Starmer:

“We’re going to make the breakthroughs, we’re going to create the wealth, and we’re going to make AI work for everyone in our country.”

also

“We will test and understand AI before we regulate it to make sure that when we do it, it’s proportionate and grounded.”

The above quotes present conclusive proof that one, the UK’s Prime Minister has no idea what AI means and how it works, and, two, he doesn’t know what words mean. But it’s totally going to work, what with all that abundance of cheap energy generated by turbines and panels, as Tammy Nemeth pointed out in the last Energy Realities podcast. Also, the man’s a carrot and I realise this remark is offensive to carrots because carrots have health benefits. I apologise.- IRINA SLAV

Net Zero vs AI: Starmer Hasn’t Worked Out That The U.K. Can’t Be a ‘Superpower’ in Both Climate and Computing

BEN PILE

This week, a grateful country learned from our Glorious Leader that the U.K. was to be not just one superpower, but two. At an event at University College London on Monday, Keir Starmer unveiled his plans for making Britain an “artificial intelligence superpower”. According to Reuters, this includes promises “to take a pro-innovation approach to regulation, make public data available to researchers and create zones for data centres”. The problem with this plan, however, is obvious to anyone who knows anything about AI and who has sufficient memory to recall Starmer’s other promise: to make Britain a “clean energy superpower” by 2030.

As has been widely discussed, Britain industrial energy prices are now among the highest in the developed world. This is a problem for AI because, unlike most computing tasks, it is energy intensive, better thought of as an industrial process. AI is not an application that runs easily on a laptop. And this is because AI does not typically run on normal microprocessors, such as the CPUs that sit at the centre of powerful desktop workstations, but on the graphics processors known as GPUs that enable 3D games, among other things. In such an application, the CPU pushes the work of rendering graphics to the GPU, leaving the CPU free for other, less intense tasks.

The GPU itself is of very different design to general processors, in some senses far more limited, but, by virtue of this reduced functionality, able to process things at much greater speed and to parallelise its functions to do many thousands of simultaneous operations. This division of labour is why GPUs are energy intensive: they are doing more than one job at a time. And though the design of GPUs is limiting, they are great at arithmetic, and so over the last decade or so GPUs have found applications beyond 3D graphics in cryptocurrency ‘mining’ and in AI. The demand for games, for Bitcoin and for AI has thus helped major GPU developer Nvidia boost its share price from approximately $5 at the end of 2017 to a whopping near-$150 earlier this month.

Nvidia has accordingly responded to this growing demand by releasing hardware that is specifically adapted to the needs of AI applications. AI is computationally-expensive, and many of the developments seen in recent years are owed not so much to leaps forward in computer science as merely to the increase of computing power – the number of processes that a GPU is able to do in a second.

But these new devices remain somewhat beyond the budgets of even enthusiasts. Though domestic set-ups are capable of running text-based AI such as ChatGPT and the image generators that now illustrate every Substack article, these still require significant computing power, previously only available to high-end gamers, and can be slow. More capable, application-specific hardware, such as top-of-the-range Nvidia devices, will set you back the best part of £30,000. Consequently, consumer AI applications are very much dependent on data centres, where the redundancy of devices can be minimised and users can access their power through a simple webpage.

And therein lies the problem for Starmer’s plan for his second superpower. Running hundreds or perhaps even thousands of these devices means running up vast electricity bills. Moreover, if, as we saw earlier this month, Ed Miliband’s expensive renewables agenda is not stopped, Britain’s power supply is going to become far less reliable. And the two deadly killers of industry and economic growth are cost of energy and interruptions to supply. Why would anyone invest here, knowing that a data centre in Oxfordshire – part of Starmer’s plan – will cost multiples of what it would cost to run in the USA or China? There thus exists a conflict between Starmer’s two superpowers. And both could lose. If Starmer manages to make Britain an AI superpower, then the immense demand on the grid would push prices up and destabilise it. And if Miliband’s plan succeeds – or even if it fails – then no data centres will be able to operate.

But much more is revealed by this stunt than merely a contradiction. There is the fact that calling each part of your policy agenda a “superpower” reveals the fantasy at work. Starmer is merely larping as a Prime Minister, and his policy agenda only imitating one capable of meaningfully transforming the U.K. economy, much as a toddler who makes car noises and simulates his parent’s actions is ‘driving’. Such make-believe fulfils the fantasist’s desire to ape what he wants to be – sweet in an infant, but catastrophic in a political leader. Starmer can no more make the U.K. a global leader than the toddler can drive.

It has been the conceit of the recent generations of European and British politicians that innovation and economic growth are produced by policy. And nowhere has this been more evident than in Britain’s putative ‘superpowers’. In his 2017 budget, then Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond announced that “fully driverless cars” would be on Britain’s roads by 2021 – a hope, of course, centred on the most prominent AI application of the time. The BBC quoted Hammond’s most revealing ambitious claim: “Some would say that’s a bold move, but we have to embrace these technologies if we want the U.K. to lead the next industrial revolution.”

What is it about Britain’s politicians that makes them want to be the champion of the “next industrial revolution”? 2021 came and went without much sign of these autonomous cars, while China stole the march on the EVs that Hammond also wanted to “boost”, and his successors tried to “boost” by banning petrol and diesel cars. A year earlier, Boris Johnson had promised a “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution”, which included making Britain “the Saudi Arabia of wind”. More than a decade earlier, precisely the same claims were being made by Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. At a “low carbon summit” in London, Mandelson explained that “the huge industrial revolution that is unfolding in converting our economy to low carbon is going to present huge business and employment opportunities”. “There’s been a huge growth in the green sector,” explained Miliband, “and its already a $3 trillion worldwide industrial sector set to grow by 50%.”

But that sector – as I and others argued at the time – was a sector that existed only by virtue of Government intervention, especially in the EU. If money was pouring into it, it was because the West lay in the aftermath of a global economic slump and green ambitions rested on Government promises of subsidies to support ‘green growth’, thereby guaranteeing profits that were not available to other forms of ‘investment’. This appearance of ‘growth’ in the green sector therefore likely caused the misallocation of resources and misdirection of policy, and was parasitic on other parts of the economy, thwarting their recovery. Yes, there may be more jobs in windfarm construction – hurrah! – But the rising cost of power means that there are now fewer jobs in the chemicals sector.

It’s as if it is not enough to be the Prime Minister or a senior member of the Government. Some kind of vanity drives senior politicians to want to champion the glossy, sexy new industries of the 21st century. Perhaps some self-consciousness afflicts them, that Britain has not made the most of its recent economic prowess and is being overtaken in league tables by far larger emerging economies. And so they seek to find ways to shore up their position before the U.K. tumbles any further down the ranks, overtaken by one-time ‘Third World’ countries.

But the desperation to champion climate by regulating the economy into a ‘transition’ did not, as the likes of Miliband and Mandelson claimed it would 17 years ago, “boost” the U.K. economy. By some international metrics, U.K. per capita GDP has been practically stagnant since the 2008 financial crash – also the year of the Climate Change Act. And the same green legislation has not created boom times for U.K. manufacturers of so-called ‘green’ technologies – it has merely created markets for producers in the East, mostly China, where the ‘green’ products are made using power from coal-fired power plants (now abolished in the U.K.) and cheap labour.

The announcement of the second new superpower comes in the wake of news that Rachel Reeves is feeling depressed that her emphasis on stabilising both the economy and the climate is falling flat. Starmer claims that fancy new AI algorithms will make life better for us by helping local authorities to identify potholes. But while the AI application developers eagerly await the cheques for millions of pounds in public funding, very many people have not been able to properly heat their homes, thanks to Ed Miliband’s contribution to making the U.K. a ‘clean energy superpower’.

But here’s the biggest problem. The more of the economy that is taken up with basic necessities like utilities, the less is devoted to the things that make life pleasurable, like cake shops, and the poorer we are as a country. Cake shops are, on the current global stage, very far from what political elites deem glossy and sexy. Should it really be a surprise, then, that many British high streets no longer have any cake shops, or countless other forms of independent retailer? There are vape shops, Turkish barbers and even completely fake shopfronts – a Potemkin economy, intended to ease the anxiety of run-down town centres to encourage reinvestment. The desolation of the British high street is an unmistakable sign of the impoverishment of the country. And just a few miles offshore from such benighted coastal towns are the glossy, sexy, world-leading wind farms, pumping electrons at up to 10 times the average international price.

Does it take an AI algorithm to make the obvious plain to the Government: look after the cake shops, and the AI data centres will take care of themselves? I don’t mean by this that cake shops and other genuine independent retailers, and countless other industries, need any direct support. I mean that the major fetter to Britain’s economic development is our politicians’ desire to be global leaders of an “industrial revolution”, reorganising the entire economy in order to achieve it. The cake shop cannot afford the energy prices, and the would-be customers’ disposable income is instead paying for the wind farms. The would-be visitors to the coastal town’s cake shop, too, have no funds for day trips or staycations thanks to the arrival of the “clean energy superpower”. Maybe just a little bit less superpowerism, a bit less ‘global leadership’, and reining in the desire to ‘change society’ might let AI find its own feet, and its own superpowers.

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This article (Net Zero vs AI: Starmer Hasn’t Worked Out That The U.K. Can’t Be a ‘Superpower’ in Both Climate and Computing) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Ben Pile

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