The UK Needs an AI Strategy Grounded in Reality

I recently attended London Tech Week as a speaker, and while I was there I caught our now outgoing Prime Minister’s speech on technology and its importance for the UK economy today and in the future. I couldn’t help but put fingers to keyboard to give my take on what he said and how he’s got it so wrong when it comes to AI and the UK.

In his speech, Keir Starmer spoke about AI being the great white economic knight galloping into places like Warrington and saving jobs. He told the gathered audience of tech entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers, about Warrington’s Unilever factory – which employed between 3000 and 5000 at its peak, to around 120 in 2020 when it closed – which is now earmarked for development into an AI data centre, bringing investment and highly skilled jobs.

Great, you might think – a factory which has stood empty for more than five years is being converted into a high-tech place of commerce. Unfortunately not. The comparison the Prime Minister is making is in my opinion disingenuous. This data centre won’t bring the number of jobs that the soap factory did, in fact, it probably won’t bring as many jobs as the factory had just before it closed. Data centres are a key part of energy and tech infrastructure, they are designed to work autonomously – they won’t need much human interaction, apart from a few security guards and people to ensure that the power is always on. To say that an AI data centre will replace the jobs of manufacturing is a fallacy.

And that is the biggest problem with AI and job creation and the whole narrative of AI being the next industrial revolution. We now look at the industrial revolution as an amazing time that changed the world for the better, but living through it was a completely different experience. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, generations of skills and trades were lost overnight and times were hard, and, in all honesty, that’s where I think we might be heading with the AI revolution – especially in areas like south Wales, and the north of England – the industrial heartlands.

London and the south East of England won’t feel the pinch of AI as much as we will in the outlying cities and regions – we will take the brunt of the AI revolution, we will see the white collar jobs go from the administrative centres in our cities and we will suffer the consequences of that unemployment.

I realise that it’s odd for me to be saying this as an AI founder, but I do so from a place of personal experience as I myself have been unemployed. I know how hard it is while you’re in that situation, the stress and uncertainty of the future and how difficult it can feel to get out of it. Luckily for me, I did, but it left a lasting impression on me. Because of that experience, I wanted to charge our customers a different way to other AI companies – charging an hourly rate, equivalent to the minimum wage. And this isn't an hourly rate based on the time it takes our AI to perform the tasks, but rather the time the AI estimates the tasks would have taken a human to perform. I also believe that AI companies should be taxed in a different way to give back to the public purse. AI companies, no matter how we charge our customers, are still taking money from government funds by not paying income tax and national insurance we would be paying via a human to do the same job.

We do have great AI entrepreneurs in the UK, and particularly in Wales, but we have to realise, and our governments and politicians in particular, have to realise that it AI isn’t the panacea to all of our jobs and economy woes of the future, in fact, it’s probably the opposite. AI will and is changing the way we work, interact and lead our lives. We have to properly plan for it, we have to teach our children about it, we have to learn what is good about it and what isn’t so good – but most of all, we need to start valuing jobs that have humanity at their heart more. Carers, nurses, doctors, childcare, hospice care – those people who work in world’s where the human touch cannot be replaced, but is, in my opinion, currently undervalued societally and financially.

AI is wonderful, AI is the future, but it also has its challenges for us as a society and our governments aren’t properly grasping that at the moment and until they do, we will be at risk of living through that next industrial revolution in all its glory and austerity.