Burnham has a chance to build trust in AI
The biggest risk to the continued success of the UK tech ecosystem isn’t the plight of founders, it’s the risk of a backlash that comes from a lack of trust, says Euan Blair
Andy Burnham wants to reset AI policy away from championing global scale ups and founders in favour of UK workers. As a scale up founder, consistently championed by the government, it’s hard not to take it personally.
But to feel offended would be a mistake. Because the biggest risk to the continued success of the UK tech ecosystem isn’t the plight of founders, it’s the risk of a backlash that comes from a lack of trust.
For AI optimists, the sunlit uplands of AI are getting sunnier still: mega-IPOs for investors, and a life raft in a storm for governments contending with poor productivity in economies in Europe
But the optimism will only turn into reality, if workers are happy and able to use AI, and the emerging signs are not good. Today trust in AI is shrinking at exactly the time it should be growing. Just 42 per cent of people in the UK say they are willing to trust AI at all.
Fewer than half trust the public sector to use it responsibly, even as three-quarters of UK consumers say they are already using it in some form. Adoption is racing ahead of confidence.
So Burnham’s response should be different. Previously governments have struggled to get ahead of public perception on risk, whether on social media or driverless cars or digital ID.
So what do we do about it? Diktat from Whitehall is unlikely to work. You do not rebuild trust in a technology by regulating it more tightly or by picking which companies to champion.
The trust deficit
You rebuild it by giving the people affected by it a genuine stake in the outcome through jobs and the skills to access them, not more rules that arrive after the job has already gone.
Fear about jobs is the heart of the trust deficit: 69 per cent of people say they are concerned about the economic impact of AI-driven job losses, 57 per cent think it will lead to widespread unemployment, and two-thirds of the public, along with more than half of employers surveyed, believe the economic gains will flow mainly to wealthy investors and large companies rather than workers.
Labour’s policy response thus far has been to roll out a wider suite of worker’s rights. The risk is that this provides theoretical protection from losing jobs that no longer exist in reality. The most important right, in fact, is the right to be able to do the job available. The right to reskill.
12 million people in England already work in occupations in structural decline, according to NFER research, and roles in those areas are shrinking three times faster than forecast five years ago. That is a lot of instability. But only 21 per cent of UK employees are learning at work today, and the ability to access training is increasingly rationed to higher earners, who are almost twice as likely to get training as those on lower wages.
That is what a genuine Right to Reskill should fix: paid time to train, built into the working day by default, the way France, Germany, Italy and Spain already treat it, rather than Britain’s current right to ask for unpaid leave to train, which employers can simply refuse. It should mean parity of funding and esteem between vocational and academic training. And we need one plain-English guide to entitlements, replacing today’s maze of Bootcamps, apprenticeship routes and college courses funded by byzantine routes.
And, none of it requires new taxpayer money. It repackages billions already committed through the Growth and Skills Levy and the Lifelong Learning Entitlement into something workers can use, and firms can benefit from through better skills.
Trust isn’t rebuilt with words. It’s rebuilt when people can point to their own pay rise and promotion as proof the technology worked for them, not against them.
Euan Blair is co-founder and chief executive of Multiverse