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It is the work shortcut that dare not speak its name. A third of people do not tell their bosses about their use of AI tools amid fears their ability will be questioned if they do.

Research for the Guardian has revealed that only 13% of UK adults openly discuss their use of AI with senior staff at work and close to half think of it as a tool to help people who are not very good at their jobs to get by.

Amid widespread predictions that many workers face a fight for their jobs with AI, polling by Ipsos found that among more than 1,500 British workers aged 16 to 75, 33% said they did not discuss their use of AI to help them at work with bosses or other more senior colleagues. They were less coy with people at the same level, but a quarter of people believe “co-workers will question my ability to perform my role if I share how I use AI”.

The Guardian’s survey also uncovered deep worries about the advance of AI, with more than half of those surveyed believing it threatens the social structure. The number of people believing it has a positive effect is outweighed by those who think it does not. It also found 63% of people do not believe AI is a good substitute for human interaction, while 17% think it is.

Next week’s state visit to the UK by Donald Trump is expected to signal greater collaboration between the UK and Silicon Valley to make Britain an important centre of AI development.

The US president is expected to be joined by Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI who has signed a memorandum of understanding with the UK government to explore the deployment of advanced AI models in areas including justice, security and education. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, is also expected to announce an investment in the UK’s biggest datacentre yet, to be built near Blyth in Northumbria.

Keir Starmer has said he wants to “mainline AI into the veins” of the UK. Silicon Valley companies are aggressively marketing their AI systems as capable of cutting grunt work and liberating creativity.

The polling appears to reflect workers’ uncertainty about how bosses want AI tools to be used, with many employers not offering clear guidance. There is also fear of stigma among colleagues if workers are seen to rely too heavily on the bots.

A separate US study circulated this week found that medical doctors who use AI in decision-making are viewed by their peers as significantly less capable. Ironically, the doctors who took part in the research by Johns Hopkins Carey Business School recognised AI as beneficial for enhancing precision, but took a negative view when others were using it.

Gaia Marcus, the director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, an independent AI research body, said the large minority of people who did not talk about AI use with their bosses illustrated the “potential for a large trust gap to emerge between government’s appetite for economy-wide AI adoption and the public sense that AI might not be beneficial to them or to the fabric of society”.

“We need more evaluation of the impact of using these tools, not just in the lab but in people’s everyday lives and workflows,” she said. “To my knowledge, we haven’t seen any compelling evidence that the spread of these generative AI tools is significantly increasing productivity yet. Everything we are seeing suggests the need for humans to remain in the driving seat with the tools we use.”

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A study by the Henley Business School in May found 49% of workers reported there were no formal guidelines for AI use in their workplace and more than a quarter felt their employer did not offer enough support.

Prof Keiichi Nakata at the school said people were more comfortable about being transparent in their use of AI than 12 months earlier but “there are still some elements of AI shaming and some stigma associated with AI”.

He said: “Psychologically, if you are confident with your work and your expertise you can confidently talk about your engagement with AI, whereas if you feel it might be doing a better job than you are or you feel that you will be judged as not good enough or worse than AI, you might try to hide that or avoid talking about it.”

OpenAI’s head of solutions engineering for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Matt Weaver, said: “We’re seeing huge demand from business leaders for company-wide AI rollouts – because they know using AI well isn’t a shortcut, it’s a skill. Leaders see the gains in productivity and knowledge sharing and want to make that available to everyone.”

FILE PHOTO: The U.S. penalized two Chinese firms that acquired U.S. chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker SMIC.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A top Google scientist and 2024 Nobel laureate said Friday that the most important skill for the next generation will be “learning how to learn” to keep pace with change as Artificial Intelligence transforms education and the workplace.

Speaking at an ancient Roman theatre at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind, said rapid technological change demands a new approach to learning and skill development.

“It’s very hard to predict the future, like 10 years from now, in normal cases. It’s even harder today, given how fast AI is changing, even week by week,” Hassabis told the audience. “The only thing you can say for certain is that huge change is coming.”

The neuroscientist and former chess prodigy said artificial general intelligence – a futuristic vision of machines that are as broadly smart as humans or at least can do many things as well as people can – could arrive within a decade. This, he said, will bring dramatic advances and a possible future of “radical abundance” despite acknowledged risks.

Hassabis emphasised the need for “meta-skills,” such as understanding how to learn and optimising one’s approach to new subjects, alongside traditional disciplines like math, science and humanities.

“One thing we’ll know for sure is you’re going to have to continually learn … throughout your career,” he said.

The DeepMind co-founder, who established the London-based research lab in 2010 before Google acquired it four years later, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing AI systems that accurately predict protein folding – a breakthrough for medicine and drug discovery.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis joined Hassabis at the Athens event after discussing ways to expand AI use in government services. Mitsotakis warned that the continued growth of huge tech companies could create great global financial inequality.

“Unless people actually see benefits, personal benefits, to this (AI) revolution, they will tend to become very sceptical,” he said. “And if they see … obscene wealth being created within very few companies, this is a recipe for significant social unrest.”

Mitsotakis thanked Hassabis, whose father is Greek Cypriot, for rescheduling the presentation to avoid conflicting with the European basketball championship semifinal between Greece and Turkey. Greece later lost the game 94-68. (AP)

HARRISBURG, Pa. — With the explosive growth of Big Tech’s data centers threatening to overload U.S. electricity grids, policymakers are taking a hard look at a tough-love solution: bumping the energy-hungry data centers off grids during power emergencies.

Texas moved first, as state lawmakers try to protect residents in the data-center hotspot from another deadly blackout, like the winter storm in 2021 when dozens died.

Now the concept is emerging in the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid and elsewhere as massive data centers are coming online faster than power plants can be built and connected to grids. That has elicited pushback from data centers and Big Tech, for whom a steady power supply is vital.

Like many other states, Texas wants to attract data centers as an economic boon, but it faces the challenge of meeting the huge volumes of electricity the centers demand. Lawmakers there passed a bill in June that, among other things, orders up standards for power emergencies when utilities must disconnect big electric users.

That, in theory, would save enough electricity to avoid a broad blackout on the handful of days during the year when it is hottest or coldest and power consumption pushes grids to their limits or beyond.

Texas was first, but it won’t be the last, analysts say, now that the late 2022 debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT ignited worldwide demand for chatbots and other generative AI products that typically require large amounts of computing power to train and operate.

“We’re going to see that kind of thing pop up everywhere,” said Michael Weber, a University of Texas engineering professor who specializes in energy. “Data center flexibility will be expected, required, encouraged, mandated, whatever it is.”

That’s because grids can’t keep up with the fast-growing number of data center projects unfolding in Texas and perhaps 20 other states as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority.

Grid operators in Texas, the Great Plains states and the mid-Atlantic region have produced eye-popping projections showing that electricity demand in the coming years will spike, largely due to data centers.

A proposal similar to Texas’ has emerged from the nation’s biggest grid operator, PJM Interconnection, which runs the mid-Atlantic grid that serves 65 million people and data-center hotspots in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The CEO of the Southwest Power Pool, which operates the grid that serves 18 million people primarily in Kansas, Oklahoma and other Great Plains states, said it has no choice but to expand power-reduction programs — likely for the biggest power users — to meet growing demand.

The proposals are cropping up at a time when electricity bills nationally are rising fast — twice the rate of inflation, according to federal data — and growing evidence suggests that the bills of some regular Americans are rising to subsidize the gargantuan energy needs of Big Tech.

Analysts say power plant construction cannot keep up with the growth of data center demand, and that something must change.

“Data center load has the potential to overwhelm the grid, and I think it is on its way to doing that,” said Joe Bowring, who heads Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid.

Big Tech is trying to make their data centers more energy efficient. They are also installing backup generators, typically fueled by diesel, to ensure an uninterrupted power supply if there’s a power outage.

Data center operators, however, say they hadn’t anticipated needing that backup power supply to help grid operators meet demand and are closely watching how utility regulators in Texas write the regulations.

The Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech companies and data center developers, wants the standards to be flexible, since some data centers may not be able to switch to backup power as easily or as quickly as others.

The grid operator also should balance that system with financial rewards for data centers that voluntarily shut down during emergencies, said Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition.

PJM’s just-released proposal revolves around a concept in which proposed data centers may not be guaranteed to receive electricity during a power emergency.

That’s caused a stir among power plant owners and the tech industry.

Many questioned PJM’s legal authority to enforce it or warned of destabilizing energy markets and states scaring off investors and developers with uncertainty and risk.

“This is particularly concerning given that states within PJM’s footprint actively compete with other U.S. regions for data center and digital infrastructure investment,” the Digital Power Network, a group of Bitcoin miners and data center developers, said in written comments to PJM.

The governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland said they worried that it’s too unpredictable to provide a permanent solution and that it should at least be accompanied by incentives for data centers to build new power sources and voluntarily reduce electricity use.

Others, including consumer advocates, warned that it won’t lower electric bills and that PJM should instead pursue a “bring your own generation” requirement for data centers to, in essence, build their own power source.

In Indiana, Google took a voluntary route.

Last month, the electric utility, Indiana & Michigan Power, and the tech giant filed a power-supply contract with Indiana regulators for a proposed $2 billion data center planned in Fort Wayne in which Google agreed to reduce electricity use there when the grid is stressed. The data center would, it said, reduce electricity use by delaying non-urgent tasks to when the electric grid is under less stress.

However, important details are being kept from the public and Ben Inskeep of the Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer advocacy group, said that leaves it unclear how valuable the arrangement really is, if at all.

To an extent, bumping big users off the grid during high-demand periods presents a new approach to electricity.

It could save money for regular ratepayers, since power is most expensive during peak usage periods.

Abe Silverman, an energy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said that data centers can and do use all the electricity they want on most days.

But taking data centers off the grid for those handful of hours during the most extreme heat or cold would mean not having to spend billions of dollars to build a bunch of power plants, he said.

“And the question is, is that worth it? Is it worth it for society to build those 10 new power plants just to serve the data centers for five hours a year?” Silverman said. “Or is there a better way to do it?”

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Follow Marc Levy on X at: https://x.com/timelywriter