A.i in public services

[pete75]

Whilst I disagree with both Elon Musk and Sir Starmer on different things, there's two things that I agree with - in Mr Musk's case, it's that taxes are more likely to be supporting a bureaucracy rather than a democracy

Could you please name one democracy that doesn't levy taxes on it's citizens?

[mjr]

[...leaves left blocking a drain...] No amount of AI will solve this kind of problem.
It is a simple problem that needs a simple solution.

It's almost impossible to fix potholes when people are making new ones faster because of a lack of viable alternatives to driving (thanks notjustbikes) in most of the country. Also, some local authorities are stupid and prioritise reports made by fighting their awful reporting websites while ignoring or badgering people who report using apps like FixMyStreet or CTC Fill That Hole.

[pete75]

[...leaves left blocking a drain...] No amount of AI will solve this kind of problem.
It is a simple problem that needs a simple solution.

It's almost impossible to fix potholes when people are making new ones faster because of a lack of viable alternatives to driving (thanks notjustbikes) in most of the country. Also, some local authorities are stupid and prioritise reports made by fighting their awful reporting websites while ignoring or badgering people who report using apps like FixMyStreet or CTC Fill That Hole.

If I want to report something to an organisation I'll use their reporting tools, not some third party app which they may not even monitor.

[mjr]

[...leaves left blocking a drain...] No amount of AI will solve this kind of problem.
It is a simple problem that needs a simple solution.

It's almost impossible to fix potholes when people are making new ones faster because of a lack of viable alternatives to driving (thanks notjustbikes) in most of the country. Also, some local authorities are stupid and prioritise reports made by fighting their awful reporting websites while ignoring or badgering people who report using apps like FixMyStreet or CTC Fill That Hole.

If I want to report something to an organisation I'll use their reporting tools, not some third party app which they may not even monitor.

Some highway authority reporting tools are basically unusable unless you're using the same browser as the council and know the valid path through, and usually those authorities refuse reports by telephone or email unless life-threatening.

Using an app like FixMyStreet (which was part-funded by the UK government, which authorities do not need to monitor, as it sends reports on to them) means there's evidence that it was reported, which was also useful when the authorities' tools generally didn't make anything about reports public. The law does not allow highway authorities to insist that only their crap tool can be used to report, and doubly so if their reporting tool is not usable by people with disabilities, but they prefer to be cantankerous idiots about it instead of fixing the problems. Fixing the problems would mean they'd get more reports and might have to act on more of them and more promptly.

I wonder if they'll start rejecting reports with "our AI didn't report any potholes there", a new twist on the "our officer couldn't find the reported defect" which I had about a 2m x 1m hole on a sharp bend, reported with geo: link and photos.

[pete75]

It's almost impossible to fix potholes when people are making new ones faster because of a lack of viable alternatives to driving (thanks notjustbikes) in most of the country. Also, some local authorities are stupid and prioritise reports made by fighting their awful reporting websites while ignoring or badgering people who report using apps like FixMyStreet or CTC Fill That Hole.

If I want to report something to an organisation I'll use their reporting tools, not some third party app which they may not even monitor.

Some highway authority reporting tools are basically unusable unless you're using the same browser as the council and know the valid path through, and usually those authorities refuse reports by telephone or email unless life-threatening.

Having worked with a Local Authority IT department I can tell you it's not incompetence on the part of the staff who who write these systems that makes them difficult to use, quite the opposite in fact.
What suprises me is there are still so many misguided fools around who think that local authorities exist to benefit the public. That may well be the theory, but in practice they're there to benefit the staff.

Here's a picture of a local authority highway inspector failing to find a reported pothole.

[the snail]

The street light example doesn't meet the criterion, since it doesn't require intelligence, but could be controlled by a procedural program implementing a formula

No difference. The light controller is following a formula, a tiny piece of logic. If the lights were controlled by a procedural formula, the controller would possibly need some more sensors/inputs (time maybe, number of pedestrians on the street etc), and maybe a few more logic steps, but it wouldn’t be doing anything materially different. In fact, the earliest street lighting procedural programmable controllers were nothing but an analogue clock, with a disc and pins that could be set to actuate contacts, energizing relays/contactors, so still only one input.

I still think the definition is poor, because it starts with the very wobbly phrase “normally requiring human intelligence”. Every single task ever that was previously performed by a human and was then given to a machine might be said to fall in that bracket, in that it normally required human intelligence until it was given to the machine.

Another definition, which I think might be more useful:

“Artificial intelligence is a field of science concerned with building computers and machines that can reason, learn, and act in such a way that would normally require human intelligence or that involves data whose scale exceeds what humans can analyze. ”

“Learn” and “scale exceeds what humans can analyse”, seem to me to be important in differentiating AI as we commonly understand it from what went before.

Part of the problem is that it's impossible to define what intelligence is, and AI is a collection of techniques that differ widely. It's not necessarily true that the problem is beyond the scale of human abilities - AI is widely used for things like computer vision which humans are pretty good at, or in expert systems that encapsulate human knowledge. Generally machine learning systems are not intelligent at all - there's no understanding of what the data represents, it's just pattern recognition.

[Nearholmer]

Hmmm ……. You say that intelligence is impossible to define, then that machines aren’t intelligent, which implies that you have a definition of intelligence in mind.

And, I do think that “scale exceeds human ability” works, simply because while we might be good at some task, we can only accomplish so much of it, whereas a machine might be made to accomplish more of it. An instance is knitting: some people are experts knitters, but if you want a million pullovers in short order you give the job of knitting them to a machine. The same applies to picking-out one face from among ten million faces, because a machine scanning its digitised face-library will be able to do the job far quicker.

TBH, I haven’t come to a personal conclusion about whether or not there is something special about human intelligence (whatever that is) that could never equaled by machine intelligence, but I’m tending in the direction of thinking that perhaps there isn’t. If our “prime directive” is to perpetuate our genes, and what we know as intelligence is processing power evolved and adapted to that end, then maybe machines can evolve and adapt their own form of intelligence to fulfil whatever their prime directive is.

[cycle tramp]

Whilst I disagree with both Elon Musk and Sir Starmer on different things, there's two things that I agree with - in Mr Musk's case, it's that taxes are more likely to be supporting a bureaucracy rather than a democracy

Could you please name one democracy that doesn't levy taxes on it's citizens?

It's not the case that taxes shouldn't be levied, its the assumption that taxes can rise indefinitely without causing an impact in other aspects of life.
Taxes should be spent in a way to achieve the maximum effect for the minimum expenditure. Speaking from someone who has worked in local government, this ideal has fallen from the mind set of some.

[cycle tramp]

I can't see that AI with it's associated cost is more effective at predicting when peak times on a help line or other council service will occur.
A simple manual look at the records or even, heaven forbid, ask the people concerned will do the same job.
It's not rocket science.

Additionally you say the council "never paid for any call handlers it didn't need" but that arguably led to longer waiting times for the public trying to phone in.
Can't see it could be otherwise.
.........

On the related theme of Ai fixed potholes.
There is locally a small housing estate that uses a small steep road as access.
This section of the steep road has ground water flowing down it- since forever.
All the infrastructure is in place to contain and catch this water but leaves block the main grid adjacent to the estate access point and as a consequence it becomes seriously icy across the whole road downhill in freezing conditions.
Every day in such conditions the council send a lorry to salt the section and every day the water washes the salt away and so on and so forth.
It is the economics of the madhouse.
(Road sweepers are rare as hen's teeth here)

Neither the council ( or any of the residents) have the nouse or inclination to spend 5 minutes using a shovel and broom to remedy the issue.

No amount of AI will solve this kind of problem.
It is a simple problem that needs a simple solution.

Er.. I think its clear from your reply, that you don't have first hand experience of working in a contact centre....
The call prediction system, broke the call numbers down over 15 minutes segments, using real time figures, adjusted by a an average taken over both weekly, monthly and yearly figures, over six different contacts telephone lines.. it also updated our rotas, pulling forward our break and lunch times if the telephone calls were lower than expected and pushing them back if call waiting times increased. The prediction system also allowed for call handlers to have specialities (such as non domestic rates, and so on). As a result waiting times fell after the system was introduced without the need to employ anyone to 'look through the manual figures'..
..as a response to the last item, why didn't the residents clear the drain themselves, if it only took 5 minutes ? Or failing that, yourself? - if you can see that it is a problem and none else is doing it, then why not do it yourself? Be the solution that you want to see - to paraphrase Gandhi.
In icy conditions, I salt the pavement outside my property (mixture of unused wood pellet cat litter and salt) and i plant trees in my spare time to assist wildlife - this year I'm hoping to build bird boxes.

[PDQ Mobile]

I can't see that AI with it's associated cost is more effective at predicting when peak times on a help line or other council service will occur.
A simple manual look at the records or even, heaven forbid, ask the people concerned will do the same job.
It's not rocket science.

Additionally you say the council "never paid for any call handlers it didn't need" but that arguably led to longer waiting times for the public trying to phone in.
Can't see it could be otherwise.
.........

On the related theme of Ai fixed potholes.
There is locally a small housing estate that uses a small steep road as access.
This section of the steep road has ground water flowing down it- since forever.
All the infrastructure is in place to contain and catch this water but leaves block the main grid adjacent to the estate access point and as a consequence it becomes seriously icy across the whole road downhill in freezing conditions.
Every day in such conditions the council send a lorry to salt the section and every day the water washes the salt away and so on and so forth.
It is the economics of the madhouse.
(Road sweepers are rare as hen's teeth here)

Neither the council ( or any of the residents) have the nouse or inclination to spend 5 minutes using a shovel and broom to remedy the issue.

No amount of AI will solve this kind of problem.
It is a simple problem that needs a simple solution.

Er.. I think its clear from your reply, that you don't have first hand experience of working in a contact centre....
The call prediction system, broke the call numbers down over 15 minutes segments, using real time figures, adjusted by a an average taken over both weekly, monthly and yearly figures, over six different contacts telephone lines.. it also updated our rotas, pulling forward our break and lunch times if the telephone calls were lower than expected and pushing them back if call waiting times increased. The prediction system also allowed for call handlers to have specialities (such as non domestic rates, and so on). As a result waiting times fell after the system was introduced without the need to employ anyone to 'look through the manual figures'..
..as a response to the last item, why didn't the residents clear the drain themselves, if it only took 5 minutes ? Or failing that, yourself? - if you can see that it is a problem and none else is doing it, then why not do it yourself? Be the solution that you want to see - to paraphrase Gandhi.
In icy conditions, I salt the pavement outside my property (mixture of unused wood pellet cat litter and salt) and i plant trees in my spare time to assist wildlife - this year I'm hoping to build bird boxes.

You are right, I do not have first hand experience of call centres, but it doesn't mean that I still can't see why peak periods can't be correlated by simply keeping records and a human putting into place more staff to cover.
It seems to me that that if you absolutely "fine tune" such a system then any slight unexpected change will lead to longer waiting times for anyone trying to get in touch because there's no spare capacity
Slight changes do happen and it is my view that waiting times for getting a reply on almost any helpline have gone up in the last 20 years, not down.
Which can lead to certain conclusions.

As for the grid, actually I have cleared it with a brush and shovel (I have a nice shiny one!) -many times too. It is therefore a solution to a problem that I know works.
Once the local councillor, who lives in said estate said he didn't like to see me doing it!!
However I live several miles away and while I will happily do my share of road cleaning I do have a certain amount of road cleaning nearer to hand.
I do that most of the time and near section of local road lis draining well thank you.
It takes time and I like to see clear and do it willingly.
There are more residents than just me!!

The case in point is that the council are happy to send a lorry with salt every day with the associated cost to us council tax payers rather than either get a guy with a broom and shovel to tidy up or get a mechanical road sweeper to do it.
(A phone call to the highways department will result in an automated answering response- and no action! We haven't had a road-sweeper lorry in the remoter hill roads for over a decade.)
If you were the salt lorry driver YOU might get out and do it yourself but I guess these local guys are thick as mince.

Or maybe Pete75 is quite right when he says, "What suprises me is there are still so many misguided fools around who think that local authorities exist to benefit the public. That may well be the theory, but in practice they're there to benefit the staff."
....
Anyway just off to do a bit of manual labour - it's a lovely day, (though it did freeze a bit and I expect the salt lorry came- a mere whiff of frost and they dump their foul load down there).

[cycle tramp]

All the infrastructure is in place to contain and catch this water but leaves block the main grid adjacent to the estate access point and as a consequence it becomes seriously icy across the whole road downhill in freezing conditions.
Every day in such conditions the council send a lorry to salt the section and every day the water washes the salt away and so on and so forth.
It is the economics of the madhouse.

If you were the salt lorry driver YOU might get out and do it yourself but I guess these local guys are thick as mince.

Rather an unfair assumption, depending on the circumstances...
Firstly, depending on the vehicle type, they may need a hgv licence (which speaking personally I don't have, and if it was so easy to get one, why don't we all have one) depending on the council, the driver may be an employee of the Council and may have already worked in the morning and part of the afternoon, if they were sent out in the evening, and if they were sent out in the evening, they may be expected to cover between 40 and 60 miles in bad weather in a heavy vehicle, at a moderate speed in order to grit other roads.
Stopping at every blocked drain to uncover it, even if they were aware of them, may delay their salting route and as such could result in collisions and injuries along more widely used parts of their route.
If they are a contractor then they are bound by whatever implicit instructions have been given within that contract.
I would advise that the person who most deserves your ire, is the local Councillor who is aware of the issue but appears to be too inept to bring about a permanent solution.

[[XAP]Bob]

The call prediction system, broke the call numbers down over 15 minutes segments, using real time figures, adjusted by a an average taken over both weekly, monthly and yearly figures, over six different contacts telephone lines.. it also updated our rotas, pulling forward our break and lunch times if the telephone calls were lower than expected and pushing them back if call waiting times increased. The prediction system also allowed for call handlers to have specialities (such as non domestic rates, and so on). As a result waiting times fell after the system was introduced without the need to employ anyone to 'look through the manual figures'..

Still doesn't need "AI", it just needs a manager who is competent.
I could probably put it together fairly easily in a spreadsheet - of course I would also be aware that a special announcement will change call volumes in a way that is fundamentally different from any previous day/week/month/year.

..as a response to the last item, why didn't the residents clear the drain themselves, if it only took 5 minutes ? Or failing that, yourself? - if you can see that it is a problem and none else is doing it, then why not do it yourself? Be the solution that you want to see - to paraphrase Gandhi.

More importantly - why doesn't the council do it's job, rather than just seeing a screw and grabbing a hammer?

[cycle tramp]

The call prediction system, broke the call numbers down over 15 minutes segments, using real time figures, adjusted by a an average taken over both weekly, monthly and yearly figures, over six different contacts telephone lines.. it also updated our rotas, pulling forward our break and lunch times if the telephone calls were lower than expected and pushing them back if call waiting times increased. The prediction system also allowed for call handlers to have specialities (such as non domestic rates, and so on). As a result waiting times fell after the system was introduced without the need to employ anyone to 'look through the manual figures'..

Still doesn't need "AI", it just needs a manager who is competent.
I could probably put it together fairly easily in a spreadsheet - of course I would also be aware that a special announcement will change call volumes in a way that is fundamentally different from any previous day/week/month/year.

..as a response to the last item, why didn't the residents clear the drain themselves, if it only took 5 minutes ? Or failing that, yourself? - if you can see that it is a problem and none else is doing it, then why not do it yourself? Be the solution that you want to see - to paraphrase Gandhi.

More importantly - why doesn't the council do it's job, rather than just seeing a screw and grabbing a hammer?

Yes, you could put it in a spreadsheet, but you would have to update it every 15 minutes, across 6 different lines, and be sure you didn't miss key, because there was a fine if a percentage of calls remained unanswered for over 10 minutes.. You would also have to watch the call numbers on a real time basis, and be prepared to alter the shift patterns of 15 to 20 members of staff, over and over again, based on a day with fluctuating call patterns........at this point using a system which made management decisions, without a manager needing to be present and would be 100% accurate with the data it provided seemed like a good idea, and was successful.

The council is directed by Parliament and the councilors. It is very probable that the blocked drain, as reported, was one of many, and as such due to other road conditions, kept falling back behind a long list of new and on going situations. It is not uncommon (especially if it is a rural area with a large network of roads) The way to get the drain brought to the front of the queue was for the councillor to bring it to the attention of the parish council and include it as an item to be discussed by a highways engineer.

[PDQ Mobile]

The council is directed by Parliament and the councilors. It is very probable that the blocked drain, as reported, was one of many, and as such due to other road conditions, kept falling back behind a long list of new and on going situations. It is not uncommon (especially if it is a rural area with a large network of roads) The way to get the drain brought to the front of the queue was for the councillor to bring it to the attention of the parish council and include it as an item to be discussed by a highways engineer.

Not right at all.
And while I hesitate to wrangle over such a small single issue, I will see truth told.

It's a big grid and carries quite a bit of water which mostly emerges higher up.
There is a dedicated concrete channel which collects and feeds it for the last few yards.
(It is the only drain for many hundreds of yards - there are open side channels along the road one of which feeds into it.)

It is adjacent to the 15 odd property estate entrance and when it's blocked the water flows right across the narrow road.
It is also very steep so the water spreads thin and travels far.
Catches no winter sun.

It's an important piece of older infrastructure now simply left to be blocked for months on end.
A mystery to me.

As to the residents doing it, I think (and it is my personal opinion) that it is a case of no one wanting to be seen to do it in case it were to set a precedent.
Or maybe just too menial a task?
Mind you there may not even be a serviceable shovel on the whole cul-de-sac, all been replaced by SUV's!
Councillor's got a nice big one!
He sees this problem every day.

Either way it's a waste of money to have it salted daily for so few houses.
The gritter doesn't come up any further.
Us upper hill dwellers just learned to drive better!
Or use shovels.
.........
Bear in mind also that my local council in their infinite financial wisdom invested in Iceland(!)prior to 2008 and lost a lot of money.
And that teams out on the highways maintenance side of things are seen at times sleeping in their vehicles mid afternoon.
But I digress.

[cycle tramp]

Yes you have done, indeed reading from your posts it feels that you have at least a personal dislike for your council - but strangely, not your councillor. Did you vote for them?

Having worked on the telephones for road repairs, my quote which you used in the above post, was based on personal experience. You said that it was 'not right at all and that you would see truth told' - but failed to give any reason for your own statement. What is your understanding of the situation?

At this stage, if I was still working, is to suggest that you raise an official complaint about the situation, to the council.

Again, if the councillor sees this problem evert day, the question remains, given that they are a councillor and have powers to table meetings and agendas, and no doubt speak with other councillors, what are they doing about it?