The UK wants to build on its early head start, but this is just the beginning of the conversation
A detailed plan for the next 12 months and beyond: The UK Government has launched a 10-year strategy to position the country as a global leader in AI. It has three main objectives: to increase the number of discoveries that happen and are exploited in the UK, to benefit from the highest productivity growth from AI, and to establish the “most trusted and pro-innovation” system for AI governance in the world. For this to happen, the Government wants a higher number of people working in AI, more access to data, and the diffusion of AI across all regions and sectors in the country (a nod to levelling up).
Another departure from the EU approach: At this stage there is no detail on one of the most important aspects – how the Government intends to regulate for AI. A white paper outlining this will be published in the next 6–12 months, but is already being positioned as having a pro-innovation stance. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the recent intention to depart from the GDPR and the recent ‘Plan for Digital Regulation’. It’s clear that we are unlikely to see anything like the ‘pyramid of risk’ of the EU proposal, which has the potential to place a significant burden on a wide range of highly innovative AI use cases.
The UK is in a strong position relative to others: The UK is in a very strong position to capitalise on the opportunities of AI. In 2020, it attracted £1.8bn of funding for AI-based technologies – more than twice the amount invested in Germany and France combined. The country is third in the world for private capital investment into AI behind the US and China, and is home to a third of Europe’s AI companies. The new framework will be designed to continue to attract investment, and – as the strategy sets out – to make the UK an “AI-first” economy. While there has been broad support for yesterday’s strategy, It still remains to be seen how it will be received by the public, which still looks at AI with caution and could be concerned about job losses due to automation. The forthcoming white paper should provide more detail on how the Government intends to deal with such risks.
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-ten-year-plan-to-make-britain-a-global-ai-superpower
