Artificial Intelligence (AI) in London

AI is no longer the future — it is already shaping daily life in London.

The question is not whether AI will grow, but whether ordinary people will grow with it.

AI can help reduce bureaucracy, improve transport, support healthcare, create new industries and give people more freedom to focus on meaningful work. But without safeguards, it may also deepen inequality, replace vulnerable workers and concentrate power in the hands of a few corporations.

London has the opportunity to lead the world by proving that innovation and humanity can coexist.

Technology should serve people — not the other way around.

I hope that AI develops very fast and is being used widely. In healthcare I can definitely see GPs replaced by AI. Patient assessments and diagnosing will work faster and more accurate with tailored treatment plans available immediately. Unlike now, when wrong diagnosis and delayed treatment at the GP put patients in dire situations. 

In the care sector we need care robots, that already exist and will be developed further. Many elderly people would not need to go into care homes when they have robotic carers. The shortage of staffing and incidents in care due to the short staffing will have an end with care robots.

AI will bring challenges in the workforce , each company will have to decide how to utilise AI before their workforce can move forward.  I know that the charity I volunteer for are having consultations woth the staff about what AI Apps the staff use.

There will be lots of new jobs but we don't yet know what these will be, what areas to focus on for educating our children and young people and teaching them how to respond most flexibly to what an unenvisioned (probably unenvisionable) future may hold.

AI in the longer term will reduce job opportunities (purely in the fact it is meant to reduce time and effort let alone manpower). Therefore the Mayor needs to invest in job creation as this occurs.

AI also sometimes gets it wrong in the information provided and better oversight and control is required.

AI can be useful but requires careful oversight & regulation to prevent abuse & societal harm.

Much of what people call AI, are not actually AI, they are large language models, all of the current chatbots are LLM, and are just “trained “ on huge amounts of text, etc, to become a super version of predictive text, so really it is a highly advanced predictive algorithm.

True AI would not need to be programmed, but would actually teach itself, at present this does not exist.

So what we have is good to allow people not to do repetitive tasks and automate them, looking for patterns in large data sets for instance.

Many of the claims from AI company’s are massively inflating its capabilities, it is at present good to highlight problems in systems and as a data quality analyst, and to monitor safety systems together with humans.

But what we have at present is just a development of other systems and not really AI.

Many people think that LLM is a dead end in the search for real AI, and many companies are doing what they have done throughout history, cut costs by reducing staff.

AI is dangerous; it must be controlled and reviewed/verified by proper oversight. It cannot just be relied on to “be right” because it reflects only what it has access to and not to all available information. The AI companies who think that it is simply alright to use any material that they choose must be challenged and obliged to get permission and pay for what they use. They should also declare the source of all material used if they want to be trusted 

My thoughts on AI are simple. It can be useful for some things for something like a drone used to search for wildfires or monitoring water levels etc, but as always we are seeing over reach as soon as it has been implemented, everything from Palantir to facial recognition cameras. This is causing a lot of distrust of large companies, policing and even more distrust of government, that for reasons we all know and dislike, want more of our information for controlling purposes. 

I say no to all use of AI purely on the basis of complete government and big tech over reach. 

I have this sent to me by email: Your feedback will help the Mayor’s AI Taskforce report back to the Mayor on how to support Londoners with AI. 

I’ll keep you updated when they share their recommendations, so please keep an eye out for me in your inbox.  

To find out more about the Mayor’s plans to support Londoners with AI, read our Talk London page on AI in London.

I don't support this but it looks like they're going to go ahead with it any way regardless of how many people who said they don't want it in London

I do not support this and I will not be forced to use it

I'm concerned about the environmental impact of uncontrolled use of artificial intelligence. A search using an AI supported search engine increases the carbon footprint tenfold of a simple search. Whilst an AI search is a useful for some things they serve no purpose for a simple search. I work in the NHS and it is sad to see many of my senior managers and colleagues believing the hype about AI- when the reality is it has not helped me in the slightest. What would help me is a tool which helps me access results of investigations and clinical letters from other trusts a computer that works and an email system that does not keep crashing. Getting the basics in place would help reduce my use of the computer and reduce carbon footprint. AI just increases complexity. It seems to me that it is a distraction for technophiles and a money making opportunity for unscrupulous IT firms. I am not a technophobe and I believe AI does have a place for example in helping patients access the correct care and helping the NHS with its confused and fragmentary referral systems and care pathways. but to see it as a panacea for everything is absurd. if we don't keep it in its place the dangers are huge. 

What could we do besides promoting jobs that are based on actual human intelligence,  effort, humanity, experience, social interaction, creativity and skill? I am reluctantly accepting that the AI revolution is happening whether we like it or not. I would suggest that AI safety, defence, and cybersecurity jobs will be needed and could be profitable. Medical research and climate science are benefiting from use of AI and there is a gap to fill due to USA politics.

NYG what is the point in that if i'm not going to understand it any exams I will fail that's the story of my life but I have made my choice I don't want AI in my life at all it's not for me and what does this word I have never seen this or heard of  protagonists

Well done for blocking Palantir from the Met.

Please continue to prevent any use of the company within British infrastructure. Leadership within these companies remains a critical factor.

 If the ethics and ideology of leaders within these companies don't align with the nation's and people's best interests then they should have nothing to do with our public bodies. When personal motivation of the likes of Karp is so clear it stands to reason the underlying goals of the company are no different.

Ethics are critical.

If the people involved are morally corrupt and devoid of human empathy then expect a cruel reality behind any seemingly good deal.

I always think it's best to develop things in house.

This country looks too often to outsourcing.

Invest in building our own capabilities?

AI is a sophisticated computer program. It is a tool and, like most programs and tools, can be used in many ways. Good and bad.

It can also be programmed. Ask Chinese AI who owns Taiwan and you'll get a different answer than when using UK AI. You can trust AI as much as you can trust it's owner. Palantir? Huawei? Musk?

If I write a job application using AI and I'm selected by a process using AI. Is it me being employed, and by who?

Who takes responsibility for mistakes made by AI?

Who pays for the environmental damage from data centres?

We must be very careful and selective about the use of AI. It is not a panacea.

Does AI bring opportunity? It sure does. It brings opportunity for the billionaire owners of AI, it raises the boats for employers - including Meta overnight - seeking deep staff cuts, etc. The only people claiming AI will generate work to compensate for the damage it does are people selling AI, or those adjacent to them. That claim has yet to be tested, and I don't anticipate we will succeed in that test - plus the jobs it does create will be globalised, which means for every 1,000 jobs lost in London even if 1,000 jobs are created they won't necessarily be in the UK. What challenges does this create, other than years more of misery, poverty, and wasted, fractured lives? Well, I guess there's an opportunity for AI surveillance "for our protection".

I use AI myself. I know the people involved, I don't trust them, or this wave, and London should not become a test bed for the impact of AI on employment, because it will immiserate Londoners even more than we have been already.