Is the AI dream over for Andy?

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0:37Tim Shipman: Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots. I'm Michael Simmons and today I'm joined by James Heal and Tim Shipman. James, you've written the political column in the magazine this week about Andy Burnham's approach to AI. What's your assessment? Well, I think it's very much still up in the air. We had Andy Burnham speaking at the UN General Assembly at the beginning of the week and he was very much talking about how Britain intends to approach this attitude. He effectively wants to have some kind of norms and ethics, but did not want to sign up to the Finnish proposal, which would do just that. And I think that's because we are very much sort of in between a rock and a hard place in the sense that we obviously want to encourage our AI industries.

1:16Tim Shipman: Britain is seen by most commentators as basically a third power in this behind the US and China. But the other point, of course, is that the Americans very much do not want to regulate AI. And I think over the past 24, 48 hours, actually, there have now been reports suggesting that the US has been pushing places like Anthropic and OpenAI not to share their models with the UK Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, which was the big thing that Rishishinak set up in 2023. So I think there's a real issue about how Andy Burnham positions this, given that, you know, Donald Trump doesn't want to be pinned down at all.

1:50Tim Shipman: But essentially, he comes after Keir Starmer, Rishishinak, both of whom were fairly enthusiastic about AI and its potential. My sense is from talking to people in the Labour Party, the group around Nandi Burnham is a bit more sceptical. You see people like Chris Bryant and Lisa Nandi join the cabinet. They have the kind of culture department's copyright scepticism. They're very concerned about that in relation to AI. And you've also seen some of the enthusiasts like Liz Kendall and Peter Kyle leave. So this is such a rapidly evolving party government strategy. It's only going to get bigger. But the question is where are we going in the next 18 months?

2:20Tim Shipman: And for me, I'm not entirely sure we'll be the world leader that some in the government believe it can be. That's right isn't it Tim I mean James says we're the third the third biggest kind of AI player but we don't actually have any influence over this right the Americans are just going to do what the Americans want to do.

2:34James Heale: Yeah, I mean, look, we had a sort of unique capability, I guess, which was this safety institute, which Sunak set up and Starmer, to be fair to him, kept going. And, you know, Burnham has now appointed a bunch of people with experience. Henry de Zoot, former Tory special advisor, who was involved in setting up that safety institute. He's now got another job doing AI stuff. So there is a decent bit of cross-party continuity at the top. I think James is right. There is more scepticism around Burnham. He's more worried about jobs and that sort of thing than about, you know, the white heat of technology, to coin a phrase.

3:09James Heale: And I think, you know, his speech at the UN was effectively saying, look, Britain can be this kind of honest broker between the US and China. We can be the sort of safety people. But, you know, if the ASI is not going to get access to the models, then that sort of removes our unique capability. and then in terms of sort of making use of this stuff I think there are some pretty big warning signs coming out of this government and particularly out of the back benches of the Labour Party Prime Minister's questions a couple of weeks ago someone stood up and said we don't want these data centres what are you going to do to stop that Prime Minister and he sort of said well you know it might be a good thing to have some data centres and you might get a clustering of tech companies that would be good for jobs it's not just a sort of negative and I think Kanishka Narayan And the AI minister has been out and about in the last 24 hours saying people are going to have to expect that there will be more data centres around the country.

4:02James Heale: But bluntly, you know, we don't have enough cheap electricity to fund as many data centres as it would be useful to have in terms of maximising the opportunity for both the public and for government to make use of AI at the scale that, you know, people think that it might be beneficial to do so. and there's a sort of instinctive scepticism of all of this on the left I think and that to a degree is shared by Burnham I think there's a view that it's all being done by these nasty right-wing tech billionaires firstly they're billionaires which makes them inherently suspicious to the left then they've got views they're kind of a lot of people who've made money out of this are you know they're mavericks they're sort of you know independent entrepreneurs who've you know taken a risk and all the rest of it these are precisely the kind of people who do not have a sort of worldview that your average Labour MP has.

4:49James Heale: So I think they're suspicious of it. I think that means that government is probably going to make less use of it than they might do. And I think it means that, you know, we will not be cutting edge of this for very long. Now, admittedly, America and China are our streets head of everybody and everybody agrees with that. But we're also caught between, you know, America and Europe, where the tendency is to want to regulate everything excessively. And I don't think the government yet has a clear line on this is how far we'll go to take advantage of it but this is where we ought to draw a line the problem is this technology is totally transformational and ultimately even if you came up with some international regulation would Iran stick to it?

5:26James Heale: Would North Korea stick to it? Would even China stick to it? It's got to be grave scepticism about that really

5:31Tim Shipman: For me the telling thing is how many articles by politicians about this are peppered with question marks it's almost like sometimes reading or listening to Sex and the City by Carrie Bradshaw Or, you know, are we the real AI that might be changed, etc.? There are just so many. And the point being is that there aren't that many answers. This is so fast evolving. This column is a stab to have a picture in time of where government thinking is at. And, of course, AI means everything. That's everything from spellcheck. All of us are perfectly content to let spellcheck on our computers. But what about, for instance, replying to casework at an MP level?

6:00Tim Shipman: And I think this is the thing. At local level, increasingly pressure is growing at a popular level, I think, to sort of have a bit of a backlash against AI. You see that with jobs.

6:07James Heale: You see that with data centres. And the other thing the MPs are getting, James, as I think you referenced, a lot of people now contacting MPs are using AI. So if you've got a case that you want an MP to take up, you're now bombarding them with hundreds of pages of documentation that has been helpfully summarised for you by AI. And you've got a legal opinion that chat or Claude or whoever else has given to you. So this is now becoming a sort of pain for the MPs as well.

6:33Tim Shipman: Precisely. And of course, you've also got diffuse interests and benefits potentially from AI versus concentrated lobbying groups against it who are saying, hang on a sec, we don't want to take away. So I think there's pressure to regulate. I think the point that Tim says about it's an elite consensus fear of AI reform, the conservatives, they all back AI, you know, Lib Dems broadly. But it's at a popular level, there'll be pressure growing there. The point I make about Anna Burnham has a potential opportunity here, which is about he could do what the AI hardware plan did in July this year, which was having more money put into chips and build up British industry.

7:02Tim Shipman: You look at the Brunel plant in Bristol. But to do that, as Tim says, you need cheaper energy. And again, it's the thing that the big fight this Labour government has always been kicking down the road for the past two years, which is are you going to sort of kibosh a lot of the net zero targets? Because that is in some ways holding back our prices, which, of course, are five times higher than in America. And Tim, another thing that James mentions in his column is that Andy Burnham is going to judge AI and in fact, apparently all policies by what he calls the maker field test. is that a sensible way to judge policy?

7:34James Heale: There may be some political upside in it but I don't think it's the way to judge economic policy I don't think it's the way to judge a long-term vision for the country if you simply go along with what you think people in maker field want I suspect you would have ended up turning against a lot of technology in the 19th and early 20th centuries that were transformational you know people operating looms didn't really want high-tech weaving equipment but of course it came along and helped boost growth and all the rest of it. So look, I don't want to just paint people of Makerfield as backwards looking but I think you've got to look at it in the round.

8:07James Heale: I think you've got to, you know, as Burnham hinted in his reply to that MP a few weeks ago, you know, it's not just AI comes along and takes a bunch of jobs, it can also boost economic growth and it can create different jobs. The question really in all these big moments of technological transformation is how quickly can mankind adapt and how quickly can governments, you know, help people to adapt, train people up in the new skills that they need. You know, this stuff will become second nature to a lot of people. It seems like witchcraft to a lot of people, you know, over the age of 50 at this point.

8:38James Heale: But, you know, younger folk will come along and make a field who will literally be using this every day of their lives for as long as they live. And, you know, there's no reason that they need to be quite so fearful of it. But at the moment, it doesn't feel really like the government understands it or really like it grasps, you know, how to take advantage of it, and even less what might be done to mitigate, you know, the potential risks of it.

9:00Tim Shipman: I would also make the point that, you know, Labour Party conferences this weekend, Andy Burnham said in his UN speech, you're going to hear more about this in the coming days, I suspect we'll have a reference somehow to AI. The Labour Party, the clues in the name, very much cares about jobs in this. What I was trying to get at with this column was opening with the scene of Makerfield. If you go to Makerfield, there's a huge number of white van man there who are basically self-employed tradesmen, this could potentially be very good for them. You know, it could make accounting costs lower. If you go to Wigan Council, they've got social care.

9:28Tim Shipman: It's being adapted by AI. So there's a lot of commentary at the moment about whose jobs will benefit and who will lose out from AI. There's a potential called a so-called collar flip, which is that blue collar jobs do well out of AI, white collar jobs, accountants maybe don't. But I would make the point that we don't yet know what's going to happen. And it's been prophesied before many, many times over the past hundred years or so that actually we would have a huge jobs loss and actually we've had more and more jobs created over that time. Estimates from The Economist suggest a million new jobs have been added in America from AI.

9:56Tim Shipman: We could potentially see similar things. We don't yet know. What I would make the point is that people like Darren Jones are raising the question about will AI spell the end of a lot of jobs? There is some evidence to suggest that it's made life harder for graduates in this country. So it is going to be potentially a huge shift. And I do think that if you look at what people like William Hager are saying is that Andy Burnham has a chance at this conference this weekend to make a popular case for AI or shift or lead public opinion on this. He hasn't really yet done that. And I would argue that in this country, we have a fairly elite consensus behind AI.

10:26Tim Shipman: Sunak and Stavr's team believe this. The question is, can it be made in a popular forum as well? Particularly at the time when you're up against the Greens who have pretty history of a degrowth strategy. Well, that's very good. Thanks, James. Thanks, Tim. And thank you for listening to Coffeehouse Shots.

11:06We'll see you next time.

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