Peter Franklin: How the tech wars of the next decade could reshape British politics

Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.

Do you ever get the feeling that politics is pointless?

Don’t worry, I haven’t given in to despair — nor to nihilism, fatalism or idle indifference. Rather, what I’m alluding to is the belief that we’re on the brink of a technological revolution so profound as to render our current concerns irrelevant.

Ever since the release of ChatGPT-4 it’s been clear that artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed to the point at which it will change our lives. Just how big of a change that might be — and its precise timing — is still up for debate.

On the one side are the cynics who believe that the current wave of AI has been massively overhyped. On the other are the true believers — folk who claim that the technology has reached a tipping point at which each advance accelerates progress towards the next advance and so on. Before long, we’ll achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) rapidly followed by artificial super intelligence (ASI). Whether these machine gods then wipe out humanity or bring about a new age of abundance is also up for debate, but either way why worry about today when tomorrow is going to be unimaginably different?

My guess is that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes. In other words, AI will bring about major economic and social change, but won’t render the future (i.e. the next few decades) unrecognisable to the present. I make that assumption not just because it seems consistent with the current pace of events, but because set against the digital ‘nothingburger’ of the AI cynics or the silicon deity of AI evangelists, only the middle way scenario is worth speculating about.

So what does this future look like? Ironically, more like the past than the present.

If you’re middle-aged, then it’s likely that your parents and grandparents experienced a faster pace of technological progress than you have. That’s because almost all the transformational inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries became commonplace before 1970 — for instance, the car, the telephone, radio, television, air travel, antibiotics, artificial fertilisers, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the refrigerator and the lightbulb.

Obviously, those have been improved upon over the last half century, but there’s been very little that’s genuinely new and life changing. Think about it: what’s in your kitchen or living room that wouldn’t have been owned by a moderately well-off household in the 1970s? Gas-fired central heating may be the most significant example and a microwave the most emblematic, but there really aren’t many others.

Of course, I’m deliberately ignoring mobile phones, home computers and access to the internet. Those have undoubtedly changed our lives. But they are, by their very nature, personal technologies whose main impact is confined to the immaterial planes of information and communication. They haven’t altered the wider, physical world to the same extent as the previous wave of inventions.

And therein lies the real significance of AI — though it too is a digital technology it has the power to unleash a new wave of real world automation.

Here’s a delicious example: James Dyson’s robotic strawberry farm. To increase productivity, the fruit are grown on a computer controlled system of giant rotating shelves. Supplemented by artificial lighting and an efficient irrigation system, this allows the full height of an industrial-scale greenhouse to be used over a year-round growing season. Rolled out nationwide, this level of automation could revolutionise British horticulture and reduce our dependence on imported food (and therefore crop varieties bred for transportability, not taste).

A tempting prospect, but should we surrender whole swathes of the British countryside to glass and robots, in place of fields and farmers? I’d say there’s a grand bargain to be struck here: we should embrace agri-tech on the most productive land in return for ambitious rewilding projects elsewhere. That would be the rational response, but I’m not sure that we’re ready to accept technological revolutions in the way that earlier generations did.

Back in 1933, the Chicago World’s Fair was unembarrassed to adopt the following motto: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man  Conforms”.

For most of the 20th century, neither government nor big business had much trouble imposing tech-driven change on the public. For instance, between 1968 and 1976, the British state was able to build a nationwide natural gas transmission network — and to send workmen into millions of homes to convert appliances to the new fuel.

Would government today have the guts to pull off similarly ambitious project? I’d like to think so, but I doubt it — the politics would be just too difficult.

If we do get new national infrastructure then either it has to be a long way from people’s homes (like an offshore wind farm) or it needs to emerge invisibly. An example of the latter is vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which could allow a radically decentralised power grid to grow up alongside our existing centralised infrastructure. The idea is that by harnessing the collective storage capacity of the nation’s electric vehicles, power can be purchased during troughs in demand and sold back to the utility companies during the peaks. This would depend on having the right kind of chargers in the right locations (i.e. where the vehicles are parked) plus the AI software to coordinate the necessary physical and financial processes: a tall order, but last month Octopus Energy launched a deal that puts all these pieces in place.

Thus vehicle by vehicle, customer by customer,  a new energy revolution is underway.

The question now is whether the politicians will allow it to succeed. Given the threat of disruption to established business models, we can expect an intensive lobbying effort to blame energy innovators and their smart technologies for every power cut. This will become a party political conflict.

Reform UK has already promised to ban battery energy storage systems — and though that’s utterly ludicrous there’s electoral advantage to be had in exploiting fear of the unknown. The more that AI reaches into everyday life, the greater the potential for friction between the early adopters of innovative products and other consumers who just want what they’re used to at a reasonable price.

The most significant battleground of the coming decade may prove to be self-driving cars. After many years of premature promises, this technology is now on the brink of a genuine mass market breakthrough. I’m not just talking about cruise control, parking assist and other facets of partial automation, but cars going completely driverless. You can already ride a driverless taxi in some American and Chinese cities — and they’ve been promised for the UK next year. If these become ubiquitous, along with driverless buses and delivery vehicles, then there’ll be zero doubt that the AI revolution has arrived.

From that point it won’t be an issue of whether we allow robot drivers on our roads, but whether we continue to allow the human variety. If automated vehicles cause many fewer accidents, then death by human error will become increasingly intolerable. Insurance companies may end up making the final decision, but there’s going to be period of years in which the debate becomes one of the most polarising in politics.

All of this is worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the future and purpose of the Conservative Party. Reform UK would be the natural party of anti-AI populism — especially when it comes to motoring. Farage and his successors will defend the right to drive in the same way that US Republicans defend the right to bear arms. Meanwhile, Labour and the Left in general will follow the trade union lead on protecting jobs from automation. As for the Lib Dems, we can expect just about anything from them except consistency.

So that leaves a slot for a cautiously optimistic pro-AI party. I wonder who might be willing to fill it?