We must legislate to ensure the AI revolution delivers for us all
Activists from 'Pause AI' and 'Pull The Plug' march from OpenAI’s London offices to Google and Meta, London, February 2026 (Ron Fassbender/Alamy Live News)
4 min read
Andy Burnham won Makerfield with the slogan “For Us”. With claims that AI will destroy the “Us” bit and a summer of tech shambles behind me, I am wondering – how is tech working For Us?
The shambles started when my Google Pixel 10 Pro developed the green screen of death while I was visiting family in the United States. My under-warranty taxpayer-funded smartphone became less useful than an actual brick.
Google is so, so global but their warranties are not valid outside the UK. My (UK-headquartered fintech darling) Revolut credit card only worked with my phone. My (UK-headquartered, co-operative, value-driven) John Lewis credit card decided my attempt to buy a cheap interim phone at a US store must be fraudulent, and suspended the card.
Without my phone, Revolut would not recognise me or my uploaded driving licence ID, and I found no effective customer service beyond intermittent and unhelpful responses from their X account.
John Lewis offered phone-only support, but when I used an unrecognised phone number to call them their fraud algorithm decided the card had been compromised and issued a new one – to my UK address, of course.
I am a tech evangelist. I became an engineer 40 years ago because I believed technology is what makes the world work for people. But I had to admit, tech was not working for me.
Ironically, half my summer reading was about the great changes AI will bring in productivity, human knowledge and flourishing, and half was about the US political techlash, the end of the tech optimisation trend and the economic and social fallout of an AI boom or bust.
Fortunately, family and friends were able to lend me the funds that the failures of Google, Revolut and John Lewis’ systems had made inaccessible.
Big Tech is simply not incentivised to devote the engineering resources needed to make tech work for us – and the consequences will be felt most acutely by the less well-off, the less tech-educated, those who are offline and those who do not represent opportunities for current or future profit.
Then there is the impact of social media on the mental health of children in particular, the growing flood of misinformation, the surveillance capture of our everyday lives, and of course the one in 10 chance we are all going to die thanks to AI.
We have come a long way from Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” speech of 1963 and his aspiration to “replace the cloth cap [with] the white laboratory coat as the symbol of British labour”.
Among the many consequences of the 40 years of neoliberalism repeatedly called out by Andy Burnham is a libertarian attitude to technology, best exemplified in the reluctance to regulate the internet: leave it to the market – governments are too slow and too stupid. The market, it was assumed, would deliver the best, most innovative products and services to those who needed them.
I believe it is important to be clear: that has not worked. Technology’s performance does not match its potential when it comes to making things work for us, and exceeds its potential when it comes to harming us. That is why my constituents don’t trust tech.
This matters now because we are in danger of repeating the same mistake with AI, at a time when tech vested interests are more powerful than ever. Twenty years ago, when global internet penetration was about 17 per cent, Facebook was a baby, only recently launched in the UK, and Google had just listed. Today, three quarters of the world uses the internet, and Meta and Alphabet are worth $6tn. Meanwhile, the enormous sums being invested in AI infrastructure – like all these data centres – are creating new pressures to generate returns, with companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI expected to go public in the pursuit of larger sources of capital.
How many years will it take for this technology to be optimised in all our interests? And how much value will be extracted to be concentrated in the hands of the few while popular distrust and dissatisfaction grows?
Our new government must legislate – with governments around the world if possible but alone if not – to ensure the AI revolution delivers for us all. It must see through the hype and restore responsibility and accountability to both tech bros and governments.
Let us make the tech we have work for us now, and shape the tech to come to work for us in the future.
Chi Onwurah is Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West and chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee
