Time was when Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson talked about the ‘White Heat of Technology’ which was going to revolutionise UK Industrial growth in the 1960s. Now Labour leader Keir Starmer is at it again, and this time it’s going to be Artificial Intelligence that will work its productivity enhancing magic on the UK economy.
AI, along with digitization, smart technology and automation, may indeed lead to higher efficiencies in many sectors, but that will also mean job losses. Some hope that the money saved will be invested new production so creating more jobs to compensate for the lost jobs and that the new jobs will be better paid and higher skilled. But it’s also possible that it will be (costly) skilled jobs that go and lower grade jobs that are left over. Plenty to debate there- some of it very grim.
Add to that, AI could enhance the political risks associated with the centralised power of the newly emergent high technology-based billionaire elite, what, in his retirement speech, President Biden called a new ‘Technology Industry Complex’- shades of President Eisenhower’s 1961 warnings about the emerging ‘Military Industrial Complex’. Biden said ‘Six decades later, I'm equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech industrial complex….today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead’ For example he added , ‘Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power’
More positively though, AI and modern information and communications technology in general, is not all bad! It can allow us to do many things we could not do before, some of which may be socially beneficial. For example, some say that AI could enable us to improve our use of energy by better system design and management in many sectors, including manufacturing and agriculture. However, it also true that AI is very energy hungry, so much so that Starmer has set an ‘AI energy council,’ which will be co-chaired by the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, and the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, to secure electricity generation for the scheme. The council is likely to accelerate investment in low-carbon energy sources for datacentres.
However, finding even more energy to power them and AI in particular may be very hard. The UK is already pretty stretched trying to see off fossil fuel, with the government claiming that we will need nuclear as well as renewables to do it. Indeed, according to the UK government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, the first data centre is set to be in Culham, Oxfordshire, home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority. Evidently the aim is for its to serve as a testing ground to drive forward research on how sustainable energy like nuclear SMR and also fusion can power AI ambitions.
As previous posts have indicated, nuclear is certainly being pushed hard at present by some in the AI context. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like may be keen, but it’s still a costly option with many other issues, and SMRs in particular look like being expensive long shots. But if not that, along with renewables (including new options like tidal) and (some say) fossil CCS, then what else is there? Do we wait for fusion- an even longer shot?
Well it may also be a long shot, but there could be another ‘white heat of technology’ option that may change the situation- natural hydrogen. And not just for the UK, globally too. As was noted in an earlier post, it’s far from clear exactly what the practically available scale of usable resource will turn out to be, but there may be significant amounts of geological hydrogen in the rock strata in a wide variety of locations. It been labelled ‘white hydrogen’ and it could well be a game changer.
It’s been ignored in the past, as it was thought to be rare, in part since hydrogen evidently doesn’t show up separately in the standard gas chromatography technology used for survey work. But now, after some new tests (in part following an unexpected fire in a water well) things have changed and there are exploratory projects underway around the world, including in the USA, Europe and Australia, with the albeit small pioneering project in Mali generating power competitively.
Some of the hydrogen resource may be too deep to get at easily and it may be mixed with other gasses making it less useful. But if only some of the huge amount that is evidently there can be used, then we may be able to forget about nuclear. Whether we would also still need to go for AI is another debate, but the energy argument would then be taken out of it…. assuming there is a lot of cheap, clean, easy to access white hydrogen. So is worth keeping an eye on: it’s certainly better that blue hydrogen produced from fossil fuels with CCS.
*A short post this week – in synchrony maybe with the AI/IT theme, my iMac broke down and had to have its disc drive replaced. So I was offline and stalled for a few days. Oh horrors!
Comments
Post a Comment