A bonus episode diving deeper into Alex Burghart's experience creating Britain's first government AI unit, from spotting benefit fraud to the bureaucratic battles that nearly killed innovation.
Calum and Tom with Alex on:
* The surprisingly mundane reality of government AI–not solving cancer, but automating correspondence, flagging outdated NHS prescriptions, and spotting benefit fraud patterns that human analysts miss,
* How departments hoard data "like family silver" to maintain leverage over each other–and why even Dominic Cummings couldn't force the sharing needed for his famous "situation room" dashboards,
* The shocking gaps in basic government knowledge: we don't know how many people live in Britain, can't get real-time data for PMQs, and the best population estimates come from supermarket footfall,
* Why hiring top AI talent required stepping outside normal civil service pay bands–and how £150k salaries (still massive pay cuts for tech workers) bought world-class engineers motivated by mission over money,
* The perverse incentives of civil service culture: brilliant specialists forced into management to advance, departments refusing to share data that could eliminate their jobs, and a system that selects for risk-averse mediocrity,
* Alex's vision for the future of government: ruthlessly cutting non-priorities, automating everything possible, and building a "smaller, better qualified, better paid" civil service–plus AI judges for instant legal settlements.
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