An open letter to Dominic Cummings on behalf of people who are trying to invent the future

Dear Dominic,

You’re a complicated man and finding out what you think about something usually involves reading quite a few thousand words, but, I think I might be part of the tribe you are trying to help. Normally I like to tone down the self-aggrandisement but, seeing as you seem to relish being described in newspapers as a “mad genius”, I’ll mention that I’m described by the BBC as one of “the UK’s leading inventors”. Don’t worry, I don’t think we’re actually peers, I mean I have to play myself on television whereas you get Benedict Cumberbatch.

Anyway I’m writing because I’m proud to be part of an amazing community of people, here in the UK, trying to use science, technology and creativity to invent the future. I think, from reading your blog, that we are the people you believe should have more influence in this country. We spend our lives working as part of “high performance team[s] responsible for complex project[s]”. We would all love to work for someone like Alan Kay, the pioneer of usable personal computers, who you very much admire, on well funded, loosely supervised, future focused research; of the kind you see as so important.

Again, I may be misunderstanding what you’ve written, but I think you masterminded the campaign to leave the EU because you saw Brexit as a chance to help us.

Refreshing as it is to see you admit that Brexit-wise things are not panning out as you envisaged, I’m concerned that you still seem determined to persist with your mission (on our behalf). I think at Y-Combinator, your favourite startup accelerator, this would be called “pivoting without compromising the vision”.

I sense that you now believe that the best way to help people like me to “invent the future” is to convince Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man who styles himself as an Edwardian caricature, to support Michael Gove, a man who believes we have “had enough of experts”, to depose the prime minister and chancellor and stop seeking an exit deal, ensuring the most chaotic possible departure from the EU, maximising damage to manufacturing and scientific research.

Would it be unfair to ask if this might also be a chance to get the old band back together?

I assume when you, and your team of special advisors who worked with you on the leave campaign, were all happily working together under Michael Gove, at the Department for Education, you were trying to execute against the same vision? Trying to create an education system that would spit out more interdisciplinary geniuses like Alan Kay? People who don’t respect hierarchies and fluidly combine art and science? Or maybe just people who are prepared for a future disrupted by the technology he helped create?

Yet you seem to have managed the opposite. You reorientated the entire system around measuring the capabilities, in students, that are most easy for computers to replicate.

In artificial intelligence research it is taken as a given that we “can only call a system intelligent if it can generalise to new situations” rather than just memorise it’s training data, yet ability to memorise the training data is all a system focused on examinations can measure.

So, maybe your reforms won’t help people avoid getting replaced by robots, but what about our friend Alan? Surely the your work at the DoE must have helped to develop future focused subjects like Design & Technology as well as the creative ones like Music and Art that we know helped people like Alan thrive? In fact Alan mentions art, artists or artistic people no fewer than nine times in the brief extract of his writings you chose to quote on your blog to illustrate how we should be “inventing the future”. I guess It must be quite important, so, I assume you’d have aimed to encourage more young people to study it?

OK, I guess that didn’t work out how you’d intended either?

So, here it is, request number one:

STOP TRYING TO HELP US!

You’re probably right about many of the things that are wrong with this country, but, do you know what? Things aren’t that bad — we’re still able to invent stuff and some of it seems like it could be the future. Plus, so far everything you have done has definitely made things worse. If you really believed in evidence based decision making you would definitely stop.

Sorry I’m not done. There’s something else.

Dominic, I really do respect you, and I admire the the way you won the referendum. You managed to execute a combination of qualitative and quantitive research and evidence-based decision making that would bring credit to any small business with a presence online. By doing this you proved yourself to be, undisputedly, tactically superior to a man who was once tricked into selling cannabis to a tabloid reporter whilst his dad was Home Secretary.

I agree with you that “Whitehall and Downing Street should be revolutionised… to integrate physicist-dominated data science in decision-making”. I fear that you may be mistaken in your assertion that you need to “hire extremely smart physicists” to do this kind of thing. In fact there are literally thousands of people who do this stuff every day, most of them aren’t physicists, some don’t have degrees at all. It’s not even a particularly high status job, some of them probably earn about as much as you pay your cleaner. All they do is use the terrifyingly powerful tools that Facebook provide to all advertisers to experiment, gather data, and learn how to make people do what they want them to do.

When they are only used to get people to download apps or buy widgets these tools aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but their use in politics threatens the integrity of our democracy (and not in a good way). You have a great opportunity to protect that democracy (take back control!) by coming clean about exactly how you used Facebook in the referendum campaign, ideally to the digital, culture, media and sport committee (assuming, of course, that you can agree a mutually convenient date).

If you came clean about all the financial irregularities in the leave campaign and your honest assessment of the their likely impact on the vote, we may even be able to get out of this Brexit nonsense and back towards some “positive branching histories”.

You really would be helping us then!

Yours,

Ross Atkin

Inventor