At the beginning of this year, Keir Starmer announced an “AI opportunities action plan”, which promises to mainline AI “into the veins of this enterprising nation”. The implication that AI is a class-A injectable substance, liable to render the user stupefied and addicted, was presumably unintentional. But then what on earth did they mean about AI’s potential, and did they have any good reason to believe it?
Not according to the authors of this book, who are refreshingly sarcastic about what they think is just another tech bubble. What is sold to us as AI, they announce, is just “a bill of goods”: “A few major well-placed players are poised to accumulate significant wealth by extracting value from other people’s creative work, personal data, or labor, and replacing quality services with artificial facsimiles.”
