- The UK government has revealed a 50-point plan to inject AI into the public sector.
- Plan includes £14bn private sector investment
- Prime Minister addresses security concerns but does not want UK to be ‘left behind’
The UK government has unveiled plans to bring AI to every corner of British industry with an investment of billions of pounds.
The Labor Government plans to “unlock” AI and make the UK a “world leader” by accepting £14bn in private sector investment, and has revealed a 50-point plan that will see AI “hit the veins” of public services.
This includes a plan to “unlock” public data by giving it to “researchers and innovators”, including anonymised NHS data, which will be available to train AI models. The government says there will be “strong safeguards to preserve privacy” and that data will never be owned by private companies.
Creating jobs
The plans will also seek to free up time for public sector workers by allowing AI to perform administrative tasks and will introduce “AI Growth Zones” that will accelerate AI infrastructure, quickly build data centers and give them better network access energy. despite environmental concerns.
The private sector investment is mainly coming from Vantage Data Centres, a company that plans to invest £12bn in data center development, creating more than 11,500 jobs in the process. Also investing are Nscale and Kyndryl, two leading digital companies that plan to help implement AI in the British economy.
“The UK Government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan will play an important role in helping the UK unlock the full potential of AI,” said Alison Kay, vice president of Amazon Web Services for the UK and Ireland.
“By placing close industrial collaboration and public-private partnership at the center of the Government’s agenda, all citizens, communities and businesses in all regions of the UK will have the opportunity to harness the benefits of AI and prosper and grow.” “.
A disruptive technology
The Prime Minister says AI can “transform workers’ lives”, speeding up planning consultations, reducing administration and feeding AI through roadside cameras to help detect potholes – although, interestingly, my car can detect potholes without problems.
Minister Pat McFadden said AI is a “test and learn” technology and “mistakes will be made” with applications, but did not confirm whether this plan will mean short-term job losses for workers. Addressing objections to the plan, the Minister warned that if the UK does not develop the technology here then the country would “lose out” to other nations in the AI race.
In the Prime Minister’s speech announcing the news, he acknowledged the anxieties surrounding AI, but stated that the real danger is of falling behind other nations, noting that “the far greater risk is that we do not take advantage of it and get lost.” “massive opportunities.”
AI makes services more human
In his speech, the Prime Minister also outlined the ways in which AI can help make our public services “more human”, referring mainly to healthcare and social work. By taking administrative and mundane tasks away from public sector workers, services will become “more human” by allowing staff to reconnect with patients and those in their care.
Starmer pledged to “make sure this technology is safe” building on the previous government’s “world-leading” AI safety institute, pledging to maintain and develop safeguards to ensure AI is used safely.
“Changes at this scale and at this speed can be worrying, especially when experts warn of security risks,” the Prime Minister said.
A boost to productivity
Productivity in Britain has been somewhat stagnant for the past 15 years, but using the full power of AI, the Prime Minister hopes to give the British economy the boost it so desperately needs.
This, of course, is if AI can increase worker efficiency, rather than causing widespread unemployment.
Recent research suggests that AI could displace up to 275,000 jobs per year at peak adoption. Politicians and tech leaders alike have long insisted that AI will simply take over workers’ mundane tasks, rather than replace them, but as someone who has worked in one of the many jobs made up entirely of “mundane” tasks, I have to be skeptical.
