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Probably42 News - June-July-2022
Welcome to our June/July Newsletter!
Doesn’t time fly! It’s now 5 years since our very first Probably42 meeting when our topic was Social Care in Old Age. In that time we’ve covered many topics and revisited a good number to refine our ideas. More importantly we’ve generated some 500 transformative ideas and captured the most important 70 of these in our document ‘A Manifesto for Society in the Artificial Intelligence Future. We’ve also made progress in getting the attention of politicians on some topics. We’ll shortly be issuing a press release to mark the occasion.
For anyone new to Probably42 we recommend reading the above Manifesto of Ideas. To give a flavour though, we’ve selected just 3 ideas to mention here.
- Introduction of a National Dividend (based on productivity increases) coupled with new requirements for organisations to report in a standard way on productivity increases. This would help to make everyone feel the country was being run for the good of all and that they had a vested interest in it, as well as engendering a strong focus on improving productivity, a current UK problem.
- Introduction of ‘Advisory Digital Voting’ on an annual basis to allow us all to input on selected individual policy proposals at National and Local level. Alongside this, a Digital Ideas system for inputting new original ideas, enabled by AI.
- Creation of a ‘Chamber of the Future’ focused on the long-term by replacing half the House of Lords to address the short-termism of politics. Members being drawn from our top scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs and business people.
As a bit of fun, we suggest members of the ‘Chamber of the Future’ should be colloquially known as ‘Time Lords’. Who wouldn’t aspire to give their services as a ‘Time Lord’?
It’s an almost impossible task to select 3 because by their nature we think they are all transformative and have lots of merit for further discussion. However, we’ve selected these three because they are relatively low cost and easy to implement compared to many Government initiatives.
We’d love to know what you think of these if you have a moment. Just reply to this email and we guarantee we’ll take a look and respond.
Recent and Forthcoming Discussion
Our most recent discussion was the Queen’s Speech with focus on the Cost-of-Living aspects. You can see the output at Queen’s Speech and Cost of Living.
In our recent discussion meetings, we have focused more on current events than our traditional look at long-term issues and opportunities. However, our focus is still on lessons for the future, rather than short-term responses. The same is true this month with our topic being Unions, Management and Workforce Negotiations. You can see the agenda at Topic for June-July 2022 - Unions and Management
Government Information that may interest you
As usual we highlight more examples of information on Parliament activity and outputs which may interest you:
The Government’s ‘vision for harnessing digital transformation and building a more inclusive, competitive and innovative digital economy’.
The plan and vision for a digitally enabled health and social care system and how we can achieve it.
Full details of what our generous Chancellor handed out to offset the cost-of-living increases
- Cost of Living Support - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
- Overall government support for the cost of living: factsheet - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
The government is delivering on its manifesto commitment to overhaul the Human Rights Act and replace it with a Bill of Rights.
Why not join a Group?
If you’d like to join one of the Probably42 discussion groups held via videoconferencing, just email in response to this newsletter and we’ll send you more details. We very much want a diversity of viewpoints, so you can be sure your views will be welcomed. Remember it’s about relaxed discussion and having an enjoyable time, with hopefully some useful ideas identified.
We also want to encourage face-to-face real world discussion groups, as feeders into the main online discussions. If you’d like to find out more about the one in Berkshire, or if you’d like to see one start in your area, just email in response to this newsletter and we’ll send you details.
Feedback
We always welcome any feedback, thoughts, ideas or questions about Probably42. Simply reply to this newsletter and you’ll receive a personal reply.
All the best
Tony