- THE NEXT THING NOW
- Posts
- AI Opportunities Action Plan
OK, so I’m not one to get political, but a few weeks ago now, the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave a big speech that reported back on the AI Opportunities Action Plan.
And I thought this was really interesting....
A link to the full report can be found below.
Something new is happening here
So there's lots of talk about growth and the future of the economy. You could have been forgiven for thinking that when this event popped up, it was just another political stunt to try and capture the news cycle.
But I think maybe there was something else going on here.
"the defining opportunity of a generation" and "the battle for the jobs of tomorrow is happening today"
I was a little surprised by the tone of this intervention from the PM.
And it was an intervention! Let me explain.
This is not a new story
He obviously isn't the first UK Prime Minister to highlight AI and its opportunities. We’ve had a lot of PM’s in recent years, of various stripes. And all of them have championed AI.
But until now, Keir Starmer has only offered warning and fear; tending to focus on the threat and the potential harms of this technology more than then opportunity.
This time however, phrases such as, [AI is] "the defining opportunity of a generation" and "the battle for the jobs of tomorrow is happening today" have brought this into sharp relief.
This really is a stark change.
And you have to wonder, I did at least, what could have provoked this dramatic and quite sudden shift in tone.
There was a sense of urgency.
More than that, I think this amounted to an attempt at leadership coming from the government. Which again was surprising and marked a sudden shift in the mood.
"this is going to change things much quicker than we think", and "we will see a decade's worth of change in maybe four or five years."
Why the panic?
You would normally expect, when it comes to technology, that the people would be leading the way in adoption, with the government often struggling to keep up. We’ve seen this time again with the shift to digital services, communications, and service consumption across the public sector.
But in this instance we have an attempt to accelerate a conversation that it feels like the general public isn't really having.
The government has intervened in the public discourse.
Many people think, believe, that AI is a thing that has happened. They're bored of all the Chat GPT and tech bro hype.
This intervention in the conversation suggests that there is significant concern inside UKGov that we are simply not moving anywhere near fast enough.
The urgency really came through in his speech; phrases like,
"this is going to change things much quicker than we think", and "we will see a decade's worth of change in maybe four or five years."
The Agents are coming
If you look at the report itself, it says this,
“... given the pace of progress, we will also very soon see Agentic systems, systems that can be given an objective, then reason, plan, and act to achieve it. The chatbots that we're all familiar with are just an early glimpse of what's possible.”
Reading that in the report, and seeing the speech from the PM, I wonder if this level of understanding at the highest level is relatively new and has changed the conversation.
Personally I think this plays down actually what's happening. We could see significant labour market shocks even in the next 18 to 24 months.
I doubt this is the last intervention that we've seen on the subject.
Take a look at the full report here: