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Tiling the roof before you’ve laid the foundations may seem like a good way of getting ahead of the competition… but there’s a reason why no construction firm has ever done it. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of economic policy… particularly in the UK, and particularly under the current Labour government, which is about to gamble the last of the pound’s value on so-called “artificial intelligence.” The thinking – underpants gnome style – being that opening the UK to the handful of multinational tech corporations which run AI will somehow result in the mythical “growth” desired by the UK government.
The plan itself is an almost word for word repetition of the report on AI from the Tony Blair Institute… which at least tells us who is running Keir Starmer these days, even if the proposals are about as true to reality as Blair’s earlier “dodgy dossier” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But hey, if you are going to hang around with the kind of tech godzillionaire who thinks flying cars, hyperloops, self-driving trucks and Mars colonies are just around the corner, then whatever faint grasp you had on reality is not long for this world.
AI in this context is about control, despite it being sold to the gullible masses as a near-magical means of stopping the rot across public services and the wider real economy where people live and work. But, as Dan McQuillan at Computer Weekly explains:
“The here-and-now harms of AI are also social. Never mind the sci-fi fantasies about AI taking over the world, the mundane reality of AI in any social context are forms of ugly solutionism that perpetuate harms rather than reducing them. The claim that more computation will improve public services is hardly new, and algorithmic fixes for everything from welfare to education have already left a trail of damage in their wake…
“Forcing AI into services in lieu of fixing underlying issues like decaying buildings and without funding more actual teachers and doctors is a form of structural violence – a form of violence by which institutions or social structures harm people through preventing them from meeting their fundamental needs.”
Fortunately (for those of us still grounded in reality) the promises of AI are about as realistic as programable central bank digital currencies… and for much the same reason, which is where the need to lay the foundations comes in. If the UK’s net zero targets are met (in just 10 years’ time) Britain will have an electricity capacity deficit of 68GW – 13GW more than current peak demand. In part, this is due to the retirement of gas and nuclear power plants, leaving the UK vulnerable to dunkelflaute events. But in larger part it is due to state-mandated electrification of transport and home heating (currently fuelled by separate gas and petroleum networks). Add in the proposed leading-edge AI datacentres at 5GW a piece, and you have a recipe for a permanent national blackout. Indeed, and flying in the face of Labour’s housebuilding pledge, the Greater London Authority has been forced to apply a moratorium on new house building in west London due to the presence of a small (by industry standards) 50MW datacentre.
Nor is electricity capacity the only limiting factor here. Cost is bound to be a consideration even for multi-billion-dollar tech corporations (Tech CEO’s may be airheads, but you can be sure their finance directors are not). And with the UK’s industrial electricity now the most expensive on the planet, we are unlikely to witness anything like the AI Klondike that Starmer is gambling the house on. At the very least, the UK will have to abandon net zero in favour of drilling and mining the last of the cheap hydrocarbons to have any chance of lowering electricity prices to anything like that demanded by Big Tech.
Water too, is a limiting factor. AI data centres don’t simply consume more electricity, they generate much more heat than an ordinary datacentre. Which is why the UK government’s decision to set aside land for it first AI region in semi-arid Oxfordshire is pure insanity. As Helena Horton at the Guardian notes:
“AI datacentres use a large amount of water, as their servers generate heat. To prevent computer systems overheating and shutting down, the centres use cooling towers and outside air systems, both of which need clean, fresh water. AI consumes between 1.8 and 12 litres of water for each kilowatt hour of energy usage across Microsoft’s global datacentres. One study estimates that global AI could account for up to 6.6bn cubic metres of water use by 2027 – the equivalent of nearly two-thirds of England’s annual consumption.”
Wales, Scotland or the Lake District (the only areas still green on satellite images during the 2022 drought) would be better locations, although even these experience water stress because only a fraction of the rainfall remains in the reservoirs during droughts. In addition, because of the distorted social and economic geography of Great Britain, the driest regions in the southeast contain most of the appropriately skilled workforce.
But even in the event that these real-world problems could be overcome, the “growth” that Starmer believes will follow will almost certainly not. First, because the UK’s experience with tech augers against it. Britain has never produced a corporation that could feature in the same paragraph as a Google, Microsoft, or Amazon (at least, not unless prefaced by the word “unlike”). And on the few occasions when a UK company grew sufficiently to appear on those corporations’ radar, they were quickly bought out and subsumed. So that, in the event that Starmer’s AI plan was to incubate a viable UK AI start-up, it would only be a matter of time before it was swallowed up by the existing AI megacorps.
Second, insofar as AI will have an impact on the economy, it will most likely be deflationary. Remember how a few years ago the UK government was telling youngsters to learn to code? Well, one of the (few) things we know AI can do is to replace human computer coders. So that’s another generation of Brits entering the workforce with redundant qualifications. It should go without saying that insofar as AI is deployed in the economy, it will be as precisely this kind of neoliberal money-saving/job-destruction mechanism. What it won’t do is replace true creativity simply because true creativity is cheaper than running a multi-Gigawatt data centre.
Third, there is good reason to believe that we are at the sucker stage of an AI-based investment bubble in which most of what we think we know about AI is hype generated by the AI corporations themselves (remember that time when the tech CEO’s warned the US congress about the risks from AI?). At a time when the smart money has already moved into (US dollar) cash, and when the monied classes are escaping Britain at a rate of one every 45 minutes, you would have to be the biggest sucker in the casino to put money on British AI just now.
These are merely the proximate reasons why UK AI is unlikely to happen. Underpinning these, as alluded to above, is the simple fact that Britain’s foundations have crumbled beyond repair. Public services don’t work anymore. Even those who want to pay tax these days are unable to do so because the phone system doesn’t work; people regularly die in ambulances while waiting to access medical care; sewage treatment systems no longer work, and even safe drinking water is at risk; potholed roads are a risk to life and property; trains seldom run on time and are usually overcrowded; police routinely ignore crime, while courts take years to prosecute the minority of crimes which are investigated. And none of this is accidental… as Anthony Stafford Beer famously explained, “the purpose of the system is what it does…” And, of course, it is a system which is unfit for the AI-boom that Starmer wants to wish into existence.
Despite these limitations, there is, perhaps, one area where AI might be productively deployed. That would be by replacing the professional gobshites sitting on the government benches in parliament. Insofar as AI is often found to just make stuff up, it would be no worse than the current crop of IQ-deficient numpties. And there is always a chance that AI might spot the obvious policy flaws – like having to have a secure electricity supply before you can have AI, like having to have trained craftspeople, along with surplus equipment and supplies before you can build 300,000 new houses every year, or like not giving the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow airport when the net-zero mayor is determined to close it on environmental grounds.
The real-world though, is not really the issue here. Because, as McQuillan points out, for Starmer’s Labour, this is a religious issue:
“This is perhaps the hole that AI fills for the Labour government; having long abandoned any substantive belief in the transformative power of socialism, it is lacking a mobilising belief system. At the same time, it’s obvious to all and sundry that the status quo is in deep trouble and that being the party of continuity isn’t going to convince anyone.
“Ergo, the claim that AI has the power to change the world becomes a good stand-in for a transformative ideology. The bonus for the Labour government is that relying on AI to fix things avoids the need for any structural changes that might upset powerful business and media interests, and rhetoric about global AI leadership has a suitably “Empire” vibe to appeal to nationalistic sentiments at the grassroots.”
Like all religious beliefs, this one will be immune to any practical limitations, or projections showing that far from generating growth, AI will be deflationary. Like the metaverse, self-driving cars, cryptocurrencies and the singularity before it, AI will be the future until it isn’t… and the UK may well prove to be the place where the AI future ceases to be, simply because of the mismatch between the imagined AI-based growth and the reality of an economy which has entered terminal decline.
As you made it to the end…
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