I helped build a government AI system. DOGE fired me, rolled the AI out to the whole agency, and implied the AI can do my job and the jobs of the others they've fired.
It can't. But, what DOGE accidentally revealed about themselves in the process is fascinating. π§΅
From Nov 2023 to Jan 2024 I worked on a tool we called the AI sandbox. Our goal: let federal software devs test out AI tools in a safe way, to discover if they have any use.
Renamed GSAi, the tool has been claimed by DOGE. It is being rolled out on an alarming accelerated schedule.
No one from the new admin wrote a single line of code for it. But GSAi has become their proud "AI-first strategy."
(Previously at my job, rather than AI or any tech we put *people* first. See 18F's work on "human-centered design.")
As my coworker explains in this demo, we knew AI's capability is limited
"The principle is to show you *not* that AI is great for everything, not to try to encourage you to stick AI into every product.... You can get yourself into trouble thinking that it can do things that it can't."
As a fed, I am accustomed to knowledgeable and diverse coworkers who don't get snookered by the latest buzzwords.
But yesterday at GSA headquarters, 6 white guys in suits (one without a tie!) took the stage. They demo'd GSAi like it was pure magic to them.
While saying "this is incredible" over and over, Musk's GSA head Stephen Ehikian asked GSAi to "write me a website." The output was not compliant with federal law. It said "Welcome to Our Company" on it and did not resemble a federal website at all.
π This garbage demo had a terrified audience
One viewer said "if this is the tool meant to replace us, thank God"
Everyone is afraid for their jobs, their projects, and their democracy. There is a widespread impression that AI is supposed to replace the people who are fired.
I actually don't think that's the plan. Let me explain:
There is a quasi-religion in Silicon Valley that views AI as godlike. This faith has always been parallel to Evangelical Christianity: it has salvation (transhumanism), the rapture (the technological singularity), and demons (Roko's Basilisk)
Lately the AI faith has fully fused with Christian Nationalism.
Together, these two faiths crave the end of American liberal democracy and government. You can smell it at GSA.
They won't replace us with AI because ππππ π ππ'π ππππ ππ πππππππ ππ ππ πππ. They want our work to end. DOGE is firing us as fast as possible, and that is the whole plan.
Listen: maybe I'm wrong and this is just the worst software deployment of my career, not actually a conspiracy against democracy.
Maybe these guys just don't see they are frittering away all product and service design knowledge in the agency. And don't even know that they lack this knowledge.
Honestly: From the 2013 failure of healthcare.gov to today, the government *almost* learned how to build software. We were close. Then a bunch of white men in suits swooped in to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Maybe they are just incompetent. But I think it's worse than that.
On stage, Ehikian asked GSAi to "write me a plan to rewrite the FAR"
The FAR, Federal Acquisition Regulations, are laws that control how the gov't buys stuff. They are legendary in their complexity for a good reason: to prevent corruption. To protect taxpayer money from theft by beltway bandits.
The AI's "plan" to simplify the FAR was generic and unusable, of course. But it is a subject that Ehikian and DOGE keep returning to: Contracting. Acquisition. The money.
They want to file the corners off of the process that regulates government spending. They want to consolidate all government contracts in one place. And put AI in charge.
@skiles 1/
Thank you for this account. You may certainly be correct in your suspicion that the objective here is simply to gut government purchasing. But I see a historical aspect to the religious conviction that you describe.
Twenty-five years ago I was part of an effort (sponsored by the UN) to develop a standard environment for the exchange of business documents called ebXML. It was an open-standards internet follow-on to EDI.
@skiles 2/
ebXML was sabotaged by Microsoft as a threat to their proprietary systems, but the creation of something that would work with human business processes was also resisted by a faction of zealots within the project who were working for an environment in which all the actual business transactions were between machines, without the need for human businesspeople at all. I can't help seeing the current push for AI in this space as a continuation of that way of thinking.
>> Twenty-five years ago I was part of an effortβ¦ to develop a standard environment for the exchange of business documents called #ebXML. It was an open-standards internet follow-on to #EDI. β¦ an environment in which all the actual business transactions were between machines, without the need for humanβ¦
Then, @timbl and #W3C invented the #SemanticWeb and #OWL reasoners, which I can't help but see as a precursor to the current AI push, and a continuation of that way of thinking
#Trump and #Musk want to run the entire #US Government with just #AManAndADog β no other humans in the loop.
I had lengthy discussions with an industrialist who wanted to run his heavy mechanical industry with "just a man and his dog" because he had seen modern data centers run in "lights out" mode.
No amount of persuasion was enough to sway his idea that he could fire his workers and replace them with #AI. Fortunately, the Board fired him before he could fire workers
John Skiles Skinner
Jon Bosak
Ramesh #NotGoingBack