Deep Learning, Shallow Thinking: How Britain Wastes the AI Revolution

It turns out that if you create an unfathomably large but empty probability distribution in the shape of a 1960s mathematical concept of how human minds were thought to work, then run a training algorithm on it with pretty much the entire internet in text form as an input - you get a model like ChatGPT.

This approximate technique extends to images, videos, music, voice, the way proteins unfold - you name it. This technique is called Deep Learning.

This shared underlying structure is important to understand because as you interact with different types of AI model, you should understand that deep learning (with enough compute and data) can accommodate the resolution required for semantic understanding of everything.

We are virtually unlimited in the amount of data we can produce and harvest (how many points in a circle?), and in terms of compute, we continue to see exponential capability driven by AI-specialised hardware (GPUs, TPUs, ASICs) and parallelisation. (Shoutout to analogue compute, which could obliterate the concept of Moore’s law altogether.)

We are currently at the AI stage equivalent to ~1998 for the modern internet. Yeah, there’s potentially a bubble coming, but it will quickly be forgotten as the overall wave goes on to re-shape the modern economy as we know it.

What the future holds exactly is very hard to predict at this stage, but given that the most powerful models ever made were released to the public with ~zero harm, it is not unfolding the way any doomer, pessimist, or sceptic has predicted.

What I think we can be sure of is that individuals able to articulate themselves will best ride the wave of this second industrial (cognition) revolution - and that a better world likely (hopefully) awaits on the other side of it.

Automation is good. Automation has always been good.

Human prosperity and flourishing rest almost entirely on automation.The modern world runs on agricultural machines, factories, API calls, software, engines.

AI is an intention amplifier - and like a smartphone, not even a billionaire can afford a better device (or in this case model) than you or I will have access to.

If our collective intentions are good, the sum of those intentions will manifest our future.

But intentions in Britain? Not so matched.

Today in 2025, I would not class Britain’s communities as having corresponding intentions. We’re seeing a race to the bottom of multicultural demands from a decline in animal rights (Halal slaughter) to the decline of secularism (de facto blasphemy laws).

Whilst I wouldn’t blame every facet of our decline on mass migration, it’s obvious that the benefits are clearly not enough given the costs. They tell us it’s good for the economy and the NHS - both of which are at record levels of crisis despite the highest inflows in history.

The reality people experience on the ground - money laundering shops, delivery drivers, car washes, knife fights, antisocial behaviour, homeless vagrants, and state dependents - simply does not match the modern talking points (students, Ukrainian refugees, enterprising Hong Kongers, highly skilled workers).

This has always been true, and voters have always tried to make it known.

At the heart of the 30-year betrayal of voters on this issue is the desire for economic growth. Indeed, the UK’s GDP-to-debt ratio is around 100% - Japan, a homogeneous ethnostate, has a staggering GDP-to-debt ratio of around 250%.

Many would trade our current situation for that of Japan - that is the instruction voters gave.

The Economic Mirage of Migration

Broadly speaking, immigration did boost the economy, especially in the early years - before the massive asylum industrial complex expansion or the unprecedented “Boris wave.”

But we’ve now reached a stage where the quality of arrivals is so low and the numbers so massive that:

• GDP per capita is in decline
• Benefit claims are skyrocketing
• Public safety and trust are worsening
• London has completely lost the culture that built it

The government is effectively run by headlines, scandals, and old media focus. Keep everything the same and do your best to appease the old, irrelevant media machine when headlines strike.

As Dominic Cummings put it in a recent interview, politicians watch legacy media and calculate their promotions - that’s virtually all they do.

A drop in GDP would cause a headline recession. A recession as a headline causes reputational and media meltdown - just look at how quickly Truss was ousted when the mysterious “markets” sent a signal which emphasised shock and panic. (But similar gilt yields under Labour - treated by the media differently - required no such leadership change.)

In a recent BBC documentary on immigration, the economy is mentioned 35 times - more than once every 2 minutes for 60 minutes.

Economic growth is good. Prosperity is good. But the cost/benefit calculation of using mass migration to make a single line go up (GDP) even when making everyone poorer (GDP per capita) was never done. Politicians became obsessed with aggregate numbers while ignoring per-capita reality, treating citizens as interchangeable economic units rather than members of a coherent society.

A proper cost/benefit analysis would have to include culture—the invisible infrastructure that allows millions of strangers to cooperate without constant supervision. It would account for trust, the social capital that reduces transaction costs and enables everything from business partnerships to leaving your door unlocked.

It would factor in crime rates and their cascading effects on property values, insurance costs, and the simple freedom to walk safely at night.

All of which would mean admitting that some cultures, some communities were lesser than our own. This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of "blank-slateism"—which will be blown apart over the coming years as revelations from the grooming gang inquiry continue to emerge.

The pretense that all cultural values are equivalent collapses when confronted with actual outcomes, actual victims, and actual costs that can no longer be hidden behind statistical manipulation.

What the Government Fails to Admit

The government fails to admit culture, heritage, identity, and meaning have all come second to economic concerns. These are not abstract concepts but the very foundations upon which a functioning society builds trust, cohesion, and shared purpose. When political leaders reduce human flourishing to GDP figures and treat centuries of accumulated social capital as expendable in pursuit of short-term growth, they hollow out the nation from within.

Culture provides the unspoken rules that allow strangers to cooperate. Heritage connects us to something larger than ourselves, offering continuity across generations. Identity gives individuals a sense of belonging and responsibility to their community. Meaning transforms work from mere labor into contribution to something worthwhile. Yet all of these have been systematically sacrificed on the altar of economic optimisation.

That is the simplest way to explain the decades-long betrayal of voters on the issue of immigration. Politicians promised prosperity while delivering fragmentation, offered economic growth while eroding the social fabric that made prosperity possible in the first place. They traded the intangible assets which built Britain for the measurable metrics that could be defended in media interviews.

Migration on all but the smallest, most elite-focused scale is no longer a viable lever for any kind of positive growth. The diminishing returns are evident in every metric that matters: declining social trust, rising crime, cultural balkanisation, and the breakdown of the civic institutions that once made Britain enviable. AI and shared intentions will shape our approaching wave, but only if we first restore the cultural coherence necessary to direct that power toward common ends.

What Will Define Our Success?

The things which will define our economic success in the coming decades have nothing to do with importing more people and everything to do with unleashing the potential of those already here. The cost of energy will determine whether British industry can compete globally or whether manufacturers continue their exodus to cheaper shores. Planning law and regulation will decide if we can build the infrastructure the AI revolution demands or remain trapped in bureaucratic amber. Tax rates will determine whether we attract and retain the talent capable of riding the next wave, or continue exporting our brightest minds to more favorable jurisdictions.

Perhaps most critically, the number of deportations of criminals, illegals, and state dependents we can achieve will signal whether Britain is serious about prioritizing its own citizens or content to remain a global welfare system. Finally, how deeply our government embraces AI, strong border controls, a unified native culture, and defeats bureaucratic gridlock will determine whether we emerge as leaders in the cognition revolution or remain spectators to our own decline. These are not technocratic adjustments but fundamental choices about what kind of nation Britain chooses to become.