YesIr Keir Starmer doesn’t do visions. But last Monday he broke the habit of his life in a speech given at University College London. It was about AI, which he considers “the defining opportunity of our generation.” The United Kingdom, he declared, “is the nation of Babbage, Lovelace and Turing,” not to mention the country “that gave rise to the modern computer and the world wide web. So mark my words: Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers.”
Stirring things, huh. Within days of taking office, the Prime Minister had invited Matt Clifford, a central casting technology expert, to think about “how to take advantage of the opportunities of AI”. Clifford scored 50 points. Action plan on AI opportunities which Starmer accepted in full, saying he would “put the full weight of the British State” behind it. He also named Clifford as his AI Opportunity Advisor supervise the implementation of the plan and report directly to you. It’s only a matter of time before Sun He nicknames him “the UK’s AI tsar.”
Clifford’s appointment is both predictable and baffling. Predictable because he has been around the government for some time: Rishi Sunak turned to him to organize the AI Safety Summit, for example, and to establish the AI Security Unit. It’s disconcerting because he’s already made a ton of money from technology: his register of external interests makes the scroll quite long. Various media and technology executives. he told the Financial times of his concern that Clifford, who had built a successful investment firm with offices around the world, had been given enormous influence over policy in the AI sector.
Clifford is “clearly a hugely capable person,” said Damian Collins, a former Conservative technology minister, “but the balance of interests represented and how they are represented is a concern.” If Starmer truly believes AI is a transformative technology, then it’s strange that his chief advisor would have so much of a role in such a big game.
Collins was referring to a particularly hot-button issue: the routine violation of copyright by technology companies that train AI models on other people’s creative work without permission, acknowledgment or payment. The most recent revelation of this practice came from recently unredacted documents in a US court case indicating that the training data set for Meta’s Llama AI had included a huge database of pirated books scraped from the Internet.
Recommendation 24 of the plan calls for reform of the UK’s text and data mining regime. And his claim that “the current uncertainty around intellectual property (IP) is hampering innovation and undermining our broader ambitions for AI, as well as the growth of our creative industries” has angered many in those industries. “There is no ‘uncertainty’ in the UK’s text and data mining regime,” says the Coalition for Creative Rights in AI. “UK copyright law does not allow the extraction of text and data for commercial purposes without a licence. The only uncertainty is who has been using the UK’s creative crown jewels as training material without permission and how they got hold of them.”
Much of the Clifford plan seems sensible (if expensive): building a national computing infrastructure for AI, for example; increase research capacity in universities; train tens of thousands of new AI professionals; encourage public-private partnerships to maximize UK involvement in “frontier” AI; and ensure strong technical and ethical standards to oversee the development and implementation of AI.
All of this is a refreshing change from the empty boasts about “global Britain” of the Johnson-Sunak-Truss era. The stated ambition of the plan – to position the UK “to be an AI maker, not an AI recipient” – involves a frank recognition that the UK has real potential in this area, but does not have the resources to perform it. Making that happen, however, means facing two uncomfortable truths.
The first is that this powerful technology is dominated by a few giant corporations, none of which are based in the UK. Their power lies not only in their capital and talent resources, but also in the vast physical infrastructures of the data centers they own and control. This means that nation states that aspire to operate in this space have to get along with them.
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In this sense, the British state urgently needs to up its game: its current attitude towards businesses is the obsequious embarrassment shown by technology secretary Peter Kyle when he said governments needed to show a “sense of humility” and use “statecraft” when dealing with tech giants rather than using the threat of new laws to influence developments in areas such as frontier artificial intelligence. In other words, the UK should treat these groups as nation states. Clearly, Kyle hasn’t realized that appeasement is the art of being nice to a crocodile in the hopes that it will eat you last.
The other inconvenient truth is that, although AI is powerful, economists like Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu I think its overall economic impact will be significantly less than technology evangelists believe, at least in the short term. Worse still, as the Economist Robert Gordon used to point outGeneral-purpose technologies take a long time to have a significant impact. The message to the prime minister is clear: becoming an “AI superpower” could take at least a few election cycles.