Politicians must act now to harness power of AI for good as 10k BT workers face losing jobs to robots
Job terminators
YOU may still think artificial intelligence is a sci-fi concept with little relevance to our lives. Tell it to 10,000 BT workers now facing the dole because bots can do their job.
They are the first trickle of a tsunami.
AI could transform work and society globally far more than the internet.
Entire occupations may disappear, performed infinitely cheaper and faster by technology which does not sleep.
It may bring unimaginable benefits.
It could cure cancer. It may save millions of lives — while also destroying millions of livelihoods. It is a gift to criminals, scammers and fakers . . . but could thwart and catch them too.
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How are our politicians preparing for a revolution so vast it could eclipse every other problem?
Britain is notoriously poor at harnessing new tech to our national advantage. If not, we would have been self-sufficient for nuclear energy decades ago.
How will the Government regulate to seize the advantages of AI while shielding us from its risks?
How will we deploy it to drive growth instead of watching impotently as millions are dumped on the scrapheap and our economy destroyed?
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What, specifically, becomes of those whose jobs AI renders obsolete? How do we retrain them all, and to do what?
For all the other challenges they face, Rishi Sunak — and maybe Keir Starmer — need a detailed strategy for all this.
AI, as Octopus Energy boss Greg Jackson says, is a freight train roaring down the tracks.
We must act fast before it hits us.
Woke a gender
WE are forever told that every penny counts at the NHS, what with it being so “underfunded” by the “wicked Tories”.
Then a hospital hands a woman patient aged 70 a survey asking which of 18 genders she is. “Two spirit”? “Agender”? “Gender variant”? If even those don’t cover her off, she can tick “Other”.
The form is anonymous, its sole aim to vaguely ascertain how patients identify.
Isn’t the NHS on its knees? Yet halfwits in diversity departments still have time to concoct woke gibberish.
When can their crazy salaries be freed up to cut waiting lists and treat the sick?
Pour effort
YOUR water bill is about to rise . . . for 100 years. We wish we were joking.
Our water firms are systematically failing: From the sewage pumped into rivers to the hosepipe bans imposed as hundreds of millions of litres a day leak from pipes they cannot apparently fix.
Meanwhile their bosses get inexplicable footballer-level salaries plus obscene bonuses impossible to justify.
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And the message from their trade body Water UK? It will only improve if we pay more — for maybe the next century.
Like that sewage, it stinks.