Keir Starmer’s AI plan misses the central point of the fourth industrial revolution

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