UK councils are now £4 billion in the hole and have decided the solution is to hire an artificial intelligence system to tell them how to fix it. This is real. This is happening right now across the country while actual humans sit in meetings nodding along to suggestions from a machine that has never paid a council tax bill or understood why a library matters.
The AI’s first recommendation was apparently to monetize literally everything. Parks? Sell them. Libraries? Lease the building to a cryptocurrency exchange. Social services? Outsource to a chatbot that will tell residents their problem is “not in scope.” The machine has no skin in the game, no constituency to answer to, and no concept that some things exist because they’re supposed to exist, not because they generate revenue.
Why would councils trust an algorithm trained on centuries of financial data to understand the specific insolvency crisis created by a decade of central government cuts? Because hiring consultants costs money, and this AI costs £50,000 a year and sounds scientific. The algorithm doesn’t care that it’s recommending the liquidation of public goods. It only knows that parks are assets and assets can be sold. It’s the financial equivalent of asking a calculator to design your town.
Meanwhile, the actual humans in these councils will probably implement about 40% of these recommendations, blame the AI when they fail, and rehire the same consultants next year to explain what went wrong.