To implement AI within existing systems you need either civil service cooperation or swathes of contractors/consultants. The alt-approaches are either a DOGE-like raid on democracy or massive rapid investment in shadow systems.
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You most likely know much more than me so apologies for the uninformed comment: my understanding is that AI is a big umbrella anyway - you have the LLMs that have been demonstrated to not help productivity anyway and which are based on copyright infringement and are the next thing to flop...
... and you have the stuff that's used to automate certain tasks that would otherwise eg: need a lot of data entered manually, and has been used for longer than the public has been aware of ChatGPT et al. My fear is that when politicians harp on about these things they either mean the worst form of
such innovations or just use them as excuses to pretend to cut waste when they just want to cut spending (in the short term, in the long term they might cause huge expense by eg relying on expensive contracts).
Amd then there's the DOGE scenario you describe...
To hit ffwd on the most dystopian option, the latter scenario is a dream for Palantir, Oracle, Microsoft etc and a nightmare for effective service delivery or democratic governance. Whether it's possible to execute is another matter, but it's a possible end point of centralised techno-managerialism
Without an effective opposition, without a democratic approach to decision-making or scrutiny, without sufficient technological expertise to understand the fictional aspects of a sales pitch, seems v possible that this will mean more corporate control of public systems.
I don't understand why the Gov is rushing to give such companies access, power and control when they are not located in the UK and can be weaponised against us at any time.
(Also waiting for the US to do that with the likes of Google/YouTube etc).
Its very depressing. Very depressing how little they know or appear to be prepared to do a modicum of research. Especially when it has to potential to affect so many and so much.
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Amd then there's the DOGE scenario you describe...
(Also waiting for the US to do that with the likes of Google/YouTube etc).