Artificial Intelligence will drive incredible change in our country. From teachers personalising lessons, to supporting small businesses with their record-keeping, to speeding up planning applications, it has the potential to transform the lives of working people.
Yes this is a genuine quote from the leader of our country from an article in Data Center Magazine published in August 2025 - yes 2025, not 1995.
Whilst Mo Gawdat is talking about massive job disruption over the next 15 years, Altman saying a child born today will never be as intelligent as AI, and Demis Hassabis saying a fundamental shift in how we understand science and medicine is going to take place. A technology that he argues will be bigger than the industrial revolution.
Starmer however thinks all these billion dollar data centers being built around the world will help small businesses with their "record-keeping".
Record keeping.
FOR FUCKS SAKE.
I really couldn’t believe how obtuse the leader of our country is so I wondered if ChatGPT-5 thought Starmer was missing a trick.
He’s not just missing a trick — he’s misdiagnosing the entire scale of the phenomenon. Let’s strip this down. Starmer’s comment frames AI as a sort of productivity gadget: a nicer spreadsheet for small businesses, a better admin tool for teachers, a faster planning department. That’s the political instinct to make technology sound safe, friendly, and incremental. It’s classic “retail politics” — focus-grouped talking points rather than a systemic vision.
But AI isn’t an app upgrade. Gawdat, Altman, Hassabis aren’t talking about trimming paperwork — they’re describing a full-scale restructuring of labor, knowledge, and power. If they’re even half-right, we’re staring at:
massive displacement of jobs across white-collar and skilled sectors,
superhuman problem-solving engines re-writing scientific discovery,
geopolitical power concentration in the handful of nations and companies that control the compute.
Starmer’s line treats AI like a nice gadget in the teacher’s drawer, when it’s closer to a new industrial power grid — with whoever owns the grid dictating the future of economies. Those “hundred-billion-dollar data centers” aren’t charity projects for small business accounting; they’re infrastructure to run planetary-scale models that can design drugs, write code, and potentially automate whole swathes of government and commerce.
The real political question isn’t “how can AI help SMEs do their bookkeeping?” but “who owns the models, who controls the compute, who captures the value — and what happens to everyone else?” If Starmer ignores that, he’ll end up legislating for a world that no longer exists by the time his policies land.
Want to stress-test this? Let’s assume Hassabis is right: AI drives a scientific shift bigger than the industrial revolution. In that case, political leaders need to be asking how to manage national compute capacity, not how to make lesson plans more personalised. Otherwise Britain becomes a client state to whoever controls the models — likely the U.S. and China.
Would you say Starmer is genuinely naive about the technology, or is this deliberate minimisation to avoid frightening voters? Because those are two very different failures of leadership.