Artificial Intelligence (AI) in London

I believe that there is an opportunity to use AI to make hospital language translation services quicker, if it is tested first. 

However, I am more worried than excited. I think that it poses a highly serious security threat, given that Meta seem to want to train AI on our personal data. This includes our identities, which could then become publicly available through AI (such as using the new Meta glasses to find information about strangers in public). This poses a serious threat to everyone, especially women's safety. We need to be resilient against this.

I am also worried that AI will affect people's ability to navigate the world confidently, and it will become a crutch for many. For example, I once met a soon-to-be doctor who used ChatGPT to diagnose flu symptoms, and even used it to decide what to eat to stay healthy. Outsourcing critical thinking and expertise like this will be disastrous for young people's confidence and general capability as citizens and professionals.

my DR's have started using AI and I thought it was a scam but because it was sent by text and with an unrecognisable name I had an appointment for my blood test results and he said that they have started using it well turns out that I have something else that showed up on my test results which is not good so you can't rely on AI I would rather see my DR face to face

Generative "AI" will hypercharge the stagnation of culture and art, and large data-set models providing the most average answer possible will whittle the human spirit down to nothing. 

When will we stop worshiping businesses and commerce? Why is that always our first concern, the "workforce"? Isn't the goal of technological innovation to not need to labour anymore? To be free to create art and express joy? To free us of the need to toil away at work the majority of our lives and to gather together in community with one another?

Who is going to ask these questions first before enacting policy instead of focusing only on the myopic, to just refer to us as a workforce and not first as people? 

I can't even get autocorrect to stop sending my boss "Sorry I kissed your email on Friday". The machine goes back to "correct" things so confidently not because the machine is magic or has any "intelligence", but because someone decided that the most average common word pairing should be forced upon it's user so they hard coded it into the system to do it without consulting the user first. The lack of access to education in this country has created a population so vulnerable to such foolishness. We just trust the device implicitly to think for us. These are not devices or data models or image generators that are provided by a charity. They are BUSINESS. They are made with the sole purpose of creating dependance, and therefore a subjugated population to extract wealth from. Off of our backs. We are the product providing the models with value. We will be dependent on the models, and they may be free now, until full adoption is achieved, when we will be charged within an inch of our lives for the clunker machine brains we have no ability to live without anymore. 

I don't want to ease the adoption of my exploitation. Fund better education, universal basic income, get out of the pockets of multinational corporations, enforce taxes on the rich instead

When it boils down to it, "AI" is usually a marketing term for the application of extremely fast data processing and pattern identification/prediction – there are (and have long been) some awesome applications, but there's also an outsized focus on LLMs' performance in once-fulfilling, aspirational career fields and as a catch-all operational systems fixer. 

A misunderstanding of what it can do has led to a mind-numbing fixation by middle management on the idea that you can just plug an AI tool into any complex problem they don't want to think about or be accountable for anymore and - ta-da! - it's solved. Public services don't need a layer of AI tools laid on top of problems no one wants to actually roll up their sleeves and solve properly with good user-centred service design.

Anyway, on the listed points:

-What opportunities: specific use cases (e.g. analysing satellite imagery), in targeted tools cross-sector, some infrastructure
-What challenges: worsening the job market and job-seeking experience, deepening the housing and climate crises, and diverting funds away from better causes and services (oh, is that all!?)

Would like any tech boom to drive tax revenue, not just give away resources to foreign corporations while squeezing locals.

Currently, "AI" tools are being rolled out in a mad rush, often accompanied by gleeful announcements about how they will disenfranchise human workers. It's an excuse for lay-offs and gives bad bosses a way to scare people into accepting worse job situations. The potential benefits of adoption must be balanced against its environmental impact, enabling of fascist surveillance, copyright infringement, and its effect on the already dire information landscape. The urgently needed training should teach people what it really is (and isn't).

Human problems and universal thriving should drive tool adoption or rejection. "AI" is NOT a monolith, or a magic wand, and acting like it is wastes time, money, and mental and physical energy.

Quality AI training* with subscription to a frontier model for 12 months to support Londoners build genuine competence. This should include some form of recognised 'certification' that is accepted by employers. 

Key resistance is due to limited access to models and lack of understanding how to steer models towards meaningful output. If both of these dimensions are properly addressed, this technology can result in Londoners increasing their competence and productivity.

*not someone's mate reading out slides. Qualified instructors with immersive learning.

as someone who is newly 18, those against AI being branded as merely "old man shakes fist at the sky" is ridiculous. AI is more harmful to everyone and everything around us than people realise. data centres destroy our environment, globally. it is actively encouraged that AI should think critically for us, quite literally damaging our ability to do it for ourselves. automating and monetising intelligence is not the new, shiny technological advancement everyone is glamourising it as. it is nothing more than dangerous.

Speaking as a relatively young person at the beginning of my professional life (5 years or so in the workforce), the AI adoption and usage is somewhat shambolic. 

While there may be some benefits from AI, the adoption of it - from what I've seen - is hurried, unstructured, and places far too much trust and in AI agents whose biases, learning data etc., are not understood by businesses. I will not deny that certain tasks are now 'quicker', but that metric is misleading, seeing that now I have to spend an equal amount of time correcting the AI output and double-checking everything manually.

Senior leadership seems to see it as an easy way to increase output, without much thought about the accuracy, quality, or broader impact of the output produced. The metric seems to be AI adoption, not genuine workplace benefits.

There also seems to be at best slim understanding of how feeding client data - including correspondence, broader behaviour patterns, etc., - fits within the legal framework of GDPR. The Mayor should work with local businesses and councils to ensure that the clients and residents data is not being used without their permission to train AI models; individuals should also have a clear and easy means of opting out from their data, correspondence, etc., being analysed by AI, without a real person to be held accountable.

I'm in the education sector and my blood curdles when I hear ideas of AI-generated learning plans, learning content, performance analysis, student engagement (measured through analysis of students' cameras and mouse movements!!!) being applauded. 

I don't see a ban on AI in educational settings being introduced - one can hope - but the Mayor should work closely with the Dept of Education and the Boroughs to introduce structured, in-depth ways for educational professionals to empower students to use AI (because they WILL use it) in sensible, limited ways that do not contribute to cognitive atrophy that we are already seeing develop.

Every time something new comes along, the same crowd appears. Right now the new thing is AI: job losses, think of the children, old man shakes fist at sky. 

Same story, different decade.

The reality is that this is a massive opportunity to make London's councils actually work. AI should be automating the slow, bloated processes that make this city so painful to navigate. If it helps the people who designed our abysmal parking portals find a better approach, I'm all for it. 

Less bureaucratic bloat means a lower tax burden for Londoners and more room for startups to grow into proper tax-paying businesses here in the capital.

We should be learning this tech, not fearing it. If you don't understand it, ask it to teach you. Work it out, or accept that you're standing in the way of progress. 

People complained exactly like this about the internet, mobile phones and even electricity. There is always someone in a burlap sack of a tote bag whining about the future. 

Get on board or step aside.

I just got a new job at a company that uses AI fairy heavily for software development. It's got me a pay rise, which also means I will be paying more tax than before, hopefully this means that other people are benefitting from my AI usage.

I'm not a Luddite - there's a long history of automation happening across many jobs - from the Agricultural revolution to the Industrial revolution to more recently changes in manufacturing and now changes in the way coding is done. I think history is a great guide to how to deal with AI - as far as I can tell it's very similar to other historical technologies in the way it affects society.

Personally I worry about the damage caused by NIMBYism in the UK and that local politicians will block what could be very beneficial infrastructure spending on data centers and energy infrastructure.

I am concerned about the use of AI by criminals to scam the most vulnerable members of society. I know Londoners will be targeted by increasingly sophisticated fraud and I think the police of London have a duty to protect us from this - even though the perpetrators aren't based in London.

I'm also concerned about the scandals of Russian interference in UK politics and public opinion.

I also think that providers of training data should be compensated for their work, but it does seem so far that AI is hugely loss making so I'm not sure if there is any money there to compensate them with.

AI is only as good as the information that’s been put in it and for matters relating to health etc where someone may need to speak to a professional, AI should always instruct this 

AI is not ethical. AI is trained on stolen data, and data centres pollute the environment. Employers encouraging using AI are only interested in cutting corners. AI is not intelligent. AI is vomit.

Why would Londoners want free training in AI. We want free public transport, free facilities, libraries, clean water, clean and tidy streets, a clean river Thames. Please please please no more AI.

Very few people over the age of 30 can identify easily when an image has been AI generated which is incredibly worrying both in and out of the development industry. I have seen a Linkedin post of a development which has not been built and is hyper-realistic and gaining praise despite being impossible to construct. Clients are demanding far quicker turnarounds due to AI’s influence on the speed of architectural visualisation. This has not yet resulted in an easier workload and is having the opposite effect as more work is expected in a shorter time. The elements of design that do not (and SHOULD NOT) use AI such as actual design thinking and sketch revision are being rushed. Nobody asked for AI, and I know the wider society will absolutely regret its blind implementation across every aspect of daily life. 

AI’s impact on employment is truly worrying, particularly for the youngens. If government don’t act, we will have a generational crisis, of which will have destabilising consequences for the country. 

The impact that AI has on the environment is huge and not particularly worth it in my opinion. If it is going to be used though, AI usage should be specialised, e.g. use it for education, use it for tackling climate change, to advance medicine and healthcare. But general AI use is not the way to go, especially not unregulated and not without consulting the general public (and consult them further than just this discussion!) on how they think it should be implemented or not implemented in certain industries.

I’m really concerned about the rollout of driverless Waymo taxis that seems to be going ahead without any public consultation. They’re dangerous, will cause people to lose their jobs and there are huge privacy violation concerns. I do not want to be scanned by their cameras when I’m just walking down the street. There are no clear benefits to introducing them and I don’t understand why they are being allowed in our city. 

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.