This week, our diarist MP Simon Alexander is concerned with Artificial Intelligence, and he doesn’t mean some of his robotic colleagues
It’s Budget Week, the day the man (except from 2024-26) in 11 Downing Street gets to hold up a battered briefcase and attempt to hold back the tide, knowing that the OBR, IFS, IPPR and WTF will critique the hell out of a carefully planned series of announcements, many of them dribbled into the newspapers.
I’ll be sitting in the chamber tomorrow as John Healey gives the address and LOTO does her ‘it doesn’t go. far. enough’ stuff. Those with long memories will remember the Mini-Budget of 2022 which torpedoed the Conservative Party, followed by the 2023 Jeremy Hunt Budget; Lame Duck Millionaire aka the MP for Richmond has commented from his Sunday Times sinecure, and declared support for the AI industry, that (as per the headline he didn’t write) ‘this budget will be built on a fairytale’. LOTO has already called Burnham a ‘showman PM’ thanks to his appearance on Channel 4 on Friday; ‘jealous much?’ was Em-Dash’s summary, with which I concur.
I remember the hullabaloo about Rachel Reeves’ ‘Things Can Only Get Worse’ Budget in 2024, but last year’s has evaporated entirely from my memory. I do know it was painful to see it breadcrumbed for weeks in the supportive press and attacked, like this one, by the unsupportive press before it was even announced. It was all a lot of fury and sound, which is all that the Starmer government was left doing once Morgan McSweeney resigned.
This week alone, we have had breadcrumbed news of: funding for a North of England bid for the Olympic Games; £1bn added to the pot for social and affordable housing; a bump in the minimum wage for the youngest workers; taking tariffs off 100 items of food including gherkins and cough drops to save ‘40p a week’(!); support for carers to come in in 2030; increased defence spending, as the Chancellor wanted when he was Defence Secretary; support for small breweries, because there must always be something about pints in every Budget; and further devolved support for mayors and local councils as a sop to Burnham’s former tribe.
Most pertinently to what I’m writing about today, there is to be £100m sent to build an AI Biosecurity Lab and a separate £180m to the existing AI Security Institute and a National Cyber Shield. What with outside being unbearable, meteorologically speaking, I spent the weekend reading some books, which meant I at last got round to reading Growth: A Reckoning, by a very clever man named Daniel Susskind, which takes us from the beginning of money to a prognosis of what to do to stop degrowth.
The final part of the book calls for ideas to stimulate growth, where he suggests that people move to where the money and that ‘one of the best things a society can do to promote the discovery of new ideas is to allow more immigration’. There’s is a sentence you definitely do not want to tell the Bendelo-Harborne Party, whose leader was shouting over Nick Robinson on the Today programme this morning. He wasn’t angry, Mr Farage, just disappointed. His time will ebb, although it’ll be fun to hear Robert Jenrick critique the Healey budget.
Susskind also points out that with technology becoming more sophisticated, a) we need more people to research and develop it and b) we need to see how it can be synthesised with ‘meat machines’, ie you and me (or is it ‘you and I?’ Let me ask a Large Language Model, or consult a grammar book to remind myself of analogue days). He also mentions in passing how the Covid-19 vaccine was developed by Moderna with the help of AI, and how scientific research can be summarised and utilised by time-poor brainiacs.
There is a quite phenomenal graph in the book which shows the precipitous plunge from prosperity suffered by rich nations like the UK, US and especially Japan (three of the G7 countries along with France, Germany, Italy and Canada). You can clearly see the growth in the UK economy after about 1993, which coincided with cheap credit and the effects of the Big Bang of deregulation.
Prof Susskind has spent his life trying to work out how to get Britain growing, using his many academic qualifications and positions within the PM’s office and the Cabinet Office. He has a very famous surname: his dad Richard literally wrote the book on computers and the legal profession, then wrote a very readable book on this decade’s hottest topic, the one Alexander De Pf. Johnson calls ‘A.I.’ but normal people call AI (trust me, watch the clip; there’s a difference).
No sooner had I read Susskind’s book on growth than he has only gone (two years later, actually) and brought out a follow-up. What Should My Children Do? is a father-of-three’s cry to the future, and a complement to Richard’s recent primer on AI (‘I love A.I.!’). For his sins Daniel had to share a panel with the Gover (ladies, form a queue!) last month but last week he had an event in London as part of the 5x15 series. He’s also doing a series of lectures on AI, Copyright and the Fight for Free Culture for Gresham College, available gratis online with the first one on Creativity here.
I was in the chamber yesterday intending to contribute to the debate on the emerging risks of advanced AI but there was too much other discussion. Fortunately, we had plenty of AI chatter during last week’s call for evidence launched by the Education Committee’s enquiry into how AI impacts kids in schools. The inquiry is being led by committee chair Helen Hayes, Labour MP for the safe seat of Dulwich and West Norwood (majority: 18,800, but it got as high as 28,000). She’s a Scouser who used to be a town planner, and her husband Ben Jupp is the brother of Rachel, former Panorama editor and recently appointed head of BBC News, the Impossible Job.
I daresay the BBC, with its excellent Bitesize series, can help get ahead of what they call EdTech by complementing how and what kids (Hayes has two of them) learn at school. I asked Vish to look at the transcript and pull anything ‘interesting or invigorating’ from it, and after he rolled his eyes he did his job that I pay him to do. There was lots of hand-wringing and pleading for money, but I’ll wait until the inquiry delivers its report to decide how doomed we are on a scale of 1 to Elon.
In the meantime, I settled down to read the rest of Susskind’s book on Budget Day Minus One and had a rollicking good time learning about the usefulness of Artificial Intelligence, particularly how we should ‘teach both, test both’ when it comes to using machines and setting them aside. There’s also a précis of the book as part of a discussion for the Royal Society of Arts Youtube channel here.
He is wise to suggest attention as a skill to acquire and hone, the better to read massive books (and also small ones like Susskind’s 190-page tiddler). He also wants kids to become, effectively, master of their domain, be it law, medicine or politics, as a vocation: go into law because you like casework, or into politics because you like casework. Then there’s the Korean example, where there are too many graduates for too few jobs and the ranks of unemployed all have letters after their name. And pause a second on page 146 of the hardback for 20 little graphs showing the exponential increase in researchers using AI: it’s up to over 20% of the total in linguistics and over 5% in engineering.
Susskind quotes the Nobel Prize winning futurist Geoffrey Hinton who says we humans need to be better at distinguishing when AI is a savant and when it’s an idiot, which is a really good joke that I bet AI would be able to tell as well as Jerry Seinfeld. Therefore, we need to be literate and numerate and to think critically, rather than outsource these skills to machines; Susskind whacks in another stunning chart which shows how rapidly the ability to count and write has plunged since a) the smartphone and b) ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok have come along. Never mind the Beatles; here’s the BeAItles. (No, Vish didn’t laugh at this.)
And here’s another jaw-dropper: whereas the Internet was built by the US Defense Department to allow information to be exchanged, AI is being ‘funded and shaped by private institutions, and so expertise is overwhelmingly concentrated inside their walls, not the state’. So all hail Elon, Altman and the rest. At the same time, Susskind concludes, ‘the greatest bottleneck is our imagination’, the same one which made Michaelangelo paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. If a machine painted like a Renaissance artist, Susskind writes, we’d appreciate it for its beauty, but a human never did it so we might be less impressed.
Ergo, ‘there are a great many things in economic life where we value not simply how well an activity is done but how it is done’. And people still play chess, don’t they, he adds. But will the kids of today grow up to pass down the wonder of human creativity when they’re busy staring at screens in their prams and bedrooms? I’m not sure. Susskind suggests, in his hello-trees-hello-sky conclusion, some personal uses for the new technology, which range from asking an AI agent to search the Internet for rare books and write him a weekly report on their findings, to a sort of Shazam for bones and plants, to reading literature with the help of a robot tutor (ParadAIse Lost? Eh? Eh? Vish?!).
‘Push back on this pessimism,’ he writes like a sort of Willy Wonka. ‘Look out on the future with curiosity and a spirit of adventure, excited to explore the expanding universe of what is now technologically possible, driven on by a sense of awe at this remarkable thing that we have somehow created.’ All the better to get the young ‘uns involved quickly, before Elon goes full Grok.
So how do I link Healey’s Budget with all of this? By reminding you of the £280m the government is giving to the AI sector, to help the men behind Grok, Claude, George and Ringo to flourish and help us all out. It may well be the case that Musk, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg ruin the planet, but won’t we all have a jolly old time distracting ourself with AI. Fun fact: Anthropic are just about to make an initial public offer that is somewhere between $1.5-2tn. That’s 2 with 12 zeroes after it: $2,000,000,000,000. £280,000,000 is a lot smaller, isn’t it? About 8000 times (well, 7,142 times). And that’s just Claude, never mind Grok, Ringo and ChatGeorgePT.
Next week: more on Big Tech, online safety and the World Wide Web, through the lessons of the woman who directed the second Bridget Jones movie and is married to the guy who wrote Billy Elliott.