Tom King

How can we tell good AI from bad? as.ft.com/r/d91f22ad-4fe…

I was so pleased to be part of a great team writing a commentary on the draft FDA guidelines on Bayesian clinical trial designs. Should have been done 30 years ago, but better late than never

Our paper from our Long Covid Research group published Considerations for epidemiological studies investigating emerging post-acute infection syndromes: Long Covid as a case study Including recommendations for future research led by @DanAyoubkhani @ONS @ARC_EM sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

I wrote about Fleet Surgeon Cruice, HMS Implacable, anti-phlogistic leeches, and why it took so long to realise meningitis is contagious - and what we still miss. thetimes.com/article/38fa54…

Here's the post. gowers.wordpress.com/2026/03/20/gro…

@TimandraHarknes I've heard that technology is not the problem...

Maybe this is the sort of thing they should mention in military training? Cybersecurity seems quite important these days…

🚨Vacancy: National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee lay members Help safeguard the ethical use of public data by promoting transparency and ensuring statistics work for the public good. Closing date: 17 April 2026. Find out more: uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/news/vacancy-n…

@Dominic2306 It was November 2015 my colleagues ran the workshop which prompted the founding of the Ada Lovelace Institute. At the time, we felt we were being left behind by such as the council for big data ethics and society in the USA rss.org.uk/RSS/media/News…

Mr 'Britain's integration miracle' says AI regulation 'wasn't envisaged ten years ago'. Vote Leave literally hired an AI team who worked on the referendum 2015-16 for this reason. Vote Leave discussed tech regulation in the referendum but the issue was totally ignored by the likes of Nelson. Some of that AI team in 2019-20 created the first AI team in a western leader's private office, per the plan. This is all in the public domain but this 'SW1 expert' burbles nonstop nonsense. Remember when you read all the bullshit 'ten years on' pieces, most will be as well informed as Nelson. There remains close to zero informed mainstream coverage of the PM's AI/data science team

1/ Tomorrow at 12pm, the Inquiry will publish its third report: ‘The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the healthcare systems of the United Kingdom’ (Module 3).

AI copyright news tomorrow

@whippletom Hope you hear some sense from someone

@Acertaintom Yeah....I've actually emailed some of them. It was reading that that confused me.

A question. If one in ten people have men B infection without knowing it, say, then what is it that constitutes an outbreak? Why does it suddenly get worrying/invasive? If we are constantly passing it (are we?) between ourselves, what changes?

#PostOfficeScandal @Karlfl Back in 1993 Computer Weekly published this letter

Frustrating to watch a large meeting, as presentations cover platitudes and questions rehearse truisms. But when the contributions depart, and challenge that narrative vested interests bristle and confusion reigns. Listening is not evident from any of the parties involved

It can be difficult to know whether to trust numbers in campaign material and public debate. Here are some simple questions you can ask yourself to help👇

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon. My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction. I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January. The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000. In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh. I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently." I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits. The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo. The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production. I do not have enough senior engineers. I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds. We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do. I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve." The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised. I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired. Some of them are the same people. I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things. The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production. I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction. The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet. I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone. The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured. My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run. The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it. But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

Lord Brailsford, Chair of the Inquiry, sets out our plans for 2026. The Inquiry will hold implementation hearings in October 2026 and release nine summaries of pandemic impact evidence, with an updated decision‑making timeline to follow. covid19inquiry.scot/news/lord-brai…

📢Expressions of interest are now open to join the new Social Survey Strategic Forum We are bringing together senior leaders across government and the survey sector to shape the future of UK social surveys. Closing date: 27 March 2026. Find out more: uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/news/invitatio…

Much like GODOT we await PACAC. But this week the public bodies witness, the Rt Hon the Lord Maude of Horsham, an advocate against ALBs, volunteers the example of ONS as a body which needs Ministers not to be able to interfere

Ahead of publishing their own report, PACAC have published the external review of the UKSA board run by the lead NED for MHCLG. They are prevaricating about the committee structure to sensibly oversee production committees.parliament.uk/publications/5…

A bit surprised to see the DG ESE at ONS is being advertised. Obviously things have been tought with the LFS, but I thought that predated Mike Keoghan's tenure. Progress has been slow on resolving that and the focus on mandatory response as a solution odd civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?j…

Wild reading through the hereditary peers realising how much the Conservative front bench relies on them. And a few on the angry benches who will be missed