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notes from JK

Booklog: The Red Sparrow Trilogy by Jason Matthews

I watched the Red Sparrow movie back when it came out and something niggled me about it. It was ok but felt like it could have been more. I then learnt it was based on a novel by a genuine CIA veteran. The first book in the trilogy lingered on my list for a while, but as I began to exhaust Le Carre’s to read, I thought I would give it a go.

Well, wow, this was so much better than the movie. (Aren’t they always?!) Other than all the necessary narrative trimming for film, I think the key element the script-writers left out for Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Dominika Egorova was her synesthesia. In the books Egorova can see people’s emotions as coloured halos, giving her an advantage whilst also adding a fascinating twist to how the books can portray key moments of tension.

Ultimately the trilogy is a love story, an incredible portrayal of a female double agent operating in Putin’s Russia and a passionate defence of human intelligence operatives aka spies. Matthews knows of what he writes, and it shows with so many details of techniques and locations that clearly aren’t just pulled together from a quick visit via Google.

As a 30 year CIA veteran, it’s no surprise he plays the Americans as the good guys, but this is no Tom Clancy black v white: FBI agents fumble and fail, as do SVB ones. The CIA’s upper echelons are filled with incompetent bureaucrats as much as the Kremlin has kleptocrats.

The horrible trade-offs the characters have to make for the greater good, the knife-edge risks they carry to survive whilst trying to live and love were compelling and moving. It took real skill from the author to portray sex being used as a weapon of spy craft, yet at other times being genuinely loving without ever becoming cringeworthy.

This is a rich, powerful series of books that had me stunned and sleepless by the time I finished the final instalment. Sadly Jason Matthews is no longer with us, so we will read no more of the incredible Agent Egorova aka Red Sparrow.

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technology

AI + LLM reading list for public servants

It’s clear to me we are in the midst of an AI hype-cycle and I’m skeptical of claims companies are making which directly serve their valuations. Throwing tech into our problems will not solve them.

But this isn’t to say that there isn’t something interesting going on, there is. Machine learning, data science techniques, large language models and all the other stuff being labelled as ‘AI’ are something public servants need to keep a watching brief on, and carefully experiment with. To that end I’ve been sharing some reading I’ve found helpful with colleagues, and I’ve brought all that into one place here.

Benedict Evans is, to my mind, one of the best commentators and analysts out there and his latest essay is extremely helpful for thinking things through: AI and the automation of work.

I really enjoyed a session on Large Language Models (LLMs) at our away day. So many great discussions delving into the philosophy of knowledge. Two recent articles fed into my thinking for the event. Firstly this one in MIT Technology Review exploring why asking an LLM to complete a test like the legal bar exam, is a flawed approach to understanding LLM’s capabilities. Secondly Simon Willinson posted the transcript of his recent sort of ‘year in LLMs’ talk which really helps to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of the art.

Innovation professor Ethan Mollick writes of his concerns about what the “write this for me” button powered by LLMs means for productivity and meaning. I don’t know if I agree but it’s thought provoking. I have heard that HMRC are already receiving LLM-created letters seeking to reduce people’s taxes with false understandings of tax law. But it still adds to their workload.

Here’s a report of a prototype powered by GPT-4 that lets you draw software that then gets coded for you. What the quality of that code is, I don’t know. But an interesting possible future for our work?

I’m sceptical of the productivity claims being made for Large Language Models (LLMs), but constantly searching for new analysis and insight into this field. Manchester University’s Professor Richard Jones has written a fascinating blog post on this topic, featuring a really interesting example on the use of AI in protein folding for pharmaceuticals. Definitely worth a read.

Large Language Models like GPT are all the hype rage at the moment, so if you want to really understand how they work then Stephen Wolfram has written an epic explanation. Or the simpler version I’ve seen online is “it’s just spicy autocorrect.” Whatever you think of the hype, here’s NCSC’s guidance on their use in government.

How the natural language interface of LLMs makes securing them so hard, enter the world of ‘prompt engineering’.

Max Roser is one of the lead members of “Our World in Data” a wonderful online data resource. I recently read his article from December 2020 Artificial intelligence is transforming our world — it is on all of us to make sure that it goes well and it’s as timely as ever.

Milton Mueller, a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, The Basic Fallacy Underlying the AI Panic, is a punchy argument against fears that “AI will take over”.

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notes from JK

Booklog: Taste, Agent Sonya and How Westminster Works

For some reason I haven’t much felt like doing these reading notes this year, in fact it’s almost exactly a year to the day since my last one. Interesting.

I’ve read more John Le Carré (no surprises there) as I seek whatever I haven’t yet read of his. I thoroughly enjoyed Jason Matthews’ Red Sparrow trilogy, far better than the film of the first book, FAR better. Elizabeth Day’s Magpie was wonderful. Charles Arthur’s Social Warming was a stand-out piece of non-fiction I’ve read. Read it and follow his emails.

Taste – Stanley Tucci

I was utterly besotted with Tucci’s Searching for Italy TV series. He is so charming and endearingly passionate about food in the land of his ancestors. Taste is a memoir which weaves together drinks, food, showbiz eating and rather touching family stories as well as a hilarious snapshot of his family life in lockdown and a tough read on his cancer treatment. Brilliant stuff, and some lovely recipes in there too.

Agent Sonya – Ben Macintyre

Even if you’ve never read Macintyre’s wonderful books, you’ve probably watched an adaptation of them, he’s everywhere these days. And it’s easy to tell way – he researches great historical tales with dedication and writes them up with gusto. He’s really having a great time telling us about them, and it’s catchy. This story of Soviet agent Sonya, a German Jewish communist from a wealthy background is just riveting and astonishing on so many levels. How a woman came to be a top spy in a man’s world. How she raised three children whilst undertaking extraordinary missions and travels. And how she managed to evade detection for so long. Another great Macintyre read.

How Westminster Works… and Why It Doesn’t — Ian Dunt

I think pretty much every section of this book is broadly right in its analysis. It’s also a fun read. Everyone should read it. Indeed much of what it suggests as positive steps forward have been recommendations in recent reports by numerous reviews. Let’s hope some get taken forward.

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technology

Perhaps we’ve been wrong to frame public service digital as a way to save money

I write this post with some trepidation. Let me begin with the incantation that this is my personal view and not government policy in any way. So why trepidation? Because I fear I may be treading on some dearly held assumptions that have been core to much work and countless business cases over many years.

Still, let me give this an airing because I know many colleagues feel frustrated when their work in public service digital (or DDaT, or tech or data science, you get the idea) is seen as a cost rather than an investment. They risk becoming relegated to ‘back office services’, or ‘overhead’ in business planning conversations.

When that happens I fear this is a category error – confusing digital work with the likes of estates and audit, with no disrespect for those important professions intended! It is perfectly rational to have a conversation about estates as a cost centre, an organisation could have smaller, cheaper offices or change its desk ratio to reduce their spend on estates. Doing so doesn’t however fundamentally change the core business.

With digital, by coming in hard on the “we can save money through channel shift/reducing paper use/improving accuracy” type arguments we have pigeon-holed ourselves in the same boat.

Do we really think that since the 1950s the public sector has actually saved money through the introduction of digital technologies? Billions are spent running and building these systems. In an alternative world, with no transistors, what would those billions be spent on? I suspect the money would be spent on delivering and administering core public services and the cost of non-digital administration would not have hugely grown. In our reality our spend on digital services, support and all the associated stuff is a major and growing part of public spending. Is that a bad thing? No, because I would argue it is enabling ways of serving the public that were never previously possible. But they aren’t necessarily cheaper.

To put it another way, as Benedict Evans does eloquently in his recent essay on automation, the introduction of spreadsheets did not reduce the amount of accounting or analysis done. Indeed we have more accountants and analysts than ever before, and the spend on them is consequently greater. Similarly in collecting more structured data in public services, whatever we’ve saved on clipboards and pencils, is dwarfed by the growth in data scientists and tools to support them. I would happily argue this is a great investment to better inform decision-making and continuous improvement, but it is undoubtedly costing more money.

I’ve sat on drafts of this post for quite some time, because in some ways it feels heretical to say this when so much of the narrative has been “faster, better, cheaper” and I’ve previously leaned on that rhetoric too, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes there are savings to be made in a tactical sense – with some channel shift here or on-demand printing there. But zoom out and I feel we’re missing a trick if we don’t move away from “efficiency” to the more vital question, what can we do today for the public benefit which wasn’t possible before?

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notes from JK

AEG oven error F113

I hope this will help those searching the web for this error message which doesn’t, at time of writing, appear in any online documentation.

Having had an engineer out this week for my new oven, he confirmed only basic errors are published with explanations online. Not helpful!

Error F113 is a logic board error with the oscillator, according to the engineer. The solution is a “software update” delivered by replacing the logic board. So if you get this error, you will need a service engineer to help. Sorry!

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technology

The hard work of change, hype cycles and why LLMs aren’t a quick fix

There has been a tsunami of hype recently about Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Bard and so on. To me it has felt quite similar to previous hype cycles, such as with blockchain – “the end of banks” vs “the end for programmers”. For a long time I would get frustrated with people leaping into the latest ‘hot’ technology because I felt they weren’t understanding the hype cycle nor the complexities of how technology really works. However, now I think something more fundamental is going on: In essence, people are consciously or subconsciously, trying to find ways around the long slow hard work of delivering fundamental change (and for me this is specific to work in public services).

Just chucking in some extra technology doesn’t deliver genuine change. Through decades of hard-won experience we know that technology-led change just does not work. It’s only through multidisciplinary teams working in a user-centred way iterating on user feedback that genuine, lasting improvement happens — it is culture change working in step with technology. This is the way set out in the UK service standard, through which we have been able to fundamentally reimagine (some) services and make a positive difference.

I very much know there’s still such a long way to go on the change journey. It is hard yards and we are at the very beginning. It can’t be led by technology, it’s about people and making a difference. When there is so much legacy tech, with poor data models around, I do really understand the wishful thinking that something new could skip the pain of sorting it all out. I know, I feel the pain. But actually doing the hard yards of building the right culture, the right data structures and the right services is what needs to come first.

The tools, technologies and the connectivity of the Internet (a la Loosemore) have allowed us to do public services in fundamentally different ways with a very different cost model, but that alone is not enough. So adding the newest hype technology will never leapfrog lasting change of our culture, behaviours, and imaginations. Indeed, I think the most important shift technological change has delivered is how it has opened our minds to genuinely re-imagining public services for the better. And that is the work. Let’s go.

For further reading on how LLMs work, and how to think about them, I recommend ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web and the lengthy What is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? followed by this UK government guidance.

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Booklog: The Little Drummer Girl, Silverview & The Whitehall Effect

John Le Carré was an author of widely acknowledged talent and impact. Personally I far prefer his writings to the screen adaptations, though perhaps ‘The Constant Gardener’ was the most faithful adaptation in my (very) amateur opinion.

Most authors I can enjoy reading (or not) but with Le Carré I enjoy, admire and feel a deep frustration at how incredibly good he is at writing. Almost to the point of wanting to never write a word again. There is total mastery in the way he captures moral ambiguity in the little moments which uncover deeper truths whilst highlighting the deceit so fundamental to statecraft.

So I am on a completist drive to read everything he has written, but not read everything about him as a swathe of new memoirs on him and his love life have begun to emerge. To that end, my thoughts on two of his works I had yet to encounter until Kent Libraries came good:

The Little Drummer Girl – John Le Carré

A remarkably finely balanced piece which somehow manages to expose the hypocrisies and moral relativism of the British, Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East. It also is a deep look into the psychology of recruiting and training ‘civilians’ to espionage, with his female lead providing, to my mind at least, a compelling narrative of her divided loyalties and motivations.

There are dream-like qualities to elements of the book as it flits between the female protagonist’s perspective and those of the agents working for each side. It delivers a satisfying ending yet one closes the book not sure who ‘won’ and if anyone really deserved to win.

Utterly astonishing and global in scope, though of course with good dollops of Germany and England as we come to expect.

Silverview – John Le Carré

At the time of writing, this was his last book, published posthumously from an essentially complete manuscript. In an afterword his son suggests that the manuscript had stayed in a drawer for some time not due to concerns over its quality, but because Le Carré feared it was ‘too close to the bone’ in its critique of his former colleagues in the British intelligence services. Personally I didn’t think it took a major detour from his usual critiques.

The usual quality is there, and many common themes are used from his previous works – the English seaside town, retired spies, the sense of British decline. Still, this is undoubtedly a new story, one told with care and grace as he delivers a final rebuke for the failings of international diplomacy as well as of ‘the Service’.

The scale is smaller than other of his tales, but this does not in any way diminish the emotional impact of its conclusion. He was just an amazing talent.

The Whitehall Effect – John Seddon

In many ways what John Seddon wrote in 2014 is well trodden ground for those of us steeped in the ways of system leadership and agile working. But he brings interesting examples and a helpful perspective to the question of why so many government programmes fail to deliver on their promises.

His argument is that the programmes are often poorly defined and led by people without the right skills who aren’t focussing on the right things. Harsh but often fair! He then shows examples of teams doing ‘study’ as he calls it, or discoveries in my world, which then roots teams into the lived experience of service users and staff before iterative work begins. To many that may seem obvious, yet others still aren’t sold so another strong book making the case can’t hurt!

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notes from JK

Booklog: Three Women, Daniel, To Kill a Mockingbird & The Cat Who Liked Rain

As with many friends and acquaintances I found reading hard at the start of lockdown. After a couple of months I seemed to regain my appetite so here’s what I’ve got through. I’m missing libraries now…

Three Women – Lisa Taddeo

Powerful, brave, searing, brutal. This really is a masterpiece. Written with such beauty and clarity. Some of the sentences took my breath away. 

Nobody is normal. Nothing is ordinary. These are easily said but by delving into three women’s lives in crystalline detail we learn something essential about the American woman’s experience in the 2010s. About desire, about expectation, how men and women treat each other. About the guilt and doubt imposed through one’s own thoughts of what being a good parent or partner or friend should be. 

Some may balk at the very explicit details shared from each woman’s sexual experience in this book. But as a frank expose of love and desire it only works with that level of detail. 

Truly a masterful piece of work. 

Daniel – Henning Mankell

Beautiful, heart breaking. Perspective on how we are so easily drawn into exceptionalism for our culture, language, race and way of life. And how good intentions can cause harm if we don’t respect the agency of individuals. 

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

It’s a classic, and rightfully so. I had never read it. Now I have, and I’m glad. Powerful and beautiful. Still so relevant.

The Cat Who Liked Rain – Henning Mankell

In my obsession with Henning Mankell I’m now even reading this story he wrote for children. It’s a beautiful piece on childhood and loss – about a treasured cat going missing. I really loved it. It’s beautiful, sensitive and comforting in how it’s set in a very normal family.

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Listenlog: Satanic Panic, WeCrashed, The Clock and the Cat, Hunting Warhead, Unexpected Fluids

Uncover: Satanic Panic

In the early 1990s a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada is rocked by allegations from swathes of children that they are being horribly abused by a satanic cult. Teachers, police officers and others are accused and charged. The trials and appeals grind on for years. Eventually, with the exception of two lesser charges, all the accused are freed or have their charges dropped. Was there ever a satanic cult out there or did the judicial system mess up?

Another superb podcast from CBC which explains how mass hysteria and lots of well intentioned individuals unintentionally created a nightmarish scenario where innocent people nearly lost everything in the face of panic fed by intense media coverage. Utterly fascinating.

Hunting Warhead

Also on the topic of child abuse is this joint series by CBC and Norway’s VG. It starts with how a two man investigative unit at a Norwegian paper who had been successfully uncovering child abusers stumbled on a complex international Police sting operation. The heart of this operation had been the arrest of ‘Warhead’ who ran a string of major dark web sites for trading child pornography.

The series explains what the Police operation did: How they managed to infiltrate the dark web but also explores in a genuinely informative and careful way the story from the perspective of the victims and the abusers. Treating child abusers as ‘evil’ doesn’t stop the crime happening, and hearing the challenges involved in even discussion of treatment or prevention strategies is well handled and thought provoking. An excellent listen.

WeCrashed

WeWork is the biggest corporate crash since Enron. But instead of fraudulent accounting (as far we know) this story is more about ‘excessive exuberance’ where a charismatic CEO along with international venture capital desperately chasing returns willingly entered into a mutual hallucination that a property rental business could be valued just like a tech unicorn.

On the basis that we can learn more from failures, this short series of 6 episodes is definitely worth a listen, even if just for the anecdotes of the wild ways money was being spent.

The Clock and the Cat

I don’t think I’ve ever met Mark Foden, but I’ve been enjoying his blogs and tweets for a long time. He’s now got a podcast exploring his favoured topic of complexity. Hence the title with clocks being complicated and cats being complex. If you’re interested in systems thinking, complexity, public service and organisational change then I think you’ll like this. Depending on your existing level of knowledge you may want to skip some of the episode but you’ll definitely find something of value in there with a fascinating array of guests coming on.

Unexpected Fluids

I suspect this one might be a bit marmite for my readers. It’s a BBC Radio 1 produced NSFW podcast built around listeners submitting their funny stories of sex going wrong. Many of the tales of sexual woe are snort-out-loud-on-the-train funny. Which is what hooked me in – a dose of bawdy comedy. But it’s much more than that as the presenters Alix and Riyadh deftly interview guests who have expanded my thinking on the wide range of human sexuality, how we discuss gender identity, consent and so much more. A fab series – well done to the BBC for using the podcast format for exploring more explicit and risky programming than they could on their radio stations.

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notes from JK

Booklog: The World According to Star Wars & When I Die

The World According to Star Wars – Cass Sunstein

A book on what Star Wars can teach us about constitutional law, democracy and family relationships? Yes, yes and yes. Even better, it’s brilliant fun. Renowned scholar Cass Sunstein absolutely sparkles in this book where he swoops through what George Lucas’ creative process teaches us about life, how the Force relates to religion and why parents should watch Star Wars with their kids. I absolutely adored this book, it’s a real quirky gem. But I do have one bone to pick – Sunstein claims that no knowledge nor affinity for Star Wars is needed to enjoy the book. I disagree, it will make little sense if you haven’t watched all the films at least once. Indeed on reading the book I found great pleasure in re-watching them all again with new insight. Just a wonderful, unusual book from a brilliant mind.

When I Die – Phillip Gould

A short, searing book told mostly from the personal perspective of political strategist Phillip Gould as he is diagnosed with and ultimately dies from cancer. It’s emotional, wrenching at points but deeply worthwhile. This is clearly a man who loved his family, but also had a huge appetite for his work and politics. Once can sense the battles within him as he suspects his work ethic may have contributed to his illness, and threatens to distract him from precious, now definitely finite, time with his family. He mostly stays true to what he identifies as the purpose for his illness: To share the experience in a direct and moving way, to help others and change how we talk about death and dying. And of course to have the conversations and time he needs to have with those closest to him. The book closes with messages from his family and close friends. He achieved his purpose and something more. A wonderful book.

In fiction:

Women – Charles Bukowski
Brutal, unrelenting, salacious and disturbing and points. It feels incredibly real, even if it is a life one would never want to live, one feels privileged that somebody was able to capture a slice of LA lowlife as eloquently and with grit as Bukowski did.  

Agent Running in the Field – John Le Carré
There are few authors so consistently good as Le Carré. I feel completely inadequate in the presence of his writing, how can he be so good? As with the great Henning Mankell, Le Carré has a talent that borders on magic: Writing gripping tales that also expose the great issues of our time in new and powerful ways. This is what great fiction writing should do – help us grow, learn and feel in ways we could never otherwise do. It’s another masterpiece.