Now I've looked...

See the diary below of my first attempt to use the AI Skills Hub. Christ, I went down some rabbit holes there. I am feeling a little bit strange now. I've read the word AI so much, but I feel like maybe some knowledge I previously had has been sucked out through my eyeballs. I think I might be a bit stupider than I was before I started.

Making kites that don't fly

When I was about twenty years old and living in a hippy commune, we ran a summer festival. It included a creche. Somehow I ended up helping to run the creche. There was one absolutely over-run woman trying to corral about thirty toddlers.

"I promised them we'd make kites. I promised them we'd fly them in the air. We need to make kites," she wailed.

I pointed out, not unfairly I thought, that we didn't have any kite-making materials of any kind.

"We need to make kites," she repeated, her eyes piercing me with murderous intent. "Just use what we've got. There are sticks. There is paper. There is paint. There is glue. MAKE KITES."

So we did. We glued two sticks together into a cross, and stuck paper on the cross, and the children happily painted their little kites, and we all got through those few hours alive, which is all the parents wanted from us.

Did it matter that thei kites weren't actually kites? Depends on your perspective I suppose. Most of the children didn't really know the difference and were perfectly content painting their little squares of paper glued on sticks. We passed the time and everyone went about their day.

On the other hand, it didn't cost four million pounds. I think with four million pounds we probably could have hired some actual kite makers.

This isn't to pick just on the AI Skills Hub. It's AI generally. It's that same feeling we got seeing the 'Fatima's next job could be in cyber' ad. The inescapable sense that behind that poster lurked a whole range of people and politicians who had no idea what the word cyber meant.

And now, somehow, the UK government have convinced themselves that AI will solve everything. It's the answer to any problem. Productivity puzzle? AI will fix it. Inequality? AI. Male pattern balding? AI.

Millions are being spent on something that very few people seem to have taken any time to actually try to understand. The result is this bizarre, borderline gaslighting attempt to convince every business in the UK that AI is magic fairy dust that will transform them into minority-report-screen-wielding Vulcans (mixed movie metaphor, excellent).

The new govt AI skills hub! Exciting! Let's look.

OK, let's see how that £4 million's been spent. Logged in after some delay, and being asked some odd quetsions, including which of four random sectors I might be from. That's odd.

I'm in. Hmm, it's suggesting I try the 'my pathway' to build a bespoke set of courses around me.

Ah, the same questions I already answered when creating an account, mostly. Including that sector question again. There are... other sectors in the UK. Quite a lot of other sectors. But fine.

And I've gone for the experienced professional option. Let's see what it brings up...

And yep, we get a bunch of resources broken into 'modules' - fundamental skills, AI skills, complementary skills. And in each, a bunch of somewhat random looking links to different providers.

First one here I tried to look at as it's a curious title - "Practical guide to uncertainty quantification". Stats and machine learning related? Here's the description:

STFC Hartree Centre: Do you want to learn how to make decision making more reliable for your organisation? Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is a method that is being used to understand and quantify uncertainty to make reliable predictions from energy grid planning before a big sporting event to planning hospital bed provision and predicting how financial investments will perform. Equally applicable across a variety of industries including finance, energy, healthcare, hospitality, engineering, entertainment and supply chain management, the knowledge you will gain will help you discover the importance of UQ in solving real-life problems as well as support advanced design and decision making. Aimed at those who already have an understanding of basic concepts of probability and statistics and may need to use virtual or data-based modelling to make an efficient forecast or design decisions in their organisation, this course will introduce the concept of UQ, key UQ techniques and approaches and, using case studies, demonstrate the need for accurate models that can tolerate and adjust for uncertainties to plan for different scenarios and how these can be applied to real-life problems.

"Virtual or data-based modelling"? What now? Anyway, let's try the link - 'enroll now, no charge' it says.

I am now on the Hartree Centre's training portal moodle log-in page. I do not have a login. It has no other information there. The top left link just goes back to this log-in page, as does the site's root at hartreetraining.stfc.ac.uk. Well, I am a data professional, maybe it's a test! Let's use those advanced skills of mine and google it.

Ah ha, well done google, here's the Hartree Centre 'create a free account' link. It's run by the Science and Technologies Facility Council - new to me, I confess. And their own 'uncertainty quantification' page actually reads like a human wrote it. I still don't know how it does or doesn't overlap with stats / ML but it does say "Pre-requisites: An understanding of the basic concepts of probability and statistics."

And, vitally, it's got not only the course description but a 'create account' link. Whoever (or whatever, I suspect) linked directly to the moodle page hadn't look at it, I don't think.

Another account to create with a lot of questions but OK and now, huzzah, the uncertainty course! Which, while it does look interesting, is... a video. A 3.5 hour video, and some text saying that if I have any questions, I can arrange a 30 minute chat with the tutors. Which is nice, but blimey that was not the most accessible way to get me to a teaching video, was it?

It's actually a set of shorter videos ranging from 40 to 3 minutes (3 minutes for Markov chains...)

Right, back to the AI skills hub! What other goodies does it have? A Turing Institute course on the mathematics of machine learning, sounds really good... another moodle type login and site...

Aaaand it's a bunch of lecture slides. Clearly solid material, but I'm pretty sure these are just slides from a taught university course stuck onto a moodle type platform. Maybe some people can learn that way, I'm not one of them. So many better sources on youtube.

Back to the hub. Oh look, links to Data Camp and Udemy courses. We knew about those, didn't we? And just the one Data Camp course linked here.

Every single course on the hub has a different picture of happy, young professionals pointing at or looking at a screen.

There's a 'not started' tag on the Data Camp course listed on the AI skills hub. Does it think it's going to track my Data Camp use? Oh, I can mark it myself as 'started'. I've done that. Does that show up in my pathway...? No. Ah, my profile then? Yep, lists what's 'in progress'.

So if I like, once I've completed that Data Camp course, I can come back here and mark that I've done it. OK then.

Sidequest: at the bottom of the skills hub, one of the things listed alongside Innovate UK as involved is something called 'bridgeAI'. Rather tricky to track down but appears to be an Innovate UK programme. All I've found is this fosstodon link. Gonna have to zoom in on that slide...

Ah, there are some of the course providers I've just been looking at.

Ah ha, found the actual site. It's not very googleable term, turns out. And look, it's those sectors again! They weren't random!

"Our mission is to help businesses in high growth potential sectors such as agriculture and food processing, construction, creative and transport, logistics and warehousing industries, to harness the power of AI and unlock their full potential."

But... h... wh... I have questions. So bridgeAI are concentrating on these sectors, OK. But why would they end up being the ones the AI Skills Hub tries to funnel people into? What set of decisions happened there?

Also, I clicked on the agri link. That picture of lettuces and robot arms... Oh OK, stock image. I need to pull out of this rabbit hole.

BridgeAI have what they call an 'AI Adoption Framework' "designed to assist you in navigating the complex journey of adopting AI". The page has this image. This is definitely what "doing AI" looks like in the mind of most politicians, I think.

Aah, the frameworks page tells me about 'capsules of AI knowledge'. There's a little video explaining what AI is and how it can help make your business more efficient. It says if you're "looking for more efficiency", you might want to think about AI. It can do things like. Err. I don't know. Something something supply chains something something chatbot something. And look at all those pretty graphics.