June 9, 2023 - 7:30am
Rishi Sunak is in Washington DC to promote the UK as a global leader in regulating artificial intelligence. The Prime Minister’s office has already announced a conference, but also seeks to found “a nuclear-style global AI watchdog based in London”. For this, he needs President Joe Biden’s blessing, and the two are clearly ready to forge close Anglo-American ties, striking the “Atlantic Declaration” to reinforce economic security on Monday afternoon.
For a nation that pioneered the computer, invented packet switching networks — on which the design of today’s internet was based — and devised the most popular microprocessor architecture currently used in the world, this is quite a change of emphasis. Once a pioneer, the UK now seeks to be a bureaucratic overlord, the chief junketeer. But then talking about technology, rather than creating it, is where the political and administrative class sees the UK making a difference worldwide. A future conference will no doubt continue this theme.
Civil service recruitment places far greater value on communication skills than deep technical knowledge or STEM qualifications. For instance, the Government’s AI Council is led by a BA in graphic design and advertising, whose qualification for the role was hosting an AI conference the previous year. Typical of what we may expect to see is The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, which the UK helped create three years ago, and which studies how people discuss AI.
Is Sunak’s regulatory zeal justified? In February 2019 OpenAI, then a non-profit, declined to release a large language model project to the general public. This was GPT2, and the lab feared negative social and economic consequences from the low-cost production of fakes. When its successor GPT3 was released, OpenAI’s own researchers again warned of “misinformation, spam, phishing, abuse of legal and governmental processes, fraudulent academic essay writing and social engineering pretexting“. Then, in November, OpenAI decided to release ChatGPT anyway.
There are other motives for regulation. Ominously for creators, a review led by Sir Patrick Vallance calls for copyright to be weakened to help the AI companies, so publishers and artists could no longer decline to have their material ingested and reproduced. Intellectual property has bounced from the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), where it is considered an inconvenience. But beyond the vagaries, it is unclear what the government is actually trying to regulate.
Sunak’s impulse to control generative AI might be noble, then, but he and his advisers have no idea how to do it, while the problem has been compounded by a reliance on self-interested or poorly-equipped “experts”. The burgeoning AI ethics community, fretting instead over bias, diversity and representation issues, was also caught napping. So we shouldn’t be surprised when we hear the wolves agreeing to regulate the sheep. They might even agree.
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Subscribe“the Government’s AI Council is led by a BA in graphic design and advertising”
Well that pretty much sums up the intelligence of the government.
“Goldstaub is particularly concerned about AI’s potential for gender bias”
“…using her positions in highly visible roles with government and the London mayor’s office to promote diversity in tech.”
Maybe they should try merit, knowledge and experience for a change.
40 years as an EU vassal province inculcated the bloc’s debilitating ‘precautionary principle’ deep into the bones of a UK State already hostile to innovation and wealth creation. Ask Dyson. Risk aversion is woven deep into the sickly ethos of the Blairite New Order and its Technocratic enforcers. Control & mild authoritarianism is all these wfh wokey losers have. Lockdown was like blood spilling into their shark pool. No wonder regulation of AI is their limp best shot.
40 years as an EU vassal province inculcated the bloc’s debilitating ‘precautionary principle’ deep into the bones of a UK State already hostile to innovation and wealth creation. Ask Dyson. Risk aversion is woven deep into the sickly ethos of the Blairite New Order and its Technocratic enforcers. Control & mild authoritarianism is all these wfh wokey losers have. Lockdown was like blood spilling into their shark pool. No wonder regulation of AI is their limp best shot.
“the Government’s AI Council is led by a BA in graphic design and advertising”
Well that pretty much sums up the intelligence of the government.
“Goldstaub is particularly concerned about AI’s potential for gender bias”
“…using her positions in highly visible roles with government and the London mayor’s office to promote diversity in tech.”
Maybe they should try merit, knowledge and experience for a change.
This is exactly where we are at the moment. Government ministers who know absolutely nothing at all about anything, who are fed one-liners for comments on every situation, who have speechwriters telling them what to say – so what do they do?
They put forward a target – NetZero is a good example – and hope that everything will work out right. This ministers will experience no personal hardships nor privations, will want for nothing, but these targets will cause incredible misery and damage to real people. When everything goes wrong, these ministers will have other interests and will ignore us all.
Tony Blair invaded Iraq, it was wrong, many people died, many lost their homes. Tony Blair gets richer and richer and his grin gets wider and wider. He thinks to himself, “What a bunch of fools. Why would they listen to me?”
This is exactly where we are at the moment. Government ministers who know absolutely nothing at all about anything, who are fed one-liners for comments on every situation, who have speechwriters telling them what to say – so what do they do?
They put forward a target – NetZero is a good example – and hope that everything will work out right. This ministers will experience no personal hardships nor privations, will want for nothing, but these targets will cause incredible misery and damage to real people. When everything goes wrong, these ministers will have other interests and will ignore us all.
Tony Blair invaded Iraq, it was wrong, many people died, many lost their homes. Tony Blair gets richer and richer and his grin gets wider and wider. He thinks to himself, “What a bunch of fools. Why would they listen to me?”
I’m not sure what this article is trying to say. Surely the author does not expect the government to be actively developing LLMs.
Britain is indeed an AI pioneer. DeepMind was created in Britain by two Brits and a Kiwi working out of UCL. It was subsequently acquired by Google and now powers Bard, Google’s AI offering which i think is better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT4.
This has little to do with the British government. Arguably they foster the environment – the university system, the legal and financial framework behind capital formation and so on. But they don’t do the actual innovation.
Britain has 3 centres of excellence for AI – Oxford, Cambridge and UCL. It seems perfectly acceptable that we should be at the centre of thinking through the regulation in this area.
It is crucial that democratic politicians are ultimately in charge so that the people have a voice among the experts. If we had better reporting of these issues, the people would be more informed and make better choices.
I’m not sure what this article is trying to say. Surely the author does not expect the government to be actively developing LLMs.
Britain is indeed an AI pioneer. DeepMind was created in Britain by two Brits and a Kiwi working out of UCL. It was subsequently acquired by Google and now powers Bard, Google’s AI offering which i think is better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT4.
This has little to do with the British government. Arguably they foster the environment – the university system, the legal and financial framework behind capital formation and so on. But they don’t do the actual innovation.
Britain has 3 centres of excellence for AI – Oxford, Cambridge and UCL. It seems perfectly acceptable that we should be at the centre of thinking through the regulation in this area.
It is crucial that democratic politicians are ultimately in charge so that the people have a voice among the experts. If we had better reporting of these issues, the people would be more informed and make better choices.
“ Once a pioneer, the UK now seeks to be a bureaucratic overlord, the chief junketeer.”
The UK has an impressive record in basic science and engineering, but its record of growing industries based on those innovations is much weaker (I’m referring to the modern era, not industry in the Victorian era).
As has recently been suggested on Unherd, the UK is now a “vassal state” that must choose between the US and the EU as its overlord. It has chosen the US and must accept whatever scraps Washington sees fit to provide. In this case, the UK will fulfill an administrative function.
The EU has no scraps to offer. It has no modern technology industry and is currently struggling to maintain it traditional heavy industry while turning off its own energy supply.
We couldn’t align fully with the US while bound by the CU and SM. Now we can and we will benefit from doing so. Yesterday it was announced that our companies can bid for US IRA subsidies on the same basis as US companies (this wouldn’t have been possible in the EU). We are also working through a technology sharing framework as part of AUKUS which is not available to any other country but Australia.
The English intellectual and administrative classes have a long history of disdain for the creative abilities of (mere) engineers and technicians. Writers, performers and social reformers are given pride of place in our history.
Consider the case of Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine – appreciated in America, barely remembered in the UK. Worse, against his wishes his invention was handed over to the USSR, in the Stalin era, by communist sympathising elements in the British government – a betrayal of enormous value to the Soviet aerospace industry.
The EU has no scraps to offer. It has no modern technology industry and is currently struggling to maintain it traditional heavy industry while turning off its own energy supply.
We couldn’t align fully with the US while bound by the CU and SM. Now we can and we will benefit from doing so. Yesterday it was announced that our companies can bid for US IRA subsidies on the same basis as US companies (this wouldn’t have been possible in the EU). We are also working through a technology sharing framework as part of AUKUS which is not available to any other country but Australia.
The English intellectual and administrative classes have a long history of disdain for the creative abilities of (mere) engineers and technicians. Writers, performers and social reformers are given pride of place in our history.
Consider the case of Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine – appreciated in America, barely remembered in the UK. Worse, against his wishes his invention was handed over to the USSR, in the Stalin era, by communist sympathising elements in the British government – a betrayal of enormous value to the Soviet aerospace industry.
“ Once a pioneer, the UK now seeks to be a bureaucratic overlord, the chief junketeer.”
The UK has an impressive record in basic science and engineering, but its record of growing industries based on those innovations is much weaker (I’m referring to the modern era, not industry in the Victorian era).
As has recently been suggested on Unherd, the UK is now a “vassal state” that must choose between the US and the EU as its overlord. It has chosen the US and must accept whatever scraps Washington sees fit to provide. In this case, the UK will fulfill an administrative function.
I share the disdain for our overlords and their competence but this feels like a good move to me.
AI will be a huge factor in the coming years. It will definitely be regulated. Positioning Britain as the regulator sounds like good strategy. The sort of long term thinking the Chinese come up with.