Artificial intelligence (AI) could add ￡630 billion (US$837 billion) to the UK economy by 2035, a government-commissioned report said.
The economic boost would come from a combination of more personalized services, improvements in healthcare and adopting machine learning to find ways to use resources more efficiently, the report said.
However, to see that gain, the UK needs to do more to encourage businesses to deploy machine learning and artificial intelligence, and to ensure that the UK maintains a leadership position in AI research and development.
“We have a choice,” wrote the report’s authors, Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, and Jerome Pesenti, chief executive officer of healthcare research start-up BenevolentAI.
“The UK could stay among the world leaders in AI in the future, or allow other countries to dominate,” the authors said.
The review is part of a series of recommendations British Prime Minister Theresa May’s government has solicited from business and academic leaders on how to shape British industrial strategy.
The report called for industry to sponsor 300 new graduate students in AI each year, and for the government and universities to create 200 additional doctoral students specializing in the subject.
It also recommended conversion courses to help more people acquire skills in machine learning and called for a government effort to help businesses understand how they can use AI to increase productivity, and improve their products and services.
Pesenti said in an interview that he and Hall had already secured verbal commitments from a number of businesses to fund the additional master’s students.
“The UK today has good skills, but it is not at the scale that is necessary,” he said.
The government should make more of its own data, and of data from publicly funded research available to corporations and academics, the report said.
“The big thing to drive the adoption of AI in industry is to allow broader access to data,” Pesenti said.
The report advocated legal changes to create an explicit “right to mine” data in any publicly funded research.
Currently, there is a public “right to read” most of this research, but whether others could exploit the data contained in such research has been a legal gray area.
Hall and Pesenti called for the creation of joint government-industry “data trusts” that would create model contracts for sharing government data with industry and could eventually serve as data repositories that businesses could access.
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