UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Ignoring the skeptics and threat of an AI bubble, the UK government is pushing ahead with AI "sandboxing" and backing a raft of projects it claims could benefit from red-tape cutting.

The moves come after it claimed civil service adoption of AI tools would save about 75,000 days of manual work each year.

Reports have offered a mixed picture of returns for AI investment. On the one hand, research shows AI chatbots might make people work more while benefiting less from their labor; on the other Lloyds Banking Group claims its employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Investors, too, are increasingly likely to be sounding the alarm signaling a potential market bubble surrounding the trillion-dollar infrastructure-guzzling technology.

But the UK government is plowing on, in the belief that that AI will get it out of a fiscal tight spot. This week, it has announced that a ...