Tony Blair Institute: UK needs bit barns to lead in AI deployment, not training Britain should not try to compete with America and China in the race to build cutting-edge AI models and focus instead on widespread AI adoption, but even this will require a boost local compute capacity. This is the message from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which warns that the UK needs to "take infrastructure …
I'd rather the UK just let other countries deal with the problems of building new power infrastructure for data centers that I'm not sure we need, and use the proposed bit barn sites for housing instead. If we really do need a lot more datacenters, an alternative (better?) way to get them built on UK soil would be to mandate data sovereignty for UK citizens.
There's a great opportunity to build bit barns in West Wales - we have a lot of renewable energy, to the point that figuring out how to ship it over to England is a controversial issue and we'll be the last part of the UK to run out of water. Moving data is a lot easier than moving electricity and distances across the UK aren't a big deal in terms of latency, it's basically a win-win, except that ultimately we might end up with a lot of underutilised infrastructure when the bubble goes up, and I'm sure we'll find other uses for that amount of computational power.
Given this was the same Tony Blair Institute that so ineptly railed against Net Zero recently I was already donning my keyboard warrior outfit to do battle. But... I agree with them entirely, dammit.
It's daft for the UK to try and outrace Microsoft, Amazon and Google in their attempt to boil the worlds oceans to give us an articificial yes-man we can question, but never entirely trust. And I agree it goes from funny to disastrous thanks to uk.gov swallowing the hook given to them by the AI firms to put their products at the heart of UK government. That will be a nice little earner for someone.
Whether anyone will listen to the Tony Blair Institute is a different matter. As a man he made a lot of good decisions and one catastrophic one, but that's what politicians are remembered for. I suspect it will be the same for his institute; yes, they might be right on this one but why would we listen to them in general?
It's unrealistic for the UK to compete with the USA, Germany and Japan in building cars, instead we must become world leaders in using cars. I call on the government to subsidise everyone in the UK to buy 3 pickups and demonstrate to the world their dynamic use in dynamically being dynamic.
T. Blair at the Future Of Road Development institute
" I suspect it will be the same for his institute; yes, they might be right on this one but why would we listen to them in general?"
Doesn't matter whether we listen, agree or disagree. Blair is a still an influential figure, and the people this report is aimed at are fellow politicos, policy makers and shapers. Doubt the idea came from within the Blair Institute, I believe it will have been an idea carefully placed by the lobbyists of big tech and bit barn developers. They (and we) know that the UK isn't going to train any new AI, so no loss in sharing that as an insight, but what these companies want is for government to sweep away all the planning rules, to offer energy supply guarantees and probably change the energy pricing system so that the costs of new capacity get dumped on domestic users.
And with the huge circle jerk that is government and industry thinking on AI, there's a good chance they'll get what they want. You don't think that anybody from DSIT or DESNZ reads these forums, or listens to the likes of us?
"As a man he made a lot of good decisions and one catastrophic one"
This the same Tony Blair that was renowned for his policy U-turns? Pretty much every decision he made had to be reversed (or that's how it seemed). So were all his good decisions those reversing most of (but certainly not all) the bad ones?
Nah.
PPE : Politics Philosophy and Economics.
Failing that, Law.
No other grads need apply especially for the Lab Party.
Reform is a bunch of losers. God help us if the idiots in the electorate elect Farage aka Mini Trump.
The Tories are a shambles and the LibDems are still working out how to sing kumbyaya.
All anyone needs to run a country is a firm grasp of the classics.
Firm grasp of something. Yes. Although I haven't heard it called classics before. ;)
I imagine if you were to read, analyse and fully understand the extant Greek and Latin authors that wouldn't be such a poor grounding for government but just because Oxbridge gives you a sheet off the classics bog roll inscribed with an A+ and can roll off the tip of your tongue apparently appropos quotes from those authors doesn't signify much as Bloody Stupid Johnson frequently demonstrated.
Correction:
All anyone needs to run this country is a firm grasp on REALITY !!!
Unfortunately, almost ALL our politicians are somewhat encumbered by working in a place that masks REALITY almost perfectly while diminishing the ability to detect the absence.
Plans are made daily for impossible dreams that cannot be done with available funds, skills or technologies or within forecast timescales.
AKA Government of the UK (for the last 50 years or so !!!)
:)
The upside is that even a Classics Grad had a more relevant world view than the Orange Oaf across the pond. That idiot would fail economics 101.
We, the UK are flat broke and have been since the Blair/Brown years. Income Tax will have to rise or we are in for the same sort of hurt that Greece went through in 2008/2009. If you think that 11% interest rates are bad, you ain't seen nothing yet if tax rates don't rise.
Raising income tax could would compound the misery of the working class and start draining the wealth that the middle class has and would just lead to the government getting kicked out at the next elections.
The other kind of tax which no government wants to start looking at even though they should is an accumulated wealth tax.
We, the UK are flat broke and have been since the Blair/Brown years. Income Tax will have to rise or we are in for the same sort of hurt that Greece went through in 2008/2009.
What rot. The UK is not broke. The Home Office was able to magic up £400m to fight a bunch of court battles to not send any migrants to Rwanda. That wasn’t budgeted or accounted. They just spent it (and of course that’s about 1day of normal NHS spend).
The UK can afford to invest in infrastructure. We choose not to. Or to tie it up in political indecision instead of letting the engineers run with it once we get a green light.
Moreover, to compare a currency-issuing monetary sovereign against Greece - a country without its own currency or even the ability to set interest rates is either ignorant or wilfully misleading. It is quite literally - structurally - impossible for the UK to end up in a Greek-style sovereign debt crisis. Can’t happen. Not in the “it would never happen here” sense, but in the sense that you can’t have a reaction without an equal and opposite reaction.
Other bad things can happen, but not Greece. And if we need to raise taxes, then a wealth tax on immovable wealth over £10m should do it. Start with the billionaires and work down. Although frankly working people could stand to pay more tax (Scandi style) - but only if they get Scandi social services - childcare, etc which people are currently paying through the nose for.
The report itself identifies (or rather doesn't) "multiple experts" (sic) but you can follow the link and find them. I was not too impressed but the only qualification for writing reports for an organisation such as this is to be able to write reports which at least seem plausible.
Yes Tony, you are the fount of all human wisdom and clearly have gained more knowledge of IT in five minutes than those of us who have spent decades in the business.
Just like your certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction obtained from a conversation some junior operative had with a dodgy cab driver rather than listen to the results of all those tedious conventional espionage measures which had found virtually no evidence to support your messianic determination to invade somewhere or other.
Whilst there were no doubt a large number of Oxford PPE graduates involved in "sexing up" the dossier, the original source was an Iraqi cab driver who seemingly just made it up as nobody bothered to check it because Blair had already made his mind up and was just looking for any "evidence" as an excuse to invade Iraq.
See https://gulfnews.com/world/europe/iraqi-cabbie-could-have-been-key-source-for-blair-1.550610 for some of the comment on this.
I think many of the war criminals are distributed across EU jails rather than locked up at the Hague. I'm not that far from HMP Long Lartin, and one of two war crims have been locked up there.
Although I don't follow why we lock them, we should just hang them like we used to; You may object, but let me offer you the prize of Sir Tony dangling on a gibbet in Parliament Square, surely that would persuade even the fiercest opponent of the noose to change their mind?
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The belief that it will magically lead to growth is complete BS.
It is technological pollution, undermining the basic benefits of computing. Toxic to anything it touches.
Let other countries throw tonnes of cash down this rabbit hole.
If Labour spend money on this rather than water, energy and the NHS, they will just lose the next election by even more votes than they already will, for censoring the internet and failing to soften the impact of Long Brexit.
"The belief that it will magically lead to growth is complete BS."
That depends on your definition of growth. The government deem this to be the change in previous periods of the sum of (consumer spending + government spending + business investment + a few lies to add 10%). So if business "invests" in AI or a snake oil manufacturing plant, then that most certainly is measured as growth. It's one of the oddities of assessing GDP that wasting money counts as growth if a company puts it on its balance sheet.
>” At the current build pace, the country is unlikely to meet its 2030 target of 6 GW of AI-ready capacity on UK soil, it says, and blames planning and permitting delays, constraints with the national grid and soaring industrial energy costs for holding up progress.”
This reads as if the authors have brought into the bandwagon.
So someone has placed a target of 6 GW based on what? Wet finger in the air? But because they have we must feel bad about not achieving it. I suspect the problem isn’t planning etc. but that businesses haven’t even submitted plans for 6 GW of capacity. Plus it doesn’t matter how much you jump up and down, building 6GW of generator capacity and (targeted) distribution network is going to take 5+ years…
One of the laughs about HS2 and lessons from it (so far) are that in their attempts to circumvent the planning system and accelerate the project the politicians and HS2 Ltd directly contributed to and accelerated the spiralling costs. An additional lesson from HS2, is that events are highly likely to harpoon your original raison d'être. In the case of HS2, speed aka reduced journey time was a big factor to the point people totally missed technology advances which enabled people to work whilst on the move or more significantly from home.
So given it is going to take 5+ years for 6GW of AI capacity to become available people aren’t going to standstill, they are going to work around the shortage problem…
Thus it makes more sense to spend the money on training people and work within the constraints. As I said to the team on the HS2 stand this weekend, the big benefit of HS2 to date has been the training of engineers, albeit an expensive training, we now need to find opportunities for them to use their skills - does an AI bit barn need tunnel boring skills?
Big point in HS2 that was never really pushed was the west coast line is at maximum capacity in regards to the number of trains using it.
So a nice HS2 line from north of Crewe down to London would take all the express trains off the west coast line and send them straight to London, leaving space for more local/commuter trains+ more goods trains(these are where the money is).
But as regards to the 6GW of AI capacity... thats a pair of Sizewell C power stations. JUST for AI bit barns.
Which does seem a bit of waste considering that we're running out of power generation now, plus no infrastructure to send that power anywhere.
And the bit barns will want to be located either inside the M25 or just outside it......
When I first heard the acronym "TBI" it stood for Traumatic Brain Injury and these days the only difference is that we now have a TBI at the national level.
"Keep investing in the bubble," he assures us, as the companies who profit from the bubble continue to pump money down his throat.
Lets just make sure those bit barns are flexible enough to be adapted for other purposes when the bubble goes up, eh?
Lets suspect disbelief for a moment and assume AI has the potential to deliver measurable societal benefit -- the very last thing you would want to do is buy in a model from Alibaba or the Silicon Valley cabals with all of the associated bias and poison associated with those sources.
Last month Rachel Reeves was going to find £5 billion (with a 'b') to shore up government finances.
Then last week Rachel Reeves had to admit that the actual figure was ZERO.
Yesterday, Elon Musk was awarded $30 billion by the directors of a failing car company called Tesla.
To get to the point -- ZERO awarded by 60 million taxpayers in the UK.........
.................while $30 billion awarded by the directors of a single private organisation.
Yup....when you hear the word "growth" used by UK politicians........it's clear they DO NOT HAVE A CLUE!
....then there's Tony Bliar!!!
