Defeating the Great Stagnation

For Technology to raise productivity, we need to do more than just plug it in.

Given the challenges of the moment, the Chancellor’s Spring Statement last week was somewhat inevitably focussed on short-term cost-of-living mitigations, with much less discussion of the most important structural challenge facing the UK today: the Great Stagnation. UK businesses produce less per hour than other Western Economies, and productivity growth has stalled since the financial crisis of 2008 averaging a dismal 0.4% a year.

This is not just an economic issue depressing wages: flat-lining productivity makes it much harder to solve the other strategic challenges facing the country. Low-carbon and secure energy supplies that are actually affordable; the rising costs of health and social care driven by an ageing population; and the rebalancing of the economy by ‘levelling up’ areas outside London and the South East. All of these are made politically soluble by raising productivity. No one wants to choose between heating and eating. Neither as a society do we want to choose between climate change and social care. Restart productivity growth, and we won’t have to.

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Film: Don’t look up – review

Netflix’s latest comedy (released 24 Dec 2021) is a laugh-but-cringe satire on the inability of our modern institutions and social systems to respond to existential threats. As the US President (Meryl Streep) says early on “You cannot go around saying to people that there’s 100% chance that they’re going to die.” Specifically the film dissects the pathologies of a Media industry adapted for entertainment over truth; a Political system tuned for persuasion over truth; and a Business/Tech sector oriented towards making money, over truth.

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AI: the future of work (hallelujah)!

A lightly edited version of a talk given at St. James Clerkenwell, June 26th 2019

Tonight I’d like to ask two questions:

  1. Is a Robot going to take your job? 
  2. And what has faith got to do with the future of work?

Screenshot 2019-07-01 at 10.31.29

First of all, what is AI?

AI is computer software that is designed to mimic some of the functions of human intelligence. Right now, it mostly functions like a calculator on steroids. Good at analysis,  bad at common sense. AI mostly works for narrow, bounded, analytical problems when you have the data to tell the algorithm what the right answer is for hundreds or thousands of different cases.

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AI Safety: correcting 200,000 years of human error

Text of a speech given at the Slaughter & May Data Privacy Forum

Amid the dizzying possibilities within the future of technology, AI, and data, in recent years somehow we have often wound up worrying about how AI is going to go wrong.

  • Sometimes apocalyptically wrong – some of our greatest scientists and engineers like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk predict that AI may spell the end for humanity.
  • Sometimes we worry about AI going philosophically wrong – worrying who our self-driving car should crash into when it has to make the choice.
  • Sometimes it is going officially wrong – like when the recommendation engine for probation officers is biased against ethnic minorities.
  • And sometimes it is just going prosaically wrong, like suggesting we should buy that Marvin Gaye album over and over again.

But whatever the cause – the popular imagination is pretty worried about the downside of these ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’.

And I think I understand why. AI impinges on our own identities. In an era when work for so many of us has come to define our sense of purpose: we look for love and find work instead. If work is our purpose, then the prospect of technological unemployment is not just an economic threat, but an existential threat. Our worries about AI are really worries about ourselves.

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University Digital Services: is an avalanche coming?

  • Boards (exec and non exec) should consider technology integrated with university services, not a separate concern the ‘IT department’. This is not yet the default behaviour within the HE sector.
  • Specific opportunities include: faster assessment & feedback, personalised tuition, and paperless administration processes. These reforms will increase University efficiency and effectiveness.
  • Digital is not the same as IT: the software is an evolving service more than a technology product; it will be designed around user needs not centrally specified ‘functional requirements’; and there should be an incremental approach to design & build, not monolithic procurement exercises.
  • Digitally effective universities will have the in-house capacity to build, operate and improve digital services, as well as to commission them from suppliers.
  • The chances of sector disruption are rising.

For the last three years I have served on the University of Exeter governing body, the Council. Unusually for most Higher Education governing boards, independent members of Council hold a specific portfolio of responsibility alongside an Executive lead – in my case, for Digital and Technology.

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Trust is Britain’s secret weapon in the global AI race

From self-driving cars to new drug discoveries and devices which know what you want before you do, AI has the potential to transform our lives as fundamentally as the printing press and electricity.

It is estimated AI could add $15.7 trillion to global GDP by 2030. No surprise then that the UK government’s industrial strategy identified it as one of four areas where Britain can lead the world.

But this looks at best optimistic when Britain is a minor player in an AI arms race dominated by the US and China. China is now second behind the US in AI patent filings and is home to three of the seven biggest AI companies in the world: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. No prizes for guessing where the other four are based. Continue reading “Trust is Britain’s secret weapon in the global AI race”

AI Ethics: send money, guns & lawyers

Photo of Westminster Abbey taken by Iulian Ursu
Photo: Iulian Ursu (cc)

My speech notes, for a talk given to the Westminster Abbey Institute on 31 May 2018

This evening I’d like to present a problem within what I believe to be the most transformative technology of our lives: artificial intelligence. I’ll suggest why I think that problem will involve some colossal rows involving money, guns, and lawyers. And as well as explaining the problem, I’d like your help to find the right way for us to respond professionally and personally, so I look forward to the discussion afterwards. Continue reading “AI Ethics: send money, guns & lawyers”

Freedom to flounder

“To food, friends, and freedom.” My traditional toast at dinner is usually readily echoed, whoever happens to be at our table. Yet if I were to substitute Freedom for a more specific word that historically has had much of the same meaning – salvation – then many of our guests might choke on their brussel sprouts.

Over the last century, the West has rightly pursued the ideal of freedom from external constraint, whether legal, social or political. The effect has thankfully given greater liberty (if not yet equality) to individuals, and particularly women, and minorities. Yet, we now face a host of social challenges from having forgotten the second kind of freedom: freedom from internal obstacles; salvation from ourselves and from our fathomless ability to screw things up. The notion of salvation promises freedom from the less beautiful chambers of our hearts; but sounds alien to modern ears because we too easily forget our own human frailties.

In an age where almost everything is permitted, our leaders and commentators have lost the moral courage to articulate how we can be saved from our instinctive choices. Poor diets have created an epidemic of diabetes. Poor financial discipline contributes to debt. Lack of community commitment has led to epic levels of loneliness. How many couples get help to navigate the useful constraints of marriage? How many of us feel confident to justify our own conception of virtue in an age of cultural relativism? Collectively, an excess of freedom has left us floundering.

Refugees Welcome

Credit: United Nations Photo
Credit: UN Photo

I’m going to a London hack-weekend on the 2nd October with a proposition. I’d like to create an easier way for people to offer to host refugees in their homes for a period of time.

This recent newspaper article gave advice for people looking to offer a room, but the process is far from straightforward. Citizens UK and 38 Degrees have demonstrated that there are a lot of people in the UK who are willing to help, but right now there is no accessible online service in the UK. But it wouldn’t take long to make…

To get ready for the weekend, I’m talking with the expert organisations who have been organising such support for years, including Boaz Trust, Assist, Housing Justice, and Refugees Welcome in Germany about how we might quickly create a light-weight digital service wrapper that could save them work in gathering potential hosts, and lower the barrier for people wanting to volunteer.

We are going to need help from people with a whole bunch of different skills, including designers, developers, user researchers, asylum experts, local authority housing experts, service managers, data analysts, and delivery managers. I’d love your help with this. If you’re interested, you can either come along to the hack-weekend or get in touch through Twitter.

The Glory of the Church

church
CC: B Hilton

A ComRes poll published yesterday showed just 22% of 18-24 year olds believe Christianity is a force for good in the world. Yet I’m struck by the range of ways in which it feels to me that it is making life better for millions of people.

Sometimes it is hard to see the glory of the church. Dwindling numbers. Occasional hypocrisy in members and in the clergy. Awkward, divisive conversations held through the media about women bishops, and homosexuality. On an individual level, sometimes the Christians we see at work don’t look all that different to anyone else in a disappointing way, through office intrigue, broken promises, or just indifference.

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Policymaker’s guide to Digital

Quite a few colleagues in the Civil Service have asked me recently about how policy professionals can learn more about ‘digital’. This collection of web resources obviously isn’t definitive or authoritative, and I don’t necessarily agree with everything that the authors say, but everything here has helped me personally. If you have other suggestions, please do leave them in the comments below.

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Digital Government in the next Parliament

Yesterday I gave a speech to the High Potential Development Scheme cohort of Civil Service Directors and Directors General. I’ve blogged it here in case it is of wider interest.


What does digital mean for you?

Getting a decent laptop for work?

Maybe getting Google alerts of all the relevant news on your brief, straight to your phone?

Maybe a transformation programme for better digital services to meet the needs of our users.

Perhaps, it’s using Twitter to improve your engagement, and strengthen your influence.

Maybe just the wistful memory of a familiar departmental website that you knew your way around, and had some sense of control over? Continue reading “Digital Government in the next Parliament”

Children: the missing manual

Anna and I recently went on a parenting course. This wasn’t under duress from social services or out of sheer despair, but because we thought it might be good. And it was. Excellent in fact. We did it at St. Marks Battersea Rise, but it isn’t a ‘religious’ course – there were plenty of folks there who never usually step inside a church. It made me feel like I finally had the manual that ought to have accompanied our children when they were delivered.

Here are five ideas that struck me during the sessions. Now – perhaps I’m just naive when it comes to fatherhood – that’s pretty likely in fact, but I’m sure that I wouldn’t have clocked these just by practice: Continue reading “Children: the missing manual”

Digital delivery

I’ve recently published two posts about the work we’re doing in the Government Digital Service to track our progress, and to measure the performance of public services:

Digital marches on: rising take-up, falling costs
The Performance Platform: open for business

We have also recently launched the Digital Service Standard, finalised guidance for Agile business cases with HM Treasury, and the long awaited user research lab is nearly complete. It has been a good couple of months!

Digital up 9% in just over a year

Freetown Dispatches

What follows is a series of letters to friends and family sent while my wife and I were working with the Sierra Leone government in Freetown between April and December 2009.


27 April 2009

We’ve just finished our first full week in Freetown, and thought it was time we let you know that we’re still alive and well.

We’re in Sierra Leone for about a year working inside their Government to contribute to their policy making and delivery processes. We’re part of a small team employed by Tony Blair’s office. We’re living in relative luxury (running cold water and intermittent generator powered electricity) with three others in a team house that resembles a ramshackle Spanish villa, nestling in the hills above Freetown. All around us is a hive of activity with houses being built wherever space allows. The planning laws exist more in theory than practice, and the builders merchants across the street from us seem to be doing a roaring trade. Our house overlooks the American embassy, which is rather an isolated fortress on a hill, and in stark contrast to the UK embassy which we visited last week, which as you might expect, contains genial diplomats with a pink gin in one hand and regrets for the passing of the Empire in the other.

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I made a thing

bag-half-done

Every workplace has different values: different cultures and stories that shape and reflect staff habits. When I was at the Treasury, credibility came from getting a ‘measure’ into the budget, with cheers as the Chancellor duly read it out at the dispatch box. At Google, it came from having been there a long time – being one of the apostles, there at the start. At the Department of Energy & Climate Change, it was being recognised as expert in your particular field.
departure-lounge

Where I currently work is different. At GDS, one thing that reliably brings respect is to be able to say ‘I made a thing’. Things like Roo’s JargoneJordan’s departure lounge, or Richard’s dials. I don’t make many things, alas. Just words, and occasionally pictures. But it is a complete pleasure to work with those who do.

I prefer not to carry a bag around, but I often want to take a tablet or a book. Limited by the size of my pockets, I looked around for things to buy. This shoulder holster looked a little strange. And the neoprene laptop rucksack just looked hot. I wanted something slim that could fit under a jacket. So rather than buying a thing, I asked a friend to help make something better. I drew a sketch and worked with Emily to cut and stitch a prototype from a cotton/linen mix. After a bit more measuring, cutting and trimming, voilà.

tablet-bag

Farewell Grandad Peter

It is unusual to start a blog with a farewell, but I thought I would post the eulogy that my sister and I gave for our Grandfather, who died just before Christmas.
Image
We stand here today as the eldest of Grandad’s five grandchildren and we would like to spend a few minutes sharing Peter’s early life and adventures followed by our own memories of Grandad, which I hope will highlight just what a truly special man he was.

Peter was born in 1919, the eldest of four children, to William and Ellen Sargeant, a working class and practical family of blacksmiths.  Peter’s brother Don is here today.  He went to Little Baddow Primary School and was a good student.  It was here, aged seven, that Peter met his future wife Jean Ager when she and her sister Betty joined the school.  Jean sat at the desk in front of Peter and at that time their friendship was limited to Peter pulling her hair to get her attention; but she soon became his childhood sweetheart and a growing friendship with Jean’s brother Bernard enabled Peter to visit the family more often.  In his spare time, Peter made some pocket money working on local farms plucking chickens, gathering potatoes and picking peas in addition to helping his parents with the chores; collecting water daily from the spring and getting fresh milk from Holybread Farm.  His education continued at King Edward’s Grammar School and in 1936 Peter secured his first proper job at Marconi’s before being called up for military service, aged 20.

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