Not to get all Freudian but calling the consultation AI 'Humphrey' rather than say 'Bernard' hints at a mindset of subtle obstructionism rather than actually trying to help
I was a pointy-headed bureaucrat: USAian. As far as vibe-checking went, we didn't need formal consultations. We knew which wheels were likely to squeak, and talked to them in advance of everything. They were also useful in preparing snag lists. (I wasn't an environmental bureaucrat, so I didn't have to worry about NIMBY sandbags: somebody producing a snail darter or spotted owl at the last moment.) The formal process was best for venting: especially public hearings. Comments were also useful for venting, because interested parties had constituents, who needed to know that their groups were on the ball.
"how might we redesign the whole process to take advantage of this new technology?"
I wonder why regulators don't use forum-like tools to get feedback more often... it would allow individuals to interact and vote on arguments - and so a regulator could filter what is an original and valuable contribution. But agencies seldom collect and analyze feedback on new directives even from their own employees...
Maybe they're afraid everything would develop into something like Twitter - which is a reasonable . And deploying a "forum-like tool" doesn't sound as fancy as "we developed a new AI assistant" etc.
Lots of food for thought there. It's interesting to consider how a few people raised the issue of flooding re: the Manchester Airport link road during the planning stages, which was then built and floods not quite every year, but often enough that I think one can make the case that snagging needs to be taken more seriously than it often is.
As to the closing question: how is the £80m actually split up? Market researchers do vibe checks for companies and it doesn't seem to be a high margin gravy train, so I wonder if the (plausible) difficulty you point to in using the system for the snags side means the savings aren't that large.
The interesting thing about the Airport Relief Road and the earlier, subject to the same problem but on a lesser scale, Alderley Edge bypass is why the engineers didn’t see that burrowing down under an existing road/railway line would create a dip in which water would gather.
£80m is the whole cost of policy consultations - they do about 80 of them a year, and typically the external spend is 100 grand. I can sort of buy that, because it seems like a much bigger exercise then all but the biggest market research clients would ever commission. the document says (and I have no reason to gainsay) that they regularly get upwards of 30,000 responses to the kind of consultation they are talking about.
If you want that turned round in less than a couple of months, you are going to need a dozen staff or so, so at a reasonable per day rate allowing for profit and writing up time the cost gets there. (I have been told on social media that the kind of temp graduate employees who gets hired for sort of job typically have absolutely no background in the kind of qualitative analysis you might hope for)
I assumed it would be like the product review AI on Amazon, “people liked the colour but didn’t like that it exploded after four days”, that sort of thing
Not to get all Freudian but calling the consultation AI 'Humphrey' rather than say 'Bernard' hints at a mindset of subtle obstructionism rather than actually trying to help
hahaha yeah, it was put together by people who thought Sir H was the hero of that show
I was a pointy-headed bureaucrat: USAian. As far as vibe-checking went, we didn't need formal consultations. We knew which wheels were likely to squeak, and talked to them in advance of everything. They were also useful in preparing snag lists. (I wasn't an environmental bureaucrat, so I didn't have to worry about NIMBY sandbags: somebody producing a snail darter or spotted owl at the last moment.) The formal process was best for venting: especially public hearings. Comments were also useful for venting, because interested parties had constituents, who needed to know that their groups were on the ball.
"how might we redesign the whole process to take advantage of this new technology?"
I wonder why regulators don't use forum-like tools to get feedback more often... it would allow individuals to interact and vote on arguments - and so a regulator could filter what is an original and valuable contribution. But agencies seldom collect and analyze feedback on new directives even from their own employees...
Maybe they're afraid everything would develop into something like Twitter - which is a reasonable . And deploying a "forum-like tool" doesn't sound as fancy as "we developed a new AI assistant" etc.
Lots of food for thought there. It's interesting to consider how a few people raised the issue of flooding re: the Manchester Airport link road during the planning stages, which was then built and floods not quite every year, but often enough that I think one can make the case that snagging needs to be taken more seriously than it often is.
As to the closing question: how is the £80m actually split up? Market researchers do vibe checks for companies and it doesn't seem to be a high margin gravy train, so I wonder if the (plausible) difficulty you point to in using the system for the snags side means the savings aren't that large.
The interesting thing about the Airport Relief Road and the earlier, subject to the same problem but on a lesser scale, Alderley Edge bypass is why the engineers didn’t see that burrowing down under an existing road/railway line would create a dip in which water would gather.
£80m is the whole cost of policy consultations - they do about 80 of them a year, and typically the external spend is 100 grand. I can sort of buy that, because it seems like a much bigger exercise then all but the biggest market research clients would ever commission. the document says (and I have no reason to gainsay) that they regularly get upwards of 30,000 responses to the kind of consultation they are talking about.
If you want that turned round in less than a couple of months, you are going to need a dozen staff or so, so at a reasonable per day rate allowing for profit and writing up time the cost gets there. (I have been told on social media that the kind of temp graduate employees who gets hired for sort of job typically have absolutely no background in the kind of qualitative analysis you might hope for)
I want you, Guarino, Pahlka and maybe Patio11 always to discuss together first, since they are the ones best equipped to weigh in.
How much would the AI systems to carry out this analysis cost ? Might their use require either lots of new "AI consultants", or
lots of legal advice about what to do in the unlikely event that "the machine has f ***ed up" ?
I assumed it would be like the product review AI on Amazon, “people liked the colour but didn’t like that it exploded after four days”, that sort of thing