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Introducing OverBanded.com, a total nonsense made with AI
I got the Eurostar back from Paris yesterday. So I made a new thing. This time I’ve combined data from the excellent new Energy Performance Certificate API with council tax bands and historic individual property prices to try to work out which nearby properties might be in the wrong council tax band. It’s total nonsense.… — read more
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Beaten by the bins
I’m beaten. Me and my LLMs have been beaten by the bins. I’ve spent a bunch of time and tokens failing to create a web app that lets anyone in the UK share their address and find out when to put their bins out. There is simply too much variation in the coding and UX… — read more
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‘Demand Management’ is doomed. Here’s how to get over it.
Anyone responsible for a public service needs to start modelling how to adapt their policies and processes for the scenario when AI Agents reduce the cost to citizens of appeals, challenges, recalculations etc to near-zero. ‘Managing demand’ by making processes confusing and time-consuming will no longer work. AI Agents are relentlessly dogged. I’m afraid you’ll… — read more
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Letting the Agents run wild – seamless Public Services?
A few days ago I shared a video of an AI Agent hosting a benefit entitlement interview. The AI Agent intuits a lot in the course of this conversation, but still has to ask loads of tricky financial questions about earnings, rent, existing benefits etc. Mistakes are inevitable, often causing huge headaches. But what if… — read more
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In the future, our AI Agent overlords will all speak MCP
I got the train back from St Ives to London yesterday, so I bashed out an MCP server for MissingBenefit.com, the UK benefit calculator I made the other week. But what is an MCP server? I mean, blimey, what is *MCP*? Well, Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard introduced by Anthropic in November… — read more
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AI agents will join up government before government does
AI agents will join up government before government joins up government. This will be a mixed blessing for citizens, with big implications for trust, equity and accountability. Let’s say you move house in the UK, and want to inform relevant public services. Well, good luck. You’re on your own. There’s no single, joined-up place to… — read more
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The dream of joined up government.
Back in 2012, a printout of the page above was stuck on a wall next to the team making GOV.UK. It captured the team’s desire to join up government, making public services radically simpler, clearer and faster for citizens. I’m proud of GOV.UK, but it remains a thin veneer of superficial consistency spread across hundreds… — read more
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Evidence to Select Committee inquiry into Digital Government
On 27 November 2018, along with Dai Vaughan, I gave evidence to the Science and Technology Committee inquiry into Digital Government. Courtesy of the House of Commons, you can read the transcript, or watch the video below. Bewarned, it’s about an hour long. A couple of tech journalists wrote it up, while The Times picked… — read more
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Interview in Offscreen Magazine
Last year I was interviewed by the mercurial Kai Brach for his magazine Offscreen, which seeks to highlight the human side of technology, and does so in style. You should subscribe. Quite understandably, Kai doesn’t normally allow the contents of Offscreen to be republished online, but wanted our conversation to get a wider audience, so… — read more
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Thank you, Liam
I first met Liam Maxwell in February 2010. It was at a Tory-dominated event called “The Network for the Post Bureaucratic Age”. Not one of my usual stamping grounds. William Heath and Tom Steinberg had urged me to go, but it was only the chance to hear a keynote by my hero Heather Brooke that… — read more
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Tom Loosemore 