Stella Tsantekidou column: ‘If I were a tech bro, I would be backing Andy’

One morning Satan slid into my LinkedIn DMs. Using a male human name and concealing his reptilian form behind the screen, he said I could get paid hundreds of pounds per hour to train AI to do my job. “Not today, “James””, I replied, typing with one hand, grabbing the Communist Manifesto from my bedside table with the other.

Reddit forums are full of people who have either worked for or been scammed by companies purporting to train AI to do their jobs. Oxbridge-educated lawyers, business consultants, medical researchers – nobody is spared; the machines plan on consuming all of us indiscriminately. This is how the artisans must have felt when the weaver machines started replacing them en masse.

But don’t let me scare you. In another life I’d be a Luddite. Had I been born during the Industrial Revolution, I’d probably have voted (what do you mean I wouldn’t get to vote?) to keep my family’s life exactly as it was, rather than have it destroyed so that my descendants seven generations later could buy Labubus and matcha lattes.

But in this life, I am a rationalist; AI is here to stay, and the UK is among the world’s top three contenders to develop the industry. As the neo-liberal bible Why Nations Fail warned, the short-term costs to workers who have a vote today could damage human progress in the long term.

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Despite the damage to the peasant masses, we agree the Industrial Revolution was good and necessary. Well, today we are the peasant masses, so now what?

AI’s benefits are huge but abstract and far away; its costs are local, immediate and an eyesore just like the ‘Dark Satanic Mills’. At first glance, the arguments against AI data centres are no different to NIMBYism or resistance to re-industrialisation on environmental grounds. People don’t want them built near them, but they don’t want most things built near them either, or on Earth more generally. They consume a lot of water and energy, but so do most types of factories, and the water fear is overblown: a data centre only “consumes” the water that evaporates as it circulates to cool its towers; the rest goes round again. Desert facilities in Arizona and Texas burn millions of litres a day, but UK centres, in a cooler climate, use far less.

What will be Burnham’s solution to having the AI revolution and benefiting from it too? A wealth redistributive devolution.

One grievance with data centres is that they don’t employ many people. That means they don’t bring many jobs to the local area, but it also means they don’t consume many services, which feel oversubscribed across the UK. Radical fiscal devolution – letting councils keep all the cash a data centre generates – would go a long way toward sweetening the pill of a big, humming hot box down the road. They won’t be built in expensive neighbourhoods; the land costs too much, and that’s a legitimate source of grievance for people in less well-off areas. But if local councils got to pocket the growth that follows them and reinvest it locally, it would be worth it. An SNP council recently passed a moratorium on AI data centres. Would they have done the same if building them meant cutting council tax bills by half or building and maintaining a new park?

However, the classification of AI as a critical industry feels like a sick joke to many people; and how could it not, when AI bosses have spent years bumping their valuations by terrifying the public about AI accidentally turning us all into paper clips? Obviously, the development of superintelligence (ASI) should be halted, while general intelligence (AGI) should be deployed to supplement, rather than replace, human productivity.

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But the arguments against AI acceleration should be separated from the arguments against building AI data centres. The problem with the former is not that we plebs are not comfortable with tossing a coin about whether ASI will bring us nirvana or apocalypse, but that we can’t prosecute those who won’t stop trying to develop it for treason against the human race. The problem with AI data centres is not that they consume energy and water (so do babies,and yet…); the problem is that most people do not yet feel the benefits of AI, only hear the catastrophising omens from its sociopathic advocates. In that, Andy’s devolution plans are the only antidote to anti-AI populism that other parties could utilise because it could answer the question in everyone’s mind: “What’s in it for me?”

Carl Benedikt Frey, in The Technology Trap, makes the case that the West’s immiserated middle class is not as powerless as the English handloom weavers were; we get to vote every four years and call in to BBC Radio 2 every weekday to tell Jeremy Vine how our representatives have failed us. That’s unimaginable power for 18th-century peasants. The tech industry is also, for once, on the back foot in the culture war it helped create. Whatever Elon Musk thought he was doing with Twitter, it hasn’t worked, and the Republicans he bankrolled are now facing a backlash. Tech people believe nothing is impossible because, in their world, they’ve solved problem after seemingly impossible problem. But in our world, there’s no such thing as a definitively solvable one; politics can make even the simplest practical task impossible, like building more houses, for example.

Any PM can wave away a data centre, but Manchesterism is the model for making it work for local people. Andy Burnham’s radical devolution may be the tech bros’ last reprieve from the pitchforks. 

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