I would also add that a lot of government work is just bureaucratic pencil-pushing that could easily be automated. So the activists can not only be monitored via AI but also replaced by it in many cases. Which saves the taxpayers a lot on bloated overhead costs.
Yep. Full replacement is harder than control of humans because it's a harder sell to the citizens, and without a human in the loop you will inevitably face scandals and blowups when the models make mistakes (uncorrectable scandals, moreover). At least for any task with even a modicum of judgement, which I think is most of them. Allowing review and appeals of AI based decisions allows it to be spun as a productivity aid and reduce people's anxiety about true automation.
There's lots of potential for more automation in government, absolutely. UK passport renewal can already be done entirely online with photos being taken by smartphone. There's presumably still a human in the loop somewhere, but you don't have to interact with them (if you're out of the country at least).
The reason I didn't focus on efficiency here is that it's automation projects are slightly different to control projects. For example, if all you want is control it may be acceptable for every single AI decision to be reviewed by a human, even if that doesn't save resources. You can also invert it: keep the work done by humans but use AI to monitor them. This reduces efficiency (cost of humans+inferencing costs) but increases control. If efficiency is the goal on the other hand, it may be simpler to just repeal the underlying law.
Your framework is missing a few important things. Namely: being smart, and having big ideas that people like. Having these two things will result in people wanting to help you do what you want to do. Lacking these two things will mean no one wants to do your thing. There's no "tech answer" here.
You may have heard the phrase "good help is hard to find" - the joke is that people good enough to be good help are also good enough to help themselves, and don't need to work for other people.
People who work for the government are not, by and large, "woke." They're mostly just quiet - but they'll take "woke do-nothing" leadership over "drooling moron with matches" leadership. Personally, I think certain sorts of "woke" are just about as bad as "drooling moron," but that's me.
When was the last time "conservatives" (as if this current crop deserves the name) had a single positive idea, or presented a single positive goal? It could be something as basic as "We're gonna make the highways smoother and better!" but it has to be something other than "burn it down." Nothing brings enemies together like a fire in the building --I mean, are you stupid?
Here's what you *should* do: pick a popularly-supported mission like "turn around the decline in math scores by any means necessary" or "fund highways not sex changes" - some popular, gettin-things-done type of mission that the "woke" will (retardedly) oppose. Bush did this with "No Child Left Behind." Then you can run the do-nothings and monkey-wrenchers out of government on the basis of their opposition to your popular mission, rather than on the basis of some kind of nebulous ideological scorekeeping. And - big bonus - the mostly-quiet general population of the various departments will be on *your* side, because you're trying to get things done rather than trying to burn the place down.
You're welcome for the advice. You probably won't take it, though. Having ideas means you have to defend them instead of simply throwing stones, and your ilk don't have the guts for that.
You've missed the point I'm afraid. Running on populist policies and trying to govern as a centre right moderate was the strategy Trump tried, the strategy Johnson tried, and it doesn't work.
You're right that there are plenty of moderate people in any institution, but they aren't the ones in charge and they're cowed by the aggressive tactics the woke minority use. If you don't use the approach I outline here you end up in the same place the Conservatives were in: issuing orders that are simply ignored by institutional employees who know they can't be adequately controlled and prefer to implement their own agenda. The attempts to stop the British NHS engaging in explicit DEI hiring are a good example of this: clear instructions from a party that won election on a moderate and popular platform, and it had no discernable effect.
Trump, I think, expected Republicans to pass bills that he could sign that would do good-sounding things that he could brag about. Things like, I don't know, building highways, hospitals, and universities in Republican districts (or everywhere), things like cutting various specific government expenditures deemed unnecessary, things like giving tax breaks to moms and apple pie. I think Trump is lazy and doesn't particularly care about the fundaments of the United States, but I also think that congressional Republicans failed him in ways that genuinely surprised him.
Take the healthcare debacle - Paul Ryan's swan song - if you don't mind thinking that far back. I think Trump expected Republicans to have a nice tidy plan ready to go. I don't think he particularly cared what would be in it. It could have been the same as the ACA with a few tweaks and additions or subtractions. "Repeal" and "replace with basically the same thing by a different name" would have A) passed, and B) been something Trump could call a win.
But they didn't do that. They had some kind of a jumbled mess that wasn't even typed up properly when they tried to pass it. I remember, back in school, reading over an essay I'd printed that morning & fixing a few typos with a pen before handing it in - appropriate behavior for high school, hardly so for Congress.
Why was it such a mess? You tell me. Trump wants to know too.
Your comment here speaks to the underlying problem -- have you ever overseen anyone in a workplace? I don't get the sense that you have. If you're able to merely "issue orders" and have them followed to the letter, that's great, but it's almost never the case. You need to be on people's asses constantly until they do things the way you want them done. And, by the way, as soon as you stop being on their ass, they'll go right back to the way they want to do things. You want some kind of AI to be on their ass constantly for you, I suppose, but all that would mean is you'd have to be constantly on the ass of whoever's in charge of making & monitoring this AI. You're looking for a way out of doing the actual work of management, and there just isn't one. It's a hard job.
The "stop engaging in DEI hiring" thing is an excellent demonstration of what I said in my first comment. You can't just say "stop." There are no metrics for whether or not they've "stopped." You can't identify any particular hire as a "DEI hire." You need to give a different directive - and a specific one. You need to say, for example, "hire the person with the highest GPA." Or, "hire the person with the degree from the best-ranked school." Or you could draw up a hiring examination and direct them to hire the applicant that scores best. There are obvious problems with these approaches: maybe the person with the highest GPA isn't very personable. Maybe you can come up with some better hard metric - but you need *some* hard metric. This will eventually have to happen with university admissions. There is no way to stop subjective decisions from being made subjectively. You need to make the decision objective, and accept whatever consequences that brings with it.
Your fundamental problem is that you have no positive agenda. You want people to stop doing all the bad things you think they're doing - OK. So do I, mostly. But you need to give them something else to do - something widely agreed to be positive. You need to redirect. "Calculus, not CRT." "Geography, not Gender Studies." "Physics, not Psychology."
Be there and be working. If anyone really expected saying "stop DEI hiring' to solve the problem in a day, they were dreaming. Rooting out the people who hire for ideology over competency will take years & decades. It will require driving these people out by constant attentive oversight and constant adherence to the principles of *true* fairness and *true* equality.
It will also require being smart. How are you at calculus, geography, and physics? How are your appointees? Can you read Shakespeare without stumbling? How's your Latin? "How's that relevant?" you ask -- well, sir, you'll beat the baddies by working harder than they do and knowing more than they do. There is no shortcut, artificial or otherwise.
> as soon as you stop being on their ass, they'll go right back to the way they want to do things. You want some kind of AI to be on their ass constantly for you, I suppose
That's the point of the article indeed.
> all that would mean is you'd have to be constantly on the ass of whoever's in charge of making & monitoring this AI.
This would (in some cases) be much less work. Instead of propagating commands through a hierarchy the policy can be implemented directly, because LLMs scale a lot better than humans. Assuming you lack the skills to set up the AI yourself you only have to be on the ass of someone once, briefly, until it's doing what is needed. Then it can be left alone to supervise the other people. Changes in requirements are easily handled as the instructions are written in English, so no programmer attention is required until you need to hook it up to new data sources or similar.
> You can't identify any particular hire as a "DEI hire."
In the situation I was referring to, which you don't seem to be familiar with, the British government told the civil service to stop creating jobs with titles like "Diversity consultant".
"NHS advertises £700,000's worth of diversity officer roles in just a month! Outrage as 'precious' cash is used to hire equality and wellbeing positions - despite op waiting list sitting at record high of 7 million"
So there's no difficulty or ambiguity in this case. Ministers give an order like "stop hiring diversity officers", the civil service ignores them, they discover this when journalists publish stories like the above. Very simple to kill this off using LLMs.
> But you need to give them something else to do - something widely agreed to be positive
I agree with the thrust of your point but "something" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. People fundamentally disagree on what positive agenda means and there's no easy way to just talk woke people around to a different point of view. If it were that straightforward people would have discovered how by now. As just one example, colorblindness in hiring is viewed as a clearly positive agenda by most people but immoral and evil by the woke. There's no way to just find a middle ground there, so to change their mind you'd need to discover an all-encompassing moral code that's not merely standard values rephrased but which somehow satisfies their psychological needs. In effect you'd need to design and implement a religion. That's never been done before, so it's not something you can just hand-wave away as obvious or easy.
>People fundamentally disagree on what positive agenda mean
I don't mean "positive" in the sense of "good." I mean "positive" in the sense of "doing something" as opposed to trying to stop bad things from being done.
Let's say the other side wants to spend money to build circuses and hire clowns to staff them. Obviously, to you and me, that's not a good use of taxpayer dollars. But circuses are fun, and people like circuses. If your platform is "No circuses with taxpayer money," people will mostly hear you saying "No circuses" and will decide you don't like fun because you're a big meanie.
If, on the other hand, you say, "Fill potholes and widen highways instead of building circuses," people will think of you as the guy who wants to build highways. And then, when you're debating the other side, instead of having the debate solely be about whether or not circuses are "worth it" or "the proper domain of government," you can say, "well, look, I like circuses, but with how the highways are right now, you're all going to be sitting in traffic for hours to get to that circus, as nice as it may be. So I think we can agree that, either way, we're going to need to fill those potholes and widen those highways before we're even talking about circuses."
Trump seems to understand this better than you: his "immigration" message was not, in fact, "stop immigration" to the average voter - it was "build the wall." It was "positive" in the sense that I am using the word - it was about bringing something new into existence. I consider it "negative" in the sense that newcomers are good, but it's good rhetorical strategy to oppose immigration with a "positive" wall rather than "negative" statements about stopping migrants, deportation, etc.
This applies to the NHS situation as well: Why did they have this money lying around to misuse? They should have been ordered *positively" to use all available funds to hire nurses & doctors or to buy needed equipment or what have you. If they still proceeded to do as they did, now you have a two-pronged argument: where before it was just "you did a thing we said not to do" now it's "you did a thing we said not to do *instead of* doing this obviously good thing we said to do."
Further, I rather think that situation illustrates why AI isn't going to help you much. You already know what they're doing. They usually aren't subtle about it: in fact they brag about it in public every chance they get. They can't help themselves. The reason they act the way they do is for acclaim and approval from their group. Finding out about it is not the hard part.
And I'm far from an expert, but may I propose we not trust important decisions to black-box AIs - especially where "we" refers to a person lacking the practical ability to look into & understand how these things *do* work under the hood, should the need arise? For all the concern about Huawei putting backdoors in chips and such like, I'm not sure why you would trust an AI that is, to you & me, a black box. Especially with respect to this subject. Have you met many programmers? I went to school with a few. "Some of them, I assume, are good people." Some of them, I know, are not quite whole people any longer.
"Managed teams" sounds like some desk-warmer business. Were they people who cared about their resumes and wanted to impress you? Then you have no idea what I'm talking about. Try managing resentful teens into showing up, keeping a store tidy, smiling instead of grimacing at customers and staying off their phones. That would be far better practice for the present situation.
You're arguing that the only positive vision is one in which governments are constantly doing expensive things, with the only question being what things i.e. you view the entire libertarian / fiscally conservative vision as "not positive". Are you explicitly aware this is what you're arguing? It feels like you might not be.
This sort of problem is exactly what motivated the essay: governments are full of people with that particular viewpoint, but very often the citizens don't vote for that. They would like neither circuses nor pointless road resurfacing, they would like lower taxes and a less intrusive government. Civil servants will never accept a positive vision of "we need fewer of you because your work is bad and unwanted" no matter how it's phrased, so the question then becomes how do you ensure they do what is asked anyway in the case that you win election on such a platform.
> This applies to the NHS situation as well: Why did they have this money lying around to misuse? .... They should have been ordered *positively" to use all available funds to hire nurses & doctors
They don't have the money and they were so ordered. Numerous times. That's what I keep telling you, but it doesn't seem to be sinking in. Woke employees will happily reallocate funds and attention towards advancing their ideology and away from the institutional mission (patient care in this case), because to woke people the ideology is virtue and the mission is either morally neutral or outright morally suspect.
Yes, in some cases the media will catch a few examples .... post facto. After those people are already hired and now protected by civil service procedures and unions (in the UK). But they certainly won't catch all of them, nor at the right time. If you find out about it five minutes after the job ad is posted you can immediately get it pulled down and fire the person who did it before anything happens. If you find out months after the fact you may not even be able to easily find who is responsible or who got hired into the role, especially if you have to go via five levels of hostile management to get at the necessary information. AI combined with good IT systems can solve all of this.
By the way, this essay is explicitly about how to manage institutions of adults. I've done this, albeit not at the scale of an entire state. The fact that you've now moved the goalpost from managing teams to being a schoolteacher indicates that you probably don't have any management experience - then why so confident what I outline here won't work? Did you dislike the part where I suggest putting AI-monitored cameras in every classroom to ensure the teachers aren't indoctrinating students into believing only leftism is "positive"?
You keep using the word "positive" in the sense of "good." I keep trying to clarify that I mean "positive" in the sense of "additive." Since I don't seem to be getting through on that front, I will say "additive" instead.
"Additive" things don't have to be expensive, nor do they in fact have to "add" anything in reality. It's a matter of framing.
Let's say you want to reduce the government payroll & reduce the amount of time that government employees have to spend interfering with private enterprise. You could say "cut this, cut that, stop this, stop that" and sound like a mean old badidie with an axe - or, alternatively, you could say, "Now that everyone is more productive for the amount of time they work, I think it's time to move toward a three-day weekend and a four-day workweek. We in the government can set the example for the rest of society - I propose a three-day weekend for all government employees. There will, of course, be a commensurate pay cut."
If you want to subtract, it's best to subtract by addition. "No, no - we're not subtracting two from four. We're adding negative two." I'm discussing rhetoric.
There is, to use an awkward phrase, a sort of "everything bagel" problem with government reduction. Sure, you can get elected on a platform promising to get rid of "unnecessary bureaucracy" and "government waste" - but when it comes to identifying and removing individual instance of unnecessary bureaucracy or waste, one quickly finds that each individual instance is enmeshed with lots of other things, is in fact considered very important by some particular cross-party constituency, etc...this difficulty gives rise to the Norquist policy of freezing additional taxation & spending - causing it to reduce in real terms with inflation & population growth - rather than hitting your head against brick walls.
Whether or not you have some hypothetical supervisory AI catching all the "wokeness" you still need an enforcement mechanism that's effective, which evidently is not present. (Or might be, I wouldn't know - it doesn't seem to have been that long yet.)
"Adults" today - after ten years of boiling in social media soup - are not the adults of yesterday. What you're seeing as the "evil force of wokeness" is closer to the "sullen force of petulance." You evidently have suffered some damage from boiling in the soup yourself -- I was clearly not talking about being a schoolteacher. You saw the word "teens" and quit reading right there rather than finishing the paragraph. It's hard to have discussions with people who don't read things all the way through -- that more than anything else is why the "woke" are so intransigent. *They literally don't read your arguments against them.* They read until they see an individual word or notion to which they can react. They don't deal in whole arguments. In this particular case, I was talking about an experience like managing a McDonald's, which should have been evident from the mention of "customers."
LOL! As if your average, typical MAGA Moron could even DEFINE calculus! My cousin, a typical TrumpSucker, thought that physics was about PHYSICAL EDUCATION and thus a physicist meant a gym teacher! ROFL! Hey, if people were to follow your truly evil and despicable directives, there would be very, very few right-wingers in any job requiring even a modicum of post-secondary education or above average math and conceptual skills!
TrumpSuckers who can read, write and calculate beyond Trump's own pathetic 5th grade level skills---people like you, for instance, who use their cerebral qualities for avarice and dominance over other humans---are a distinct minority within most of the highest paid professions and leading corporate and government entities.
So, dream on. Your neo-Mussolini fantasies about "JUST FORCING THEM" to do as we say might make you feel better as you pontificate online to similar MAGA miscreants and mentalities, but judging by the historically unprecedented slide in Donny Dumb Dump's approval ratings and the growing anger and specifically focused resistance and upheaval across all regions and demographics, you might have to immigrate to another country where your dreams are coming true, as in Russia, Hungary, Turkey or even China. Be careful what you wish for, boys. Americans of ALL ideological stripes LOVE FREEDOM; and what you and DOGE and Dumb Dump are all planning is doomed to crash and burn. The only question is how soon and how severe the damage for Project 2025, Musk, MAGA and Trump. But it's coming...
Further mechanisms for control by minorities over majorities are last thing you want if you're interested in living a free and undisturbed life full of burgers or whatever.
It's a mechanism for control of minorities (civil servants, institutional employees) by the majority (the citizens who employ them). Given that the "minority" here (lol) consented to follow orders in return for money, there's no ethical or philosophical problems raised by ensuring they actually follow their agreements.
I understand that this is the stated goal of your proposal. But what it actually entails are just mechanisms that allow smaller groups of people to effectively wield power.
In your proposal, I don't see where the balance of power moves away from bureaucratic civil servants and towards the general public, I only see it moving towards a smaller and thus more powerful bureaucracy.
I cannot foresee the potential consequences of its implementation, but when I think of historical populist movements that got convinced to give absolute power to their leadership, I think of the Russian soldiers and peasants who in the end entrusted the communists with the power to smash the old oppressive regime. We know were they did end up ultimately. (There, terror and other psychological means were the tools the new regime was permitted to use to bend the bureacracy to their will, instead of soft control and technological surveillance - but the resulting power balances seem somewhat comparable.)
The assumption is that the leadership of government departments are chosen by elected representatives, so concentrating power in them is inherently towards the general public.
Of course it would be better in many cases to not have governments do those functions at all, but voters aren't ready for that yet.
Subscribed after reading this. Interested to see what else you have to say.
I would also add that a lot of government work is just bureaucratic pencil-pushing that could easily be automated. So the activists can not only be monitored via AI but also replaced by it in many cases. Which saves the taxpayers a lot on bloated overhead costs.
Yep. Full replacement is harder than control of humans because it's a harder sell to the citizens, and without a human in the loop you will inevitably face scandals and blowups when the models make mistakes (uncorrectable scandals, moreover). At least for any task with even a modicum of judgement, which I think is most of them. Allowing review and appeals of AI based decisions allows it to be spun as a productivity aid and reduce people's anxiety about true automation.
Something like a passport renewal could be done at an automated kiosk, the way fast food restaurants take orders nowadays.
There's lots of potential for more automation in government, absolutely. UK passport renewal can already be done entirely online with photos being taken by smartphone. There's presumably still a human in the loop somewhere, but you don't have to interact with them (if you're out of the country at least).
The reason I didn't focus on efficiency here is that it's automation projects are slightly different to control projects. For example, if all you want is control it may be acceptable for every single AI decision to be reviewed by a human, even if that doesn't save resources. You can also invert it: keep the work done by humans but use AI to monitor them. This reduces efficiency (cost of humans+inferencing costs) but increases control. If efficiency is the goal on the other hand, it may be simpler to just repeal the underlying law.
Efficiency can also bring control because it reduces the job security of would-be saboteurs.
Your framework is missing a few important things. Namely: being smart, and having big ideas that people like. Having these two things will result in people wanting to help you do what you want to do. Lacking these two things will mean no one wants to do your thing. There's no "tech answer" here.
You may have heard the phrase "good help is hard to find" - the joke is that people good enough to be good help are also good enough to help themselves, and don't need to work for other people.
People who work for the government are not, by and large, "woke." They're mostly just quiet - but they'll take "woke do-nothing" leadership over "drooling moron with matches" leadership. Personally, I think certain sorts of "woke" are just about as bad as "drooling moron," but that's me.
When was the last time "conservatives" (as if this current crop deserves the name) had a single positive idea, or presented a single positive goal? It could be something as basic as "We're gonna make the highways smoother and better!" but it has to be something other than "burn it down." Nothing brings enemies together like a fire in the building --I mean, are you stupid?
Here's what you *should* do: pick a popularly-supported mission like "turn around the decline in math scores by any means necessary" or "fund highways not sex changes" - some popular, gettin-things-done type of mission that the "woke" will (retardedly) oppose. Bush did this with "No Child Left Behind." Then you can run the do-nothings and monkey-wrenchers out of government on the basis of their opposition to your popular mission, rather than on the basis of some kind of nebulous ideological scorekeeping. And - big bonus - the mostly-quiet general population of the various departments will be on *your* side, because you're trying to get things done rather than trying to burn the place down.
You're welcome for the advice. You probably won't take it, though. Having ideas means you have to defend them instead of simply throwing stones, and your ilk don't have the guts for that.
You've missed the point I'm afraid. Running on populist policies and trying to govern as a centre right moderate was the strategy Trump tried, the strategy Johnson tried, and it doesn't work.
You're right that there are plenty of moderate people in any institution, but they aren't the ones in charge and they're cowed by the aggressive tactics the woke minority use. If you don't use the approach I outline here you end up in the same place the Conservatives were in: issuing orders that are simply ignored by institutional employees who know they can't be adequately controlled and prefer to implement their own agenda. The attempts to stop the British NHS engaging in explicit DEI hiring are a good example of this: clear instructions from a party that won election on a moderate and popular platform, and it had no discernable effect.
Trump, I think, expected Republicans to pass bills that he could sign that would do good-sounding things that he could brag about. Things like, I don't know, building highways, hospitals, and universities in Republican districts (or everywhere), things like cutting various specific government expenditures deemed unnecessary, things like giving tax breaks to moms and apple pie. I think Trump is lazy and doesn't particularly care about the fundaments of the United States, but I also think that congressional Republicans failed him in ways that genuinely surprised him.
Take the healthcare debacle - Paul Ryan's swan song - if you don't mind thinking that far back. I think Trump expected Republicans to have a nice tidy plan ready to go. I don't think he particularly cared what would be in it. It could have been the same as the ACA with a few tweaks and additions or subtractions. "Repeal" and "replace with basically the same thing by a different name" would have A) passed, and B) been something Trump could call a win.
But they didn't do that. They had some kind of a jumbled mess that wasn't even typed up properly when they tried to pass it. I remember, back in school, reading over an essay I'd printed that morning & fixing a few typos with a pen before handing it in - appropriate behavior for high school, hardly so for Congress.
Why was it such a mess? You tell me. Trump wants to know too.
Your comment here speaks to the underlying problem -- have you ever overseen anyone in a workplace? I don't get the sense that you have. If you're able to merely "issue orders" and have them followed to the letter, that's great, but it's almost never the case. You need to be on people's asses constantly until they do things the way you want them done. And, by the way, as soon as you stop being on their ass, they'll go right back to the way they want to do things. You want some kind of AI to be on their ass constantly for you, I suppose, but all that would mean is you'd have to be constantly on the ass of whoever's in charge of making & monitoring this AI. You're looking for a way out of doing the actual work of management, and there just isn't one. It's a hard job.
The "stop engaging in DEI hiring" thing is an excellent demonstration of what I said in my first comment. You can't just say "stop." There are no metrics for whether or not they've "stopped." You can't identify any particular hire as a "DEI hire." You need to give a different directive - and a specific one. You need to say, for example, "hire the person with the highest GPA." Or, "hire the person with the degree from the best-ranked school." Or you could draw up a hiring examination and direct them to hire the applicant that scores best. There are obvious problems with these approaches: maybe the person with the highest GPA isn't very personable. Maybe you can come up with some better hard metric - but you need *some* hard metric. This will eventually have to happen with university admissions. There is no way to stop subjective decisions from being made subjectively. You need to make the decision objective, and accept whatever consequences that brings with it.
Your fundamental problem is that you have no positive agenda. You want people to stop doing all the bad things you think they're doing - OK. So do I, mostly. But you need to give them something else to do - something widely agreed to be positive. You need to redirect. "Calculus, not CRT." "Geography, not Gender Studies." "Physics, not Psychology."
Be there and be working. If anyone really expected saying "stop DEI hiring' to solve the problem in a day, they were dreaming. Rooting out the people who hire for ideology over competency will take years & decades. It will require driving these people out by constant attentive oversight and constant adherence to the principles of *true* fairness and *true* equality.
It will also require being smart. How are you at calculus, geography, and physics? How are your appointees? Can you read Shakespeare without stumbling? How's your Latin? "How's that relevant?" you ask -- well, sir, you'll beat the baddies by working harder than they do and knowing more than they do. There is no shortcut, artificial or otherwise.
Yes, I've managed teams before.
> as soon as you stop being on their ass, they'll go right back to the way they want to do things. You want some kind of AI to be on their ass constantly for you, I suppose
That's the point of the article indeed.
> all that would mean is you'd have to be constantly on the ass of whoever's in charge of making & monitoring this AI.
This would (in some cases) be much less work. Instead of propagating commands through a hierarchy the policy can be implemented directly, because LLMs scale a lot better than humans. Assuming you lack the skills to set up the AI yourself you only have to be on the ass of someone once, briefly, until it's doing what is needed. Then it can be left alone to supervise the other people. Changes in requirements are easily handled as the instructions are written in English, so no programmer attention is required until you need to hook it up to new data sources or similar.
> You can't identify any particular hire as a "DEI hire."
In the situation I was referring to, which you don't seem to be familiar with, the British government told the civil service to stop creating jobs with titles like "Diversity consultant".
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11376619/NHS-advertises-700-000s-worth-diversity-officer-roles-just-month.html
"NHS advertises £700,000's worth of diversity officer roles in just a month! Outrage as 'precious' cash is used to hire equality and wellbeing positions - despite op waiting list sitting at record high of 7 million"
So there's no difficulty or ambiguity in this case. Ministers give an order like "stop hiring diversity officers", the civil service ignores them, they discover this when journalists publish stories like the above. Very simple to kill this off using LLMs.
> But you need to give them something else to do - something widely agreed to be positive
I agree with the thrust of your point but "something" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. People fundamentally disagree on what positive agenda means and there's no easy way to just talk woke people around to a different point of view. If it were that straightforward people would have discovered how by now. As just one example, colorblindness in hiring is viewed as a clearly positive agenda by most people but immoral and evil by the woke. There's no way to just find a middle ground there, so to change their mind you'd need to discover an all-encompassing moral code that's not merely standard values rephrased but which somehow satisfies their psychological needs. In effect you'd need to design and implement a religion. That's never been done before, so it's not something you can just hand-wave away as obvious or easy.
>People fundamentally disagree on what positive agenda mean
I don't mean "positive" in the sense of "good." I mean "positive" in the sense of "doing something" as opposed to trying to stop bad things from being done.
Let's say the other side wants to spend money to build circuses and hire clowns to staff them. Obviously, to you and me, that's not a good use of taxpayer dollars. But circuses are fun, and people like circuses. If your platform is "No circuses with taxpayer money," people will mostly hear you saying "No circuses" and will decide you don't like fun because you're a big meanie.
If, on the other hand, you say, "Fill potholes and widen highways instead of building circuses," people will think of you as the guy who wants to build highways. And then, when you're debating the other side, instead of having the debate solely be about whether or not circuses are "worth it" or "the proper domain of government," you can say, "well, look, I like circuses, but with how the highways are right now, you're all going to be sitting in traffic for hours to get to that circus, as nice as it may be. So I think we can agree that, either way, we're going to need to fill those potholes and widen those highways before we're even talking about circuses."
Trump seems to understand this better than you: his "immigration" message was not, in fact, "stop immigration" to the average voter - it was "build the wall." It was "positive" in the sense that I am using the word - it was about bringing something new into existence. I consider it "negative" in the sense that newcomers are good, but it's good rhetorical strategy to oppose immigration with a "positive" wall rather than "negative" statements about stopping migrants, deportation, etc.
This applies to the NHS situation as well: Why did they have this money lying around to misuse? They should have been ordered *positively" to use all available funds to hire nurses & doctors or to buy needed equipment or what have you. If they still proceeded to do as they did, now you have a two-pronged argument: where before it was just "you did a thing we said not to do" now it's "you did a thing we said not to do *instead of* doing this obviously good thing we said to do."
Further, I rather think that situation illustrates why AI isn't going to help you much. You already know what they're doing. They usually aren't subtle about it: in fact they brag about it in public every chance they get. They can't help themselves. The reason they act the way they do is for acclaim and approval from their group. Finding out about it is not the hard part.
And I'm far from an expert, but may I propose we not trust important decisions to black-box AIs - especially where "we" refers to a person lacking the practical ability to look into & understand how these things *do* work under the hood, should the need arise? For all the concern about Huawei putting backdoors in chips and such like, I'm not sure why you would trust an AI that is, to you & me, a black box. Especially with respect to this subject. Have you met many programmers? I went to school with a few. "Some of them, I assume, are good people." Some of them, I know, are not quite whole people any longer.
"Managed teams" sounds like some desk-warmer business. Were they people who cared about their resumes and wanted to impress you? Then you have no idea what I'm talking about. Try managing resentful teens into showing up, keeping a store tidy, smiling instead of grimacing at customers and staying off their phones. That would be far better practice for the present situation.
You're arguing that the only positive vision is one in which governments are constantly doing expensive things, with the only question being what things i.e. you view the entire libertarian / fiscally conservative vision as "not positive". Are you explicitly aware this is what you're arguing? It feels like you might not be.
This sort of problem is exactly what motivated the essay: governments are full of people with that particular viewpoint, but very often the citizens don't vote for that. They would like neither circuses nor pointless road resurfacing, they would like lower taxes and a less intrusive government. Civil servants will never accept a positive vision of "we need fewer of you because your work is bad and unwanted" no matter how it's phrased, so the question then becomes how do you ensure they do what is asked anyway in the case that you win election on such a platform.
> This applies to the NHS situation as well: Why did they have this money lying around to misuse? .... They should have been ordered *positively" to use all available funds to hire nurses & doctors
They don't have the money and they were so ordered. Numerous times. That's what I keep telling you, but it doesn't seem to be sinking in. Woke employees will happily reallocate funds and attention towards advancing their ideology and away from the institutional mission (patient care in this case), because to woke people the ideology is virtue and the mission is either morally neutral or outright morally suspect.
Yes, in some cases the media will catch a few examples .... post facto. After those people are already hired and now protected by civil service procedures and unions (in the UK). But they certainly won't catch all of them, nor at the right time. If you find out about it five minutes after the job ad is posted you can immediately get it pulled down and fire the person who did it before anything happens. If you find out months after the fact you may not even be able to easily find who is responsible or who got hired into the role, especially if you have to go via five levels of hostile management to get at the necessary information. AI combined with good IT systems can solve all of this.
By the way, this essay is explicitly about how to manage institutions of adults. I've done this, albeit not at the scale of an entire state. The fact that you've now moved the goalpost from managing teams to being a schoolteacher indicates that you probably don't have any management experience - then why so confident what I outline here won't work? Did you dislike the part where I suggest putting AI-monitored cameras in every classroom to ensure the teachers aren't indoctrinating students into believing only leftism is "positive"?
You keep using the word "positive" in the sense of "good." I keep trying to clarify that I mean "positive" in the sense of "additive." Since I don't seem to be getting through on that front, I will say "additive" instead.
"Additive" things don't have to be expensive, nor do they in fact have to "add" anything in reality. It's a matter of framing.
Let's say you want to reduce the government payroll & reduce the amount of time that government employees have to spend interfering with private enterprise. You could say "cut this, cut that, stop this, stop that" and sound like a mean old badidie with an axe - or, alternatively, you could say, "Now that everyone is more productive for the amount of time they work, I think it's time to move toward a three-day weekend and a four-day workweek. We in the government can set the example for the rest of society - I propose a three-day weekend for all government employees. There will, of course, be a commensurate pay cut."
If you want to subtract, it's best to subtract by addition. "No, no - we're not subtracting two from four. We're adding negative two." I'm discussing rhetoric.
There is, to use an awkward phrase, a sort of "everything bagel" problem with government reduction. Sure, you can get elected on a platform promising to get rid of "unnecessary bureaucracy" and "government waste" - but when it comes to identifying and removing individual instance of unnecessary bureaucracy or waste, one quickly finds that each individual instance is enmeshed with lots of other things, is in fact considered very important by some particular cross-party constituency, etc...this difficulty gives rise to the Norquist policy of freezing additional taxation & spending - causing it to reduce in real terms with inflation & population growth - rather than hitting your head against brick walls.
Whether or not you have some hypothetical supervisory AI catching all the "wokeness" you still need an enforcement mechanism that's effective, which evidently is not present. (Or might be, I wouldn't know - it doesn't seem to have been that long yet.)
"Adults" today - after ten years of boiling in social media soup - are not the adults of yesterday. What you're seeing as the "evil force of wokeness" is closer to the "sullen force of petulance." You evidently have suffered some damage from boiling in the soup yourself -- I was clearly not talking about being a schoolteacher. You saw the word "teens" and quit reading right there rather than finishing the paragraph. It's hard to have discussions with people who don't read things all the way through -- that more than anything else is why the "woke" are so intransigent. *They literally don't read your arguments against them.* They read until they see an individual word or notion to which they can react. They don't deal in whole arguments. In this particular case, I was talking about an experience like managing a McDonald's, which should have been evident from the mention of "customers."
LOL! As if your average, typical MAGA Moron could even DEFINE calculus! My cousin, a typical TrumpSucker, thought that physics was about PHYSICAL EDUCATION and thus a physicist meant a gym teacher! ROFL! Hey, if people were to follow your truly evil and despicable directives, there would be very, very few right-wingers in any job requiring even a modicum of post-secondary education or above average math and conceptual skills!
TrumpSuckers who can read, write and calculate beyond Trump's own pathetic 5th grade level skills---people like you, for instance, who use their cerebral qualities for avarice and dominance over other humans---are a distinct minority within most of the highest paid professions and leading corporate and government entities.
So, dream on. Your neo-Mussolini fantasies about "JUST FORCING THEM" to do as we say might make you feel better as you pontificate online to similar MAGA miscreants and mentalities, but judging by the historically unprecedented slide in Donny Dumb Dump's approval ratings and the growing anger and specifically focused resistance and upheaval across all regions and demographics, you might have to immigrate to another country where your dreams are coming true, as in Russia, Hungary, Turkey or even China. Be careful what you wish for, boys. Americans of ALL ideological stripes LOVE FREEDOM; and what you and DOGE and Dumb Dump are all planning is doomed to crash and burn. The only question is how soon and how severe the damage for Project 2025, Musk, MAGA and Trump. But it's coming...
Is this satirical?
Further mechanisms for control by minorities over majorities are last thing you want if you're interested in living a free and undisturbed life full of burgers or whatever.
It's a mechanism for control of minorities (civil servants, institutional employees) by the majority (the citizens who employ them). Given that the "minority" here (lol) consented to follow orders in return for money, there's no ethical or philosophical problems raised by ensuring they actually follow their agreements.
I understand that this is the stated goal of your proposal. But what it actually entails are just mechanisms that allow smaller groups of people to effectively wield power.
In your proposal, I don't see where the balance of power moves away from bureaucratic civil servants and towards the general public, I only see it moving towards a smaller and thus more powerful bureaucracy.
I cannot foresee the potential consequences of its implementation, but when I think of historical populist movements that got convinced to give absolute power to their leadership, I think of the Russian soldiers and peasants who in the end entrusted the communists with the power to smash the old oppressive regime. We know were they did end up ultimately. (There, terror and other psychological means were the tools the new regime was permitted to use to bend the bureacracy to their will, instead of soft control and technological surveillance - but the resulting power balances seem somewhat comparable.)
The assumption is that the leadership of government departments are chosen by elected representatives, so concentrating power in them is inherently towards the general public.
Of course it would be better in many cases to not have governments do those functions at all, but voters aren't ready for that yet.
I think this sick, sickening, vile Orwellian Essay was better in the original Ancient Latin, when authored by Caligula.
How do you define wokeness?