Keir Starmer’s AI plan misses the central point of the fourth industrial revolution
No liberation in sight
Keir Starmer’s plan for artificial intelligence (AI) falls well short of the main point of the fourth industrial revolution. That is to liberate people from labouring work they don’t want to do, providing more time for social, creative, and intellectual endeavours.
Instead, Starmer is largely pursuing private sector for-profit ownership of AI that threatens to rob people of their work without fairly sharing the fruits that robots have created.
In his speech on AI, the prime minister paid some lip service to the issue, without saying how for-profit, private ownership of AI will facilitate it:
Who gets the benefits?
Just those at the top – or working people everywhere?
AI: utopia or apocalypse?
The thing is, there will be a point where capital increasingly becomes labour: where the money for resources equates to labour. That’s because in the long term the economy will be mainly automated rather than consisting of people providing the labour.
Without public ownership of that automation or some kind of citizens dividend, the opportunity for the utopia explored in Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism will be replaced by the opposite: AI-controlling overlords and a poverty stricken public.
Yet the public research and development funding for AI Starmer has issued is a drop in the ocean compared to the private investment we are seeing.
The government’s AI plan also mentions the environmental factor in this, given AI generation is an energy intensive process. But corporate lobbyists and fossil fuel donations have played a role in reducing the government’s green energy strategy to near zero, compared to what’s necessary.
In Labour’s first budget, the government issued just £100m to Great British Energy (GBE) for two years. That’s despite its already low pledge of £8bn by 2029. GBE aims to crowd in private investment in renewables. It falls far short of what we need. And it squanders the opportunity for a publicly funded Green New Deal.
The peoples’ work and funding to fuel private, for-profit tech
Starmer’s plan further proposes a national data library to power for-profit AI. That includes data from publicly funded institutions such as the British Library, the NHS, the BBC (through TV license), the Natural History Museum and the National Archives. It also includes reworking copyright law so AI can use people’s work, whether academic or creative.
All of this is essential for the development of AI. But why should people’s work and public funding fuel AI if the outcomes are going to be privately-owned profit generation? It only makes sense for public ownership of the outcomes: AI machines that could be liberating.
At present, the British people are already paying twice for education and information.
Once, to create research (for example, through Research Council funding).
Then, we are paying again to buy back the research through online journal subscriptions, university fees and public library costs. Despite funding the research, the taxpayer must pay again for access.
The for-profit agenda for AI threatens to prolong this reality but at a much greater scale, across the entire economy.
Featured image via the Canary
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The suggestion that there are two possible routes, one emancipatory and the other a living hell, is misleading. There is only the living hell. The history of human life is oppression for the many. Surveillance technology, the use of law and private contracts, atomisation to the extent that parents never lifted a finger in retaliation at introduction of university fees, have done nothing to stem the tide if rising house prices meaning young people will spend their lives being seriously fleeced by landlords. All societies are made up solely of family relationships, and friendships. Yet, those relationships count for nothing when it comes to the economy, parents have simply watched as their children’s futures are stolen by rentiers and not even bothered to shrug. That is what atomisation is, the absence of any emotional response to the destruction of the lives of those we claim to love, and it is largely complete, the great liberal vision of the free individual is done. There will be no uprising against this, no solidarity, people will simply sink in misery, complain about the usual suspects, and shift further to the right. There will be no emancipation, AI will not deliver “efficiency savings”, there won’t be a climate dividend, no ecological paradise awaits, only squalor, and the further degradation of human and all other life. Hate is the prevailing feeling here. Fred Newman, a psychologist, controversially noted that, if feelings drive actions (as psychologists often claim), then the only feeling that explains how parents allow their children to be treated by govt and the state (this was the US) is hate. He concluded that parents hate their children, because love would lead to a very different set of actions (joining together, marching on centres of power and dismantling them). The left in the UK has repeatedly capitulated to the right, since the first Labour insurgency into parliament didn’t set about dismantling it and returning power irreversibly to the people. The left uses the language of the right, and the false narratives of the right (tax funds spending, the economy is primary, govts don’t have their own money), and the institutions of the right (parliament, centralisation, hierarchy). We are finished. I don’t exclude myself from culpability here. There is no political party, no definitive election, that will solve this.
This misunderstanding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution needs setting right. WEF, states a plan, to remove 90% of the current world population. (a good start seems to have been made with mass murder of Wars and with the coronavirus hyped to the far edge of fear, whose results killed so many). Then to turn 9% into microchipped slaves, to serve the other (totally, dangerously deranged) 1%, who regard themselves as ‘important’.
It is really nasty and currently being followed by acolyte trainees of WEF (Aderne, Trudeau, Starmer, Von Der Leyen, Biden & others) who seem to be making a cock of it. That being our one hope to fight free and get the dangerous caught up.. and stopped! For that, Blackrock (Larry Fink) and all it’s tentacles, need to be prevented from continuing – with planned and executed wrongs set right, at their expense.. And a permanent cessation. of the ability in future, to continue down this inhuman road.
.. and then we need an actual education, into the entire population of the world, discounting, wherever necessary, the need to trap children in seats for years, and instead making the aim of their attainment, a learning how to think and learn. The fact that such education is mainly missing/withheld, accounts in large part, for the lack of observation of/objection to the current crop of tiny greedy, inhuman, ‘world masters’.
To say “All of this is essential for the development of AI” is playing their game. To rework copyright law so AI can use people’s work, whether academic or creative, is just allowing the, as you say private, owners of the AI technology to steal creative and academic work by tweaking it through AI and then give no recognition or recompense to the original creators.
We are all going to be paying the cost of AI as it destroys any small gains we’ve made in reducing energy usage and thus greenhouse emissions, and we will end up financing (through electricity bills) the massive increases in infrastructure needed to feed the AI leech that will then not only destroy the viability of many creative careers (something the UK is still a world leader in) but will replace that genuine creativity with a shiny bland corporate version made from the theft of ideas and original works rehashed.
Any AI bill needs to be reinforcing copyright, reinforcing people’s rights to protect their work and personal data from AI theft, and making sure that the expansion of power use by AI is controlled to a rate that can be sustained with renewables. Force them to limit grid usage and they will not only make massive advances in efficiency, but will have to put their own grid scale storage in a y new developments so they are making use of the excess power from wind and solar, not draining the vital base load and requiring more fossil fuel use. We also need to make sure that the “need” for AI does not lead to a massive expansion of badly regulated micro nuclear power, foisted on locals through the Govt’s new infrastructure planning regulations.
If you seriously think that ‘the main point of the fourth industrial revolution’ is ‘to liberate people from labouring work they don’t want to do, providing more time for social, creative, and intellectual endeavours. ‘, think again. This is just the WEF’s propaganda. As usual, the opposite is true. It will ‘liberate’ people from work they DO want to do, and it will make social, creative, and intellectual endeavours much more difficult by flooding them with fake information that has been manipulated to serve the oligarchs’ purposes. It is part of the digitisation of the entire economy, based on complete surveillance and control of everyone all the time. Everything you say, write, do, everywhere you go, your spending, your health, mind and body, everything will be constantly monitored and AI will decide whether is is ‘acceptable’ or not. (i.e. does it feed the plutocrats wealth and power, because that is our only value to them).
Justice like everything else will be automated – AI will issue rewards and punishments only the model of the Chinese Social Credit system. The future for almost everyone is apparently to live like a teenager plugged into the metaverse playing endless rounds of GrandTheft Auto, prevented from going outside because of the latest lockdown, or imprisoned within a smart neighbourhood where everything requires a vaccine passport.
The purposes of AI are (1) to create misinformation and manipulative fakery such that nobody will be able to think straight anymore. Everyone will be reduced to a fearful quivering wreck who dare not question anything for fear of being thought mad (2) to control everyone and everything, without any humanity, compassion, or kindness – because these things are obsolete. Look at Palestine. (2) to take the blame for any consequences – the destruction of people and planet alike can be blames on ‘technical faults’. Which can be fixed of course by more AI.
The good news is that (1) artificial intelligence is not real intelligence at all. It is incapable of replacing humans or providing services humans actually want or need. However coercive your capitalism, consumer demand is going to be hard to generate. It is a bubble that is going to burst and take down the investors in it (2) it requires so much energy to power it that it will require us to destroy the planet to generate it. (3) it and its massive infrastructure are extremely vulnerable to first, commercial competition and second, hacking or even physical destruction. (4) It is not sufficiently controllable by those who own it. Like all technologies it will sooner or later be used against its inventors.