🎉A letter to the PM: Technology and optimism
A note on the importance of technology optimism for the new occupant of No 10 Downing Street
Keir Starmer’s in-tray will already be overflowing with issues and demands. The new Prime Minister of the UK has already met the King, been given nuclear codes to protect the country, and will, by the time you read this, have had phone calls with Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and other world leaders.
In his maiden speech as PM, Starmer spoke of the need for turning politics back into public service and the importance of “national renewal”. His plans for the first 100 Days are designed to tackle national security, investment, infrastructure and planning. But I’d like him also to consider how we bring the spirit of innovation into that long journey of national renewal. Let’s hope he’ll read this.
Dear Prime Minister,
Congratulations on your resounding and well-deserved election victory. As you step into 10 Downing Street, to begin the process of national renewal, you do so against the backdrop of accelerating march of AI, the growing challenges of climate change and increasing geopolitical tensions.
That backdrop will transform Britain in the coming years of your premiership. AI will mediate citizens’ access to resources and services while the energy transition accelerates. Electric vehicles will dominate new car sales, powered by a largely renewable grid. Technologies now nascent—like AI-designed materials and clean industrial processes—will become commonplace.
It will be a remarkable time in which technology—the bottled-up spirit of collective creativity—will enable all sorts of innovations.
Despite this potential, Britons have become fearful of the future. Nearly two-thirds of our citizens claim they want less artificial intelligence in their lives—yet that wave has barely begun. Their fears are reflected in our culture. Our books speak less about progress and the future and more about anxiety and risk. Technology does not deliver belief, security and possibility to people on its own. As we have learnt for the past decade or more to trust in innovation, people have to come to trust those overseeing it.
As you noted in your first speech at Downing Street, we’ve not done well since 2015. The fundamental dividing line in our politics has shifted: it is no longer between capital and labour or between the middle and working class. Successive elections since 2017 have shown that. Instead, it has become a rupture rooted in how we envisage the future.
Your guiding light should be the belief that the future will be better than the past: that the rest of the decade can still be a Roaring Twenties.
Yet, to give those words meaning, we need to give them structure. Call it pragmatic optimism — acknowledging that we have the tools, the ingenuity, and the will for the future to be better. But it all takes work.
Here’s how you can spark pragmatic optimism:
Foster a culture of innovation
Culture leads renewal. Tech alone can’t renew a society. Artists imagine futures into which societies can evolve. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art1 anticipated modernist principles decades before Germany’s Bauhaus, and his influence lives on in the user-centred design of today’s advanced gadgets. When Britain leaned into the early industrial revolution, our literature became infused with words of progress, rapidly and ahead of growth in productivity.
Celebrate risk-takers across all sectors. Creators drive growth, from local businesspeople to scientists, musicians to tech entrepreneurs. Your government should reward creators in the broadest sense: risk-takers, imaginers, the heterodox. Technologies like AI let those individuals flex their muscles and create new industries we have not yet conceived of, paying dividends for decades.
Speed up the act of creation. Encourage universities to more rapidly and sensibly spin out their innovations into firms that can grow. Ensure British founders have access to substantial amounts of appropriate risk capital and all the talent they need, wherever that talent is in the world. Innovative firms lose their momentum when confronted by onerous regulation. Make it lighter touch, particularly around employment conditions, especially for small, high-risk firms trying to chart their path to success. Once they are successful, then the leash can be tightened.
Communicate technology’s tangible benefits
Talk benefits, not ideologies. The LED lightbulb is cheaper and better than its incandescent predecessor. It also happens to be more environmentally-friendly. Consumers care more about the former than the latter. Electric vehicles are cheaper over their lifetime and better than petrol cars in most cases. Heat pumps are cheaper to run and better than boilers and air conditioners. These technologies are better for consumers because they are better products. No climate culture war is necessary.
Reframe AI. Technologies like AI, even the limited chatbots of today, are skill equalisers. People whose skills are below average are levelled up through interactions with them. They are also supercharging the highly skilled. This is a win-win scenario: AI can make all people able to do more. Reframe the conversations from fear to opportunity and hope — while being mindful of risks.
Reimagine civic engagement
Imagine new civics. We witnessed the second worst turnout in a century, at a time when some of the most complicated, intersecting wicked problems should motivate civic engagement. Something needs to change. Citizens assemblies can be one way forward. But digital technologies, through online voting (as practiced flawlessly in Estonia for years) for example, should also be utilised to bring democracy into the 21st century.
Pragmatic optimism turns technological anxiety and apprehensiveness into curiosity and catalyzing excitement—an optimistic antidote to the pessimism that has pervaded the UK for 15 years.
Pragmatic optimism recognizes that new technologies can spark real revivals. When planning your time in office, think of the Roaring Twenties in the United States. What exponential technologies could be the electricity, car or telephone of our age and will come to define your leadership—and our era—in the new Roaring Twenties?
With best wishes for a successful term,
Azeem Azhar
The school was badly damaged in a fire in 2014. Repairs are ongoing.