I tried to fix government tech for years. I'm fed up.

For the people who’ve figured out the right incantations to type and buttons-buried-in-submenus to click, computers can automate administrivia, surface information, and make them feel “more fully participant in the future”. But getting there is an arduous journey, and many people get in a place where computers just make things harder. The experienc... See more

And yet the marketing, the libertarian politics, and the continued social acceptability of technologically driven industries like the one that has produced decision-guidance technology depends on the assumption that tech makes our lives better. That assumption drives the adoption of AI, as it drove the adoption of smartphones and the Internet befor

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2. Most of the newcomers to the realization that govt is paralyzed (Ezra Klein, Dunkelman etc) think that the red tape jungle can be pruned, or organized with better feedback loops (Pahlka). This is falling into Gore's pit. There's a fatal defect: the operating system is designed around legal compliance--instead of human authority to make tradeoff ... See more

“The hardest thing,” he told me, “is that the systems you’re interacting with were built decades and decades ago . No one is building them; they were built in the past. You’ve effectively got to go and learn them from scratch.”