Please welcome my guest Theo Blackwell MBE, London’s first ever Chief Digital Officer. We talk all things data, transparency, what makes London unique to do business, how does UK government supports dialogue between its representatives, tech companies and citizens, how does the government address current financial crisis, how does CDO day to day look like, and much more. Connect with Theo and Kamila.
Watch on YouTube:
Transcript
Hello.
This is Kamila Hankiewicz and I need
to tell you what’s going to happen.
It’s about you and AI. Ready?
Theo, it’s a pleasure to have you here.
I’m really excited for this conversation.
Yes, thank you for inviting me.
Looking forward to it.
So, Theo, looking back, London’s history spans over
centuries of innovation, from humble beginnings as roman
settlement, collection of villages, to a tech hub
of Europe it is today.
So what do you think made London or
UK become a global pioneer in tech?
In terms of this century?
London had a lot to build on.
It was a centre of immigration into the UK, so
we had talents and ingenuity from across the world.
And also the fact that London, the
geographic location where it is, its rich
scientific heritage, it has numerous universities.
At one count, according to a statistical
government definition, it had over 40 universities,
several of which are real global players.
And on top of that, you have
a huge tradition of finance as well.
So you have quite a lot of the ingredients
there that would make London an important tech hub.
I would also say London’s proximity
to Europe is fundamentally important.
And people in the tech scene also tell me
that time, that the fact that London is.
Yeah, time zone.
So London is a place where you can, in
the same day do business east and west, the
United States, or further to the east in Asia.
So that’s a kind of inbuilt advantage that London has.
And I think we really see that as the combination
of those factors has seen a real acceleration in the
kinds of tech specialisms that we have in our city.
Yeah.
And I’m the real life example of that.
I’m polish by origin, but no, londoner
and british for a few years now.
So I migrated because I wanted to explore.
And I’m american by origin and naturalized in 1999.
So I’m also part of that immigrant story.
Right.
Do you have any greek origins, Theo Theodore?
No, not that I know.
No, just northeast coast America.
Right, because your name derives from Greek.
So I was just wondering.
Yeah, and of course, we had worldwide web developed by
a british guy, so it was invented in CERN.
Right, but counts as british invention.
Absolutely.
Okay, so let’s dive deeper
into your firsthand experiences.
Maybe with today’s technology as the CDO of
London, you have, I’m sure, seen lots of
different projects, lots of groundbreaking projects.
And you are the first CDO of London, right?
Yeah, that’s right.
And I’ve read on your medium paper, which you wrote
in 2016, I think from what I’ve read, it was
created in the image of other digital leadership roles.
So the first CDO role was in New York,
then San Francisco, and some other european countries cities.
So what did London decide?
Like, why did London government decide
to create such a role?
And, yeah, what are your responsibilities?
So London’s journey towards creating a chief digital officer post
did come through the influence of what was happening in
New York and in other places in those two cities,
they saw the development of their tech sector.
That raised questions about the delivery of public
services and the way in which public services
can innovate and partner with universities and tech
firms in order to provide citizen benefit.
So when we looked at this in London, and I was,
as it happens, one of the people who did look into
the question of how it was shaped with the business community.
At the time, I was a local government
elected representative in the London Borough of Camden.
So one of our 32 boroughs that govern London.
My next question, and the question was put to us is,
what kind of model do we need to adopt in London?
And whereas certainly in New York, there had been
a strong emphasis on the digital economy, engagement of
the chief digital officer role in London, there was
felt to be a need not to have another
role championing the tech sector.
We have quite a few of those, but it was
more about how we collaborate together as a city.
So our 32 boroughs, which are pretty sovereign entities, how
do they come together so we can do things at
scale rather than have 32 versions of a smart city?
Yes, exactly.
The question about scale is really important, because,
fundamentally, what drives digital change is data.
And the ability to share data and get
large data sets enables you to do more
things equally, to be attractive to the market.
32 opportunities of populations of around 250,000 isn’t
as attractive as four or eight or 16
boroughs coming together and giving really sizable populations
and business opportunities as well.
Yeah.
And you can derive many more, like, you can see
much more depth and more patents into this, you can
just into different communities, and you can just do much
more with a smaller number of resources. Okay.
In the same article you wrote, we are committed
to working with the tech sector and other cities
across the world to build a bold, people first
approach to the way data and technology serve those
who live, work and visit our great city.
So you act as a link
between citizens, businesses and the city. Right.
So how do you engage with each group
and make sure that everyone is heard?
Yeah.
So when I was appointed in September 2017,
London had a track record on smart cities
that was primarily implemented by Transport for London.
The congestion charge, effectively a smart city function about
six years before the term was even coined.
It’s a set of cameras linked to a national
database linked to a payment mechanism in order to
do something, which was reduce and manage congestion in
the city, the oyster card and contactless payment.
Our smart city plays transport for London’s open
data, which powers apps which improve wayfinding and
choice of public transport to use.
In our city, these were all
things that were already in place.
And also city hall had championed open data.
So when I got into post, we had
a series of kind of London wide plays.
But the challenge for us is, like, how do we
get more into the needs of citizens as they are
felt on a very local level, and how do we
develop new solutions to tackle urban problems?
So I went on a listening tour.
Sadiq said, go out there, talk to people about
what it is to be a smart city.
We had over 80 meetings
with innovators, with the public.
We did polling, we used
our online platform, talk London.
We created a digital tool which used transport data in
a funky way to just draw people into the conversation.
And what we found was this, that people were
citizens of London, were a little bit wary of
the term smart cities, because, for want of a
better word, it was too solutionist, it was too
technology first rather than people first.
That’s takeaway one, takeaway two is that innovators who
remember at the time, 2017, 2018, really at the
height of the sort of tech bubble, if you
like, people were putting forward ideas for drones, delivering
pizzas and flying taxis, all of that stuff, and
they were like, hang on a second.
Yeah, there is, of course, a space
for that kind of cutting edge innovation.
Cipher books.
Yeah, but fix the plumbing.
So they wanted us to ensure that
we had a modern fiber connected city.
London, of course, being an early adopter
of technology back in 19th century onwards,
had a large copper legacy, still has.
Like, in central London, like you
said, it had this technology before.
So, for example, in Poland, we skipped the wave.
So we have new fiber, we have very fast Internet.
I remember up to, I think, three years ago
in Oldgate, where I live, we didn’t have fiber.
Yeah, well, exactly.
I mean, there’s been massive increase in that 4%
of the city was full fiber in 2017.
Now that’s 55%, and 89% of the city is gigabit capable.
So that’s been a total step change.
But you’re absolutely right, there were sort of pockets of
places who couldn’t figure out who owned the land or
the buildings and getting legal agreements and all of those
things we had to just cut through all of that.
So fixing the plumbing was really
important on connectivity and also data.
Data powers innovation.
How can we create a better way for
people to do data projects, whether they have
commercial application or they’ve got civic application?
That kind of people first approach coming from
citizens and innovators saying fix the plumbing has
really, really guided our work since then.
Yeah.
And it seems to be working right.
It’s definitely going in the right direction
with connectivity and also as we build
a new data platform for the city.
And where would you say there is still
much more work to be done in which.
I mean, just if we take those two priorities,
they’re probably missions that will never be fulfilled, but
you can certainly turn the dial massively on them.
I think London has still got a remaining
challenge on connectivity, in the sense that foreign
ownership of buildings means it’s quite difficult to
identify who owns these things.
That’s in the hands of the government.
Presumably they feel it’s of some competitive
advantage to keep all of these things.
But some areas of central London are only
hindered from being gigabit capable because of overseas
ownership and the opaqueness of that.
We’d want to see that change.
And then with data, our journey on improving
our data platform has been done alone.
The central government has not shown any interest
in the power of local government data.
Imagine if we could free up and share the
transactional data, not just the demographic and geographic and
place data, but the transactional data of citizens, so
that we can get real insights into people’s lives.
We can develop more responsive
services and things like that.
At the moment, that data lies behind legacy
technology barriers with third party suppliers, often with
restrictive contracts which don’t allow us to freely
get our own data and share it.
Sometimes local government councils are not as
data mature as they could be, but
there’s a relationship between the two.
If you can’t use your data, you kind of
tend not to invest in data teams and also
the normal kind of data sharing barriers, consistency in
application of law and things like that.
There is a huge amount of work that we have to
do in London in order to make that flow of data.
And as I say, we’re doing it alone,
because when government talks about data and government
and AI, we’re in a hot AI summer.
So it’s talking about AI a lot.
It doesn’t talk about freeing up that vast resource,
which is local government data, which is superior to
the kind of data that central government collects and
could make a real difference to people’s lives.
No, I know something about it around
siloed data, fragmentation, all kind of things.
So I work in a tech company as well and
we work with one of the UK police forces.
Same problem, there are 43
different forces across the UK.
Lots of times data is not shared.
And like you said, you have to have
advocates from the top in order for those
kind of things to happen, to really take
benefits, because otherwise you acting alone, even if
you have great examples of benefits, data gives.
It’s just like, yeah, and I mean, like, there
is a lot of fragmentation on a local level.
Across the United Kingdom, you’ll have
fragmentation between police forces, fire brigades.
The NHS is contrary to public and international perception
about the NHS being a kind of centralized monolith.
It is actually an extremely federated system
wrapped together with one big brand.
And it has legacy technology challenges,
it has data sharing challenges.
However, it is a really good example of where the
government turned the money tap on about three or four
years ago and said, how do we use health data
that we should be able to get for better purposes?
Whether it’s r D healthcare, productivity of
the actual NHS, or commercialization opportunities, its
investment there has created a much better
data ecosystem which is ready to go.
So we would say, well, if that’s in play,
and it could be made even better with local
government data, imagine what you could do on kind
of non clinical things like understand the relationship between
housing quality and health and start looking at the
relation between environmental changes and health.
All of these things.
I think if there was that investment in
government data, including local government, we would have
a really exciting potential for the future.
So I always take with a little bit of a
pinch of salt, when you hear government ministers sort of
talk about AI and all of that stuff.
Without the data, you’re not going to get anywhere.
And it’s a really obvious point.
It is.
And it’s such a waste of resources, right.
Because even on the individual level, you have people
moving across UK, so lots of times the files
need to be recreated in another county or whatever.
We are talking about healthcare.
It’s just so much replication.
Well, not only that, England in local government,
divided into local government authorities, has got lots
of local authorities covering not a huge, relatively
speaking, not a huge amount of space.
So we calculated that a third of
the population of London lives within less
than a kilometer of another administrative boundary.
A third of one is 3 million people.
Even that should just be a
driver for more data sharing.
So this has been a real investment from us, from
our journey from being just an open data sharing platform
to developing data services bringing on board what’s called non
open data in order to solve specific problems.
And it’s not just about the data, it’s
about the question you want to know, really.
So that’s where kind of, I think another advantage of
London is that we’ve got a really good kind of
resource of people who’ve done digital transformation and design thinking,
and they can sit down with the kind of domain
experts and the traffic engineers and the people looking at
flooding and air quality and all of that stuff and
say, what is the problem you want to solve?
Let’s define it, and then let’s
go out and get the data.
And I think that just flips that smart city idea on
its head, where you kind of get the sense that in
some smart cities, perhaps in Asia or otherwise, it’s all about
the collection of data and having massive numbers of data sets
and live feeds and things like that.
But what do you want to do with it?
So a kind of purpose led approach to data
to solve problems is absolutely key, as well as
obviously being able to join that data together.
Yeah, that’s, that’s very.
And like you said in London, we are
lucky to have people who speak the language. Right.
Like they can translate between of the problem and
what can be actually achieved with tech, with data.
Yeah.
And you won’t solve things through just having a
bunch of data analysts looking at data alone obviously
help, but it’s teams of people getting together.
So the way of working the culture,
the process of collaboration, is fundamentally important.
And I can’t remember who said this, but it was a
really astute observation from someone in, I think they were in
the norwegian government at a conference I was at.
And he said that actually, that this decade
could be characterized not solely by artificial intelligence
being the game changer, but it’s collaboration which
will be the game changer.
You mean collaboration with AI?
No, just collaboration.
The ability to collaborate with others, with data and
design in order to solve problems large and small.
The ability of the Internet to connect people,
to talk to people without gathering them all
in one place, the ability to share ideas.
All of this collaborative force could actually be a
less obvious, but much more of a kind of
silent shift that’s happening, that has greater productive results.
And of course, we need to caution against AI
being a proxy for collaboration or doing collaboration.
Well, yes, and inclusion of people who
don’t really know how to use.
Right, exactly.
So if we go down a road where
artificial intelligence means that you don’t talk to
people, you’re probably not getting the most out
of artificial intelligence, as you should do.
Okay, another question, maybe like going back
to when you started nearly six years
ago, you said September, right?
Lots of things have changed and
so did your role evolve?
We had pandemic, we had lovely Brexit, we
had other few major crisis along the way.
How did you make sure that city
adapts to digital initiatives, to what’s happening,
knowing that there are so many unknowns?
And what interesting findings did you
learn from this crazy experience?
So, one of the first things I did on getting
to office was to set up a new team of
people who are actually located outside of city hall.
They’re not part of the city hall structure.
So I set up, effectively, a new institution
or agency to help us think about design,
use of data and new forms of delivery.
And they’re called the London
office of Technology and Innovation.
And effectively, that is a regional deployable resource that’s
close to London’s 32 boroughs and their cdos.
So through that, we are able to problem solve,
do shared projects together, offer our services to traditional
sort of delivery departments, to say, hey, there’s a
different way of thinking about this, going about this.
And so that’s just celebrated its fourth anniversary.
It’s really well respected outside of the
UK as well as inside of the
UK, as an example of regional collaboration.
They have done projects from identifying how we plan
for future demand in electric vehicle charging stations, through
to new business models for adult social care, through
to working with net zero teams, specialist net zero
teams, on how they can improve their delivery, on
retrofitting the city, how they can think about the
role of technology in doing that, and define the
problem in a way that helps their procurement.
So all of these things are a way in
which local government can talk to itself, rather than
sometimes facing the challenge of local government not being
confident about data and technology, and talking to outside
partners armed with less information, as they should do.
So there is a strong emphasis on learning, and
also learning by doing and creating consistent methods.
So that, in a sense, going back to
that point, about 32 boroughs, that we’re greater
than the sum of our parts.
So that really came to play in the pandemic, where
we were able to do what would seem to be
quite niche projects on data sharing between various parts of
London, but were extremely necessary in order to deliver services.
There was a lot of work done on how we
get data from the community and voluntary sector, civil society,
who were often at the coal face or had set
up mutual groups in order to feed people hot meals
during the pandemic or help people in other ways.
How do you get data from that
and incorporate it within council systems so
that you can meet need most effectively?
And then fundamentally, the big, big project that
came out of the pandemic that the London
office of Technology and Innovation is delivering now
with good Things foundation is setting up a
digital inclusion service for London.
So this is a triage where a citizen
can be signposted to free basic digital skills
courses delivered by civil society or adult education.
A SIM card.
A place for corporate telcos to donate
as part of corporate social responsibility.
SIM cards for disadvantaged people, but
one place to put them. So a data bank.
And then how they’re distributed.
And then they get distributed to people.
So if someone has a need that isn’t basic
digital skills, but is like, I can’t get connected,
they can go and get a SIM card.
And then the third bit, which is starting with
public sector, when they do an it refresh, donating
their old laptops to the Good Things foundation, who
are then refurbished with a partner of theirs, and
then distributing those laptops for free to disadvantaged Londoners.
And so far, we’ve distributed, in the first
year of this program, 2000 laptops to Londoners.
And this is growing every day.
That’s amazing.
I’ve never heard of that, but, yeah.
It’S called get online London.
Get online London.
Okay, I’ll check that. Definitely.
And share the news with my network.
And I also heard about a really great initiative
which city hall collected some data showing that right
now, 54% of Londoners are either financially struggling or
just about managing in the current economic crisis.
And I’ve read about the poverty prevention challenge.
I just saw you when you were
liking the news from Sadiq Khan.
So, this competition was launched by London government.
I don’t know what was your involvement, but
you will tell me in a second.
And from what I understand,
seven companies, smaller companies, won.
Some of them are using AI, and they will receive some
funds to bring their ideas to life to support Londoness.
Yeah.
So part of our approach on collaboration is to develop
our expertise on open innovation or making open calls.
So this is where a public sector partner says, using design
thinking, this is the problem we need to solve, or this
is the area we need to concentrate in, and then setting
that call outside of their normal procurement framework to the tech
sector to come up with solutions to try and solve it,
or turn the dial on a problem.
So we’ve been working on open calls since 2018,
done some great work on things like prototyping with
one borough council and the electricity grid and a
firm called Connected Curb, curbside electric vehicle charging.
So you can just sort of put a charging point
into a curb rather than creating new piece of kit.
Do they go past and prototype?
Yeah.
So that’s been tremendously successful and there are tens
of thousands of them rolling out across the country.
So it’s testing an idea with a London borough.
So it’s a firm gets the opportunity to learn about
how you do business with a public sector organization.
So coming across and solving problems that they might
not have anticipated in their own product development and
also working with electricity network as well.
So national grid, and again, the same process base.
And the learning goes both ways because, of course the
local authority learns how a tech firm operates and what
its drivers are, what its pain points are, and so
does a national agency like national grid.
So that’s just one example.
And we’ve done various iterations of this.
We did some open calls during the pandemic.
So mainly more in social innovation, people
redesigning high streets, access to public amenities
like toilets and community gardens.
So lot of work happened there on a
series of projects about how we make neighborhoods
better places to come back to after lockdown.
And then the kind of third tranche
of this has been the top priority.
Going back starting about 18 months ago,
has obviously been this huge strain on
people’s finances, on cost of living.
So we’ve worked with one of the largest boroughs, called
the London Borough of Barnett, on finding innovative ways in
which the cost of living crisis can be tackled.
And so they set out the call, they engaged
civil society and the tech sector and in the
end, seven different products and services have been identified.
From an AI that scrapes data from supermarkets,
online offers and effectively creates cost effective meal
plans for you, which is really interesting.
I don’t think people have thought about using
data like that through to a process that
can help triage and support refugees.
Of course, London was extremely welcoming to Ukrainian
refugees and over the past few years there’s
been a number of big refugee pressures, afghan
refugees at one point after the pull out.
So how to support suddenly an increased
population that’s quite desperate is a really
fundamental thing for local authorities here.
So there’s a service around that which I
think the Barnett officers find quite interesting.
In short, these are ways to
prototype and test new ideas.
They might not make it to
mainstream service delivery, but they might.
And I think it’s really important that whilst
we’re tirelessly working on cost of living cris,
and so is civil society, using tried and
tested methods to help people.
There still needs to be room to think about
what we could do, especially with digital tools.
So that’s what that’s about, really.
Are there any ways, or like, what are the best
ways for smaller companies or even citizens to come up?
Like, for example, if they see some
problem they want to work on?
Not like, is there the other
way, the individuals coming to you?
If yes, how can they do it?
The best way to be seen and heard.
We do have a really big online
engagement platform where people can shape policy.
It’s called Talk London.
It’s got about 70,000 members.
It’s recently been redesigned, so it’s much more
user friendly than it was in the past.
It was originally spun up at around time
of the Olympics to engage people, but it’s
been through sort of various iteration now.
It’s been kind of completely rebooted
with design thinking at its heart.
And that’s our form of participatory democracy.
In London, we had for a long time a
very rich tradition of crowdfunding using online platforms.
So we would say the mayor will match 50% at 50%.
A community project that you want, it’s just you,
the community, have to raise the other 50%.
The amount of 50% might be tailored slightly
according to just a take on the social
capital of the given area in London.
So it might be a little bit more.
But fundamentally, that was a really interesting way
in which we used established crowdfunding platforms.
We sort of tweaked them for London, and
people were able to get actively engaged.
One of the problems with a kind of global
tech hub like London and indeed other cities is
what’s the connection between, let’s say, a finance city
worker or a tech worker who comes home late,
has just moved into the area.
Where’s the sense of community?
How can they get involved?
That kind of idea of kind of dormitory streets
that aren’t as integrated into the local community.
And crowdfunding was a really great way
of bringing people together and also allowing
local businesses to contribute to good causes.
So that’s done everything from community
gardens through to rebuilding community centers.
I used to live in Crystal palace.
There’s some wonderful victorian life size dinosaur models
there in the middle of the park.
They needed a lick of plant and a replastering
or whatever you do to replicate dinosaurs, and that
was crowdfunded locally, and people put money in.
So that kind of engagement,
I thought, was extremely successful.
And that model actually during the pandemic,
using crowdfunding platform, we could repurpose to
give people services like pay it forward.
So your favorite cafe might have been struggling during the
lockdowns, but you could help them out with their cash
flow by saying, I’ll take ten coffees next month.
And also the crowdfunding was also available
to help shops in that time of
great uncertainty where they didn’t know.
It’s difficult now to think back on it, isn’t it?
You just think.
Exactly.
A lot of them survived and maybe some of them don’t.
But at that time we didn’t know if
there was going to be a vaccine.
We didn’t know how long it’s going to go on for.
The UK in particular seemed to have particularly long
lockdowns, so all of these things were at play.
And I think digital tools really helped that as well.
Yeah, I love the idea of crowdfunding and also marketplaces
like things like, I don’t know if you’ve heard of
Olio, where people just share leftovers of food when they
go to holidays, whatever, and it’s just great that you
feel like you belong to community and you just distribute
your resources in the right way without.
Yeah, I think on open innovation, which is
where your question started, is there a way
for a citizen to trigger an idea?
We’re on a journey on open innovation, where we want to
build up our expertise as a city to do things that
are kind of maybe slightly higher on the risk area.
And I see the future trajectory of that to be
much more open to citizens, to suggest problems and ideas.
But fundamentally, at the moment, it is something where we’re
using as a kind of learning by stealth technique to
transform public sector organizations that have had a quite a
set way of dealing with things and say, actually, this
is a different way of thinking about this.
Yeah, we’re on a journey on that one.
Yeah, I can completely understand that.
Smaller startups, as you know, working with large
organizations, with lots of legacy systems and lots
of people who are afraid of change, people
just don’t like to change. Right.
So it’s just very difficult to suggest things change
things if you don’t have advocates within organization or
the community are trying to do something.
Okay, so let’s go back to your day to day.
I know you will tell me that there is no such
typical day, but how does your day or week look like?
More or less.
Any given week probably involves a lot
of time outside of city hall.
I do a lot of visits to talk to entrepreneurs,
I engage with a lot of the councils a lot.
My preferred mode of business is to meet
people at where they work, rather than people
coming to see me at city hall.
But our particular focus at the moment is
on building the data for London platform.
So there’s quite a lot of work going on
to develop that in a technical sense, but also
the things that we need to do to make
a kind of easier, more discoverable, helpful data ecosystem
than the one that we had in the past.
So there is a fair amount
of doing, as well as proselytizing.
Okay.
And since your role involves being a digital
ambassador, but how do you make sure that
tech sectors receive or have the access to
full range of talents, especially after Brexit?
How can we still make sure that Europeans
and global talent still sees London as attractive
place to build business and live?
I mean, firstly, I’d say that, yeah,
Brexit has made things more difficult.
But ironically, London, which didn’t vote for Brexit, is
more resilient than other areas of country that did.
And so, although there has been an
intensification of competition for talent, London’s still
a great place to do business.
But it may have been able to deal with this because
it was able to attract more talent from around the know.
That’s.
That’s one of the weird ironies of Brexit, I think.
Know London has a certain brand and
image which is attractive to entrepreneurs.
I think the way in which we’ve been able, that
we’ve been long been a champion of open data.
And I think that there was a really good call
back in the day at transport for London and also
at the GLA, not to try and commercialize a lot
of data that we were able to link to.
I don’t think that would have worked, actually.
We probably would have spent more on a team to
raise money than we would have raised, to be honest.
But I think that gave a really good signal to
the tech sector that we were open for business.
There are lots and lots of
different factors that help London.
I also think London made kind of reached a
level of maturity in its tech journey where specialisms
have just sort of like, created other specialisms.
So we don’t just talk about life sciences
or video games industry or things like that.
There are specialist clusters, even within those that kind
of spin off and feed off each other.
So my colleagues in London and partners
would call this the benefits of agglomeration.
The fact that there are so many
strong specialisms in this city, it’s created
a momentum of even more specialism.
We think London’s got an extremely strong
future despite the ill winds of Brexit.
And the sort of general patter of the government,
which has been for ideological reasons, has been focused
on beating up the capital, as if beating up
the capital will win them friends elsewhere.
I mean, maybe short term gain, long
term pain for them on that.
But the basics of London and the
culture, the excitement, the skills, the experience,
it’s just all there in abundance.
And like you said, there
are specialties within London boroughs. Right.
Like, I saw that Camden was special.
It’s more focused on data.
I guess it was your result of your budgeting and
the things you’ve been doing when you were working.
How many years have you
been working for Camden Borough?
I was at Camden from 2002 to 2017,
so we did a lot of open data.
They’ve done loads of good stuff since then.
Okay, and how does managing one borough differ
to what you are doing right now?
I think you’re closer to the people because boroughs
deliver services and you’re closer to people and the
service users and you see the impacts more.
That can be quite challenging sometimes, but
it’s also a very good feedback loop.
If you’re in a strategic authority for
a much wider area, um, then it’s.
It’s.
It’s an entirely different role, really. My.
My job, however, is to kind of.
I think the challenge with local
authorities is they do so much. What’s the.
What’s the.
Can they carve out an amount of
time to think about change and innovation?
And so my job, in a sense, is
to ensure that the challenge isn’t insurmountable.
All councils have a challenge over budget, but
they shouldn’t have a challenge over time.
Getting their limited resource of people who can
think about innovation in a room and create
time for them is a big task of
mine and London office of Technology and Innovation.
Yeah, that’s true.
Difficulties with limited resources.
How can we involve citizens in conversation about how
we design systems, AI systems, how government is using
AI to build a safe and transparent city?
I know that you are very
big on transparency, on data transparency.
So what do you see as a good practice?
I think that, first of all, let’s set
aside AI and just talk about data.
We are creating lots and lots of business, government and
others are creating lots and lots of data services of
various levels of complexity for people all the time.
So let’s have consistent methods around that, about how
we talk and design around the needs of the
user, like a methodology of creating a data service.
Let’s show our workings, let’s be very clear
about the purpose for which we’re doing things.
So I think there’s some fundamentals that
kind of cut across, whether it’s an
AI or creating any other service.
There is a live debate on a national level
about whether you should enforce transparency on algorithms and
what to do about bias with data.
Those are the two main topics now on transparency.
I think it’s totally legit to regulate for a
level of transparency or total transparency in algorithms.
But it only takes you so far.
On my mobile phone, every time there’s an update,
there’s screeds and screeds of text on terms and
conditions that I roll past in order to get
to Facebook or use my iPhone.
Someone calculated it would take 150 hours
a year for the free average person
to read the terms and conditions.
And even so, it’s take it or leave it.
It’s not like you can amend them.
So what’s algorithmic transparency going to
do when we already experience that?
So it’s important for governments to take action.
It’s important for regulators and civil society.
But let’s not kid ourselves that it’s
going to lead to huge public engagement.
I just want people to just embrace the reality of that.
So do it, but do it with that caveat.
Secondly, on bias, all data is biased. Really?
So I think you need to start your discussions about engaging
people on the basis that all your data is biased.
So let’s have a discussion based upon reality
here that transparency only goes so far, important
as it is, and bias is locked in.
And I think if we see AI develop with those two
bits of understanding, then it helps us get away from this
idea that it’s a magic line of code that’s totally going
to alter our lives for the better and gets us into
a more human, practical discussion about the benefits of it.
Yeah, and like you said, it’s only as
good as the data you feed it in.
Yeah, but most data is not in
a very good state as well.
So, I mean, I’d also say that for critics
of AI or people think that there’s about to
be a takeover, there’s still a long, long way
to go, because I think people overestimate the quality
and shareability of the data that’s held.
It’s just simply not been built to
be shared in many cases or computed.
It’s been built to make a certain
vertical system a bit more efficient.
That’s been the driver, and
that’s a different question.
Yeah, but like you said, if we can have computers,
help us to understand the jargon, the language, in case
of your app agreement, terms and conditions, if we can
interact, like, let people interact with the data easier.
I think it’s a.
I mean, I think there is really exciting potential.
Gartner said that it took, was it sort
of like two years for Twitter when it
was launched to reach a million followers?
And Chat GPT is five days.
Okay, so this is on people’s plates.
We need to respond to it.
But be aware of the shortcomings of
hallucination and other things which sometimes you.
Say Chat GPT convinces you that
it’s giving you the right answer.
So people still have to use their critical
skills to sort of like, doesn’t quite sound
right, or it’s wanting to agree with me.
It’s programmed to do that as
well as it’s effectively two things.
It’s programmed to convince you that it’s right.
So that’s no different from someone putting an
argument or opinion piece in a newspaper and
you going, I don’t quite agree with that.
And it’s also programmed to ensure that the answer
does not include racist or other unethical content.
There are two processes going on
whilst that cursor is flickering there. Yeah.
So going back to.
There’s a kind of middle way here of like, would
the algorithm being transparent give me more info about that?
Or would Chat GPT telling me or people at chat,
this is how it works, which is different from transparency.
It’s the explainability thing.
And that I think is really important.
Yeah, but how can you make sure that you
are projecting the facts and at the same time
protecting some people who may abuse it?
Yeah, these are questions we’ll have to work through.
Okay, let’s end on a light note.
As someone involved in smart city initiatives and
AI, you must have fascination with futuristic ideas.
Are there any Sci-Fi books or
maybe movies or authors you enjoy
that explore technological and societal advancements?
I was always a fan and I do pick it up occasionally.
Of Azimov’s short stories.
I think it’s remarkable and extremely futuristic.
I think my near term horizon
is probably more than I’d like.
Dominated by minority report, which I thought was
an extremely effective film in showing the kinds
of technologies that could easily come into play.
And you can even imagine the kind of experiments
with facial recognition and advertising as the character walks
into the gap shot with someone else’s eyes.
Happening today.
