Looking back over the journey of this blog I can tell you that I have learnt a thing or two about making an FoI request. I probably need to go a bit deeper than I need to on some and remember that the legislation is for gaining documents not anything else. That being said I have also learnt that I know a lot less about certain things than I gave myself credit for. This is where I try to figure out where I went wrong with certain things.
One of the things that I am really interested in is the Cold War (In case you hadn't noticed…) and one of the things that I am interested in is finding out what the government would have done if the bomb had been dropped (We should be very grateful that it didn't). So, one of the things I wanted more than anything else was the documents that the BBC had made on what would have happened if the bomb had been dropped. They did have a duty to reassure the British public in that event. So I sent this to the BBC. Now for starters I asked for all documents made between 1959 and 1992… Let's assume that there are a thousand people working in the BBC for that time period and they all generate 10 pages a day… That’s 630,000 documents… Assuming it takes a minute to upload a document onto the computer, that’s 437 and a half hours of work… I think that is beyond the recommended 18 hours....
So what can I do to narrow the field to get the information that I need? Well, one to the things that I would need to do is to find out a few things. Let's find out how long they keep their files for and how many files they own. That should at least help us narrow the field down a bit and be able to show us where to dedicate our efforts afterwards. Wouldn't it be interested to find out how much work they did on this?
Artificial intelligence is something that I am also interested in. So wouldn't the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have some information? Turns out they had too much… not only that when I asked the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory if they could give me all details of all reviews that have been made on the use of artificial intelligence, it turns out that when they did some research they popped back the following results on how many reports they did, which were:
“Artificial Intelligence” returned approximately 4840
“Machine Vision” returned approximately 548.
“Robotics” returned 2430.
“Machine Learning” has returned approximately 924”.
So how am I going to get around this one? A look into the ethical use of artificial intelligence may help us. Maybe if I was to ask them had they done any studies into the use of robots in war? That would at least make us think.
The good thing about this is that it does make you think about what you are asking for. I just thought about asking for artificial intelligence and documents. Turns out there was FAR too much information in that question. So, in some respects they are trying to help me narrow down the field. Perhaps this is a way of making sure that I know what I am asking for too.
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