Jumping on the AI Bandwagon

The UK government is so cool and trendy

William Essex
2 min readJan 13, 2025
A whiteboard with ‘AI?’ weitten on it in black.
Really? Yesterday’s failed solution today. Photo by Nahrizul Kadri on Unsplash

So I turned on my radio this morning and a voice told me, “The government has announced plans to massively increase the amount of AI in the UK.”

This was the main headline. Ahead of the LA fires.

Using the term AI throughout, rather than going into any more detail about what the new technology would be, the voice told me that AI would reduce the amount of admin teachers have to do, and detect potholes in the roads.

Those were the two I remember. I think I heard them correctly. There were others.

So. Just as we’ve spent vast billions on developing AI already, rather than, say, spending that money on educating children, employing and training teachers, and mending potholes — so we’re going to hand over more of the money that’s apparently so scarce to technology companies.

If I had massively increased the amount of AI in this bedroom, I could have bothered to look up who said of Tony Blair, at the start of his premiership, “Nobody could be that enthusiastic about computers, who knew anything about computers.” But I don’t have the bandwidth right now.

I could have told you all about the several UK-government IT projects that were expensively launched and abandoned in the first decade of this century. But.

Yes, we are now talking about today’s UK government — the UK government that cut winter-fuel payments to elderly pensioners because they couldn’t be afforded. That’s the government now planning to massively increase its spend on shiny, unproven gadgetry.

Detecting potholes in roads, frozen-to-death pensioners — whatever next?

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William Essex
William Essex

Written by William Essex

Former everything. I still write books, I still write stories. Author of The Book of Fake Futures, The Journey from Heaven, Escape Mutation.

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