Public investment in technology is the right move. But ministers must not become boosters for an industry that causes harm as well as good
Digital technology companies have reshaped our world and will continue doing so. Sir Keir Starmer knows his government must seek a role in shaping this new order – and avoid ceding all control to the US and China. According to official estimates, the UK is the third-largest AI market. Its universities are important incubators of talent. Google DeepMind, two of whose scientists won a Nobel chemistry prize last year, was a British company until Google bought it in 2014. But the world’s two largest economies, and particularly the US corporations that dominate our online lives, are a long way ahead. The danger for the rest of the world is being swept along in an AI wave over which it has little control.
Expanding Britain’s publicly owned computing resource – a national asset known as sovereign compute capacity – is a necessary step toward securing technological independence. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is right to warn of a coming battle to ensure democratic control of computing. Countering private-sector dominance with new public investment is part of that. Plans to boost the AI industry, beginning with a new growth zone in Oxfordshire, make sense as part of a 21st-century industrial strategy.
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