Do we need it ?
The current government has committed us to becoming an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Super-Hub. This is without consulting us, and without putting in place any safeguards to ensure that AI aligns with human welfare. In 2023 the European Union set clear rules for the use of AI, and a few days ago Italy became the first country to implement these into law. Now in Italy, legislation limits child access and imposes prison terms for damaging uses of AI.
2025-10-19
The UK has just accepted £31 billion of inward investment targeted at AI from some of the biggest American companies. Much of this money is for building huge Data Centres that consume enormous amounts of power and require significant volumes of water for cooling. We must demand that regulations ensure an energy-efficient design, perhaps where the heated water is piped into nearby homes. Europe’s largest Data Centre in Hertfordshire, just outside London, is to spread across 190 hectares of green-belt farmland with its computers housed in giant warehouses, some 20 metres high. And the government plans to construct many of these across the country. At a time when our priority must be to reduce our energy consumption to meet Net Zero targets, do we really need this technology?
What is AI, and what is it for?
AI is a remarkable digital technology that is able to scan vast amounts of human-generated data simultaneously – many billions of parallel ‘calculations’, and then mysteriously be able to reason about it. How this happens is not fully understood, so is not completely under human control.
The data that AI is using is our cultural heritage plundered without permission from published books, articles, works of art and music, etc. AI implementations have serious flaws, one of which is called ‘hallucinations’ - confident but false outputs that are the result of its statistical operation.
All AI implementations require retrospective alignment that adjusts their outputs after training. This can mean filtering hate speech, blocking misinformation about vaccines, preventing the promotion of self harm, or constraining political partisanship. This alignment is imposed by those that control them and thus not guaranteed to be neutral.
There are impressive AI breakthroughs in healthcare, such as AI-assisted diagnostic imaging. But AI’s also generates 'resmearch' - bullshit science employed by corporations that are not interested in truth, only in persuasion. And AI ‘slopaganda’ - generated images and videos that are swamping Social Media to get attention, money and political influence.
What sort of technology will help us survive into the future? I believe we need to pause the headlong rush into AI and invest in ‘frugal tech’ and ‘low tech’. After all, the essential stuff of life – love, family, friendship, community – are still best left in analog.