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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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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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”

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”

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