The purpose of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was to allow a guard to monitor any inmate of a prison at any time, without the inmate being aware of the surveillance. Yet despite the panopticon being deemed too cruel for convicted criminals, even by the standards of 19th-century justice, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has now specifically referred to the device as being part of her “ultimate vision” to keep an eye on criminals — and by extension the general public.

This comes as police chiefs evaluate around 100 projects in which officers tested the use of AI to combat crime. Mahmood told attendees of the Tony Blair Institute’s Christmas party last month that “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.” A new age of digital law enforcement is around the corner.

British law enforcement takes an increasingly lackadaisical attitude towards keeping track of burglaries, muggings, bicycle theft and shoplifting, seen as crimes resulting in a charge or summons continue to decline. It’s therefore surprising to hear that the Home Office is now considering applying the principles of total societal control, as envisaged by Michel Foucault’s 1975 book Discipline and Punish. What are they going to do with all of the people they will inevitably catch, given that the official Government position is that the courts are so busy they need to scrap jury trials?

The answer is, evidently, artificial intelligence. Sir Andy Marsh, the head of the College of Policing, has said that AI will be used to provide better data to help police forces identify potential criminality before it emerges.

There is a general sense among the political class that AI is going to revolutionise how large organisations, including the Government itself, are likely to work in the future. As a result, there is an incentive for ministers to drop references to AI into their speeches and plans, in an attempt to make them sound up to date if nothing else. But given how rare even a basic understanding of computing is in British policymaking circles, AI is little more than a buzzword to such people — a technological deus ex machina that makes problems go away.

If this is an indication of the mediocre standards to which we’ve grown accustomed in public life, it probably sounds like a fairly harmless one. Tony Blair himself said at the turn of the millennium that the internet would usher in the new knowledge economy, and that universal access was vital if the UK were to keep pace with such a future. But we can hardly say that the now-broken public sector is a beacon of efficiency, even if there was widespread adoption of the internet.

Recent history is littered with examples of government heralding technological solutions to political problems, which in the implementation reveal the state’s impulse for control, and its paranoia about individual autonomy. The care.data project, launched in early 2014, promised to transform the care system via data sharing, but saw GP records unilaterally centralised into a single database and was later scrapped altogether. The Online Safety Act is also a case in point, as is the proposed National ID scheme. Nothing expands the reach and presumption of official power quite like a system that promises convenience while quietly turning citizens into perpetual data subjects under an ever more intrusive permanent bureaucracy.

Shabana Mahmood’s panopticon will surely be another example of this. Greater Manchester Police is apparently already using “AI assistants” to provide “instant access to criminal law” at crime scenes, which sounds rather a lot like they are using ChatGPT to make up for gaps in operational knowledge. This reveals a more alarming problem about the way the public sector is likely to use AI in practice, which is to treat it as a kind of oracle which makes up for sound human judgement. You can hardly blame the frontline police officer for that when the Home Secretary is clearly doing it herself. AI is likely to turn human life upside-down, but to think that giving the Government carte blanche over technology will improve our lives is a fantasy. Instead of the promised panopticon, we’re likely to just see more police reports with em dashes.

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Chris Bayliss is an independent consultant who works on energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

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