Zero-Click Government

How Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Public Infrastructure Will Make the State Proactive

Gustavo Maia

• Publisher: Mojo
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9786589008675
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The State knows when you were born, where you live, and when you lost your job. Yet at the moment you need it most, you are still expected to seek it out, prove who you are, fill out forms, and wait. This book investigates why public authorities continue to arrive late in people's lives—even when they already possess the information needed to act sooner. Gustavo Maia founded Colab, a Brazilian GovTech company, in 2013 after visiting a stilt-house community in Recife, northeastern Brazil, where families were waiting for the State to offer more than campaign promises. More than a decade of working with governments in Brazil and abroad revealed that the problem is no longer primarily technological: it has become an institutional choice. The State chooses to react when it could anticipate, and this reactivity penalizes precisely those with the fewest resources to persist. Zero-Click Government proposes reversing this logic by organizing State action around the events that shape people's lives—birth, loss of income, illness, and aging—and using data, artificial intelligence, and digital public infrastructure to ensure that rights reach citizens without requiring them to fight for them. The book examines the conditions, risks, and limits of this transition, without naive faith in technology and without resignation to the current model.

Table of contents

• Presentation
• Foreword
• Introduction
• I. Why Does the State Fail Even When It Digitalizes?
• II. What It Means for the State to Work Well in the Twenty-First Century
• III. Coordination Is an Attribute of the State, Not of the Software
• IV. Coordination as a Power Struggle
• v. The New Legitimate Unit of State Action
• VI. Expanded Capacity, Expanded Responsibility
• VII. The Limits of Anticipation
• VIII. From Thesis to Public Decision
• Epilogue — What to Do with All This
• Afterword — A Response by Beth Simone Noveck
• Bibliography
• Index