In the same way as you upgrade your iPhone, we need to upgrade Britain." Labour MP Darren Jones believes artificial intelligence will bring an economic change on the scale of the industrial revolution, which politicians must be ready to shape. As chair of the business and trade select committee, the ambitious 36-year-old backbencher, who represents Bristol North West, has built a reputation for himself in Westminster as a tough interrogator. With speculation raging last week about the future of Thames Water, he took to the airwaves to criticise the way the heavily indebted sector has been regulated, saying he was "increasingly sick" of its failures. However, Jones is at his most animated when talking about AI. He has clashed with company bosses over their use of technology to monitor and control staff – including at Amazon and Royal Mail. But he is an evangelist for the upsides of innovation, including the arrival of large language models (LLMs) such as the hit dialogue-based AI software ChatGPT. "It's really important that we flip this debate.

The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), which we are living through the early stages of, will fully embed existing and future digital technologies in society. As with earlier such shifts, the last of which was the ongoing'Digital Revolution' that began in the 1980s, there are positives and negatives. Two troubling aspects are the rise of decision-making by artificial intelligence (AI)-powered algorithms, and automation in the workplace by robots and AI. 'Traditional' algorithms – formal descriptions of how people or computers should perform tasks – have been in widespread use for years. Universities, for example, use'degree algorithms' to calculate final degree classifications from students' assessed work. But AI-algorithms are created by feeding a computer program huge amounts of data and'teaching' it how to behave.