Artificial Intelligence
Posted: 20th January 2025
Time was when Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson talked about the ‘White Heat of Technology’ which was going to revolutionise UK Industrial growth in the 1960s. Now Labour leader Keir Starmer is at it again, and this time it’s going to be Artificial Intelligence that will work its productivity enhancing magic on the UK economy. AI is very energy hungry, so much so that Starmer has set an ‘AI energy council,’ which will be co-chaired by the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, and the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, to secure electricity generation for the scheme. The council is likely to accelerate investment in low-carbon energy sources for datacentres. However, finding even more energy to power them and AI in particular may be very hard. The UK is already pretty stretched trying to see off fossil fuel, with the government claiming that we will need nuclear as well as renewables to do it. Indeed, according to the UK government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, the first data centre is set to be in Culham, Oxfordshire, home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority. Evidently the aim is for its to serve as a testing ground to drive forward research on how sustainable energy like nuclear SMR and also fusion can power AI ambitions.
Renew Extra 18th Jan 2025
Britain’s problem is that almost everyone names growth as their priority, and almost no one means it. There is always another consideration that takes precedence, whether geopolitical, ecological, cultural or egalitarian. The result is the worst of all worlds: no serious drive for economic success, but also no tacit national agreement that we should bed down for a life of low-drama stagnation. Either of these would be a grown-up choice, with its own merits and costs. It is the fudge — which holds growth to be desirable in the abstract but in no specific form — that has Britain in its gelatinous grip. This week, Sir Keir Starmer set out a plan to exploit artificial intelligence to enrich the UK. The moment it was clear that he wasn’t serious was when he said he would make AI “work for everyone”. Almost no government reform that is worth a damn works for everyone. His line all but concedes that, once AI upsets an interest group, he is liable to cave. If AI is half as transformative as the hype suggests, it implies public sector job losses: in the diagnostic phase of healthcare, for example. Unions want economic growth. But not that much. AI also has colossal energy needs. Even with existing levels of electricity usage, the government’s target to decarbonise the grid by 2030 is at the outer bounds of achievability. To accommodate the new demand from data centres, those targets might have to slip. Sensible environmentalists want growth. But not that much. If Britain aims to lure the best AI talent, it might have to cut tax on high incomes or capital gains. As soon as Starmer goes near that idea, a think-tank of the Resolution Foundation sort will nag him into submission with charts about the effect on inequality. Offered a choice of being a social democracy with 1.5 per cent annual growth or a more stratified nation with 3 per cent, some people choose the first. They want growth. But not . . .
FT 15th Jan 2025