Back in March, James O’Malley wrote about the UK Government Digital Service’s (GDS) ‘One Login’ and the conceptually related Government ‘tell us once’ service. The thesis behind these services is that the Government should appear essentially monolithic from the perspective of a UK resident: information should be extensively shared across agencies, and if one updates one’s details with one agency, that update should propagate across the rest.

I agree with much of this: there is a lot to be said for simplifying interactions with Government. However, one underplayed cost is how linking data across services reduces individuals’ control over their own information. This can create murky trade-offs and unintended consequences.

To give one example: I know of a public sector organisation in the health field that went all-in on ‘one person, one record’. Superficially, this made a lot of sense, as it makes contextualisation much easier if you can see every interaction an individual has had with the organisation in a single list. _Except_… that’s not really how life works. If a journalist contacts that organisation, should that professional query really be stored alongside their personal medical data? The same applies to other professionals, say a headteacher contacting the service for advice about a pupil. Most people would have a reasonable expectation of a ‘firewall’ between personal and professional interactions, but that’s the antithesis of a ‘one person, one record’ approach. This led to a load of workarounds—appending people’s profession to their surname to create distinct ‘professional’ records, for example—that ultimately made the underlying data worse.

James cites Google as an example:

If you update your address on Gmail, you don’t need to then go and do the same thing separately on Google Maps, Google Drive and YouTube – all of those other services that are owned by the same company, and updating one will update the rest.

Yet, viewed from a different angle, this is a clear counter-example: many people have multiple Google accounts to keep their personal and professional lives separate, and they reasonably expect to update each one independently. When the Government ties all interactions to a single real-world identity, that separation becomes impossible.

‘Tell us once’ can quickly morph into ‘tell the entire state at once’—and this is often undesirable. For example, we offer free tuberculosis treatment to everyone, regardless of whether they are entitled to NHS care, because this is the best way to protect the public. This means that there will be people in the country illegally who are sharing personal information, like their address, with the NHS. If we link that data up with the Home Office, the net effect is to prevent people from accessing treatment for an infectious disease—thereby increasing risk to the public. We’ve been here before, and not that long ago.

Similarly, you might register a particular, private phone number for your interactions with services where you need a reasonable expectation of privacy—for example, if you’re reporting a safeguarding concern about a member of your family. Disaster might follow if all of your different phone numbers are thrown into a single identity—or, more likely, services find workarounds and store phone numbers in unexpected places, which exacerbates the very problem the data sharing is meant to solve. It becomes very difficult for anyone to reliably update all of their data, even within a single service.

James uses the word ‘citizens’ five times in his article. I feel a certain sense of trauma when I hear that word used in this way, borne from experience during COVID. This terminology seems to be the default within GDS. People who live in the UK but who are not citizens often have more frequent and complex contact with the Government than citizens, yet the service frequently defaults to terminology that excludes them. That feels revealing.

One would hope that the social contract is about Government giving the greatest support and most careful thought to the neediest, the most vulnerable, and the most marginalised. Yet, at least from my far-away vantage point, it often reads as though Government technology conversations begin with ‘let’s make this easier for people like me’.

So, while the direction of travel is probably right, it’s an area that needs careful thought and planning. We need to be open about the fact that ‘convenience’ often comes at the cost of personal control over data. This trade-off might sometimes be justified, but it deserves far more scrutiny than it currently receives. These kinds of changes often have unintended consequences—especially for the most vulnerable in society—and the first duty of any Government ought to be to put those very people first.

The image at the top was created with GPT-4o.

Just a recommendation: I can’t remember how long I’ve been reading the Jennifer Mills News, but it has been brightening my week for years. It’s a single-page ‘newspaper’ about Jennifer Mills, published by her once a week, with its own distinctive journalistic style.

It is just personal, fun and delightful.

A lot has been written recently about the development of artificial intelligence tools hitting a wall: that is, we’re reaching a point where the pace of improvement in models has slowed considerably. Some have made the point that this may not matter as we’re not yet close to exploiting even a fraction of what the existing models can do.

I think this is a reasonable take. One of my main uses of ChatGPT has been to help with the finer points of coding. I’m not really a coder, but I occasionally throw together a bit of PHP or Javascript to solve a specific problem: to tweak the output of an ical feed, for example, or to tweak the layout of a webpage, or to use an api to very quickly check public transport departures for a specific stop. This has been made much easier by being able to paste the code into ChatGPT and ask: “Why isn’t this working?!”

But just recently, I’ve been playing with the ChatGPT api and plugging in into some of those small scripts—with great results. When my alarm goes off in the morning, ChatGPT gives me a quick, sensible verbal briefing on my calendar events, tasks and so forth before I’ve even opened my eyes. I plug it into scripts where I’d like the wording to be a bit varied rather than identical every time, with pretty good results each time.

None of these things are lifechanging, but they are the sorts of small quality of life improvements that haven’t yet become commonplace—but will no doubt spread over coming years.

In the London Review of Books, Donald MacKenzie has a beautifully written and informative article about apps and online advertising.

The only mobile phone games I regularly play are Wordle and Connections from the New York Times (Wendy and I often tackle the latter together), so I’m a bit out of my depth with all of this stuff. I’m not sure I’ve ever played Candy Crush, which is the game MacKenzie leads his piece with:

Playing​ Candy Crush Saga on your phone involves moving brightly coloured sweets around to the sound of cheerful music. Get three or more identical sweets into a line, and they gently explode and disappear. Your score ticks up, and a cascade of further sweets refills the screen. If all goes well, you’ll soon complete a level. A warm, disembodied, male voice offers encouragement: ‘Divine!’, ‘Sweet!’

The iPhone version of Candy Crush was released in November 2012, and an Android version a month later. In December 2013, the BBC reported that train carriages in London, New York and other big cities were full of commuters ‘fixated on one thing only. Getting rows of red jelly beans or orange lozenges to disappear.’ It has always been free to install Candy Crush, and it has been downloaded more than five billion times, which suggests that hundreds of millions of people must have played it. More than two hundred million still do, according to the game’s makers, the Anglo-Swedish games studio King. Those players aren’t going to exhaust the game’s challenges any time soon: Candy Crush has more than fifteen thousand levels, and dozens more are added every week.

Candy Crush is big business. By 2023, it had earned more than $20 billion in total for King and Activision Blizzard, the games conglomerate that bought King in 2016 for $5.9 billion. Activision Blizzard has now itself been bought by Microsoft for $69 billion, a consolidation of the games sector that caused the UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, enough concern that it initially tried to block it.

I was surprised to learn that only 3-5% of players typically spend money on these games. I’d understood that microtransactions were a big source of income, but not that so much of the income comes from so-called ‘whales’ who spend tens of dollars a month.

I did not know that a big portion of the income from these games comes from advertising other games within them. Companies are keen not to lose ‘whales’ to other games, which is presumably why buying things in games often comes with the side-benefit of removing ads… for other games where you might otherwise spend your money instead.

I was also surprised—and pleased—to learn that only 20% of iPhone users consent to apps tracking their behaviour, in that pop up which appears when one first installs an app. I had not understood how many job losses this had caused in the gaming industry.

The article is well-worth a few moments of your time.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

When I first bought an iPhone, I remember regularly checking the App Store charts, searching for anything new or exciting to install on my phone. The top apps weren’t just installed on my phone, but also on all of my friends’ phones. It seemed like everyone had the same selection.

I don’t think that’s true anymore. As the number of apps has increased many-fold, and perhaps as the cultural milieu has become more diverse, I think the selection of apps on people’s phones varies to a much greater extent.

So I wondered: what proportion of today’s most popular apps are installed on my phone?

Of the top 10 free apps on the App Store, only one (ChatGPT) is installed on my phone. Of the top 20, only three are installed. Many of my apps rank lower in the charts, but I still have 18 of the top 50 installed—more than I might have guessed.

Of the top 50 paid apps, I have only one. I also have just one of the top 50 free games, and none of the top 50 paid games.

I’m not sure what any of this means, but it feels like a big change compared to fourteen years ago. Perhaps our personal devices have become a little more personal than they once were? Or maybe our collective attention is becoming ever more fragmented, threatening the shared nature of reality? Or perhaps both?

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Before I read this Financial Times article by Bryce Elder, I didn’t know:

• That ‘Trump’ branded watches existed.
• That anyone would try and sell such watches for $100,000, let alone successfully.
• What a “tourbillon” is, “and, though it probably does nothing, people appreciate the extra engineering required.”
• That a 75% gross profit margin on a luxury watch is not unusual.
  

Every day is a school day.

60 years ago, the ‘bullet train’ first ran on Japan’s newly built East Coast Tōkaidō Shinkansen line. In celebration, a nose cone from one of the first trains has just gone on display at Japan House in London. I’m not sure I’ll go and see it, but news of the exhibition did make me ponder.

When the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line opened in 1964, trains ran at a maximum of 130mph—faster than Britain’s East Coat Mainline, but not by all that much. Our (diesel-powered) trains ran at 100mph on sections of the line.

By the time the first generation of bullet trains retired in 1999, the line was running at a top speed of 168mph, and the now-electrified East Coast Mainline had bumped up to 125mph.

Thanks to a commitment to continuous improvements, today the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line runs at 177mph. Yet, the East Coast Mainline’s top speed hasn’t increased in the last 48 years. A line whose speed was once competitive has since stagnated.

But the UK certainly beat Japan on one big improvement: smoking was banned on East Coast Mainline trains in 2005, but astonishingly persisted—albeit in designated on-board smoking rooms—until March this year on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line.

Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell have a short but fascinating thought in The Economist concerning how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT might influence work rituals.

Organisations couldn’t work without rituals. When you write a reference letter for a former colleague or give or get a tchotchke on Employee Appreciation Day, you are enacting a ceremony, reinforcing the foundations of a world in which everyone knows the rules and expects them to be observed—even if you sometimes secretly roll your eyes. Rituals also lay the paper and electronic trails through which organisations keep track of things.

Organisational ceremonies, such as the annual performance evaluations that can lead to employees being promoted or fired, can be carried out far more quickly and easily with LLMs. All the manager has to do is fire up ChatGPT, enter a brief prompt with some cut-and-pasted data, and voilà! Tweak it a little, and an hour’s work is done in seconds. The efficiency gains could be remarkable.

Exactly because LLMs are mindless, they might enact organisational rituals more efficiently, and sometimes more compellingly, than curious and probing humans ever could. For just the same reason, they can divorce ceremony from thoughtfulness, and judgment from knowledge.

I don’t think any of this is exactly surprising, but the way of thinking about it—through the lens of rituals—was new to me.

Rituals form a critical part of organisational life, even if we don’t always notice them. In health and higher education, rituals around topics like sustainability, inclusion, or diversity set the tone for how organisations present themselves. Yet these rituals can easily become hollow.

In my own experience, many organisations have rituals which are already divorced from their original intention. For instance, consider performance reviews. We all know the drill: managers gather feedback, write it up, and then sit through slightly awkward meetings where everyone knows what’s coming. This ritual started with the idea of providing useful feedback, promoting development, and assessing progress. But it has, in many places, become a tick-box exercise. Managers rush through the task, focus on compliance rather than insight, and employees nod along, knowing that what’s written is often more about playing politics than providing meaningful development.

Now, throw an LLM into the mix. For managers juggling a hundred other tasks, it’s tempting to get ChatGPT to churn out those reviews in seconds—especially if the task has already become perfunctory. But the consequence is that the process, already watered down, becomes even more superficial. The words become smoother, and probably more aligned with corporate standards, but they’re ultimately just noise—an efficient effluent, a downgrading of a ritual that’s already lost most of its meaning.

The same goes for things like corporate values. Having pronouns or a phonetic spelling in one’s email signature started off from a genuine desire to foster inclusivity. These days, their presence—or absence—often ends up being used as a proxy signal for other things, without deeper thought. It’s like the phrase ‘consider the environment before printing this email,’ tacked onto the end of countless emails. It almost certainly does nothing for the environment, but it signals that the person sending the email aligns with certain values.

What’s fascinating here is how easily LLMs could amplify these rituals. They can craft the perfect corporate spiel on inclusion, diversity, or sustainability, and they’ll do it without any sense of irony or understanding. A well-prompted LLM could pump out a flawless internal memo about the company’s dedication to [insert value here] without anyone needing to reflect on whether the company is actually doing anything meaningful about it.

It hadn’t previously occurred to me that LLMs have the potential to reinforce this effect by parroting the corporate lines to perfection, with absolutely no understanding or judgment behind them. Prompt an LLM to write an annual review for an employee in a way that aligns with corporate values, and it will do so—with absolutely no ability to thoughtfully probe whether or not the work actually demonstrates those things.

Of course, LLMs have a place in business, and can be transformative when thoughtfully applied. But the drive towards efficiency is not always thoughtful—even without LLMs involved, we can all think of times when processes have been made more efficient without proper regard to whether they remain effective.

It’s definitely something to think about. And perhaps that’s where the real work lies: recognising where rituals, human or automated, stop being useful and start being obstacles to real progress. If we’re not careful, we might find LLMs influencing deeper organisational habits and values in ways we don’t anticipate.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

After some serendipitous channel-hopping, Wendy and I were captivated by Friday’s press conference by Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, stranded on the International Space Station. Suni, especially, seemed remarkably grounded and professional in the midst of what must be an extraordinarily trying circumstance for anyone.

In Ars Technica, Stephen Clark’s invocation of their status of Navy captains who have abandoned ship—or, whose ship has abandoned them—perhaps gives a peek into the professional disappointment that this turn of events must hold for the pair. One wonders whether the safe , unscrewed return of the Starliner compounds or alleviates that heaviness.

I’m reminded, too, of the stories of early astronauts being looked down upon among test pilots based on the view that they were essentially passengers on vehicles that flew themselves. It’s hard not to wonder whether the safe return of Starliner stirs up those emotions in Suni and Butch as well.

There must be a lot on their minds—but you’d never know it to listen to them.

It’s been years since I left Twitter. In the end, it was a simple observation about the effect that opening the app had on my mood that made me quit:

I’d felt relaxed before I opened Twitter; now I was mildly stressed.

Since then, the arguments against what’s now called X have only mounted, and perhaps become so widely understood that they’re no longer worth rehearsing. I don’t regret deleting my account, and sometimes wonder what I ever saw in the service in the first place.

Helpfully, John Elledge’s recent New Stateman column was a good reminder of what used to be valuable about the platform. It helped me remember the excitement I used to feel back when the service felt new and fresh. I remember the excitement of posting my one and only truly viral tweet about—of all things—Opal Fruits. Elledge’s column also reminded me of James O’Malley’s essay from last December, which discussed the app’s contribution to social mobility.

I remember attending a course some years ago during which Twitter was used for discussion during the presentations. It was enormously helpful and engaging; it felt like the future. It’s impossible to imagine that happening in a constructive way nowadays, without the chat becoming hijacked by non-attendees or descending into incivility. The moment has passed.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.