It’s no bad thing that Britain is embracing artificial intelligence. Who wouldn’t want more technology that can diagnose cancer, fix potholes and nix credit card scams? Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s grand scheme announced on Monday is thus helpful. But his goal of making the country a “world leader” demands more than servers, algorithms and enthusiasm.
The government’s plan to mainline AI into the nation’s veins comes in three parts. There’s building infrastructure, using AI to make the country economically zingier, and creating homegrown champions, which the plan characterises as becoming a “maker” rather than a “taker”.
The first part amounts to a kind of modest economic stimulus. In the US, data centres have impacted millions of jobs — although such facilities are not exactly labour intensive once up and running. Trade group Tech UK counted 43,500 British data centre jobs in a recent study. That could double in a decade, it estimated, but it’s still small.