Fixtures
Years back, I check out author and historian Peter Ackroyd on London’s secret below ground history. I ended up being consumed by the lost rivers, like the Effra and the Westbourne, still streaming in darkness below the city. Considering that I started investigating this piece, I’ve felt likewise about expert system, thinking about it as a mainly undetectable system spreading out below and throughout London, mushrooming through districts and organizations, twisting into daily lives.
Throughout London an AI network is currently taking shape. Underneath the streets, Thames Water has more than 75,000 acoustic sensing units listening for leakages (no jokes about effectiveness please). In Tooting, AI listens to assessments at St George’s A&E and composes the medical notes, conserving physicians a typical 47 minutes per shift; throughout all 32 districts, artificial intelligence enrolls fragmented records to assist London comprehend the journeys of individuals sleeping rough.
In Lewisham, AI has actually determined more than 3,000 neglected websites with theoretical capability for almost 10,000 homes; if you hang out in Croydon, you may have been among more than 470,000 individuals who had their face scanned by AI-powered video cameras installed on lampposts and compared versus a cops watchlist. On television, predictive AI identifies the indications of difficulty before a train, signal or escalator leaves. Progressively, algorithms exercise how groceries take a trip from shop to front door. And if you drive an electrical lorry, AI might currently be choosing when your cars and truck charges. We are handing more of the reins to AI and the handover is gaining ground and scope.
It’s felt a bit like the Apocalypse Olympics. Over the previous month alone, Anthropic alerted that AI designs are getting “tactical intelligence targeting and traditional weapons abilities”. OpenAI required worldwide requirements to govern frontier AI systems, which are possibly advancing faster than human beings can comprehend, test or manage them, and Bill Gates cautioned that, untreated, AI might “trigger a billion deaths”. All of which puts me in mind of the timeless Crimewatch sign off: “Don’t have headaches, do sleep well!”
“The opponent just requires to get it right as soon as”
Dr Stephanie Hare
“The sci-fi situation is not in fact what we need to be fretted about,” states Dr Stephanie Hare, co-presenter of the BBC’s Artificial Intelligence: Decoded. “The extremely genuine circumstances that really major individuals are fretted about are extremely standard.” The greatest threat to London, as she informs it, is great old-fashioned cybersecurity. The majority of organisations “have actually not been staying up to date with their newest cybersecurity financial investments”. It is a David-and-Goliath issue, other than the benefit is reversed. “If you’re an organization or business, you need to protect your whole attack surface area,” states Hare. “Whereas the assaulter just requires to get it right as soon as.”
“Think about what that implies in a city as digital as London. Picture anything that can be hacked that you depend upon,” states Hare. “Imagine their bank cards do not work any longer. Their public transportation does not work any longer. Picture that you wish to trigger optimum mayhem in London. Enter into a bank so individuals can not access their cash and watch London lose it.”
Fixtures Vulnerabilities
Just recently, the Government provided the somewhat surreal recommendations that we need to all keep an emergency situation supply of food and water in your home. France and Switzerland, Hare states, are much more authoritative. Britain is “a bit hand-wavy; like, you must have some beans. What is incorrect with us?” Being an equal-opportunities catastrophist, in reality I had actually presumed the much-discussed “prepper kitchen” was for El Niño effects or climate-change dry spell. Hare’s issue is what occurs if the significantly AI-reliant systems that get food to us stop working.
London is abnormally based on those systems. Ninety-nine percent of the 6.347 million tonnes of food and beverage providing the capital each year originates from outside the city; less than one percent is produced here. Municipal government explains a food supply based on “a complex set of interdependencies and just-in-time shipment systems”. This summer season the Mayor, Lord Khan, revealed the London Resilience Unit was dealing with a London Food Systems Resilience Partnership, partnering with food and farming charity Sustain to get ready for interruption from “worldwide shocks and crises”.
“Wave one was reversible. Wave 2 isn’t”
Tim Checkley
A lot of Londoners are not worrying about AI, or hoarding cans of baked beans. At Weave, a current top held by London innovation business Loomery on “developing the agentic business”, the enjoyment had to do with what it calls AI’s 2nd wave. Wave one was specific performance: AI assists us do existing work quicker. Wave 2 is organisational reinvention: services revamp the work itself around AI representatives. Eliminate the AI and the procedure quits working. “Wave one was reversible. Wave 2 isn’t,” was Loomery co-founder Tim Checkley’s formula. This is agentic AI: instead of awaiting every human timely, an AI representative is offered a result and gets on with it.
David Lagnado, teacher of cognitive and choice sciences at University College London, has actually been studying what occurs when AI enters our decision-making procedures. He is broadly a fan. Just recently, when he discovered himself awake at 4am with tooth pain, he turned to ChatGPT. “It entirely got it all. And it was rather complicated,” he states. “If we utilize it in properly, it might open things for many individuals.’
stokkete – stock.adobe.com
But, at the moment, it seems like there is a pain barrier. Recent global research on AI and jobs found the gains skew heavily towards senior workers: employment rose 6.7 per cent in senior roles but fell 2.5 per cent in junior ones, precisely the jobs people need to get started.
In April, lastminute.com founder, former government digital tsar and now peer Baroness Lane Fox was appointed by the Mayor to lead a review into what AI means for London’s jobs. The Lane Fox review reported in July with similar findings to the global review, warning not of mass unemployment but of a “quieter drift” towards fewer entry-level jobs, weaker career ladders and greater inequality. What if Londoners got something tangible from all this computing? Last year I found myself in an old, leaky house in south London watching a man strap a tiny data centre to a hot-water tank. The retired owner and his lodger had fallen into fuel poverty. The solution was apparently to move a computer into the airing cupboard. As the installation unfolded I began to see it for what it was: a genius intervention.
Surrey-based Heata’s servers take on computing jobs normally sent to data centres, including AI workloads. Computers get hot, but data, unlike heat, is easy to move. The jobs arrive over the internet; Heata pays for the electricity and the householder gets the resulting heat in their water. Heata now has servers in 100 homes, with 3,000 people waiting for one. After all the promises about how AI might make us richer and more productive, here it was delivering a benefit you could turn on at the tap.
Uplifting, but still an outlier. Large-scale data centres remain the preferred model for burgeoning AI. London has staked a sizeable chunk of its future on AI. More than half of Britain’s AI companies are registered here, its AI start-ups pulled in a record $3.5 billion in venture capital in 2024, and City Hall is spending millions to accelerate adoption.
Is the pursuit of AI worth the risks and the trade-offs? If AI is about to deliver an economic miracle, London ought to be where we see it first. However, research shows that simply being an AI company is no productivity wand— the technology doesn’t float above the real economy. Its success still depends on people, skills, capital and place.
Fixtures Remaining in control of our city
So how do we make sure we remain in control of our city and how do we stop useful reliance becoming blind dependence? For Theo Blackwell, London’s chief digital officer, the starting point is deceptively simple: keep humans in the picture. “AI can help us improve public services, but it should support people rather than replace human judgment and accountability,” he says. “If an AI system gets something wrong, there needs to be a clear way for a person to check it, challenge it and ultimately take responsibility.”
London, he says, is already trying to build that principle into the way the city adopts AI. City Hall’s Emerging Technology Charter sets standards for responsible use, while the London Office of Technology and Innovation connects more than 200 people working with AI across local government.
Critics point out that London has no standalone AI scenario on its Risk Register, while its safeguards remain organised around individual risks such as cyberattack, power failure, transport disruption, health and public disorder. But what if AI helps one failure cascade across several systems at once? Who, then, is responsible for seeing the whole picture?
“We still obviously need to assess the safety of the models themselves but we need to do much more than that”
Professor Jason McEwen
Professor Jason McEwen is interim chief scientist at the Alan Turing Institute, which has just released Frontier AI Risks: A practical way forward. “We shouldn’t be just thinking about safety in the context of abstract models,” he stresses. “When we deploy these models within businesses, within industry, as underlying workflows and processes, then we need to make sure they’re safe in those operating environments. We still obviously need to assess the safety of the models themselves but we need to do much more than that. It’s the safety of the whole system.”
In other words, it’s not enough to ask whether the AI itself is safe. You have to ask what we’ve connected it to, what we’ve allowed it to do and what happens to everything else if it goes wrong.
One thing we can say with a degree of certainty is that there won’t be a big red “off” button that solves this. “There’s been a lot of talk of kill switches lately,” says McEwen, “but once AI is deeply integrated, it’s not the case that we can always just switch things off.” Imagine doing that to the electricity for a hospital, for example. McEwen says we need systems that “fall back to a graceful, safe state”, making sure the world we’ve connected AI to can carry on safely without it.
stokkete – stock.adobe.com
But, at the moment, it seems like there is a pain barrier. Recent global research on AI and jobs found the gains skew heavily towards senior workers: employment rose 6.7 per cent in senior roles but fell 2.5 per cent in junior ones, precisely the jobs people need to get started.
In April, lastminute.com founder, former government digital tsar and now peer Baroness Lane Fox was appointed by the Mayor to lead a review into what AI means for London’s jobs. The Lane Fox review reported in July with similar findings to the global review, warning not of mass unemployment but of a “quieter drift” towards fewer entry-level jobs, weaker career ladders and greater inequality. What if Londoners got something tangible from all this computing? Last year I found myself in an old, leaky house in south London watching a man strap a tiny data centre to a hot-water tank. The retired owner and his lodger had fallen into fuel poverty. The solution was apparently to move a computer into the airing cupboard. As the installation unfolded I began to see it for what it was: a genius intervention.
Surrey-based Heata’s servers take on computing jobs normally sent to data centres, including AI workloads. Computers get hot, but data, unlike heat, is easy to move. The jobs arrive over the internet; Heata pays for the electricity and the householder gets the resulting heat in their water. Heata now has servers in 100 homes, with 3,000 people waiting for one. After all the promises about how AI might make us richer and more productive, here it was delivering a benefit you could turn on at the tap.
Uplifting, but still an outlier. Large-scale data centres remain the preferred model for burgeoning AI. London has staked a sizeable chunk of its future on AI. More than half of Britain’s AI companies are registered here, its AI start-ups pulled in a record $3.5 billion in venture capital in 2024, and City Hall is spending millions to accelerate adoption.
Is the pursuit of AI worth the risks and the trade-offs? If AI is about to deliver an economic miracle, London ought to be where we see it first. However, research shows that simply being an AI company is no productivity wand— the technology doesn’t float above the real economy. Its success still depends on people, skills, capital and place.
Fixtures Remaining in control of our city
So how do we make sure we remain in control of our city and how do we stop useful reliance becoming blind dependence? For Theo Blackwell, London’s chief digital officer, the starting point is deceptively simple: keep humans in the picture. “AI can help us improve public services, but it should support people rather than replace human judgment and accountability,” he says. “If an AI system gets something wrong, there needs to be a clear way for a person to check it, challenge it and ultimately take responsibility.”
London, he says, is already trying to build that principle into the way the city adopts AI. City Hall’s Emerging Technology Charter sets standards for responsible use, while the London Office of Technology and Innovation connects more than 200 people working with AI across local government.
Critics point out that London has no standalone AI scenario on its Risk Register, while its safeguards remain organised around individual risks such as cyberattack, power failure, transport disruption, health and public disorder. But what if AI helps one failure cascade across several systems at once? Who, then, is responsible for seeing the whole picture?
“We still obviously need to assess the safety of the models themselves but we need to do much more than that”
Professor Jason McEwen
Professor Jason McEwen is interim chief scientist at the Alan Turing Institute, which has just released Frontier AI Risks: A practical way forward. “We shouldn’t be just thinking about safety in the context of abstract models,” he stresses. “When we deploy these models within businesses, within industry, as underlying workflows and processes, then we need to make sure they’re safe in those operating environments. We still obviously need to assess the safety of the models themselves but we need to do much more than that. It’s the safety of the whole system.”
In other words, it’s not enough to ask whether the AI itself is safe. You have to ask what we’ve connected it to, what we’ve allowed it to do and what happens to everything else if it goes wrong.
One thing we can say with a degree of certainty is that there won’t be a big red “off” button that solves this. “There’s been a lot of talk of kill switches lately,” says McEwen, “but once AI is deeply integrated, it’s not the case that we can always just switch things off.” Imagine doing that to the electricity for a hospital, for example. McEwen says we need systems that “fall back to a graceful, safe state”, making sure the world we’ve connected AI to can carry on safely without it.
AFP/Getty
A stylish alternative presumes human beings still understand how to take over. “The bulk of individuals do not do mathematics any longer. They simply go to ChatGPT, or their preferred AI design of option for whatever, and they trust it totally,” states Hare.”Those designs are frequently incorrect. You need to understand that they’re incorrect in order to challenge them. Now picture in 30 years time, a medical professional, a cosmetic surgeon, who is utilizing AI rather of having actually been trained appropriately to do these things. Envision that throughout every occupation. That is in fact my most significant concern. Makers are getting smarter, human beings are getting dumber.”
It’s adequate to send you scooting to the nearby analogue library. As has actually typically been stated, checking out books may be our biggest defence.
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