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A week later, the British government a sweeping plan It reveals more details about how this will shape the public sector to make big investments in AI. On the agenda: AI assistants to speed up public services; information sharing deals between secret departments; and a new set of artificial intelligence tools to speed up the work of civil servants, named ‘Humphrey’ after a character in an old British TV political sitcom.
The plans will be formally unveiled on Tuesday at a press conference led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), along with two other departments, Work and Pensions and Health/Social care.
if you switch to UK government AI site to check the progress of some projects, you will find that most of the efforts so far are either in limited testing or very early stages in the testing phase; others are even more newborn. For example, a plan to bring more AI services to the customer-facing side of the NHS is only “in preparation”charter” sticking to the concept.
Some include links to Github repositories to check out some of the work to date. It is not clear how many people work in total on these projects and which third party tools (eg LLM) are used. (We’ve asked these questions and will update when we learn more.)
At their heart, projects are all about efficiency. According to DSIT, the government currently spends around £23 billion annually on technology, and the idea would be to repurpose that money in more modern ways.
“Slow technology has hampered our public services for far too long, costing us all a fortune in time and money… Not to mention the headaches and stress we’re left with after waiting or having to travel to fill up. a form,” Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for DSIT, said in a statement. “My Department will put AI to work… We will use technology to challenge the nonsensical approach the public sector takes to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves.”
Plans include a new team to lead projects within DSIT DOGE In the US, however, it was conceived and run by government people, not tech tycoons.
DSIT initially develops in three areas:
1. Work of civil servants. Humphrey, named after him cunning, clever assistant starred by the late Nigel Hawthorne in Yes, Minister and later Yes, Prime Minister is a set of programs aimed at reducing the typical daily workload of civil servants, especially around the large amount of information required to read. and process as part of their work.
The ‘consultation’ is designed to take hours to read and summarize the ‘thousands’ of responses to the consultation (the responses, which can be long and numerous, are central to how the government considers feedback from stakeholders and the public). Parlex will enable them to query and read conversations in Parliament on bills or other policy documents they are working on. Minutes is a secure transcription service for taking notes from their multi-hour meetings. Redbox helps them prepare briefings and policy documents. And “Lex” allows them to consult relevant legal information.
2. Another direction of efficiency will be around speeding up public services. The idea is to target old bureaucracy, of which there is a lot in the UK, such as the 100,000 calls the tax authorities receive every day, or the need for people to attend in person to register a death, or (weirdly) the local newspaper ads as part of the process of getting a lorry licence. placement.
Overhauling processes like this with more AI-powered automation could save £45 billion every year, according to DSIT. (It’s not clear if this estimate is before or after the costs of building and running AI services are deducted.)
3. A final area will focus on greater collaboration between departments to help share information to speed up how services are procured and then run.
Taken together, the various projects are a signal that the government means business on its new AI push. But they also raise a number of questions.
For example, in the case of data sharing, DSIT currently says that the operational idea here will be a “common sense approach to data sharing”. Central government departments such as HMRC (revenue and customs) and the Department of Business and Trade can, for example, share information with each other and with local councils in fraud investigations or to better understand how businesses work and what programs can help them. But what happens to data protection for individuals when data is shared in ways you didn’t intend?
Another possible question surrounds Humphrey: right now, DSIT said that some initial applications are only in the testing phase, but the main question is how far will the government go in relying on some of the results of artificial intelligence?
There will be more human problems. As a former civil servant (currently working for an AI company) notesPast efforts to create programs that cut across departments have not always worked. Cooperation, money and power are the levers that will ultimately make or break any of these plans.
