Unruled e-Britannia

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4-min read

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“Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians,” advised Charles de Gaulle. So, with an election and new government looming, can we rely on Britain’s forthcoming administration to respond wisely to the imminent technology revolution that promises to provide humanity with godlike powers and economic rewards worth tens of trillions of dollars?

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Based on recent history, Britain’s political prospects for this aren’t great. Across decades, while claiming techno-leadership the UK Government’s dithering has stifled technological progress and worse: recall the failed ￡9.8 billion NHS computer system upgrade; the broken benefits system; the Covid-19 contact tracing app debacle, the Horizon scandal...

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We are on the brink of a transformation of human civilisation, powered by advanced AI, biotechnology and a penumbra of other transformative technologies, as Mustafa Suleyman’s book, The Coming Wave, forcefully explains. Governments need an urgent agenda of actions to harness technology’s huge benefits while avoiding its catastrophic dangers, as only governments can tackle many of the societal and political issues this will raise.

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In 1999 Tony Blair declared that he was going to make Britain the best place in the world to do e-commerce. His Labour government then proceeded to squander vital UK opportunities – they failed to control and leverage the .uk domain, to back TrustUK, to support Greenwich Electronic Time tools, to foster digital high streets... As of 2020, .uk is the fourth most popular country code top-level domain with over 113 million registrations – millions of .uk domains have been acquired by foreign entities, attempting to give the impression that they are British and trustworthy, when often they are neither.

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Since 2010 the digitophobic Conservative government’s laissez-faire approach has left the development of the digisphere to the giant companies whose technologies enable it, resulting in everyone else scrambling to remain relevant in a fast-changing world.

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2015 saw Prime Minister David Cameron – soundbite in hand – introduce a universal service obligation whereby fast broadband would be considered similar to other basic services such as water, electricity and mail – to guarantee broadband access to all. Yet in mid-2018 the UK had slipped from thirty-first to thirty-fifth place in the global broadband league table, behind twenty-five other European countries: in 2021 the UK’s ranking had slumped to forty-third. To date, every UK government broadband pledge ever made has been either missed or rolled back.

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In this rudderless digital environment, online crime is rampant and goes unchecked; the super-rich get super-richer; unbridled social media amplifies absurdity and legitimises guile; young people are alienated and depressed, deprived of the relative economic security of previous generations. What should be bringing prosperity is instead all too often bringing misery.

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“We must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention”, said Boris Johnson, while mayor of London in 2010, speaking of the Harry Potter novels.

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But that is exactly what we continue to do. Britain’s dismal record of leaving it to others to monetise our inventions includes the first modern computer, the microchip, the World Wide Web, HTTP, the first web browser, supercomputers, laptop computers, the RSA cipher, the Linux kernel, fibre optics, liquid crystal displays, cash machines, micro-TVs, teletext, SMS text messaging, touchpads, the MP3 audio player, ARM architecture that powers nearly every smartphone...

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As the world moved from an oil-driven economy to a data-driven economy – the most momentous economic and geopolitical development of the last century – UK governments, both red and blue, lounged on the sidelines, occasionally administering suggestions.

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This has to change. The coming explosive technological revolution is the most consequential issue of our times. Big Tech is poised to be uniquely disruptive, accelerating change faster than institutions can adapt. The resulting proliferation of power can be used for human good – or threaten everything we have built.

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The UK has considerable strength in AI, though a distant second to the US as an AI world leader. We have over 3,000 AI companies that generated ￡10 billion of AI related revenues last year. And Britain has a globally respected and socially minded champion in London-born Oxford drop-out, Mustafa Suleyman, who is CEO of Microsoft AI, having previously co-founded DeepMind, a UK AI company that was acquired in 2014 by Google and sits at the centre of their AI research, maintaining its largest campus in London.

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Our government claims that Britain is a global superpower in AI and published a National AI Strategy in late 2022. But words are cheap, and governments are constantly distracted. We need the next UK government to take a highly proactive approach to technology, get way more involved, know in detail and deeply understand what is happening, exert far greater control, set standards. To achieve this will be expensive and require in-house expertise in national critical roles, instead of relying on management consultants and third-party suppliers.

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With elections looming, we all have opportunities to influence the forthcoming government’s focus, and then monitor and hold it accountable. Technology is complicated, so it’s incumbent on those who understand its implications to help enlighten those who don’t.

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The age of advanced technology is upon us, and we can’t afford to allow our politicians to screw it up.

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ENDS

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James Roper is author of the definitive book: “THE RISE OF E-COMMERCE – FROM DOT TO DOMINANCE” - https://amzn.eu/d/foXLD4k

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