Rishi Sunak’s government is spending £100m on AI chips. Labour’s Future of Work plans don’t reference AI jobs displacement. New info on agricultural lobbying sheds light on state investment in alternative proteins – and animal abuse.
Here’s some effective altruism-relevant UK political news from the last ~week. This is my attempt to justify the ways of Westminster to EA, and EA to Westminster.
In the blue corner: government on AI
The Summit
I think you know already: The AI safety summit will be held at Bletchley Park on 1-2 November.
Wild speculation: Sunak personally requested Star Wars-y graphic design. Prove me wrong.
You might want to read Politico on the government putting summits at the heart of their post-Brexit foreign policy.
We should probably expect: China to be invited. H/t Politico, who report:
“If you were a betting man I reckon you’d see China there in some capacity,” said a U.K. government official familiar with planning for the summit
[Scandal: Official did not give their credence as a percentage]
AI Minister Jonathan Berry has previously said China will take part in conversations on AI “one way or the other”1
This will upset China hawks in Sunak’s parliamentary party (e.g. former leader Iain Duncan-Smith)
But also Japan, the US and the EU. Japan (this year’s G7 chair) wanted to talk AI with China via G7 meetings
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are setting up an AI Study Group. (But see also: BRICS is Fake by Noahpinion)
Britain is buying AI chips
Sunak puts £100m towards AI chips. Separate to £100m committed to the Foundation Models Taskforce, the government has pledged another £100m for purchasing AI chips. Procurement contracts will go to Nvidia, AMD and Intel, with the government looking to secure up to 5000 Nvidia GPUs. The Telegraph (paywalled) got the scoop.
Why buy a state supercomputer? Some public goods from AI will not attract enough private investment; this week, Meta shut down its protein folding team to focus on more profitable services (h/t FT; paywalled). BritGPT could do AI for the public benefit, whether that’s protein folding or alignment research.
But a source tells the Guardian that £100m “is far too low relative to investment by peers in the EU, US and China”.
The scramble for AI hardware is on. Saudi Arabia bought ~3000 Nvidia chips (paywalled) recently. Nvidia – one of only five trillion-dollar companies – expects earnings around $16bn for the three months until the end of September.
You may be interested in an opinion piece by Charles Jennings published by Politico: “There’s Only One Way to Control AI: Nationalization”. Jennings says the US federal government need to take control of key AI infrastructure. He writes:
Historically, and legally, the Atomic Energy Commission provides a useful precedent for when America creates technology that could potentially end life as we know it — a category into which AI clearly falls
AI isn’t listing in Britain
But Sunak’s overtures to an AI chips company failed to persuade them to register in the UK. Arm, a British chip designer based in Cambridge, held its Initial Public Offering (IPO) not on the London Stock Exchange, but on New York’s Nasdaq. Sunak, as well as being particularly motivated among world leaders by AI safety, has made a particular push for the UK to reap financial benefit from AI companies.
And Britain’s not investing in China
Sunak moves to block UK investment in Chinese tech. Sunak may be upsetting the US by bringing China to the summit, but he is also taking steps to echo America: “Department for Business and Trade (DBT) officials have told companies that — like the Biden administration — the U.K. will curb investment into China's semiconductor, artificial intelligence and quantum computing technology.”
In late June, businesses were sent a survey asking if they had invested in a range of industries (more than just AI) in a range of countries (more than just China). This is seen as a fact-finding mission to kickstart a response to national security-compromising outward investment.
And the red corner: opposition on AI
Darren Jones Tweet-threads through his week
Darren Jones has been weighing in on AI news this week. Jones is the opposition Labour Party’s loudest voice on AI. This week, he wrote an op-ed arguing not only that China should be invited to the summit, but also that a key measure of success should be the establishment of a G7-style association for AI powers – with China at the table.
Hours later, Jones wrote to Michelle Donelan, Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology, asking about the £100m spent on AI chips. Jones wants to know:
Who will build and house the supercomputer?
Which staff will be responsible? Will they be outsourced to a private company?
Will the hardware be funded with the initial £100m or the subsequent £900m?
If the government builds a large language model and trains it with public data, what governance, oversight and legislation will there be?
When will the supercomputer be running? Who will use it? What will be different about it vs commercially available options?
How much funding was given by the UK to the European High Performance Compute Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), and will the UK collaborate with EuroHPC JU?
What are ‘public service procurement pilots’ (a term used in previous gov communication), and how are they different from ordinary procurement rules?
Jones doesn’t technically shadow Donelan. Jones is instead chair of the Business Select Committee, but widely seen as a challenger to Shadow Minister Lucy Powell for “Labour’s tech crown”.
Reshuffles are expected before conference season (October). But even if Jones wins the tech post, he still won’t technically be Shadow Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology. Starmer is likely to reject mirroring Sunak’s recent government reorganisation (DSIT was only established this year), so Jones would become Shadow Minister for Digital, Culture and Media.
Is AI the future of “The Future of Work”?
Will Labour talk about AI as part of the Future of Work? Labour has revised its policy commitments on workers’ rights. Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, who is responsible for the Future of Work, said plans were not being watered down. Details of the new commitments will be public before the October conference. It is not yet clear if or how the party will integrate AI policy into the Future of Work platform.
Economists have said AI could have a displacement effect on employment; even if new work evolves and employment experiences a long-term replacement effect, the near-term impact could be brutal on ordinary workers. This week, this risk has been discussed in The Economist and The NYT, among many others. Could be something for Jones and Rayner to talk about.
Trade unions are concerned about AI in work. The Trade Unions Congress, which brings the majority of unions in England and Wales together, previously produced a white paper emphasising their concerns with employee surveillance and automated decision-making (i.e. firing, etc).
Labour’s policy could also be informed by the EU’s AI Act and a report on AI’s impact on skills and employment demand commissioned by the government back in 2021 (produced by PwC).
Labour’s revisions to its workers’ rights platform included consulting on a framework to “properly capture the breadth of employment relationships in the UK” instead of creating one legal class of “worker”, a move which would have strengthened protections for gig workers. The decision was criticised by Unite (Labour-affiliated trade union) and Momentum (Corbynist group), but supported by other Labour-affiliated trade unions like GMB.
Green and pleasant: animals and environment
The Scottish government launched a consultation on banning snare traps
On Saturday, animal rights activists marched in London.
Lobbying & public spending: animal ag vs alternative proteins
A new study claims that alternative proteins receive much less lobbying and much, much less public funding than animal agriculture. This will confirm your priors, but its always good to get data and headlines – the report was covered by e.g. the Guardian: ‘Gigantic’ power of meat industry blocking green alternatives.
I think it’s good practice to link the study itself too! The study authors were Simona Vallone and Eric F. Lambin.
Vallone and Lambin investigated public investment in the EU and the US between 2014 and 2020. The UK left the EU on 31 January 2020. They found that livestock farmers in the EU (US) received 1200 times (800 times) the public funding that plant-based meat companies received. (Check out Table 1 in the paper for some key figures).
The authors conclude that “vested interests” are protecting industrial animal agriculture and “resisting a food system transformation”.
I note that this report discusses ‘innovation’ subsidies for animal agriculture. I’d like to dig in to better understand what some of these subsidies are being spent on before making firm claims about their impact on animal happiness/suffering. I’m sure there are agricultural innovations that are positive, neutral and negative for animal welfare.
Let’s step back from innovation spending specifically, and talk about the general case against subsidies for animal agriculture. Farm subsidies artificially lower the price of meat. Animal welfare and environmental advocates argue this obscures significant externalities of industrial animal agriculture, like the suffering of billions in factory farms and the emission of greenhouse gases. (A German supermarket recently charged the true ‘climate cost’ of its meat and dairy).
But revoking farm subsidies could be politically disastrous. Farmers and fishers – seen as a traditional Tory block with their votes ‘up for grabs’ now – will be key constituencies in the next general election. The fishing industry “causes a disproportionate amount of political and economic discussion in comparison to its size”; fishers were some of the biggest victims of the EU in the stories Britain told itself about Brexit, after all. And Keir Starmer’s Labour has made clear overtures to the National Farmers Union (NFU): he was the first Labour leader to address the NFU in 13 years, he’s pledged that a greater proportion of the food procurement budget will be spent locally, and his then-DEFRA lead Luke Pollard (current Shadow DEFRA Sec: Jim McMahon) wrote this piece promoting Labour’s rural outreach.
If winding down farm subsidies is firmly outside the Overton window, then linking farm subsidies to higher animal welfare standards should be clearly on the table. (See a report arguing for this here.)
The government’s post-Brexit farm subsidy programme, the Environmental Land Management scheme (Elms) introduced by Michael Gove, incentivised farming that was “symbiotic” with “nature”. The focus is more environmental than welfarist, with support for species recovery, biodiversity and rewilding; but one strand, the Sustainable Farming Incentive, pays farmers to adopt and maintain “sustainable farming practices” including “improving animal health and welfare.” I’d like to see assessments of how effective this has been for improving animal welfare, and proposals to make it more effective.
But Vallone and Lambin weren’t comparing animal welfare-incentivising subsidies with animal welfare-disincentivising subsidies. They were comparing status quo with food system transformation: animal agriculture vs alternative proteins.
The media are starting to recognise alternative proteins as an industry or industry group of its own. Focused on the US (“K Street”), Politico have written about lobbying from alternative proteins companies/advocates. Vallone and Lambin claim that, between 2014 and 2020, plant-based lobbying cost US$5m and US$0.2m in the EU and the US respectively. On the flip side: Fast Company, writing about the “social media disinformation war on plant-based meat”, reports that many of animal agriculture’s attack lines on plant-based substitutes (‘dog food’, ‘ultra-processed’) can be traced back to a lobbying firm, Berman and Company.2
Big Meat has invested in alternative proteins, and reporting on plant-based lobbying should recognise that interests aren’t clearly delineated here. In March, Nestle hired a lobbying firm “to engage on plant-based policy” in the US. We should consider carefully: how much lobbying from Big Meat is about slowing vs promoting plant-based food?
I’d like to weigh in here with two personal thoughts on stakeholders in animal agricultural and plant-based policy. These come from my POV as a vegan advocate who thinks it’s important for the freedom and flourishing of many animals, and for the health of the planet we share, to move beyond animal agriculture.
We should support a just transition. To the extent that any public spending is about moving beyond animal agriculture, we should ensure ordinary farmers are supported, just as governments should look out for miners, oil riggers, and any industries about to be seriously disrupted by AI. If Big Meat continues to invest in alternative proteins, they will continue to be successful in a post-animal ag world – but Big Meat is not ordinary farmers. I might be a vegan advocate, but I grew up near Grimsby, one of the homes of English fishing, in Lincolnshire, where agri-food is the largest industry; I think reaching out to forgotten industries and rural areas is politically admirable.
We shouldn’t underestimate environmentalist influence. As referenced above, animal-linked Elms payouts are largely about sustainability. And mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is framed as a key argument for alternative proteins; the Guardian report on Vallone and Lambin’s study reminds its readers that BCG found alternative proteins to be the most effective climate change investment. Animal advocates should be wary of strawmans in public discourse that decouple animal-friendly policy from environmentally-friendly policy (e.g. over-indexing on models that downplay the climate credentials of alternative protein)
Speaking of environmentalists –
The UK still wrestling with its response to American green investment
There’s no new news on alternative protein green investment specifically. But British political commentators have written a fair amount about what the UK’s response to the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) should look like recently. This seems important, given that I wrote last week that alternative proteins could — and should! — receive funding under green public spending, and given the importance of climate change itself.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has ruled out an IRA style spending package. H/t Politico, who report the UK will rely on “existing policy levers” to support private investment into green projects. (“IRA” has different connotations on this side of the Atlantic, to be fair.)
There is some pressure within the government for more public spending: Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch is pushing for financing for an advanced manufacturing plan styled as an IRA response (FT; paywalled).
Does Hunt’s policy makes sense? He has received criticism from think tankers. A climate change and energy expert at the Tony Blair Institute, for example, said Hunt’s plans “will not be sufficient to compete with the ambitious action taken by U.S., China and Europe”. Gideon Salutin, a researcher at the Social Market Foundation, argues “Biden’s $370bn green subsidies are only a threat if we continue ignoring them”.
The New Statesman have published an op-ed by titled “The Tories must become the party of green capitalism”. Oxley’s “futurist vision of climate change” involves funding R&D for clean energy, carbon capture and, possibly, geoengineering. (Note that some geoengineering projects have been met with concern from existential risk researchers)
It’s valid to wonder if Hunt’s red line will last, given not only Badenoch’s push but also the churn of Conservative Chancellors and economic policy.
Some have speculated that speculated that Sunak might replace Hunt in a September reshuffle. Hunt was not appointed by Sunak (he was helicoptered in as a steady hand after Liz Truss’ Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, underperformed last year), and Hunt inevitably suggests continuity with Cameron, et al. — at a time when the Tories would prefer a presidential-style contest that frames Sunak as a reset, a break from 2010-22.
But Hunt looks unlikely to be replaced. “Unsackable” say former colleagues (Times; paywalled); Sunak may have no better options for Chancellor. And even if Hunt were replaced, his commitments are likely to live on. Sunak wants to be seen as serious on the economy, and serious about governing itself: post-Truss, his party cannot afford to be seen as indecisive, cannot afford the faintest whiff of a U-turn. No party could be so primed for the sunk costs fallacy. Big green spending, then, looks vanishingly unlikely under a Conservative government.
What about worlds where Labour wins the next election? Labour dialled back their original commitment to a 28bn/year green plan. This was part of a wider campaign to signal economic cautiousness: in ruling out a wealth tax, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves is walking the priceless vase across the slippery floor. But we shouldn’t underestimate how seriously Starmer has taken the IRA, and Biden himself, as models for centre-left governance. The party’s “securonomics” is clearly inspired by “Bidenomics”, and I enjoyed Jonn Elledge’s case that “Once it wins Labour can set the terms of the debate”. Hopefully prophetic.
Thanks for reading
I bet this is of interest too..
Some important headlines:
Some EA-adjacent news:
Rory Stewart, head of GiveDirectly, has a new interview with the Times
Opinion columnist Joel Snape wonders whether AI is the Great Filter, complete with a paperclip maximiser reference
The public on animals:
‘Dangerous dogs’ have been the animals in political focus this week. See this Guardian piece
And this profile with Chris Packham, who talks about his love of animals, his autism, and how he values effectiveness in protest: Would he break the law? “Well, again I have to ask myself what is the most effective use of me?”
The Social Change Lab, who recently released a report on political opinion relating to Animal Rising protests at the Grand National this year, will be hosting a webinar on their findings today.
Emergent capabilities: This week, AI seems to have been reading people’s minds? And the Pentagon is testing an AI-piloted drone.
“Humans will continue to play a central role in the new vision for the Air Force [...] but they will be increasingly teamed with software engineers and machine learning experts,” reports the NYT. An AI drone is scary, but a paradigm shift towards AI being inextricable from warfare is much scarier to me. “Almost every aspect of Air Force operations will have to be revised to embrace this shift.”
A newsworthy vegan: Darren Jones!
London vegan restaurant rec: Mali Vegan Thai. Absolutely delicious, absolutely no risk of sneaky fish oil.
But Jonathan Berry is not to AI as James Cleverly is to foreign policy. Berry is an Undersecretary of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, reporting to Minister Michelle Donelan. He’s an elected hereditary peer (only in Westminster?). You might want to read this profile.
Let me note here that I’m wary of overly conspiratorial reporting. I’m not accusing Fast Company of that, but my sense is tingling. Ultra-processed food, a genuine concern for understandable reasons, would always emerge as a criticism of alternative proteins. That said, I’ve been reading Merchants of Doubt; I think we should recognise that industries are highly motivated to manipulate public opinion – and that can come at the expense of our health: public, personal, planetary and moral.