Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, made a speech last week at UCL East. The ‘typescript‘ on the Government website is astonishing. The whole thing is printed in the style of a Mr Men book. Now, perhaps this is justified by the fact that Starmer was speaking rather than writing: but it still seems to be somewhat alarming that politicians do not speak in sentences but in a sort of liturgical dirge style in which there is a continual doleful optimism.
Contemplate the Mr Men style in the opening lines of the speech:
Deb Kelly is a prison officer and a PE instructor.
Two years ago, this month…
She got up on a Saturday morning…
And collapsed on the floor.
Her whole face had completely drooped.
Her left side had gone completely weak.
She was having a stroke.
She was found by her son, rushed to hospital…
Where the doctors used Artificial Intelligence…
To help pinpoint the exact location of the blood clot.
They successfully removed it.
“Well done!” said Mr First Lord of the Treasury.
This is odd. It is paginated as if it is poetry. Perhaps Starmer had it written like this so he could offer it to the London Review of Books as a poem. Or so the Roger Hargreaves Estate could add it to the canon.
That’s the form.
The content is AI.
Starmer is keen on AI. He thinks it will “transform” things. Three things. He uses the word “transform” three times. AI will transform “the lives of working people”. It will transform “our entire understanding of biology”. It will transform “our public services”.
Biopower!
Anyhow, Starmer is keen on AI, and keen to reassure us 1. that there is no serious danger, 2. that there is a Government agency tasked with reassuring us that there is no danger. How? By regulating AI. Good.
What is AI?
Answer 1. It is a grandiose assimilator of words, also replicator, digestor: a self-teaching, massively cancerous self-teaching computer programming system. For some reason, everyone seems to accept it as an inevitability. Why?
Answer 2. Why? Well, it is the solution to All Our Problems. It will replace Theresa May’s Magic Money Tree, it will plaster over Rachel Reeves’s Black Hole, it will break strikes for the stay-at-home British Work Ethic, and it will compensate for our lack of Common Sense. It will write every application letter, compose every undergraduate essay, and write every political speech from now on.
Here is Starmer. AI will (and I quote) “help in the fight against tax avoidance… halve the time social workers spend on paperwork… make public services more human… [give doctors and nurses] more time for the personal touch… turbocharge every single element of our Plan for Change”.
This is funny and scary. AI will be so busy doing what a doctor should do that the person formerly called ‘Doctor’ will now be called a ‘Bedside Mannerer First Class’ while the person formerly called ‘Nurse’ will now be called a ‘Beside Mannerer Second Class’. And notice how much of this AI is to be used to ensure that the Kraken Government maintains its grip on the Ship of State: by fighting tax avoidance and turbocharging plans for change.
If the benefits of AI are the first part of his speech, the impetus to become a leader in AI technology is the second part. “Britain is going to shape the future.” “This is the nation of Babbage, Lovelace and Turing,” he says, listing three figures as little like Starmer as it is possible to be. He then lists a lot of companies I have never heard of, which are clustering around, attracting and extracting much cash – OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale, Mistral AI, Wayve, Synthesia, Blackstone, Kyndryl, Nscale, Vantage Data Centres – and likens what is happening now to the industrial revolution. He says that Britain was once “the cradle of engineering innovation”, and presumably hopes that it will be the nursing home of engineering innovation too.
The bit that puzzled me most was this section of the speech:
And, then of course, the engine of AI progress…
…is what’s called compute.
We’ll increase our public sector compute…
Not by a factor of two or three or even 10….
But by 20.
Eh? Is he using “compute” as a noun? My dictionary knows no such thing. I asked Google, and I found a discussion thread on Reddit from 2020 where someone notes that “compute” has become a noun, and someone else explains that it is common language in “cloud-related” or “cloud-adjacent” industries. Perhaps people don’t want to use “computation” any more. I wonder if the emphasis is on the first syllable. (ComPUTE is the verb; COMpute is the noun, perhaps?) I check the video of the speech on YouTube (at around 12 minutes in) and find that Starmer is a bit unsure: first, he says, “it’s what’s called comPUTE…”, then he adds, “We’ll increase our public sector COMpute…”)
This has to be translated into English.
The English translation is:
I, Keir Starmer, propose that the Government magnifies its power by employing AI knowledge-assimilating power-grabbing linguistic tools.
(Knowledge is power, quoth Francis Bacon, four centuries ago.) He is a bit clearer in the text of the article he published in the Financial Times on January 13th to coincide with his speech.
Britain should be excited by this. For one, it offers credible hope of a long-desired boost in public sector productivity. Nurses, social workers, teachers, police officers — for millions of frontline workers, AI can give the precious gift of time. This means they can refocus on the care and connection aspects of their job that so often get buried beneath the bureaucracy. That’s the wonderful irony of AI in the public sector. It provides an opportunity to make services feel more human.
“Public sector productivity” is as bad as “public sector compute”. (Though I suspect it may mean that frontline workers will have more time for the shirking parts of their jobs.) But this “public sector compute” seems to be a euphemism for what is elsewhere called “sovereign AI”. CNBC Africa comments:
Sovereign AI has become a hot topic for policymakers, particularly in Europe. The term refers to the idea that technologies critical to economic growth and national security should be built and developed in the countries people are adopting them in.
The UK wants a Little England (or Chinatown) version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT so that it can carry out more coups d’état against its poor subjects. And of course the private corporations want a piece of the action. One CEO (of a company called Antler), a man with the alarming name of Magnus Grimeland, identified the £7 trillion pounds of English pension funds as a “pocket” – his word – that he would like to pick. “Imagine if you take just 5% of that and allocate it to innovation — you solve the problem.”
Starmer himself in the FT adds: “AI has arrived as the ultimate force for change and national renewal.”
Good Lord. Is anyone thinking this through?
What I worry about is this. Many significant grim commentators are saying that the United Kingdom – even if we ignore Brexit, Covid, Climate, Diversity and Immigration – has gone through colossal changes, economic on the one hand (Bank of England, OBR, excessive borrowing, bailing out banks, inflation, no joined-up policy etc.) and political and constitutional on the other (undermining Parliament by Devolution, the Supreme Court, Quangos etc.) If this is so, as it is, then isn’t Starmer hoping that AI will bail out this bloated superstate? He seems to be wagering not on putting the house in order, but in hoping for a miracle to come along, a “game changer” (and add other fashionable phrases, as Starmer does). In other words, he is what the haughty ladies of the Guardian call a ‘tech bro’.
It seems to me that there is a moral case against AI. Most of the things promised seem strictly unnecessary. And every time we turn to AI to do something we only demonstrate our unwillingness to do it ourselves. In relation to manual labour, technical advance was mostly a blessing: relieving us or our animals of hours of milling, reaping, cutting etc. But since AI is a linguistic system, what we are facing is the destruction or demoralisation of our own linguistic abilities. Why learn to write when AI can write for us?
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
Editor’s note: Apart from anything else, AI keeps getting even simple things wrong. Twice this week the Google ‘AI Overview’ that now appears at the top of searches has given false information. In looking up a George Orwell quote, the AI Overview wrongly asserted that it came from 1984, when in fact it comes from a preface to Animal Farm.
The AI Overview also claimed, in a different search, that the correct phrase is “hone in on”, while “home in on” is a “common mistake”. In fact, as the top search result below the AI Overview, an article from Merriam-Webster, relays, the original phrase is “home in on”, derived from homing pigeons, and “hone in on” is a more recent corruption.
If AI can’t even get simple facts like these correct – facts confirmed in Google’s own top search results – how can it possibly be trusted with anything of any consequence?
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No he doesn’t.
Nobody does.
Everything is labelled AI. Buzzword, innit.
It’s like the weeks and months in the runup to the .com bubble bursting.
At least the internet was and still is useful.
Watching arrogant, clueless numpties like Starmer tie themselves in knots is bloody hilarious. Grab the popcorn, folks.
I have a Phd in AI/ML. There are limits to both. ML is a subset of AI. All depends on the data sources and the logic within the code. If you use AI to translate an english sentence into python – it is great. If you use AI to query why Relativity is horsehit and fake science, it is a joke. AI only returns the data it has access to. Whoever controls that data can control the narrative.
So no Sir Idiot Starmtard knows nothing. Nothing about AI, nothing about the pros and cons; nothing about the jobs that will be gained/lost; nothing about how AI can be manipulated. Stuck Farmer.
Perhaps it’s another method of governments shifting responsibility from themselves, a bit like a super quango.
it seems clear to me that having a robust system that can quickly provide a set of possibilities based on the given circumstances is very, very helpful. But for the algorithm to rewrite itself, ie the basic core program, is pie in the sky, and if it is possible is dangerous.
Many of the people I have worked with over 40 years or more who have been involved with code would fail to fit in the description of well-balanced human being. I haven’t met many recently, but I have a feeling that enforced working from home has probably not improved the situation. This can only impact on the systems they are involved with which are designed to interact with humans.
I don’t think Starmer knows what he’s talking about on what he had for breakfast. But if he didn’t like it I’m sure he’d find a way to blame the ‘far right’.
I was going to say we could shorten that sentence as well…
2TFGStarmer is supposed to be a lawyer. He should recognise that there is nothing illegal or wrong in “tax avoidance”. The government even encourages it with ISAs and Pensions. It’s tax evasion that is wrong (if understandable).
If a government is acting illegally tax evasion can hardly be described as wrong.
Tax evasion would be an ethical way to react to a corrupt government, otherwise you help perpetuate corruption.
Only problem is, they’ll go after you if you try!
Which is why using cash is essential. I can hardly be held responsible if someone doesn’t pay tax can I?
Cameron started this idea in June 2012 when he came out with criticising what was absolutely legal and equating it to a moral sin. “Frankly some of these schemes where people are parking huge amounts of money offshore and taking loans back to just minimise their tax rates is not morally acceptable.
“Some of these schemes we have seen are quite frankly morally wrong” In 2016 his hypocrisy was revealed by Ch4 news no less “The Prime Minister is under pressure after admitting that he had a stake in an offshore investment fund set up by his late father, despite being an outspoken critic of tax avoidance.
While some of his political opponents are calling for his resignation, David Cameron insists his assets were “subject to all the UK taxes in all the normal way”.
Some of us are old enough to remeber Harold Wilson wittering on about something he called the white hot heat of [technological charnge] all the while subsidising low grade jobs and driving inovators away through high taxation and exchange controls.
Starmer needed a word or phrase that sounded significant and his PR people came up with this.
Starmer is actually an expert on AI, his intelligence is artificial.
Very good!
Personally, I can see a lot more Natural Stupidity in his government.
Perhaps Sir Starmer should have a word with Mr Miliband first. Already a number of Gigawatt data centres are being planned in the US. By way of comparison, the whole UK peaks at just below 40GW. And our electricity is way more expensive than the US. Can we build these in the UK?
As for the value of A.I., and making government departments more efficient, no it won’t. Parkinsons law is alive and well, and all that will happen is the same number of staff will invent more and more bureaucracy and red tape to fill in the time created by A.I. So each task will be cheaper, but many more tasks will be invented – self preservation is a powerful instinct, especially for bureaucrats.
The never ending problem with the Civil Service is that every civil servant needs an assistant.
CT and MRI have been used for over 40 years to pinpoint the site of strokes.
Both modalities use powerful software programmes to generate images. Nothing to do with “AI” whatever that is… well, in Starmer’s case it’s Absent Intelligence.
That’s what I mean in my comment above. AI is what people now say for “things computers do” (as if computers were, are or ever will be sentient).
You are right. The idiot thinks he’s on to something new, like it’s just come to his attention the wheel has been invented.
Some years ago “AI” was called “Fuzzy Logic” – wiki explains.
”Neural networks based artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic are, when analyzed, the same thing—the underlying logic of neural networks is fuzzy.”
”Neural networks based artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic are, when analyzed, the same thing—the underlying logic of neural networks is fuzzy. A neural network will take a variety of valued inputs, give them different weights in relation to each other, combine intermediate values a certain number of times, and arrive at a decision with a certain value. Nowhere in that process is there anything like the sequences of either-or decisions which characterize non-fuzzy mathematics, computer programming, and digital electronics. In the 1980s, researchers were divided about the most effective approach to machine learning: decision tree learning or neural networks. The former approach uses binary logic, matching the hardware on which it runs, but despite great efforts it did not result in intelligent systems. Neural networks, by contrast, did result in accurate models of complex situations and soon found their way onto a multitude of electronic devices.”
And…
“Fuzzy logic is an important concept in medical decision making. Since medical and healthcare data can be subjective or fuzzy, applications in this domain have a great potential to benefit a lot by using fuzzy-logic-based approaches.”
”One of the common application areas of fuzzy logic is image-based computer-aided diagnosis in medicine.[28] Computer-aided diagnosis is a computerized set of inter-related tools that can be used to aid physicians in their diagnostic decision-making.”
So Dear Leader Starmwurstführer being the ignoramus and nitwit he is, wouldn’t know this.
Dr Alexander’s article indicates a significant degree of ignorance on Kneel’s part which is hardly a sensible position to occupy given his position.
Politicians in general seem to me more like actors than anything. They say some lines and try to be convincing. Perhaps they sometimes believe them and sometimes understand them, but mostly it just seems like saying what they think people want to hear and making sure that they can weasel out of being accountable when promises X and Y are not delivered on – usually by spouting meaningless vague platitudes. As long as a large proportion of the electorate continue to hope, expect and believe that the state can solve almost all their problems, politicians will continue to do this.
God help us if we are going to be offered a “Starmer meme” crypto-currency too.
He could call them 2TK tokens or similar, value….. less than zero
I recall reading recently that the NHS were getting a quantum computer to help with their rotas.
https://quantumzeitgeist.com/uk-unveils-quantum-computing-center-to-tackle-nhs-rotas-and-more/
My understanding is that quantum is theoretically workable but not ready for use.
Rota generation is hardly an unsolvable problem and I’m willing to bet that nobody in the NHS has any understanding of why they want it, except that it sounds cool.
And it’s ‘reassuringly expensive’, so it must be good AND cool…
rota creation has been done on spreadsheets for years, it isn’t difficult. The main issue they will have is a crazy selection of competing and overlapping or contradictory rules and policies… they shouldn’t be systemising anything until they sort that out
In the 30+ years that I have been using computers, the hardware and the software have become steadily more capable. Setting aside the buzzword use of the term “AI”, has some threshold been crossed which separates AI from the old world of ever ‘smarter’ computing?
Not in my (admittedly fairly uneducated in this area) opinion. My 10 yo daughter likes to call everything “AI” and I’ve given up explaining to her that there’s nothing really that special about it, it’s just a continuation of computer intelligence that has been developing for a very long time. It’s now been given a fancy new name (and somehow become acceptable to use to “cheat” on essays, speech writing and so on in a way that would never have been allowed in the recent past) and touted by idiots such as Starmer as the saviour of mankind.
We presumably can’t really afford the electricity that will be used to run the data centres anyway, under the terms of the new Climate and Nature Bill!
I wonder if.
The said Deb Kelly.
Had ever received
An mmRNA.
“Covid Vaccine”.
And if so.
Could that.
Have caused.
The stroke.
This is odd. It is paginated as if it is poetry.
The speech was written by AI, isn’t it obvious!
That was my first thought and it makes everything meaningless, to not know whether or not a human has put any genuine effort into writing something.
Just watched Trump announce his AI plans to Davos. I think that has put an end to Starmer’s plans.
Well, we’ve already had the Babbage Engine, maybe 2TK can come up with the Cabbage Engine.
Halfwit.
AI cannot be trusted. It picks up high profile bits and pieces and ignores soundly based specialist stuff. I discovered this when I ran a check on what it said about an eminent plastic surgeon, Sir Harold Gillies, where it referenced a populist knock-off of my own comprehensive study published a few years earlier, but did not reference mine, which was based on a large primary source collection that I found myself.
Well AI’s f**ked if TTK’s pushing it.
He was basically announcing the creation of Big Brother …. and assuming we wouldn’t understand the implication of his words and that we’d all cheer at the Government’s intention to “cancel” privacy and autonomy and control our lives.
AI often does get things wrong and the problem is that you need to know the subject to spot the mistakes.
And that is where the one of the dangers lies; if you don’t know the subject and believe what AI is telling you to be true.
I asked Grok AI What is the ‘best’ complete theory of everything?
The reply :-
“The “best” theory would ideally be experimentally testable, mathematically consistent, and capable of explaining all known phenomena along with making new, falsifiable predictions. Until then, the search for a complete ToE remains one of the greatest challenges in theoretical physics.”
So we encounter known human blindness as opposed to AI blindness.
Keir Starmer, with childhood delight, struggles for words as he believes he has ‘The Answer’. AI.
It’s actually quite like a politician… rather than saying ‘I don’t know and there isn’t an answer’, it makes up something that really says nothing at all.
First class.
If we ever have enough cheap electricity to run AI, it will be used to make the public sector even more lazy. We won’t have a private sector by then
The quest for real artificial intelligence started back in the 1970s when computers were just starting out. At that time AI meant being able to think and build knowledge like the human brain. It could program itself. The AI today is nowhere near this. It is just a computer program that is very good at presenting things that have been programmed into it or that already exist as structured data. It does not think or create data so in reality in not really AI but just a smart and different computer program that pretends to be thinking. All of AIs traits such as political opinions and leanings are programmed. Be wary of the hype being built around AI, as it sounds like another scam coming our way the purpose of which is $$ and control.
We have become a nation of stupid, ignorant wretches. Many, many English language failures are appearing, not least the apalling ‘bored of’ instead of the correct ‘bored with’ . We have allowed far too many to go to university and indulge their personal fantasies of being intelligent. Most (90%) university graduates have an IQ suitable for shop and factory tasks only.
We are a collapsing, thick nation, that is being dragged further down by bringing in third world, barely civilised, low IQ people from the Stan’s and Africa.
Prepare for the collapse. For it cometh.