If you bring an incredibly persuasive machine into every level of your power system, your power structures, all those like intellectual frameworks of advice, you know, if you're encouraging all of your ministers to constantly talk to a particular kind of software and use it to run the country, you're taking a risk that I think we have yet to calculate with who holds power.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Will Dunn.

Will is the business editor at the New Statesman.

And he recently wrote a fantastic piece looking at the UK government's adoption of generative AI technologies and why the government has been so

forceful and so enthusiastic about the adoption of the technology, but also the many risks that

come along with that that maybe aren't getting considered to the degree that they should.

For people who have been watching, they will not be surprised to hear that the United Kingdom

has been very aggressive in adopting generative AI, has really wanted to appear to be on the

forefront of adopting this technology and, you know, continuing this notion that AI is the

future, that AI is revolutionary, that it is something that, you know, all sectors of society

should be using, whether it's the public sector and government or the private sector or nonprofits

or whatever, right? Everybody should be using AI to some degree, and the United Kingdom has wanted

to appear ahead on that, right, to be one of the leaders, and also to try to attract investment as a result of doing it.

But really what we see there is that there is growing pushback to the data centers that are necessary for AI.

There was just a story recently that Open AI was pulling back on its own investments in the United Kingdom of infrastructure, of course.

But then there's also the

questions of what the actual effects here are, right? Is generative AI really as efficient or

encouraging productivity to the degree that the companies and certainly governments like the one in the

UK have been suggesting? Or, you know, is this a technology that is really not delivering the economic

gains that the industry suggested it would? And on the flip side, is actually delivering a lot of

social harms, but also is setting the government up for dependence on a technology that is going

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