IFOW Response to Government's AI Action Plan

We are encouraged by the government’s ambition for AI as a game-changing technology that could ‘deliver a decade of national renewal’, helping deliver better public services and increasing living standards. What we hope unpins all of this is a vision for a fairer future with more good work for more people.

Over the past 3 years - with funding from the Nuffield Foundation - we have been running the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing to understand how this vision of AI-powered innovation matched with human flourishing and wellbeing can be delivered.

What we are urging is a comprehensive socio-technical approach to tech adoption, one that remodels the process of automation and understands technological transformation as highly interconnected and interdependent with socio-economic change.  

Deploying this model would empower the government to act on the latest, multi-disciplinary insight on the systems behind AI, their wider impacts and actively managing risks as well as identifying opportunities in ways that secure benefit all people and places across the UK.

The work in our Pissarides Review shows how this can be done in practice, as well as aspiration, through integrated, future-oriented, socio-technical and outcomes-based approaches.

Growth and productivity are not ends in themselves – they are means to a better society. New technologies will be key to that. As Gaia Marcus from the Ada Lovelace Institute makes clear, ‘AI in the public sector will have real-world impacts on people’. It is vital that we centre human experience and societal good in this process of AI adoption.

On 27^th January we will be hosting the launch of our the Final Report of the Pissarides Review at The Shard and satellite venues across the UK. We are delighted to have Lord Patrick Vallance – Minister of State for Science, Innovation and Technology delivering a keynote address.

Find out more about the conference and the review here.

‍