At the Labour Party conference in Scarborough in 1963, Harold Wilson announced that Britain was about to embark on “a period of technical change… greater than in the whole Industrial Revolution of the last 250 years”. This great shift, Mr Wilson claimed, would come about because machines had learned to think. “Computers have reached the point where they command facilities of memory and of judgement far beyond the capacity of any human being,” he said. The revolution was not only miraculous but compulsory: Britain had “no accumulated reserves on which to live”, Mr Wilson warned, so it was “no good trying to comfort ourselves that automation need not happen here”. Resisting such advances would make Britain “a stagnant backwater”.
At the time this was heralded as a bold, new direction. But the promise of a future transformed by artificial intelligence has been repeated ever since. It is now the default position to intone that AI is, as Keir Starmer announced in January, “the defining opportunity of our generation”.
Science and technology have continued to drive economic and social change, but we have paid heavily for blind political faith in the power of disruptive innovation. Facebook arrived in the UK in 2005, and the iPhone in 2007, but it took a further 20 years for the UK to introduce specific legislation to address the potential harms posed by digital and social media. As the Online Safety Bill came into force on 17 March, campaigners asked if Ofcom might now be able to ban a website that hosts pictures and videos of the violent deaths of real people. Any newspaper or cinema that showed such horrors would be closed immediately, but governments continue to support the delusion that the digital realm is different, and that a platform does not bear the responsibilities of a publisher.
Similarly, a film studio or publisher would find itself in court if it made money from other people’s copyrighted works, but the government is reluctant to apply the same principle to the AI models built using huge data sets of other people’s writing, photographs, illustrations, films and songs, from which the models produce derivative works without any credit or payment.
Britain’s local papers and high streets have already lost out to Silicon Valley; its creative industries and free press will be next if America’s technology companies are allowed to mine its intellectual resources for free. Despite protests from artists such as Paul McCartney, and open letters signed by thousands of cultural figures, the UK government may still force British businesses and artists to “opt out” of their intellectual property being appropriated wholesale by overseas companies.
The data most prized by US technology companies are the medical records held by the NHS, as Andrew Marr writes. Rather than protect this resource, we are paying for the privilege of giving it to a US company, Palantir, which has developed close ties across Westminster.
Having spent many years courting the Chinese government, Big Tech has hastily aligned itself with the Trump administration and is now attempting to recast its data grab as essential to protecting Western democracy. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, said recently that without “unfettered access” to the world’s intellectual property, “the race for AI is effectively over”.
It is not, however, clear that the UK would have fallen behind in the international race had it better regulated social media or smartphone technology. And further questions remain. If the digital economy has delivered such wonders, where is the economic growth? Where are the fulfilling new jobs? Why have real wages barely recovered from a financial crash that took place 17 years ago? Why, despite these new technologies, is Britain’s labour productivity (which was rising rapidly in 1963) now in decline?
The Luddites – the 19th-century machine-breakers whom Mr Wilson invoked as emblems of our backward past – were not opposed to technology itself, but to the job losses and poverty that it allowed the owners of technology to inflict on them. Their government legislated not to defend their wages but to protect the machinery they smashed. Today’s government is right to explore the opportunities afforded by digital innovations. But in mutely accepting technological progress as a moral good, it risks replacing British interests with those of a foreign power that is no longer unequivocally our ally.
[See also: Trump’s Golden Age]
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age