Selling AI to the left

The Labour government has honed a set of arguments intended to sell the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to its electoral base of public-sector workers and trade unionists, who are wary of the technology’s potential to disrupt or replace jobs. AI is here anyway, it says. The choice is whether it is “aligned with the labour interest”, in the party jargon. In three ways, Labour suggests, AI aligns nicely.

First, AI can re-professionalise public-sector jobs. Doctors, social workers and teachers are miserable because the skilled work they trained for has become swamped in bureaucracy. Let the bots handle the paperwork and professionals can get back to spending time with the public. A government report on how to reduce the workload on children’s social workers recommended adopting AI to record case notes or get guidance on legislation, for example. “I think, and this sounds counterintuitive, that AI can make us more human,” Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, told The Economist in a recent interview.

Second, AI can help save a state that has become discredited. If a large and sluggish public bureaucracy is not fixed on Labour’s terms, the argument runs, a right-wing Reform UK government under Nigel Farage will have a pretext to take a chainsaw to it. Ministers point to the bunged-up planning system: government AI developers created a tool known as Extract which converts old paper maps into usable data, in the hope of speeding up applications.

Third, AI benefits Labour’s working-class voters disproportionately, by providing services otherwise accessible only to richer folk. A case in point was the announcement on January 26th that the government wanted developers to build an AI “tutor” that would provide tailored teaching support. This was laced with the politics of class: the programme would “level the playing field for those who cannot afford private tutors”.

The Trades Union Congress, an umbrella body, supports AI adoption in principle but wants “meaningful worker participation” in the technology’s development. Contracts, it argues, should go only to firms that recognise unions. The tutoring app will be “teacher-led”, the government said, and will “never replace the human connection that only great teachers can provide”.

That is a hint of the real fight to come, when AI doesn’t augment jobs, but eliminates them. Ministers have announced a unit to study the impact of AI on the labour market; it will ensure the government “will protect communities from the mistakes of past industrial change”. That is a tall promise.■