PM plans to 'unleash AI' across UK to boost growth

“ Good morning, citizens! Remember, the AI government exists to serve you. Report any deviant thoughts to your nearest Patri-Bot. Today’s forecast: drizzle with a 90% chance of being grassed up by your nan.”

Each technology hype-cycle is more boring than the previous one, and clueless business “leaders” and politicians predictably falling for it more depressing. It is really hard not to become utterly cynical.

Meanwhile there would be lots of productive uses for machine learning techniques when properly applied in a domain to assist human experts. Often used example is identifying anomalies in x-rays. These techniques are incredibly powerful in pattern recognition, which could be used to good effect in countless domains.

I did not expect every few words to push me deeper into despair. I fucking guarantee that an AI "teaching assistant" cannot do a single classroom task that teaching assistants actually exist for.

The official AI Opportunities Action Plan has been published on gov.uk which may be worth a read.

I'm expecting the DWP to instantly adopt whatever AI it is that that insurance company that recently lost its CEO uses to deny claims. And all I can do is hope that they, and those enabling them, get a similar response (though who am I kidding, if the general public gave two shits about poor and especially disabled people being deliberately and systemically denied support and left to die, we'd have seen a reaction a decade ago).

Yeah…