Thought Shrapnel

I grew up under a government led by Margaret Thatcher. Thatcherism was a rejection of solidarity, the welfare state, unions, and a belief in neoliberalism, austerity, and British nationalism. It an absolute breath of fresh air, therefore, when in 1997 as a 16 year old I witnessed ‘New’ Labour sweeping to victory in the General Election.

What followed was revolutionary, at least in the place I grew up: Surestart centres, investment in public services, and a real sense of togetherness throughout society. They lost power 15 years ago, and the period of Tory rule up to the middle of last year introduced Austerity 2.0, the polarisation of society, and chronic underfunding of the NHS and other essential services.

It’s surprising, therefore, that the first six months of Keir Starmer’s Labour government hasn’t felt like much of a change from the Tory status quo. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the recent announcement that AI will be ‘mainlined into the veins’ of the UK, using rhetoric one would expect from the right wing of politics. As I read one person on social media as saying, this would have been very different had Starmer and co been seeking the support of the TUC and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

I’ve been listening to Helen Beetham’s new podcast in which she interviews Dan McQuillan, author of Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. It’s not one of those episodes where you can be casually doing something else and half-listening, which is why I haven’t finished it yet. It has, however, prompted me to explore Dan’s blog, which is where I came across this post on ‘AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism’, written in late 2023,

It’s extraordinarily disingenous for the government to say that the move proposed is going to ‘create jobs’, as the explicit goal of ‘efficiency’ is to remove bottlenecks. Those are usually human-shaped. Maybe we should stop speedrunning towards dystopia? We need to prepare for post-capitalism; it’s just a shame that our government is doubling down on hypercapitalism.

One thing that these models definitely do, though, is transfer control to large corporations. The amount of computing power and data required is so incomprehensibly vast that very few companies in the world have the wherewithal to train them. To promote large language models anywhere is privatisation by the back door. The evidence so far suggests that this will be accompanied by extensive job losses, as employers take AI’s shoddy emulation of real tasks as an excuse to trim their workforce. The goal isn’t to “support” teachers and healthcare workers but to plug the gaps with AI instead of with the desperately needed staff and resources.

Real AI isn’t sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form. Like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable. Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn’t provide insights as it’s just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences. The logics of ranking and superiority are buried deep in the make up of artificial intelligence; married to populist politics, it becomes another vector for deciding who is disposable.

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Shouldn’t we be resisting this gigantic, carbon emitting version of automated Thatcherism before it’s allowed to trash our remaining public services? It might be tempting to wait for a Labour victory at the next election; after all, they claim to back workplace protections and the social contract. Unfortunately they aren’t likely to restrain AI; if anything, the opposite. Under the malign influence of true believers like the Tony Blair Institute, whose vision for AI is a kind of global technocratic regime change, Labour is putting its weight behind AI as an engine of regeneration. It looks like stopping the megamachine is going to be down to ordinary workers and communities. Where is Ned Ludd when you need him?

Source: danmcquillan.org

Image: Mike Newbry