The AI Trap

Right now, Britain is patting itself on the back for “winning” a £31bn investment package from the great and the good of Silicon Valley. Microsoft alone is throwing £22bn at new data centres, Nvidia is promising the “largest AI rollout in British history,” and Google is planting another cloud tentacle into the Ministry of Defence. Starmer calls it a “generational step change.” It looks more like a generational outsourcing.

Because let’s be blunt: this isn’t Britain building a sovereign AI industry. This is Britain playing landlord to America’s oligarchs. The servers will hum in Loughton or Blyth, but the intellectual property, the control, and the profits sit firmly in Redmond and California. Britain provides the land, the grid, the tax breaks, and the workforce. The dividends will be wired elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the promises are dusted off and wheeled out. “Five thousand high-skilled jobs.” But scratch the surface and you see the contradiction. AI doesn’t exist to create jobs, it exists to eliminate them. Every bank of servers in Hertfordshire is a call-centre, a back office, or a supermarket till quietly scheduled for extinction. Yes, a handful of engineers will be hired. But far more people – those in lower-paid, routine roles – will find the ground pulled from beneath them. GDP is well and good, but not when it’s funnelled to the few.

History gives the warning. The first Industrial Revolution destroyed artisanal livelihoods in favour of the mill owner. The digital revolution hollowed out the high street in favour of Amazon. Every wave of technology funnels wealth upwards – from the artisan to the oligarch. Without intervention, AI will do it faster and harder than anything before. Nadella himself admits it: all tech comes in “booms and busts.” The bust, in this case, will be borne not by Microsoft’s shareholders, but by the cashier in Sunderland, the clerk in Doncaster, the van driver in Walsall.

And what safety net is in place? None. Labour, drunk on American handshakes and royal banquets, talks only of “opportunity.” The Conservatives, who flogged DeepMind to Google without a murmur, now pretend to be guardians of sovereignty. Reform? They cosy up to Musk while railing against “globalists,” then plan to deflect the inevitable anger onto scapegoats – migrants, minorities, anyone but the oligarchs actually pulling the strings.

The one serious answer – Universal Basic Income, or at least some redistributive mechanism to stop the funnel emptying the pockets of millions into the yachts of the few – isn’t even on the table. Instead, we march towards a social powder keg. When the jobs vanish and the bills rise to keep Microsoft’s servers cool, the poor and dispossessed won’t blame Nadella or Altman. They’ll blame Westminster. And into that anger will step the flag-waving frauds, promising “patriotism” while they clasp hands with the very oligarchs hollowing Britain out.

Britain has done this before. It industrialised without safety nets, and it took a century of unrest, blood, and bitter struggle to force reform. To repeat that mistake with AI – eyes wide open, cheered on by a government talking about “step changes” – would be folly of the highest order. The artisan has always been sacrificed on the altar of progress. But unless we learn to share that progress through policy, this time the altar may collapse under the weight of the dispossessed.