Bowing to Big Tech is not the answer

Apparently Britain should show a sense of ‘humility’ to technology companies because they now have power at a scale equivalent to most nation states. 

This is not a pronouncement from Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerburg. 

It’s the view of the Labour Secretary of State for Business, Industry and Trade, Peter Kyle. 

One can only guess how much the provision of a free member of staff to his office by a leading AI company for several months ahead of the election may have influenced his view. 

One of the annoying things about Kyle’s pronouncement is that he is, in some ways, right. Technology companies do have ludicrous amounts of power. They can afford to invest at a scale which buys them a growing slice of our future economy (and our natural resources), they have the best lobbying operations money can buy and their legal teams can navigate their way around pesky problems like taxation or regulation. 

The power problem extends beyond classic corporate strength. The way many technology companies harvest and utilise our data gives them a historical unparalleled insight into human behaviour. Right now they use this mostly to sell adverts but if you stitch together the insight you’d have if you had our location data, our social media feeds, our spending habits, our health data, access to all the photos and videos on our phones and a listening device in our living room. Throw in world-leading computing power, which is another thing these companies have a monopoly on, and you’ve got the recipe for a digital panopticon. 

Recent events in the US place Britain in a sticky situation when it comes to technology policy. We do need growth and technology is a growth area. Technology and growth have a messy symbiotic history but so do technology and politics. 

Are we really OK with the idea of our leaders genuflecting to the bros of silicon valley? 

Their track record when it comes to democracy isn’t great. The products they have designed in recent decades have poisoned the public sphere, intensified the worst of human nature, extracted billions pounds worth of our data whilst creating addictive advertising platforms readily accessible by children and pursued monopolistic practices that run counter to good capitalism. 

When met with these charges, the leaders of these companies have mostly sat on their hands. They’ve shirked the kind of responsibility traditional media companies had to take as publishers of news, despite dwarfing the wealth of most countries, they’ve failed to invest properly in keeping users safe from hate speech and other harmful content and they continue to espouse alarming theories about the future of humanity that threaten to reduce us to the role of machines. 

Now these same companies are developing artificial intelligence technologies. These technologies are sold to politicians like Peter Kyle on the promise of savings, efficiency and growth but where’s the evidence for this? There’s little doubt that used properly AI can and will have useful applications across the public sector but if you take a moment to think about the second order consequences of AI adoption then you might be tempted to tether the brakes.

Anybody who knows the state of public sector IT can tell you that using AI effectively is going to be difficult until we’ve got that in order. Which, to put it politely, might take a while and cost a bit. The same goes for data management. 

Anybody who knows how bureaucracies function can tell you that whilst we are free to imagine a world where police officers are unencumbered by forms or doctors can spend more time with patients, the reality is likely to be that even with some admin hived off into a new parallel world of AI workflows ‘the system’ will find new ways to prevent people from getting on with the job. 

If that happens we will be left with a big new bill for public sector AI use but we won’t get the outcomes we’ve been promised. The profits will accrue to technology companies who will continue to pay a tiny percentage of their ‘de-facto’ tax share and whilst that might look like growth on paper, it’s not going to feel like it at the ballot box. 

Britain and the wider world are at a critical juncture when it comes to the relationship between humans and technology. None of us should envy this government as it looks to pick a path forward on technology. It is caught between a macho-libertarian future where AI companies act like states without citizens or looking back over its shoulder at Europe where there’s still a belief that these companies can and should be constrained. 

When you put it like that, it doesn’t feel like such a tough decision. Whatever Labour choose, let’s hope it’s only Peter Kyle who ends up having to bow to our AI overlords.