This is the introduction to the longer article which has been published in Computer Weekly.
"Labour has published its 'AI Opportunities Action Plan' (The Plan).
The Prime Minister is very bullish about The Plan, and peppers his foreword with muscular terms like growth, revolution, ambition, strength and innovation.
In itself, The Plan is full of claims that AI is essential and inevitable, and urges the government to pour public money into the industry so as not to miss out.
In the style of tech entrepreneurs, The Plan likes to put 'x' after things, so investment must go up by 20x (meaning twenty times), the amount of compute AI requires has already gone up by 10,000x and so on.
The Plan claims that Britain is already leading the world through the AI Safety Institute (of which more later) and infuses the usual AI hype with a nationalist vibe via terms like world leader, world-class, national champions and 'Sovereign AI'.
Above all, The Plan emphasises the need to scale.
The significance of scale for AI and its technopolitical impacts will be explored below.
This article addresses the poverty of The Plan and the emptiness of its claims about AI but,
rather than a point-by-point rebuttal, it's about the underlying reasons why this Labour government supports measures that will harm both people and the environment.
In between invocations of speed, pace and scale, there's some recognition in The Plan that the UK is not a wholly happy place right now.
While recommending a high-tech form of land enclosures via ‘AI Growth Zones’ (AIGZs), which are about handing data centre developers "access to land and power", it gestures towards the idea that these could drive local innovation in post-industrial towns.
While The Plan's claims about AI's inevitable progress and the oncoming wave of agentic systems that will reason, plan and act for themselves already seem dated and discredited, what hasn't changed is that the very regions targeted for growth via AIGZs have already seen violent anti-immigrant pogroms accompanied by fascist rhetoric, and those sentiments have not gone away.
Ultimately, it's argued here, the misstep represented by The Plan and its total commitment to AI will reinforce and amplify the threat of the far right, as well as connecting it to the extremely reactionary ideas that are in the ascendency in Silicon Valley.
This article proposes instead 'decomputing'; the refusal of hyperscale computing, the replacement of reductive solutionism with structures of care, and the construction of alternative infrastructures based on convivial technologies.