Other countries ahead of UK on use of AI, expert warns

Britain has a low understanding of the artificial intelligence used by its allies and adversaries, a former top UK government adviser has warned.

Immediate action is required to tackle this, said Sir Anthony Finkelstein, who was chief scientific adviser for national security between 2015 and 2021.

While other countries – such as the US, the UAE and China – are developing AI at high speed, Britain is lacking a “critical thing”, Mr Finkelstein told the Artificial Intelligence, Technologies and National Security conference in London.

“Our understanding of our competitors and adversaries’ science and technology base is inadequate,” he said at the event held by the Policy Exchange think tank on Monday.

Unlike other countries, Britain was not “scaled” for tackling the opportunities given by AI and this needed to be addressed as “an immediate action”, said Mr Finkelstein, who is president of City, University of London.

State secrecy over AI capabilities is also hampering the work of scientists without the right security clearance, David Willetts, a former UK government minister for science, told the conference.

Obsessive secrecy is denying developers access to top-grade information, he said.

These were “tricky issues” that needed to be resolved – particularly getting experts from defence and security together with civilians in meetings.

But many gatherings were only available to people with “relatively high-security classifications” and some civilian scientists could not attend.

“This is a dual-use technology but they are not allowed to find out exactly what the dual use is,” said Mr Willetts, who was science minister between 2010 and 2014.

“One of the urgent programmes under way at the moment is that we need to get greater security clearance for more of the civil experts.”

It was unacceptable that civilian scientists were being denied access with “arguments, which basically say, ‘if you knew what we knew you would understand why this is a problem’”, Mr Willetts said.

The former Conservative minister said this was “so frustrating and is a way of stopping rational discussion linking defence and civilians”.

AI research and development projects were also held back by demands for extra requirements and analysis, he said.

“You’ll be surprised at the number of what were previously simple commercial public R&D spending decisions now get caught in an extra six months of analysis,” said Mr Willetts.

Unlike other countries, Britain was not ‘scaled’ for tackling opportunities given by AI, warned

Sir Anthony Finkelstein