Notices by John Skiles Skinner (skiles@carhenge.club)

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. 🧵

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.")

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.

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.

https://www.wired.com/story/gsa-staff-all-hands-meeting-ai/

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."

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:

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.

😟 This garbage demo had a terrified audience

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.

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 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒅𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝒓𝒆𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒖𝒔 𝒂𝒕 𝒂𝒍𝒍. They want our work to end. DOGE is firing us as fast as possible, and that is the whole plan.

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.

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.

I believe the firings and the AI have the same purpose: to get humans out of the loop of evaluating contracts. To automate the process of spending government money. To rig up a computer that sends taxpayer dollars directly to the broligarchy. And to make sure democracy can't switch that computer off.

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.

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.

I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F.

18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it.

We made this website to tell our story:

https://18f.org/

@lain those articles are obscure enough they probably have only one contributor writing the majority of the text. If that person was a bad writer (or not very knowledgeable or careful) then the article will be bad.

@elrohir
Yup! @pluralistic has written a lot about how a big platform like youtube "can't resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Once they have saturated their market, they can't grow anymore by honest means. So the only way they can expand is by squeezing more money out of the existing market. Which means they become worse at software.

The Southern Baptist Convention kicked out all the churches with women pastors, including their second-largest church. I love watching conservative Christianity tear itself apart.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/southern-baptists-boot-saddleback-church-woman-pastor-rcna71714