UK Government Vows to Hack Through Regulation to Get Benefit from AI
The UK government is pushing ahead with its ambitious plans to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive efficiency and productivity in public services, despite growing concerns about the technology's potential risks and limitations.
Civil services have claimed that adoption of AI tools could save a staggering 75,000 days of manual work each year, but the government is taking a more nuanced approach by "sandboxing" regulations to allow companies to test new technologies in a controlled environment.
Regulatory Relaxation: A Key Part of the Plan
The UK government has announced a slew of projects that will benefit from a more relaxed approach to regulation, with £8.9 million invested through the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO). The funding will support 15 projects across various sectors, including healthcare, film classification, and local government.
- Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) gets £1 million backing for a pilot AI assistant to help its experts assess clinical trials more efficiently and consistently.
- The British Board of Film Classification gets nearly the same figure to build an AI tool for age classification of videos streamed on demand.
- Milton Keynes Council has won a £781,817 portion of the pot to pilot the licensing of robots that could clean and de-ice pavements.
The government is also promising to let companies try out "AI sandboxing," an idea that will allow individual regulations to be temporarily switched off for a limited period of time in "safe, controlled testing environments." This move aims to give businesses the freedom to innovate while minimizing the risks associated with regulatory overreach.
A Promising but Unproven Track Record
The UK government's efforts to harness the power of AI are being met with a mixed bag of results. On the one hand, research has shown that AI chatbots might make people work more while benefiting less from their labor. On the other hand, Lloyds Banking Group claims its employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Investors are also increasingly likely to be sounding the alarm, signaling a potential market bubble surrounding the trillion-dollar infrastructure-guzzling technology. The government's plans to save £45 billion through the application of AI lack clarity and are based on broad-brush assumptions, experts told MPs last week.
The Government's Fiscal Woes
The UK government is facing a fiscal tight spot, with unpopular tax rises and worrying borrowing in the Autumn Budget next month. Any savings promised by the adoption of AI will not come a moment too soon, as the public purse is looking increasingly threadbare.
Banking such expectations might create a hostage to fortune, though. The government's reliance on AI to drive efficiency and productivity raises questions about the potential risks and limitations of this technology. Will it truly deliver the promised savings, or will it simply paper over the cracks with more administrative tasks?