The UK’s National AI Strategy: The Governance of AI, Depoliticization and Neoliberal Ideology

Despite considering Artificial Intelligence (AI) ‘one of the most important innovations in human history’ (UK government, 2021: 10), the UK government has been reluctant to legislate on AI. However academics, journalists, civil liberties groups, and activists have powerfully made the case for action (Pierce, 2020), politicizing the issue. In response, the UK government has developed a National AI Strategy after conducting a number of investigations into AI (Hall and Pesenti, 2017; House of Lords Select Committee on AI, 2018; Committee on Standards on Public Life, 2020). In this paper, I consider the National AI Strategy, and the reviews which informed it, as crucial to understanding how the UK government makes sense of AI. To unpack this, I undertake a discourse analysis of these communications. I argue that the UK government’s discourse on AI: (1) constructs the proliferation of AI as inevitable; (2) embraces a tech-optimist ideology that constructs AI as a solely positive force; (3) and promotes industry self-regulation of AI. I therefore consider the UK government’s National AI Strategy to be a depoliticizing discourse which naturalizes the unfettered penetration of AI in to ever more areas of life, suppresses more critical accounts of AI’s impacts, and hives off the regulation of AI. The UK government’s discourse on AI therefore reflects broader neoliberal ideology which sees technological change as both inevitable and desirable, constituting a technological ‘third industrial revolution’ and delivering a high-growth, knowledge-based economy (Reynolds and Szerszynski, 2016). This ideology also sees industry self-regulation, market rule, and a light-touch regulatory state as natural and key to ensuring economic growth, even in the face of public discontent (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010).