Staff at £100 Million Alan Turing Institute Attack “Chaotic” Management Amid Diversity Row
Staff at the Alan Turing Institute, which was recently granted £100 million for AI research, have condemned its leadership and described its “chaotic” culture amid a diversity row that has embroiled the organisation. The Telegraph has the story.
In a report written by external consultants drafted in to tackle collapsing morale among its workers, staff were said to be angry about alleged “nepotism” and “tokenistic” hiring in a row over a lack of diversity.
“Across all focus groups, there is a significant proportion of responses indicating that leadership is perceived as ineffective,” the report said.
The report said the body suffered from “pervasive issues of low morale”. One source said there had been a “catastrophic decline in trust” at the institute.
A spokesman for the Turing Institute said it was engaged in a “transformation programme” that included a shift in focus to fewer, more focused research projects.
Earlier this month, staff sent a letter of no-confidence in its leadership team including Jean Innes, the Chief Executive, to the institute’s board, warning it was “rudderless; left behind as both the community and the cutting edge has moved ahead without us”. …
The institute, named after the Second World War codebreaker, has been accused by some AI experts of missing the coming wave of demand for the technology heralded by the launch of ChatGPT.
Despite the criticism, the institute, originally set up by David Cameron’s Government in 2015, was handed another £100 million by the Treasury in March to continue its research.
Yet the body has also been riven by staff anger this year with more than 180 people signing a letter shortly after the Treasury award questioning the level of diversity among its leading scientists and executives.
Worth reading in full.
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You cant have an organisation of more than fifty people without having a few trans in there. You wouldn’t get away with it. The corporate system is deeply corrupt and now it has a parasite on its back which forces it into a corner. It is grotesque, magnificent, and evil. It is hard to describe the depths and the fall just how far we have unconsciously fallen. I suppose a good number of people got a good wipe around the face in the last five years. Part of me hopes that these mysterious drones are the product of a more advanced culture that is observing our behaviour. Perhaps they have concluded that the benefits of having us chimps around is far outweighed by the costs.
So, the institute got Diversity to the extent that it now has a woman in charge, but coincidentally, staff have come to feel that leadership is ineffective and the organisation is “rudderless”, so some of them see the solution as being… more Diversity?
Surely in honour of Turing all the staff should be queers?
Employing people who share Turing’s sexual proclivities but without his ability as a mathematician is exactly the point the staff are making. I doubt that being a homosexual also made him good at maths.
No, Gays with Asperger’s Syndrome.
Queers or brains? That’s a tough choice!
So, another organisation discovers, to its great surprise, that it can appoint people based on their competence or instead that it can appoint people based on their possession of a cervix or a sacred skin colour, and that the latter kind of appointees may not be very good.
But what mental universe do these dolts inhabit that this comes a surprise to them?
An institute for AI research has absolutely no reason – or, for that matter, ability – of hiring based on competence as it’s nothing but an institute for burning government money for as long as government money keeps raining from the sky.
I realize £100,000,000 is – for government spending – peanuts, but nevertheless: Imagine what could have been done with this hadn’t it been spent for an institute of researching its own diversity while being nominally occupied with creating Thoroughly Useless Wow-ware™.
Quite so.
The problem isn’t the 100 million – 2 quid per taxpayer, the price of a cheap coffee.
The problem is there are hundreds if not thousands of idiotic programmes each one taken on its own not a major problem but as they say a 100 million here 100 million there and pretty soon you’re talking national bankruptcy.
Much better left in the hands of the tax payers
Let them fall apart.
Didn’t Trump say something like “everything that woke touches turns sh*t”?
Excuse me, but all diversity hires are tokenistic.
Anyway this nonsense is reaching its sell-by date.
And thank goodness.
I wonder what attainment in Mathematics those employed at the institute have obtained: degree, A’ level, CSE? (Yes, CSE.)
All the obsession with Diversity is demonstrating, is that diversity is not necessarily a strength or a good thing.
State sponsored research and business is never successful.
Stop funding it. Let them get private funding then decide what they want, “diversity” or jobs in a functioning enterprise with a valuable output.
I am not quite sure which way the staff are leaning. The report does not really come straight out and say whether they are for or against more diversity. One sentence seems to indicate they against token hires and nepotism but overall it is very unclear and muddled.