Good morning. This Will Dunn, business editor of the New Statesman.
Over the past year I have conducted dozens of interviews with current and former ministers, officials and advisors, technologists and MPs about our government’s headlong rush into the AI future. The UK has committed to adopt AI more quickly than any other G7 economy. Plenty see it as a source of economic growth and a means to produce a smaller, more effective state.
But what I found in this investigation shocked me: a government that was wholly unprepared for the arrival of a transformative technology; officials and advisors whose belief in AI borders on religious faith; a network of vested interests; and a technology that has already been given power to shape every conversation, to write political speeches, to influence major economic decisions. “Make no mistake”, one former No 10 adviser told me, “this is a war.”
You can read an extract of my piece below, or click through to read it in full. It is free for paying subscribers (click here!). If you do not subscribe, you can avail of our Spring deal. Thanks for reading. Finn will be back on Saturday with a run down of the week in full.
Who is in charge?
On 20 April 2025, an official in the British government emailed their colleagues a story from that day’s Financial Times. The headline read: “UAE set to use AI to write laws in world first”. The officials, all of whom are involved in implementing AI in the running of the British state, read the article with amusement. “We were tempted to say: ‘We got there first,’” one of them told me. But they felt that the UK was “not fighting for the crown of the first AI-written line of legislation”, so they decided not to make public a fact very few people know: text composed by a large language model has made its way into an act of parliament. British laws are already being written by AI.
This is a matter of sovereignty. The software products we refer to as “AI” are all built on advanced “foundational models” from the US and China. This is a technology we do not control, but which plays an increasingly active role at every level of the British power structure. It is part of every conversation, drafting emails between officials, summarising ministers’ briefings and composing speeches delivered in the House of Commons. The Bank of England is using machine learning to inform its decisions on interest rates. The BBC uses AI to redraft articles. Every student at Oxford – where 31 of our previous prime ministers were educated – is now being educated with the help of OpenAI. There is little public understanding of how quickly this technology is moving through the institutions of power, or how enthusiastically it’s being pursued by a government that believes AI software could solve all its problems…
Thanks again, see you on Saturday.
The common yet questionable refrain incredibly still prevails amongst ‘free-market’ capitalist governments and corporate circles: It claims that best business practices, including what’s best for consumers, are best decided by business decision-makers.
While there must be a point at which such greed thus practice will end up hurting big business’s own monetary interests, can the unlimited-profit objective/nature be somehow irresistible? It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.
I sometimes wonder whether some morbidly and self-mortally greedy corporate officers may know their big businesses will inevitably, if not imminently, collapse due to a great lack of consumers who can afford those big businesses’ products — perhaps including some would-be consumers who’d lost their jobs to employer-profit-maximizing Artificial Intelligence or other forms of non-human automation; yet, the corporate officers will nonetheless continue ardently politically supporting (via covert lobbying of governments, of course) the very economic system, especially its below-poverty-line minimum wage, that is basically going to ruin their big businesses.
As strange as it likely sounds, perhaps those corporate officers cannot help themselves, and even they realize an intervention by a truly-independent body/entity may be needed, one completely untouchable by the morally- and/or ethically-corrupt corporate lobbyists. ‘We scorpions simply cannot help ourselves. We need externally independent intervention, but we will still resist it. It's in our nature.’
Clearly, many Western governments need to cling much less onto a long-outdated capitalist-manifesto mentality and instead open their eyes to increasingly disturbing corporate greed that's ignoring, if not even exploiting, the growing number of financially struggling citizens.
Instead, corporate officers continue shrugging their shoulders and defensively saying their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. And shareholders also go on shrugging their shoulders while stating they just collect the dividends and that the big bosses are the ones who make the decisions involving ethics/morals or lack thereof.
'Bullshit baffles brains' and an AI assisted web search can tell you why. Good policy requires critical thinking about the advice you receive, be that from the office bullshitter or Generative AI.