Too much focus on Trump and Musk being totally potty without spotting some BS closer to home.

When your science minister knows precisely nothing about science, either academically or through their employment experience.

"Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes." - a Richard Hamming quote in the days before AI had been created. But computer scientists these days are gradually being replaced by AI (icon).

Yet more proof (if any were needed) that the set of lackwits we have in Government at present are on the ropes, panicking and throwing any old shit at the wall to see if it'll stick and help them out of the hole.

As opposed to the former set?

The political movement that led to Brexit (and indeed Trump) seems to have purged from government and its orbit anyone who has a clue how things actually work and replaced them with a bunch of chancers who cling to their childish belief that wishing will make it so.

Not that we haven't had crises before, but in the past reason has eventually prevailed. Now I'm not so sure: I see no sign the electorate is going to abandon its taste for fantasy. politics.

This is what happens when politicians and political parties promise increasingly undeliverable stuff to get elected.

"This is what happens when politicians and political parties promise increasingly undeliverable stuff to get elected."

Surely the blame lies on those who believe them? Whilst I don't excuse the politicos, the underlying problem is that they're just playing to the gallery of a public wanting services like Denmark and taxes like Chad.

Other than the outstandingly stupid (perhaps 5% of the population) anyone will agree that if you want better public services you need to pay more for them, but when it comes to voting it seems that a good proportion of the 95% are willing to suspend their logical faculties and vote for lying idiots. As it happens, the current lot are a whole lot more honest and well intentioned than the carousel of thieves that we've had for the previous decade or more, but they still had to make mendacious promises on tax to get elected, and even then won only because sufficient would be Conservative voters withheld their vote in disgust at the Tories.

There isn't much choice. I suppose it's too much to hope for a party to just promise to do its best* to make sense of events as they unfold. It's setting out to do specific things that causes the trouble.

* And backs that up by having capable, intelligent candidates.

sed 's/la/fu/'

Problem is, the Tories put us in that hole. Much like Trump, they ran up a MASSIVE debt and hid it from everyone.

I ask because, not covered in this article, is - yet again - giving access to supposedly anonymised NHS data. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/mainlined-into-uks-veins-labour-announces-huge-public-rollout-of-ai

(no, I don't trust a government that whole heartedly adopts all of the recommendations of a venture capitalist)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/mainlined-into-uks-veins-labour-announces-huge-public-rollout-of-ai

' the creation of a new National Data Library to "unlock" the value of public data in supporting AI development.'

That statement blatantly says public data will aggregated and sold to AI systems. It does nothing to suggest any level of privacy or opt-in for the use of data so why do we need public consultation as, obviously, if you have nothing to hide why would you worry ...?

Surely this shows how incompetent the Government are ...

"Venture Capitalist" and "tech entrepreneur".

I know El Reg was baiting us the way they used those terms in the article, but what the hell, I'll bite...

Argggggggh, I mean, arrrrrghh.

Sorry, that's all. I'm preaching to the choir here anyway, and I need a piss!

He started an incubator, hardly qualifies as an entrepreneur. Seems more like a wheeler-dealer than anything. Wonder what his family background looks like.

Can't say for the family, but seems he hit the big time by riding the coat tails of that drip Cameron:

https://www.politico.eu/article/matt-clifford-britain-powerful-technology-adviser-artificial-intelligence/

(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Oh sorry I forgot this will line the pockets of several backers and their political lap dogs ensuring their kids can go to the best schools.

So it's not a total waste after all.

Pissup meet Brewery. Brewery, pissup.

Fuckwits.

I hope the government is thinking about pattern-finding and pattern-matching AI, and not LLM bullshit-generation.

I fear a tsunami of bullshit, otherwise. Perhaps even rolling power cuts: we're already close to maxing out grid capacity at certain times of peak electrical demand.

Good point about AI not being exactly the same as generative AI. Alas, it was ChatGPT and its friends who grabbed the headlines, so the two are basically as one in the public consciousness, I fear.

True, the only use for ChatGPT is to give me a very rough idea of how to do a powershell script (knowing full well it will be mostly wrong) but at least ChatGPT doesn't insult me for asking unlike StackOverflow.

The only other 2 uses is commenting code when lazy and telling me what a bit of code actually does because I, again, don't want to be insulted by the folks of StackOverflow.

But, the government don't appear to understand how power hungry these LLMs are. Its OK, idiot Starmer might give China back the building of the nuclear power station. China def won't put in a backdoor for the time it all goes to shit so they can make the reactor go pop. They def haven't already done this (as has been seen in the news) with America's infrastructure.

If the lights go out, Starmer's motley crew will follow very quickly afterwards.

The AI trend will fizzle out after a tonne of public money has been wasted on it. It's what governments do. Private companies will pocket the cash and exit, stage right, quietly, when it all comes to nothing. Standard form for the UK.

The government are just trying to buy some positive publicity as Brexit Britain is too broken for them to fix and the natives are getting restless.

They have a fall guy - Clifford - for when it fails, but it won't save them.

I believe Boris owns the copyright to the hollow promise, 'our plan will make Britain the world leader'.

Brazier is largely correct, but AI is no benefit, and not worth the extra cash.

Keep chasing third place for right-wing tripe, behind Reform and the Tories. At least you haven't convinced the voters to cut you out of selling out to the corporate aristocracy yet.

"Mr Starmer hopes to use AI to boost efficiency in the public sector from education to detecting potholes."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-14/keir-starmer-lays-out-bid-for-ai-in-public-sector/104813444

It must be the detection, as when people spray paint a swastika or racial slur over the pot hole they come out and cut the section of road out and replace it next day.

You mean they come along, throw some blacktop over it, roll it once or twice (maybe) and then run away. Like they do for every other pothole.

If they want to detect potholes they just need to find Herefordshire on a map. It's the only county where you can detect the border when blindfold in a car (best not done as a driver).

And a happy 10ᵗʰ Anniversary to [1]Wanksy ... May there be many more before his inspirational artistry is shabbily outsourced to genAI-driven Robo-Wanksies of the hot-dog & buns brigade!

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/2/8535259/penis-pothole-activism-wanksy-england

Yet more policy that only makes sense through the lens of someone getting what they paid for.

A lot of it going around - no clear national interest for it but *someone* is going to make a stack off it and there seem to be plenty willing to help it happen.

Icon for your wallet getting lifted to pay for it all.

Under the AI Opportunities Action Plan, announced Monday, the administration claims that fully embracing the technology will boost productivity by 1.5 percent a year, gains said to be worth up to £47 billion ($57 billion) each year.

How much was HS2 supposed to add to the economy each year? And look how well that's turned out!

I've got news for you. It's not being built now. Well, no enough of it to be actually of much use. So freight, stopping and city-city trains will carry on sharing the same track. Except between the midlands and London. Which is not a lot of use

Yep but HS2 was a Tory idea to line the pockets or someone's mates.

"Under the AI Opportunities Action Plan, announced Monday, the administration claims that fully embracing the technology will boost productivity by 1.5 percent a year, gains said to be worth up to £47 billion ($57 billion) each year."

I call bullshit on that figure.

If you were to argue "But we can use it more for reports". Yes, they won't be accurate and all that will happen is you're get grifter directors, already overpaid and incompetant. Still getting the same pay and using AI to do all their reports for them and spending the rest of the day playing golf.

The last paragraph is baiting fear of missing out.

It would be more informative to compare how AI is and can be used across the Atlantic.

In US, anything goes conditional on your legal budget.

In exchange for a fee you pay, all your data is now theirs, for an ephemeral benefit to be realized somewhere, somewhen.

In EU, any mention of AI in a funding proposal triples the vetting, where you need to carefully show that training data is secured, results are reproducible, and harm is defined in the context of the application (as it should).

The 100$/month is the tax vendors now charge to desperately recoup their datacenter investments (see recent Microsoft dark pattern of increasing subscription by 40% for the pleasure). It is not a function of availability or market demand.

LLMs are available open source and for free, even on CPU. No tax needed.

Keir should concentrate on just keeping the lights on at this point, instead of committing to building vast data centres that will consume power which the UK has precious little capacity to provide.

The example AI use case mentioned in his speech gives an idea of just how out of touch the government is....

"The plan also gives other examples for how AI could be used - for example to inspect roads and spot potholes around the country."

Councils know exactly where the damn potholes are when claims from angry motorists arrive in their inbox for car repairs! Locating them is not the issue, it's getting them fixed that is the problem.

> a risk that the impact of AI may be far less than expected.

If the government gets involved we can upgrade that from an expectation to a certainty.

"Hello ChatGPT, my name is Kier. How can a government rapidly expand it's AI thingies?"

Hi Kier. I think you should award a huge consulting contract to OpenAI. I can arrange that for you, for a small fee

nothing like a fucking heroin addiction reference released from government office

Theres no way we can meet our net zero carbon plans if we allow AI data centers to be built in the UK or anywhere.

We should put a stop to AI until it can be implemented without using so much computing power and energy. There should only a few AI centers for research until the energy issue is sorted.

It's crazy how the Government has jumped on the AI bandwagon. More waste of tax payers money, when there's more urgent things to spend our tax payers money on like sorting out social care.

Meta, the smallest of the FAANGs, will spend $26B this year on AI data centers. The idea the perennially bankrupt UK government (or any other European government, or even the EU) can play with the big boys is completely delusional. It would make a lot more sense to fund a few millions’ worth of PhDs at Cambridge to find ways to train AI more efficiently without the insane Capex.

How many other ways did they consider to spend the equivalent budget to better effect? (Rhetorical question, does not need an answer.)

Does anyone remember when blockchain was going to solve everything?....well, here we go again....

were fucking awful but this is just stupid. Not only moving to using AI but also partnering with China. Look at Chinese human rights abuse, why partner with them? Look at their abuse of the Belt and Road system.

It was already being used at the DWP I believe to decide if people should get benefits or not and had to be stopped because it just pretty much saying no to everyone.

We used it in a meeting, it took notes. It then, in those notes said I said something that was never actually said.

Years or even only a year later that could be used in court "Mr Jones said this while on a Teams meeting. He denies ever saying it but CoPilot said he did so it must be true. On that note, send him to 20 without parol".

Its all fucked up.

Starmer needs to be replaced. He's just a posh lawyer who, apparently, has never really been interested in politcs. Have they never seen I, Daniel Blake. Not AI related but something similar will happen with AI.

"Why did Mrs Jones die?" Oh because Ted used CoPilot to summerise her e-mail. The problem is it totally missed the part where it said she was vunerable and really needed support and Ted never bothered to check. Starmer told us we HAVE to use all this AI shit.