Weeknote 10.0
10 weeks in?! Not quite sure how that happened…
Rethinking thinking
So, remember how we’re doing this project on how technology will impact the public service workforce? Whether you do or don’t, the first thing you’ll probably think about now is technological automation. As improvements in hardware and software combine to make machines better at solving a wider range of problems, they’ll start coming for our jobs. Etc.
Not long after, you might think about technological augmentation. I.e. the extent to which these ever-improving machines will make it possible for humans to do their jobs better, by automating or speeding up certain tasks. You may even think about how technology could augment humans themselves, perhaps at a ‘hardware’ level — powered exoskeletons making it easier to do physical labour, for instance.
There’s also potential for technology to augment our ‘software’, though. We can, of course, already outsource some thinking and tasks to our increasingly proficient computers, for example by searching Google or asking Alexa to retrieve information for us. But we’ve been starting to look a bit beyond this, considering how technology could allow us to think in completely different ways — augmenting humans by expanding our range of possible thoughts and approaches to problems.
The most recent Dominic Cummings blog is actually very good on this (it also says that ‘the Institute for Government [and others]…will not engage with these ideas…’ — but we are engaging!). He highlights Bret Victor and Michael Nielsen’s ideas about interface design, reflecting in part on how applying them ‘would radically improve how people make decisions in government’.
Won’t dwell on it too much, because this should feature quite heavily in our forthcoming report on using technology to do policy making differently. The general point is that, over time, humans have created ‘cognitive technologies’ which enable us to perceive, understand and think about the world in different ways — language and writing, mathematical notation, maps, and data visualisation are all examples of this. We still rely on these past inventions heavily, but there’s no reason to think they should mark an end point in the means of human thinking.
Computer interfaces already enable new modes of thought: the ability to navigate and manipulate images, documents, data and virtual environments with a mouse, with finger swipes on a touchscreen, with game controllers, or even with physical movements in virtual reality. But this is only the start (Jaron Lanier’s Dawn of the New Everything is excellent on the future possibilities of VR). From a government perspective, new interfaces should create opportunities for exploring, getting to grips with and developing solutions to complex problems in ways that previous cognitive technologies did not allow.
This is something government could try and drive (not sure Whitehall currently employs many interface designers?), developing new ways of interacting with technology to suit its needs. If that sounds too ambitious, just exploring the new possibilities that already exist would be a step in the right direction. Hopefully our work can help!
Three things that happened this week
- We had the fourth edition of Data Bites on Wednesday eve, featuring excellent presentations from the Office for Statistics Regulation, London Borough of Newham, the GDS team working on GOV.UK, and the new Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. You can watch and listen back here.
- The workforce report continues to take shape. We’re having discussions with the senior team here about emerging findings and putting in some more meetings for the coming weeks.
- We’re tidying up a draft version of our submission to the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s review of AI in the public sector. We’ll be discussing it further with the teams working on accountability and outsourcing here to tighten up some of our messages before submitting this time next week.
People we chatted to
- On Monday, the team headed over to the Alan Turing Institute at the British Library to meet Omar Guerrero. He chatted through his work on modelling the outputs of different countries’ investments in development to help governments determine their policy priorities more effectively. For more on that, see here.
- Gavin and Marcus caught up with the data team at the Royal Society. We discussed their recent reports on Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Data Science Skills, both of which have a bearing on our own research. We also discussed the upcoming National Data Strategy, and the challenges of sharing data across government. We also compared notes on the CSPL’s inquiry into algorithmic decision making and public standards.
- We all had a great lunch today with Tanya Filer, who leads the Bennett Institute for Public Policy’s work on the ‘Digital State’. Lots of good chat about the govtech landscape, the digital skills pipeline, knowledge management (should we think increasingly about ecosystem memory rather than institutional memory?), and more.
What we’re reading and thinking about
- Gavin spent Wednesday morning at the OneTeamGov Bureaucracy Hack, where one of the bureaucratic issues to be hacked was the governance of tech and data projects. A longstanding issue we identified back in 2016 (and since) was that digital teams can sometimes get frustrated that traditional accountability and governance arrangements can feel burdensome and not fit for purpose with agile projects. The morning brought these and similar issues to the fore — other points raised included processes not being clear, there being too much duplication or repetition, and teams seeing governance as a burden rather than something that could help — and the afternoon (which Gavin missed, preparing for Data Bites) prototyped some solutions. Lack of clarity about processes and lack of visibility about how other organisations do things added more grist to Gavin’s current mill that we should all be making lists and getting back to basics — here’s a new list of key government data recommendations, plans, pledges and announcements down the years. And in a busy week of great conversations about digital and data, this was another highlight. More anon.
- Marcus has been thinking about how all this hangs together. One question he’s particularly interested in is how widely the need to prepare for the impact of future technology on the workforce is reflected in the various annual reports, corporate strategies and business plans of government organisations. More to follow on that. He’s also been thinking about how technology impacts the performance of Government, and what indicators you could track to measure this. He also had a good conversation with Tom Huges from Sally Jones MP’s office about building standards and future policy directions in that area.
- Lewis’s recent reading and thinking is mainly encapsulated in the above (this seems to be what happens when you let him write the weeknote…). On a similar tack, he’s been reading Alfie Bown’s The Playstation Dreamworld and this article on ‘Human-Computer Insurrection’, both of which make the case for using technology and our interactions with it to challenge and question, rather than reflect and reinforce, the status quo.
What’s coming up next week?
- Gavin and Lewis are both going on leave at various points, but they’ll be back…
- Lewis will be at techUK’s annual dinner on Wednesday, so do say hi if you’re around
- Marcus is having a science-focused day on Wednesday, sitting in on the Committee for Climate Change’s 2019 progress report to Parliament in the morning, and then off to the launch of Imperial College’s ‘The Forum’ in the evening.
- Still packing a few conversations into the diary early on in the week — more on that next Friday
- The new Lords Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee is having a private meeting ahead of publishing its first call for evidence, which is expected ‘shortly’. The SciTech Committee is running another session on commercial and recreational drone use on Tuesday morning, with the EFRA Committee due to hear about rural broadband and digital only services on Wednesday afternoon.
Any last thoughts?
- As ever, hit us up with any thoughts or feedback! Email (digital@instituteforgovernment.org.uk) or Twitter or commenting on this or whatever works best for you — it all works for us.
