The UK’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Liz Kendall, backs driverless cars and British AI startups, but the likely next prime minister’s team has doubts, and her own job is on the line.
According to The Next Web, Ms Kendall wants Britain to back its own AI companies before someone else does. In a Sifted podcast, Kendall, the UK’s science and technology secretary, made a pointed case for driverless cars.
“We should be backing British companies in this technology,” she said, “because if we don’t, we’ll end up reliant on US companies.”
The warning has a target. London’s streets are about to host a robotaxi race, with Alphabet’s Waymo and China’s Baidu both eyeing launches. Kendall singled out the British contender, Wayve, as a “brilliant British success story”. The startup begins piloting driverless taxis in London with Uber later this year.
Andy Burnham is the overwhelming favourite to be Britain’s next prime minister and last week, the Financial Times reported that his team wants to revamp the AI strategy. His advisers allegedly ‘distrust’ the driverless rollout, fearing it will cost taxi and Uber drivers their jobs. The report rattled the UK tech sector, but as Highways News reported, althuogh Burnham’s approach to AVs signalled a different direction, it did not mean opposition.
Ms Kendall said she believed Burnham shared her vision. AI, she added, sat at the heart of his plan to reindustrialise the country. But she drew a clear line on jobs.
“We’re not like the Tories in the 80s and 90s, who saw whole industries decimated and left people to cope on their own,” she said. The government, she added, would help workers through the transition.
She spoke candidly about her own future, too. Kendall ran against Burnham for the Labour leadership in 2015. She said she would “love to stay”, but that the call rests with the next prime minister. “I absolutely love doing this job,” she said.
Ms Kendall’s bigger theme was control. She reckons Britain is “genuinely third in the world” on AI, behind the US and China. She wants to guard that position. She pointed to the £500 million Sovereign AI unit, a £1.1 billion AI-hardware plan, and a £2 billion quantum bet as proof.
She casts this as urgent. She called the recent US move to restrict access to Anthropic’s top models a “wake-up moment”. Her answer is a push for greater sovereign control. Britain, she hopes, can join the €5 billion EU Scaleup Fund. “Watch this space,” she said.
She spoke more sharply about the fear driving public unease. Tech bosses themselves warn that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish in five years, the host noted. Kendall’s answer was neither denial nor doom. “The choice is between seizing it and shaping it to work for us, or being left at its mercy,” she said. For now, whether she gets to do the shaping is out of her hands.
(Picture: Wayve)
