abuse or be weaponised for surveillance. It must consider how algorithmic decision-making affects employment, social services, and access to healthcare. It must address the risk of AI-generated deepfakes impersonating officials or manipulating elderly citizens. And crucially, it must navigate the very questions Tamkivi raises: how do we maintain a functioning tax base when productivity decouples from employment? How do we prevent extreme inequality? How do we ensure AI benefits spread across society rather than concentrating in a tiny elite?
These aren’t abstract thought experiments. Singapore’s framework explicitly addresses how the AI deployment affects different societal groups. The US committee has a dedicated subcommittee on AI and law enforcement that examines bias and civil liberties. Finland’s approach combines technical AI research centres with ethics advisory boards and anti-discrimination training for public officials deploying AI systems.
This Should Be a Scandal
Anywhere else in the developed world, announcing a government’s primary AI advisory committee with this composition would trigger immediate outcry. The Prime Minister’s office clearly prioritised speed and recognisable names over competence and legitimacy. The press release should have waited. They should have taken the time to build something credible instead of slapping together what looks like a networking event guest list and calling it strategic governance.
This is taxpayer-funded policy development on technology that will fundamentally alter our economy, labor market, tax base, and social fabric.
We have the expertise in this country - the researchers, the ethicists, the legal scholars, the social scientists, the AI practitioners who’ve been doing this work for years. What we apparently lack is a Prime Minister’s office willing to do more than grab five famous tech names and pretend that constitutes serious policy development.
Perhaps most troubling is that these committee members, all educated, internationally experienced professionals, apparently saw nothing wrong with joining an all-male panel that lacked genuine AI expertise. In 2026, how do you accept such an appointment without asking basic questions: Who else is on this committee? Why are there no women? Where are the actual AI practitioners? The ethicists? The social scientists who can help navigate these fundamental questions about our social contract? The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
Our digitised public data and our international reputation for digital governance require serious engagement with these challenges. The profound questions AI raises about our economic model require the same. In 2026, with everything we know and everything at stake, this composition isn’t just inadequate - it’s simply embarrassing.
Karen K Burns is the CEO & Co-Founder of FYMA, Guest lecturer on AI at Cambridge University Judge Business School and Cambridge Spark.
Sten’s story (in Estonian):
