Politicians must take ownership of the transformational changes AI brings - Stewart McDonald

The future has arrived early - it’s time for our politics to catch up

Could you describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics? What does it mean to say that an object has mass? What is the relationship between velocity and acceleration? If those questions, awakening long-dormant memories of wobbly wooden highchairs and Formica tables, send shivers down your spine then you - like me - may find yourself firmly on one side of what the novelist and scientist C.P. Snow described as the defining divide of Western intellectual life: that between the humanities and the sciences.

The three questions above, Snow argued in his 1959 Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge, are the scientific equivalent of asking someone “Can you read?” Yet when he asked them of well-educated people with entire alphabets after their names, Snow said that he found himself greeted by blank stares and frosty silence. Despite the scientific progress made throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he lamented, “the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into modern science as their Neolithic ancestors would have had”. He argued that this divide was a major obstacle to progress, and that it was essential to bridge it to address the challenges of the modern world.

Four years later, building on Snow’s lecture to propose a new marriage of science and politics, Harold Wilson gave his famous speech to the Labour Party conference, urging his party to grasp the “white heat” of technology and use its power to forge a new country. On Thursday last week, in a pale and less punchy imitation of Wilson’s speech, the Prime Minister outlined the risks and opportunities that Artificial Intelligence holds for us. “If harnessed in the right way”, Sunak told an audience at the Royal Academy, “the power and possibility of this technology could dwarf anything any of us have achieved in a generation.”

Sunak, it has been widely observed, is a model early 2000s-style technocrat, firmly on the “science” side of Snow’s divide. If there can be one driving impulse behind his premiership, it might be described as a desire to make the state carry out its work faster and more efficiently - without ever stopping to reflect on what that work actually is and whom it is for. His speech, which noted that AI can help reduce the time it takes lawyers to prepare for trials and help to clear administrative backlogs in the NHS, exemplified this approach, focused on the nuts and bolts of government delivery rather than the broader picture of profound structural change.

AI cannot simply be reduced to a technology which allows us to do more things, better and quicker. If there is a right way to harness the power of AI, it can only come from bridging the divide between Snow's “two cultures” - from an approach which recognises both the scientific and the social changes that this technology will bring about. The changes that took place in the UK in the late twentieth century should serve as a warning of what happens when we forget to consider both sides of that equation.

The technologies Wilson spoke of transformed working life in the United Kingdom, boosting productivity and growing the economy. But those gains were not evenly shared across the country: productivity rises decoupled from wage rises and economic inequality climbed to grotesque levels, fomenting public distrust in the political institutions that allowed this to happen. We cannot allow ourselves to fall into this trap again; decisions about AI and other technological advances cannot continue to be made by a relatively small group of people who may not fully contend with the social and ethical implications of their work.

This time, politicians must take ownership of the changes that are fast approaching and embrace the potential for transformative change that they bring. This applies as much in Edinburgh as it does in London. With new frontiers in AI being crossed each week, the Scottish Government’s newly announced Green Industrial Strategy should incorporate a democratic vision of what we want these technologies to be deployed for, and the kind of country we want to build with them. Westminster, institutionally incapable of long-term planning, cannot deliver this. The international embarrassment of HS2 - the inability of one of the world’s richest countries to build a rail link between its capital and its second largest city - made that very clear.

More broadly, my party must show that we are alive to the scale of the changes we are living through. That means our manifesto for the 2024 general election cannot look like any that we have put forward in my lifetime. Yes, we must address pressing issues like the cost-of-living crisis and the economy, but we must also outline our vision of how these transformational technologies can be used to improve the lives of people across the country in qualitatively new ways across all policy areas.

The tech debate we have is so often focused on mitigating risk. That is essential, not least when you consider what might unfold if it is in the hands of the wrong people. But we must show ambition in harnessing technology for the public good and see it as central to building a Scotland that is prosperous, resilient and fair. That will mean new ways of political thinking that we shouldn’t shy away from but embrace wholeheartedly. Every politician, from the Prime Minister to the local councillor, must seek to understand new technologies and create new networks of cooperation between academics and politicians together with engineers and business leaders - bridging the divide between those worlds.

Indeed, over 50 years since Snow’s lecture, the gap between the two cultures he described remains stark. If we are to harness the power of the technology revolution, we need to develop a new kind of politics: one that is scientifically literate, socially responsible and ambitious. The future has arrived early - it’s time for our politics to catch up.