Obviously, artificial Intelligence (AI) is a boom industry that will transform many other industries and make fortunes for some people. Anyone should want Britain to be involved and earn itself a slice of the AI pie. Why, then, does the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan depress me?
Apparently, according to Keir Starmer, it is going to turn Britain into an ‘AI superpower’. There are going to be AI growth zones, and the public sector is going to be at the forefront. AI is going to help teachers plan lessons, help councils speed up decisions on planning applications, even help mend potholes – all the biggest public sector failures, in other words, are going to be cured by AI.
Sorry, but I’ve heard it all before. Remember how we were going to be a green energy superpower – only to watch as China gobbled up our wind turbine and solar panel industries? Or how Britain was going to be plastered with ‘gigafactories’ churning out electric car batteries – until the first government-backed project, Britishvolt in Northumberland, went toes up. You can guarantee that when a government starts trying to pick winning industries it is going to lose out. Governments like to latch onto what sounds exciting and prestigious – and onto projects which will create jobs in marginal constituencies. They tend not to notice that in fast-evolving areas like AI, the attrition rate of start-ups is huge. Government investment, pushed along by political considerations, is rarely agile enough to survive in such an environment. Remember Concorde, whose commercial underpinnings were undermined by the 1973 oil crisis, meaning no airline other than the national carriers of Britain and France ever ordered a plane. But such was the political capital invested that the government plodded on regardless.
As for speeding up planning applications, it would help if planning officers were working a five-day week actually in the office. I don’t think it is really impossible to keep roads free of potholes without resorting to AI – the roads used to be in a much better condition than they are now, before we even had the internet, let alone AI.
A wise industrial policy doesn’t involve the Prime Minister snatching at whatever seems in vogue – it involves keeping taxes low, regulation easy to understand and comply with – and then letting business get on with it. And it requires affordable energy. Britain is going to look a miserable place to invest in energy-hungry AI so long as we have some of the highest energy prices in the world. Is there anything in the AI Action Plan to change that? Sorry, but locating the first AI growth zone in Culham, Oxfordshire, so that ‘sustainable energy like fusion can power our AI ambitions’ doesn’t breed confidence. If Culham could master the tricky business of building a commercial nuclear fusion plant, that would be a world-beating industry in itself. But then it has been trying for 60 years. The idea that it can suddenly be magicked into existence to power our AI supercomputers is somewhat fanciful.
The Prime Minister looks like a schoolkid who has just discovered something terribly exciting. Sorry, but if Britain does succeed in the AI business, it will be in spite of, rather than because of, his government’s policies.
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