Deputy PM: AI can fix Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling
www.theregister.com
'Computer-says-no' to be replaced by summaries written by LLMs trained on government data
  • PhobosAnomaly@feddit.ukEnglish
    153·
    8 months ago

    Yes, but also no.

    The Civil Service runs on menial tasks, the public sector could trim down by - and I’m pulling a figure out of thin air here - at least 20% if a lot of the superfluous admin grade jobs were automated or trained on.

    That said, nobody can hallucinate and produce wildly neutral and self-defeating policies quite like the civil service. That’s something we’ll intuitively beat AI at for centuries yet.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      They could wrongfully prosecute hundreds of more people much more efficiency with that technology. And bonus points for “the computer did it, not use” deniability.

  • brewery@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    8 months ago

    It will be funny when they eventually decide the AI bureaucracy is the problem like they are blaming the civil service now. Nothing to do with their disastrous unworkable policies (Rwanda), pandering to the extreme elements of their party (Truss) or their complete ineptitude (pretty much everything else)…

    One good thing that happened in recent years is the digital push and gov.uk websites. I have to say, getting a driving licence, renewing a passport, finding information on lots of topics has massively improved. Carry on with this, not wasting money on untested technology. Of course, that’s silly for me to say. The money will all go to friends of the party with nothing gained.

  • kralk@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    I was going to say something along the lines of “dumbass politicians always looking for a silver bullet”, but turns out he literally used that phrase himself. File this under “quiet bat people”.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    3·
    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The UK government will trial large language models to help ministers analyze and draft documents as part of a push to overhaul public services using AI.

    In a speech on Thursday, deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden called the technology a potential “silver bullet” to reduce the burden of routine admin tasks and make civil servants more productive.

    More worryingly, perhaps, is Dowden’s idea of crime-prevention algorithms that could “direct police to where they are most needed” and “spot patterns of criminality to discover culprits quicker than ever.”

    “This is not about replacing real people with robots, it is about removing spirit-sapping, time-wasting admin and bureaucracy freeing public servants to do the important work that they do best and saving taxpayers billions of pounds in the process,” Dowden claimed.

    The UK government has hired data scientists, engineers, and machine learning experts for its Incubator for AI, dubbed i.AI, a group dedicated to exploring how the technology can improve public services.

    i.AI is piloting ten different initiatives, including using algorithms to flag fraudulent transactions in pharmacies and moving asylum claimants out of hotels more efficiently.

    The original article contains 408 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • dyathinkhesaurus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      I’ve got a dollar says that one of those solutions is to cut out or simplify the time wasting, spirit-sapping bureaucratic procedures rather than having the “AI” do them for you.

  • zarathustra0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    So if the LLM doesn’t feel like doing its research properly then questions won’t be accurately answered? And the inbuilt bias of the AI will never be challenged because all of the references it chose to include will check out? Its blind spots becoming our blind spots? It’s idea of a criminal becoming our idea of a criminal?

    No wonder politicians love it.