AI will save us - or doom us all, of course.
I was waiting for the perfect time to 'start writing', but our fascination with both the promise and threat of technology wouldn't wait.
This isn’t the first post I spent most of my Christmas holiday fantasising about. Maybe I mean ‘first post I was planning’, but that gives me credit for concrete intentions I haven’t yet earned. There was always something... intangible about me starting to write again, properly. And by ‘intangible’, really, I mean that it was likely never going to happen. But, thanks to a really inspirational post on writing by the wonderful and talented Helen Lewis, and the voice of my creative writing professor from at least one lifetime ago (‘A writer writes.’; more on that later), I’m feeling… inspired to get on with it. Imperfectly, messily, inexpertly inspired.
And I figure I’ve got a few of these to do before anyone starts reading them anyway, so a little practice won’t hurt…
While I’ve been planning my Introduction to the world (more on that later), explaining what I was going to write and why, an intriguing story on AI thrust itself onto the UK’s headlines this week. Too soon! I cursed. I haven’t done my ‘Why I write’ manifesto or chosen a blog title or selected my fonts! But this is 2024, sorry, 2025, and I don’t need to code my new blog in HTML like I once did. (More on that later.)
I know, roughly, how I want to use this space, and what I want to write about. But while I was juggling the words ‘monsters’ and ‘messiahs’ and ‘machines’, hoping that when I dropped them they’d land in the right order, along comes Keir Starmer’s announcement this week that AI will come to save us all! which, I knew from experience, would lead to the inevitable response that we’re all doomed!
I think there’s a solid argument to make that we live in an age when the vicissitudes of polarised opinions are not uncommon, though probably not any more than at any point in the last few millennia of human history. It’s just that so much of this hysteria today is - predictably - based on all the aspirations and anxieties that we imagine around technology, some of which is real and some of which is straight out of the pages of fiction.
I have been writing about this largely for the last decade or so, working on the social impacts and cultural aspects of robotics, AI, VR and other new technologies. I mean, this is what I have been writing about when I’ve been at my happiest. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about other things that were much less… fulfilling. (More on that later.)
So what happened last week was that the UK Prime Minster announced that his government would take forward all 50 recommendations set out by Matt Clifford in his AI Opportunities Action Plan. Which should, by most measures of such things, be pretty banal. Especially if you have a realistic grasp of what AI can reasonably do as the technology stands right now. (More on that later.)
There was tremendous fanfare accompanying this announcement (not surprising, perhaps, given that this is a government in search of not just a story but of a narrative), but what really struck me was the unusually unproblematic optimism that glowed throughout the announcement that our government was about to use AI to ‘revolutionise our public services’. I’m old enough to remember when declaring an impending machine ‘revolution’ was not something a social democratic government would boast about helping to bring about.
But then, one of the little observations I often like to fall back on reminds us that in 1984, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the monstrous robot/AI sent back in time to ensure the destruction of humanity, but in the sequel a mere 7 years later Arnie has already become humanity’s greatest hope. So we’re very capable of changing our minds about such things.
Still, given our traditional (Western) anxieties about AI, I found some of the language in that government announcement a bit sloppy. I mean, were it my job to write a press release on robots and AI (and it was, once, for a bit, but more on that later), I would definitely avoid the word ‘revolution’ or any derivatives. I probably would avoid saying we want to ‘unleash’ AI, and I definitely wouldn’t allude to injecting any machines or artificial intelligence into our veins. (Starmer, for the record, promised to ‘mainline AI into the veins of this enterprising nation’.) It wasn’t so long ago that a lot of people, or at least far too many, believed that Covid vaccines contained nanobots that Bill Gates would use this technology to take control of our bodies. Remember that?
(A number of sources picked up on that imagery, even the overwhelmingly compliant and positive ones. I think someone needs to speak with a copywriter. It’s almost like someone in the press office did that on purpose, trolling the conspiracy theorists. Which, you know, objectively speaking is funny, but maybe now is not the time.)
But while many of us can be, rightly, ambivalent about the promises of AI, some people will wear the outfit and become cheerleaders, and others… well, their instincts are to re-assure us all that AI will most certainly bring about the Apocalypse.
But the usual deluge of fearmongering never really materialised. Not in the usual way. The coverage was overwhelmingly positive…
… EXCEPT for the usual suspects. And I don’t mean the usual media outlets with an axe to grind against Labour, though there’s a correspondence between these two that is very satisfying for people like me that don’t like to be surprised about such things.
GB News, for example, could be relied upon to be ‘riled’ and ‘terrified’. But the main thrust of their concern wasn’t genocidal machine intelligence but that the messaging was all wrong, that it sounds, apparently, ‘like it is a middle class P.G. Wodehouse novel.’ (I’ve asked people who know P.G. Wodehouse better than me. It doesn’t.) The Sun warned that Kier’s AI push could leave us vulnerable to blackouts, which isn’t anything other than a Shadow Minister grasping for criticisms but mocks the serious conversation we need to have about the power required by all this artificial intelligence).
The Express found in Kier’s speech a complete vindication of Brexit, because we apparently couldn’t possibly conceive of this if we were still in the EU. (I don’t need to ask anyone this time. We could.) So they are less afraid of psychotic machines and more concerned that the British people will lose faith in their Brexit project.
The Daily Mail added a BUT… what about data security and job losses? which is nice of them to care. And their addle-brained attack dog Quentin Letts was so bored by Sir Kier - who’s vegan? - that he, I think, made us take our underwear off? I’ve got to be honest, I don’t really know what Letts is saying. But what’s interesting is that he found the speech boring. Which is interesting, because not so long ago, I remember when any mention of AI or robots in the Daily Mail used this picture:
But I suppose we can call it ‘progress’ when AI fear-mongering in the British (increasingly-far-)right-wing press is neutered, and they only use an AI policy announcement to only score imaginary political points against Labour in an argument that literally no one is having any more instead of decrying the certain end of humanity.
But I’m not writing here to say, ‘Nothing to see. Don’t worry. It’ll all be fine.’ I’ve never been one to just provide the fig-leaf of cover for important questions about robotics and AI (in spite of some accusations I’ve had in the past. More on that later.) There are important, intelligent issues that we need to interrogate, because no utopia is quite as happy as it sounds. Last week, The Morning Star wasn’t a bad place to start, I find myself a little surprised to say, even if their headline, ‘Starmer's AI bid risks a ‘race to the bottom for workers’ is a bit hysterical. (Though… you know… ‘headlines’… sheesh.)
The Morning Star article, on the whole, is nicely balanced, and reminds us that yeah, hey! These things can be great! But we need to have conversations about who this is going to benefit and how. And it’s human beings that need to have this conversation. It can’t be a conversation between machines and capital. Because then we will lose. And half-human automatons like Musk and Zuckerberg (AI *never* gets humans right, does it?) will be the only ones that reap the benefits.
(The reminder in The Morning Star article that we need to protect the rights of creative workers might be highlighted by anyone who is cross with me for the images I’ve used in this article. Which includes my younger son, if he finds out I’m writing this. So let’s not tell him.)
Anyway. So there. I started. No fanfare, no big manifesto or mission statement. (More on that later.) Just a simple response, and this more or less explains what sort of thing you’ll see here, all packaged in a post that’s a little longer than I intended and lacking in a lot of the crunchy details that I can’t wait to get my teeth into.
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