Today’s coordinated media blitz from the government concerns the government’s latest “AI Opportunities Plan” in which Sir Keir Starmer hopes to secure Britain’s global leadership in the field of artificial intelligence, or AI. 

To carry out this plan Labour announced that three “major” tech companies (really a bunch of private companies or small/mid-caps) – Vantage Data Centres, NScale and Kyndryl, whoever they are –  had agreed to commit (read: haven't actually invested yet) £14 billion to develop AI in the United Kingdom.

Publishing a working plan is all well and good. To dominate the AI market, the UK is going to need to do much more than what was contained in this strategy, and will have to do something that it doesn't, historically, like doing.

The UK needs to get the government out of the way. Sir Keir needs to take a good hard look at what the UK did 20 years ago to lose the battle for the future of the Internet, and ask himself how the country can avoid repeating those same mistakes.

What I did not see in the Government’s “game changing” (their words, not mine) AI opportunities plan was any such acknowledgement. What I saw instead was classic British political procrastination; “we need a plan in six months, we need another plan to start expanding research capacity within six months, we need to appoint some program directors who will make additional plans within six months.”

The overall scheme of the plan is in three parts:

(1)   Wooing data centres to set up shop in the UK;

(2)   Using public-sector pilots to encourage private-sector adoption; and

(3)   Becoming the “best state partner to those who are building frontier AI.”

The only thing this shows is that the Government can’t see the wood for the trees:

(1)   The UK has the highest industrial energy costs in the world, making data centre provision there completely uneconomical.

(2)   The idea that the public sector should or even could lead the private sector in AI is laughable, with private sector adoption of AI in practically every domain racing ahead in places like the United States.

(3)   You cannot claim to be a good state partner for entrepreneurs at the same time as you've instructed the Met’s counterterrorism directorate to investigate the owner of one of the world’s leading AI companies, xAI, for his entirely lawful shitposting on the social media platform he owns. Other Internet entrepreneurs with opinions that fall outside of the British centre-left consensus have noticed everything the UK is trying to do to Elon. 

It's not a good look for the country.

If you want to beat the Americans, you must become the Americans, and that means allowing British citizens and residents to do the same things with technology that Americans do, in exactly the same manner Americans do.

The UK doesn't need plans. It needs to unleash technology business to be maximally creative in the minimum amount of time. Here’s what it can do – today, at no cost – to actually change the game without spending a penny:

1)    Immediately repeal the Online Safety Act in its entirety. Nobody is going to develop AI in the UK if they’re going to get sued or arrested when the AI says something that violates UK speech laws. Nor will they be eager to neuter their AI to appease Ofcom and other UK speech commissars. (The UK will probably also need to repeal its speech crimes, too, because American AI and social media tech leaders will be very hesitant to relocate to the UK and give up their US-style political freedoms.)

2)    Enact an equivalent to Section 230 immunity for both online platforms hosting third party user content and those hosting or distributing AI large language models. Otherwise, companies will host these models in the United States and deploy them from the United States to avail themselves of the liability protections of the United States.

3)    Immediately repeal the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Defamation Act in its entirety.

4)    Offer massive tax breaks to anyone working in the field of AI or starting AI companies.

5)    Immediately start building ten full-scale nuclear power stations. 

6)    Clean up London and make it the nicest city in the world to live in once again. You might not be able to beat New York on price, but it should be feasible to beat New York on the experience.

The UK has one shot to get this right, else be left behind forever. Will it take it?