Hello
For Neurodiversity Celebration Week, my colleague Angela explored how tools like HelpFirst can help caseworkers who struggle with reams of text. We are increasingly excited about the potential of AI as a force for digital inclusion.
On a significant day of the year for me, I wrote some very personal reflections on why prioritisation matters so much to me" [trigger warning: baby loss]
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Thought provoking links
The 80:20 campaign aims to reverse the current situation which sees social workers spending close to 80% of their time working on computers, while only 20% of their time is spent in direct contact, building relationships with children and families. What a shame this campaign is needed… but what an opportunity for new tools to improve the situation.
Herbert Laming reflects on changes to child protection since his 2003 report on failings in the care of Victoria Climbié. A shift from crisis response to prevention is needed but services are more resource constrained than ever: 58% of social workers find their workload either not at all or only partially manageable. Laming writes: “You’re employed as a frontline worker to work with people. There must be a way of ensuring that the bureaucratic stuff can be kept in its place. I’m all for record-keeping – I’ve read too many bad records [as a chief inspector] - but it is a means to an end. The end is the child.”
DWP has contracted Capgemini to identify the most vulnerable and target interventions providing extra support, using data from the Universal Credit system and sharing with local authorities. We hope to see more of this trend: social services and data science.
Large Language Models are starting to show emotional intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg sees this as a priority area: “One modality that I'm pretty focused on… is emotional understanding. So much of the human brain is just dedicated to understanding people and understanding expressions and emotions.” If LLMs do show good emotional intelligence, it will open the door to many new possibilities in care.
As a counterpoint to that optimism, I liked the phrase “fooled by their fluency” from Yann LeCunn. LLMs may be good at writing, but don’t have a good world model below the surface. Benedict Evans makes a similar point: “You can go to Midjourney and it’ll make your picture and the perspective, the lighting, colour, the focus, everything is perfect. One of the people in the picture has three legs, and it’s like that’s the equivalent of the factual error in a ChatGPT response.”
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At HelpFirst we are building a tool that lets caring organisations understand their cases notes at scale. Our big aim is to stop vulnerable people slipping through the cracks. We’d love to hear from you - or your contacts - if they work in this area. Please forward this to anyone who might find it relevant.
Best wishes,
Andy
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