In The Making of the English Working Class, the leftwing historian EP Thompson made a point of challenging the condescension of history towards luddism, the original anti-tech movement. The early 19th-century croppers and weavers who rebelled against new technologies should not be written off as “blindly resisting machinery”, wrote Thompson in his classic history. They were opposing a laissez-faire logic that dismissed its disastrous impact on their lives.
A distinction worth bearing in mind as Britain rolls out the red carpet for US big tech, thereby outsourcing a modern industrial revolution still in its infancy. Photographers, coders and writers, for example, would sympathise with the powerlessness felt by working people who saw customary protections swept away in a search for enhanced productivity and profit. Unlicensed use of their creative labour to train generative AI has delivered vast revenues to Silicon Valley while rendering their livelihoods increasingly precarious.
The wider public shares such concerns. According to new research by the Tony Blair Institute, a large plurality of Britons see AI as a risk to the economy, rather than as an opportunity. Viewed from the perspective of actual and future workers, it is not hard to understand why. Automating swathes of the labour force may become a growth machine when it comes to the size of shareholders’ dividends; it is less clear what the upside is for the human beings displaced.
AI already appears to be squeezing the number of entry-level jobs in white-collar occupations. Energy‑hungry datacentres championed in the UK-US prosperity deal will generate significant (and undiscussed) environmental costs, but little new work. More broadly, there is public unease regarding AI’s cultural impact. The Post Office scandal laid bare the dangers of allowing anonymous tech to take charge of people’s lives at work and beyond. Opaque and insidious algorithms sow discord and fuel extremism and disinformation online, a social ill embodied in the sneering trollery of Elon Musk.
Yet as it desperately scrambles to attract private investment to kickstart growth, Labour appears content to hand the keys to Britain’s tech future to the likes of Nvidia and Microsoft. Sir Nick Clegg, who should know, has pointed out that this will mean the game is played on Silicon Valley’s terms, and risks hollowing out public capacity and oversight. When the stakes are so high, and the perception that power in society has been captured by remote, self-serving elites is already pervasive, that is a reckless approach.
Last month, the Trades Union Congress published a “worker-first” strategy for AI, noting that “unmanaged disruption is not inevitable or acceptable”. Its call for employees’ voices to be heard when new technologies are deployed should be heeded, not least from the perspective of growth. From the creative industries to social care, those who work in affected sectors are best placed to understand the societal benefits AI can bring, as well as the dangers its introduction may pose.
As the economist Mariana Mazzucato has argued, state investment drove many of the technological breakthroughs that launched us into the era of AI. It now needs to be managed in the interests of the common good, which means a public conversation that extends well beyond the commercially driven priorities of big tech. A Labour government should have no qualms about convening that wider debate, and it should start in the workplace.
