A claim that the UK is attracting billions of pounds in AI investment has been debunked. That’s no surprise when our establishment runs on dubious ‘good news’
O
ne trillion dollars. That’s the amount of financial aid Gordon Brown triumphantly announced at the 2009 London G20 summit. (I contributed my own two cents here.) Except it wasn’t exactly real: the number was a mixture of already promised apples and aspirational future oranges.
So it should hardly be a surprise that when ministers proclaimed last year that the UK was attracting billions of pounds of new investment in AI, they were being more than a little economical with the truth. As a Guardian investigation revealed, much of it turns out not to be new at all: existing datacentres rented rather than built, a supercomputer site not yet even started, promised investments that might never arrive and claims of job creation that have little or no connection to reality. The headline numbers are impressive. The underlying reality rather less so.
Nor should this surprise anyone who thinks for a minute about how the economy actually works. Companies do not make billion-pound investment decisions because a minister wants a photograph beside a server rack. Policy matters – sometimes a great deal. But its effects are typically slow, uncertain and hard to attribute to any single government initiative.
