And no doubt another nice bonus for a AI-enthused venture capitalist crony ...

How long until "national id to allow easy access to Government services" will be trawled up again?

I think they learned last time that the way to introduce that kind of thing is to make it optional until all of the greenhorn kids have signed up and all of the old cynics are dead.

Probably the scheme would be designed in the manner of an eel trap to prevent those kids leaving once they'd been caught.

I don't have an issue with a single ID which can be used whenever you need to prove who you are, and whether you are entitled to certain benefits or privileges.

I _do_ have an issue with making it mandatory for such documentation to be carried at all times and shown on demand.

It should be for your benefit, not the benefit of those in authority (or indeed, police forces).

"I don't have an issue with a single ID which can be used whenever you need to prove who you are"

The only way to do that is with fingerprints, DNA, retinal scans and the like, all tied in to the mother of all databases. I have more than one issue with that. I have even more issues with how such a beast will be used and abused.

ID cards (however they are called) can just fuck off. Along with the "if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" morons.

all of the greenhorn kids have signed up

They announced the "Digital Driving Licence" recently which was squarely aimed at the younger generation

QED

how long? .. Just as soon as they can come up with a reason to spend billions (again) on ID while not having the cash for things people actually want...

It has already started. This so-called digital driving licence is just today's fancy name for an ID card. It'll be called something else tomorrow. When it all goes tits-up, the Home Office will give it yet another makeover and try again.

DVLA are building a national ID database by stealth - and with no oversight or parliamentary approval. Whenever you renew or update your driving licence, the bastards want a copy of your passport. Which is utter bollocks. These documents serve different purposes and there is no valid reason to link them together. Unless you work at DVLA and want be ahead of the Passport Office, DSS, HMRC, etc in Westminster's eternal quest for a national identity register.

It would be wonderful if this worked

and one step closer to a real robo-Humphrey for the day-to-day which one can optionally set to full Malcolm Tucker mode when things are starting to hit the fan PR-wise and the politicians need to be "managed"

Although I do see the usual crowd in the news complaining already about the choice of name (as if half of them didn't have to use their favourite tax-dodging search engine to figure out what the name meant first)

The civil service will have already spotted that this will be used to remove them from the decision making process entirely.

I feel some ‘unforeseen circumstances’ will be arising to scupper this in the near future as the implementation process winds it way through Whitehall.

You underestimate the Civil Service.

The Civil Service does not exist to make decisions. It exists to implement decisions made by the democratically elected government of the day comprising His Majesty's Ministers and Prime Minister. In the event that an 'AI Humphrey' presents a directive, the appropriate Civil Servant will ask the appropriate Minister for guidance as to the legality of implementing such directive should it appear to be inconsistent with the Minister's wishes.

As Sir Humphrey pointed out to the Rt. Hon. Jim Hacker concerning Civil Service delays: one should not confuse lethargy for strategy.

HMRC employs 61,186 people full time. So 100,000 calls equates to a little over one and a half calls they need to deal with on average per employee each day.

God forbid they actually pick up a phone.

I can hear a million consultants up and down the land editing their CVs to add "Government AI Expert" to the list of non-jobs they charge four-figure-per-day fees for.

It's pretty easy to predict what will happen. There will be long consultations during which everyone tries to remember, and then obfuscate what it is they actually do in their job that they need a computer for. Then there will be long consultations during which consultants argue over the most overblown (sorry, reassuringly expensive) system they can fit to the task. This will, without fail, be a "enterprise framework" of some sort from one of the major vendors - that will need such extensive customisation that (in man hour terms) they might as well have started from scratch with standard (and much cheaper) tools. They will then commit to a multi-year long programme of implementing the proposed system, during which there will be at least four department re-organisations, and the scope of the required system will be re-written at least twice. As a consequence, the original estimate and price will be blown out of the water as large chunks of the system are deemed to be unsuitable for the job, and therefore re-written from scratch (after another consultation). Then they'll try to install it, discover all of the things they failed to discover in the original spec, and start from scratch again.

And because they went with a (almost certainly foreign owned) enterprise vendor over which they have no control, the whole process will have required foreign travel, consultants with meaningless certification (and exorbitant fees), and eventually calling in experts from the vendor itself at even higher cost.

Then some civil servant who still doesn't fully understand what an AI is will write a report.

This was a triumph

I'm making a note here: huge success

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction

"HMRC employs 61,186 people full time. "

Is that for the phone line that politicians get to use, just to cover up their brown envelope deposits into offshore accounts? After all, we can't do with the politicians embarrassing themselves can we?

@Andy 73:

I nominate you as president of the "Seen this Shit Before and it's Gonna Happen Again" Club!

I am of course ineligible for the role, since I do this stuff professionally every day of my life, and therefore would run the risk of accidentally fixing things if involved in the fiasco. They will exclusively hire from the queue of baying idiots currently polishing their CVs on LinkedIn.

The only thing I'm allowed to be president of is my dog's food bowl.

> The only thing I'm allowed to be president of is my dog's food bowl.

That's a good job. And you'll recieve true recognition for it.

" the "Consult" tool analyses "the thousands of responses any government consultation might receive in hours, before presenting policy makers and experts with interactive dashboards to explore what the public are saying directly "

In reality that probably means "to filter out any challenge or counter argument to the govt. proposal." However the AI will render even more efficient a process that seems (from my experience of submitting to govt. consultations) to be quite effective already, so maybe we won't see much change from outside. The key difference will merely be that, instead of having to read and reject unpalatable responses, staff will never get to see them in the first place, so the workload and stress will be reduced and the department will be a happier place to work. I suppose that's a good thing...

Personally I welcome anything which allows the government to ignore the public more swiftly and efficiently.

Consult AI:

"In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.

Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now."

At last, "AI" being used for what it's good for: bullshit generation.

No...

No, Minister ...

Train it on his manerisms and it is perfect - see the quote below from Yes prime minister

Sir Humphrey: Unfortunately, although the answer was indeed clear, simple, and straightforward, there is some difficulty in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated and the facts, insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated, is such as to cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear.

Hacker: Epistemological? What are you talking about?

Sir Humphrey: You told a lie.

Good luck getting ChatGPT2000 to respond as eruditely, grammatically and uselessly as good old Sir Humphrey. Then of course, there should be an AI Bernard Woolley to quote irrelevant Shakespeare passages.

A real Sir Humphrey would have mentioned that "chequered" is the common UK usage....

as I believe is phrasmotic contrafibularities ...

Taking a look back over the past 20+ years of large-scale government computer and data projects handed to consulting practices such as Accenture, Capgemini and others, I believe we will see the same result from this 'Humphrey' project. The NHS 'digitisation' project known as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), was a total fiasco, and cost the UK taxpayers a staggering £10 billion pounds and disappeared down the wazoo. The reason?

The programme began in 2002 under the Labour government, aiming to create a centralised electronic care records system and modernise IT infrastructure across the NHS. The initiative was officially dismantled in 2011, after almost a decade of implementation issues, technical failures, and criticism.

The NPfIT is widely regarded as one of the largest and most expensive IT failures in UK history. It faced challenges such as lack of user engagement, poorly defined goals, and unrealistic expectations about the complexity of integrating diverse NHS systems. I believe the odds of this crackpot initiative will result in the same, sad and inconclusive state. Many years ago, as a project director for a top-secret military project, I learned a valuable lesson from one of my team. This was, that the client and the consulting practice never spent sufficient time to discuss the real situation and the practical solution with the individuals at 'the coalface.' Instead, vast amounts of hard-earned taxpayers' money was squandered on pointless reviews with clients who had not even a shred of understanding of how the existing system worked. This, Sir Humphrey, is exactly what will happen here too.

> the client and the consulting practice never spent sufficient time to discuss the real situation and the practical solution with the individuals at 'the coalface.'

Tread carefully - discussing things with actual users sounds suspiciously like "Agile" and then the Humphrey proponents will start fling those buzzwords around as well.

One slippery slope away from The Beast having "synergy".

"A very courageous decision Prime Minister"

A very slippery slope indeed.

Looking for footage with some of Sir Humphrey's signature lines I stumbled upon a 5 minute gem [1]"Sir Humphrey speaking Latin" .

Really reinforced just how much today's politics have become a complete mockery, easily undermining the satire of Yes [Prime] Minister.

[1] https://youtu.be/beuKfLn8a6c

Appleby : He who would keep a secret must keep it a secret that he hath a secret to keep.

Hmm, were those outsourced tasks ones that the Civil Service used to have the in-house ability to cope with (until they were streamlined away)?[1] Where we have been "reaping the rewards of efficiency" in the years since.

And how many of those consultants are part of the Old Boys club and will be looking to get themselves re-inserted into newly-found cracks in the new arrangement?[2]

[1] I don't actually know that sort of detail about the CS, so - anyone? Back in the 1980s, perhaps?

[2] possibly not that many now, after 40-odd years, but some of them no doubt have a New Management look to them and are good for a couple of centuries still.

...hackers will be able to take down the entire government with one malware attack. Instead of being put to the trouble of undertaking one for each individual department.

'Watch out, watch out, there's a Humphry about'.

Another blast from the past, for those who remember the good/bad/other old days...

voiced, IIRC, by the dulcet tones of Frank Muir.

"It also promises a new package of AI tools it nicknames Humphrey, in homage to the classic British satirical TV comedy Yes Minister, through which fictional civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby became a byword for the art of obfuscation, manipulation, and filibustering. After the 1980s era TV show, "Sir Humphrey" became a synonym amongst Brits for civil servants."

SHIIIT!!!

Is it April 1 st already?

Doesn't time fly when you're having fun?

You have a problem.

You decide AI is the answer.

You now have two problems, at a conservative estimate.