My other half just sent me an article entitled “How universities have been reorganised into incompetence” detailing how budget cuts have forced universities to streamline their administration tier.
AI might, allegedly, take on a lot of the lecture scheduling and even recruiting role that professional services do (read about one company that has outsourced recruitment to AI, which sifts then interviews all applicants simultaneously over Zoom), and surely it couldn’t do a worse job than the current NHS patient facing admin does - ask my husband about his ongoing saga with the Glaucoma clinic, that insists on scheduling the consultant meeting a week before the scans that they should be discussing. I worked as a civil servant in a regional multi-departmental office. It was all “make work”, sitting in on other organisations meetings whilst senior staff built their empires. Eric Pickles closed us down and nobody noticed.
I agree with much of this. I think you started on this line of thinking after you made a comment that Bradford Council did not in fact have a lot of waste capacity. I got my first job working for a manpower services commission job creation scheme overseen by Bradford council. There used to be so much training available in the form of night classes or on the job. The MSC is long gone and it’s functions redistributed and down graded. On administrative roles in local government it was always well known that the best day or leisure centre or care homes or even whole services were only as good as their admin support BUT this was based on some of the admin workers being excellent multitasking jacks of all trade. In my experience in local government a third of staff and management are excellent, a third are okay and a third are worse than useless and create loads of work for everyone else. (obviously put the excellent in charge of the rest and the useless can be either sacked or put in the right job and training). I notice during my rise through the tiers that that much of academic training was out of date and of late often driven by ideology. In my 40 years in various roles I have caught the eye of a Assistant or Executive Director perhaps 4-5 times and been fast tracked or seconded to run an innovative project. A sixty minute lecture on Kaizen theory got me interested in business process re-engineering which eventually led me to to apply the theories to a bunch of Bolshevik Welfare Rights Officers and that led to a 1.7 million annualised benefit maximisation scheme for frail elderly people who otherwise would end up in costly care homes. I had to make a lot of mistakes and learn from them to achieve anything. I learnt a lot about how things do not work trying to make them actually improve. I do think a lot of public sector regulations and services actually reinforce the problems that they are supposed to address. I do think there is a role for AI and am working with a social enterprise using the technology in a social care like arena at the moment. But councils will try and AI to cut another 30% of their capacity to meet this latest round of austerity - we will be facing a local government competency crisis writ large as my generation retire.
Not so much that nobody noticed, perhaps, but when a child went missing, or someone broke their suspension in a pothole, no one made any connection because no one was accountable
It’s a good point but sadly our department never did anything so useful, it was more about badgering local authorities, police etc to achieve Labour’s ever increasing sets of pointless targets. In fact, I partly blame the obsessive focus on reducing “volume crimes” (burglary, cars, ASB) in the early 00s for the inaction on the grooming gangs because no targets were attached to such a complex and shocking monstrosity. Ann Cryer was abused by her own party for raising it but “look, burglaries are down, fantastic!”.
TBH I think actual tuition itself - and not just at further education level - could be vastly improved with existing LLM technology. Infinitely patient tutors that don't go on strike and don't indoctrinate young people with woke BS.
I mean, with no effort at all I can already visit https://chatgpt.com/ and ask it to explain lambda calculus or Bayesian probability to me, and it will do a darned fine job of it. The proverbial writing is on the wall...
Agree. I think a trick was missed during the Tyranny, to decouple tuition from a “place” - why shouldn’t the online lectures be delivered by the best in the world to the world, rather than from the local institution? Obviously political bias has to be accounted for, and remuneration, but it should have led to a whole re-jigging of what higher education actually means. I have learnt more from “In Our Time” (it is painful to praise the BBC) than I probably did at A level history, lol.
Loath to admit, but although I am a constant autodidact who makes use of tech, including latterly AI, I advance and produce best when answerable to a human being who is competent, present and focused. In the case of the old university tutorial system, I happily referred to this as 'mind-meld', and my view was that, generally, multiple minds worked more effectively than single minds (notable exceptions conceded, although it might be defended that no mind works in a vacuum). That said, it remains to be seen whether Zoom + LLM might be able to reproduce - or even exceed - such synergies
I am writing this as a constant critic of bureaucracy and bureaucrats although to be fair I know very little about paper pushing. Surely the answer is to have less rules and regulations then you won't need the staff to administer it and I suspect things would get done quicker. What, it seems to me, happens instead is we get more and more rules and regulations needing more and more staff.
thanks for ploughing this lovely furrow of common sense. There is a feeling that bureaucracy metastasises beyond our ability to control it. The beast is out of control as systems become too complex to manage and those in charge want to achieve more with less and without understanding the processes they are in charge of. A wise old Jesuit priest I knew - this was over 40 years ago - identified the root cause as the universal eunuch running the brothel.
AI might, allegedly, take on a lot of the lecture scheduling and even recruiting role that professional services do (read about one company that has outsourced recruitment to AI, which sifts then interviews all applicants simultaneously over Zoom), and surely it couldn’t do a worse job than the current NHS patient facing admin does - ask my husband about his ongoing saga with the Glaucoma clinic, that insists on scheduling the consultant meeting a week before the scans that they should be discussing. I worked as a civil servant in a regional multi-departmental office. It was all “make work”, sitting in on other organisations meetings whilst senior staff built their empires. Eric Pickles closed us down and nobody noticed.
I agree with much of this. I think you started on this line of thinking after you made a comment that Bradford Council did not in fact have a lot of waste capacity. I got my first job working for a manpower services commission job creation scheme overseen by Bradford council. There used to be so much training available in the form of night classes or on the job. The MSC is long gone and it’s functions redistributed and down graded. On administrative roles in local government it was always well known that the best day or leisure centre or care homes or even whole services were only as good as their admin support BUT this was based on some of the admin workers being excellent multitasking jacks of all trade. In my experience in local government a third of staff and management are excellent, a third are okay and a third are worse than useless and create loads of work for everyone else. (obviously put the excellent in charge of the rest and the useless can be either sacked or put in the right job and training). I notice during my rise through the tiers that that much of academic training was out of date and of late often driven by ideology. In my 40 years in various roles I have caught the eye of a Assistant or Executive Director perhaps 4-5 times and been fast tracked or seconded to run an innovative project. A sixty minute lecture on Kaizen theory got me interested in business process re-engineering which eventually led me to to apply the theories to a bunch of Bolshevik Welfare Rights Officers and that led to a 1.7 million annualised benefit maximisation scheme for frail elderly people who otherwise would end up in costly care homes. I had to make a lot of mistakes and learn from them to achieve anything. I learnt a lot about how things do not work trying to make them actually improve. I do think a lot of public sector regulations and services actually reinforce the problems that they are supposed to address. I do think there is a role for AI and am working with a social enterprise using the technology in a social care like arena at the moment. But councils will try and AI to cut another 30% of their capacity to meet this latest round of austerity - we will be facing a local government competency crisis writ large as my generation retire.
Not so much that nobody noticed, perhaps, but when a child went missing, or someone broke their suspension in a pothole, no one made any connection because no one was accountable
It’s a good point but sadly our department never did anything so useful, it was more about badgering local authorities, police etc to achieve Labour’s ever increasing sets of pointless targets. In fact, I partly blame the obsessive focus on reducing “volume crimes” (burglary, cars, ASB) in the early 00s for the inaction on the grooming gangs because no targets were attached to such a complex and shocking monstrosity. Ann Cryer was abused by her own party for raising it but “look, burglaries are down, fantastic!”.
TBH I think actual tuition itself - and not just at further education level - could be vastly improved with existing LLM technology. Infinitely patient tutors that don't go on strike and don't indoctrinate young people with woke BS.
I mean, with no effort at all I can already visit https://chatgpt.com/ and ask it to explain lambda calculus or Bayesian probability to me, and it will do a darned fine job of it. The proverbial writing is on the wall...
Agree. I think a trick was missed during the Tyranny, to decouple tuition from a “place” - why shouldn’t the online lectures be delivered by the best in the world to the world, rather than from the local institution? Obviously political bias has to be accounted for, and remuneration, but it should have led to a whole re-jigging of what higher education actually means. I have learnt more from “In Our Time” (it is painful to praise the BBC) than I probably did at A level history, lol.
Loath to admit, but although I am a constant autodidact who makes use of tech, including latterly AI, I advance and produce best when answerable to a human being who is competent, present and focused. In the case of the old university tutorial system, I happily referred to this as 'mind-meld', and my view was that, generally, multiple minds worked more effectively than single minds (notable exceptions conceded, although it might be defended that no mind works in a vacuum). That said, it remains to be seen whether Zoom + LLM might be able to reproduce - or even exceed - such synergies
To be future-proof it might be helpful to explain the phrase "the Tyranny".
The Covid Tyranny, what else?
I am writing this as a constant critic of bureaucracy and bureaucrats although to be fair I know very little about paper pushing. Surely the answer is to have less rules and regulations then you won't need the staff to administer it and I suspect things would get done quicker. What, it seems to me, happens instead is we get more and more rules and regulations needing more and more staff.
thanks for ploughing this lovely furrow of common sense. There is a feeling that bureaucracy metastasises beyond our ability to control it. The beast is out of control as systems become too complex to manage and those in charge want to achieve more with less and without understanding the processes they are in charge of. A wise old Jesuit priest I knew - this was over 40 years ago - identified the root cause as the universal eunuch running the brothel.
The main trouble with bureaucracy is the lack of leadership from the bureaucrats in charge.
More lack of accountability - the besetting sin of bureaucracy
That as well.
You're on fire Mr North! Your observations are not limited to the public sector either.