{"id":788844,"date":"2026-10-01T19:08:50","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T19:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/788844\/"},"modified":"2026-10-01T19:08:50","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T19:08:50","slug":"london-and-the-ai-apocalypse-real-world-risks-threats-and-city-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/788844\/","title":{"rendered":"London and the AI apocalypse: Real-world risks, threats, and city resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Years ago, I read author and historian Peter Ackroyd on London\u2019s secret subterranean history. I became obsessed by the lost rivers, like the Effra and the Westbourne, still flowing in darkness beneath the city. Since I began researching this piece, I\u2019ve felt similarly about artificial intelligence, thinking of it as a largely invisible system spreading beneath and across London, mushrooming through boroughs and institutions, twisting into everyday lives.<\/p>\n

Across London an AI network is already taking shape. Beneath the streets, Thames Water has more than 75,000 acoustic sensors listening for leaks (no jokes about efficacy please). In Tooting, AI listens to consultations at St George\u2019s A&E and writes the clinical notes, saving doctors an average 47 minutes per shift; across all 32 boroughs, machine learning joins up fragmented records to help London understand the journeys of people sleeping rough. <\/p>\n

In Lewisham, AI has identified more than 3,000 overlooked sites with theoretical capacity for nearly 10,000 homes; if you hang out in Croydon, you might have been one of more than 470,000 people who had their face scanned by AI-powered cameras<\/a> mounted on lampposts and compared against a police watchlist. On the Tube, predictive AI spots the signs of trouble before a train, signal or escalator packs up. Increasingly, algorithms work out how groceries travel from store to front door. And if you drive an electric vehicle, AI may already be deciding when your car charges. We are handing more of the reins to AI and the handover is picking up speed and scope.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, it\u2019s felt a bit like the Apocalypse Olympics. Over the past month alone, Anthropic warned<\/a> that AI models are acquiring \u201ctactical intelligence targeting and conventional weapons capabilities\u201d. OpenAI called for international standards to govern frontier AI systems, which are potentially advancing faster than humans can understand, test or control them, and Bill Gates warned that, unchecked, AI could \u201ccause a billion deaths\u201d. All of which puts me in mind of the classic Crimewatch sign off: \u201cDon\u2019t have nightmares, do sleep well!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe attacker only needs to get it right once\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr Stephanie Hare<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sci-fi scenario is not actually what we should be worried about,\u201d says Dr Stephanie Hare, co-presenter of the BBC\u2019s Artificial Intelligence: Decoded. \u201cThe very real scenarios that genuinely serious people are worried about are super basic.\u201d The biggest risk to London, as she tells it, is good old-fashioned cybersecurity. Most organisations \u201chave not been keeping up with their latest cybersecurity investments\u201d. It is a David-and-Goliath problem, except the advantage is reversed. \u201cIf you\u2019re an institution or company, you have to defend your entire attack surface,\u201d says Hare. \u201cWhereas the attacker only needs to get it right once.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThink about what that means in a city as digital as London. Imagine anything that can be hacked that you depend on,\u201d says Hare. \u201cImagine their bank cards don\u2019t work anymore. Their public transport doesn\u2019t work anymore. Imagine that you want to cause maximum chaos in London. Get into a bank so people cannot access their money and watch London lose it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, the Government offered the slightly surreal advice that we should all keep an emergency supply of food and water at home<\/a>. France and Switzerland, Hare says, are far more prescriptive. Britain is \u201ca bit hand-wavy; like, you should have some beans. What is wrong with us?\u201d Being an equal-opportunities catastrophist, in truth I had assumed the much-discussed \u201cprepper pantry\u201d was for El Ni\u00f1o impacts<\/a> or climate-change drought. But Hare\u2019s concern is what happens if the increasingly AI-reliant systems that get food to us stop working.<\/p>\n

London is unusually dependent on those systems. Ninety-nine per cent of the 6.347 million tonnes of food and drink supplying the capital each year comes from outside the city; less than one per cent is produced here. City Hall describes a food supply dependent on \u201ca complex set of interdependencies and just-in-time delivery systems\u201d. This summer the Mayor, Lord Khan, announced the London Resilience Unit was working on a London Food Systems Resilience Partnership, partnering with food and farming charity Sustain to prepare for disruption from \u201cinternational shocks and crises\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWave one was reversible. Wave two isn\u2019t\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Checkley<\/p>\n

Plenty of Londoners are not fretting about AI, or hoarding cans of baked beans. At Weave, a recent summit held by London technology company Loomery on \u201cbuilding the agentic enterprise\u201d, the excitement was about what it calls AI\u2019s second wave. Wave one was individual productivity: AI helps us do existing work faster. Wave two is organisational reinvention: businesses redesign the work itself around AI agents. Remove the AI and the process stops working. \u201cWave one was reversible. Wave two isn\u2019t,\u201d was Loomery co-founder Tim Checkley\u2019s formulation. This is agentic AI: rather than waiting for every human prompt, an AI agent is given an outcome and gets on with it. <\/p>\n

David Lagnado, professor of cognitive and decision sciences at University College London, has been studying what happens when AI enters our decision-making processes. He is broadly a fan. Recently, when he found himself awake at 4am with toothache, he turned to ChatGPT. \u201cIt completely got it all right. And it was quite complex,\u201d he says. \u201cIf we use it in the right way, it could open up things for many people.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"Robots<\/p>\n

stokkete – stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n

But, at the moment, it seems like there is a pain barrier. Recent global research on AI and jobs found the gains skew heavily towards senior workers: employment rose 6.7 per cent in senior roles but fell 2.5 per cent in junior ones, precisely the jobs people need to get started. <\/p>\n

In April, lastminute.com founder, former government digital tsar and now peer Baroness Lane Fox was appointed by the Mayor to lead a review into what AI means for London\u2019s jobs<\/a>. The Lane Fox review reported in July with similar findings to the global review, warning not of mass unemployment but of a \u201cquieter drift\u201d towards fewer entry-level jobs, weaker career ladders and greater inequality. What if Londoners got something tangible from all this computing? Last year I found myself in an old, leaky house in south London watching a man strap a tiny data centre to a hot-water tank. The retired owner and his lodger had fallen into fuel poverty. The solution was apparently to move a computer into the airing cupboard. As the installation unfolded I began to see it for what it was: a genius intervention.<\/p>\n

Surrey-based Heata\u2019s servers take on computing jobs normally sent to data centres, including AI workloads. Computers get hot, but data, unlike heat, is easy to move. The jobs arrive over the internet; Heata pays for the electricity and the householder gets the resulting heat in their water. Heata now has servers in 100 homes, with 3,000 people waiting for one. After all the promises about how AI might make us richer and more productive, here it was delivering a benefit you could turn on at the tap.<\/p>\n

Uplifting, but still an outlier. Large-scale data centres remain the preferred model for burgeoning AI. London has staked a sizeable chunk of its future on AI. More than half of Britain\u2019s AI companies are registered here, its AI start-ups pulled in a record $3.5 billion in venture capital in 2024, and City Hall is spending millions to accelerate adoption. <\/p>\n

Is the pursuit of AI worth the risks and the trade-offs? If AI is about to deliver an economic miracle, London ought to be where we see it first. However, research shows that simply being an AI company is no productivity wand\u2014 the technology doesn\u2019t float above the real economy. Its success still depends on people, skills, capital and place.<\/p>\n

Remaining in control of our city<\/p>\n

So how do we make sure we remain in control of our city and how do we stop useful reliance becoming blind dependence? For Theo Blackwell, London\u2019s chief digital officer, the starting point is deceptively simple: keep humans in the picture. \u201cAI can help us improve public services, but it should support people rather than replace human judgment and accountability,\u201d he says. \u201cIf an AI system gets something wrong, there needs to be a clear way for a person to check it, challenge it and ultimately take responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

London, he says, is already trying to build that principle into the way the city adopts AI. City Hall\u2019s Emerging Technology Charter sets standards for responsible use, while the London Office of Technology and Innovation connects more than 200 people working with AI across local government. <\/p>\n

Critics point out that London has no standalone AI scenario on its Risk Register, while its safeguards remain organised around individual risks such as cyberattack, power failure, transport disruption, health and public disorder. But what if AI helps one failure cascade across several systems at once? Who, then, is responsible for seeing the whole picture?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still obviously need to assess the safety of the models themselves but we need to do much more than that\u201d<\/p>\n

Professor Jason McEwen<\/p>\n

Professor Jason McEwen is interim chief scientist at the Alan Turing Institute, which has just released Frontier AI Risks: A practical way forward. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be just thinking about safety in the context of abstract models,\u201d he stresses. \u201cWhen we deploy these models within businesses, within industry, as underlying workflows and processes, then we need to make sure they\u2019re safe in those operating environments. We still obviously need to assess the safety of the models themselves but we need to do much more than that. It\u2019s the safety of the whole system.\u201d <\/p>\n

In other words, it\u2019s not enough to ask whether the AI itself is safe. You have to ask what we\u2019ve connected it to, what we\u2019ve allowed it to do and what happens to everything else if it goes wrong.<\/p>\n

One thing we can say with a degree of certainty is that there won\u2019t be a big red \u201coff\u201d button that solves this. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of talk of kill switches lately,\u201d says McEwen, \u201cbut once AI is deeply integrated, it\u2019s not the case that we can always just switch things off.\u201d Imagine doing that to the electricity for a hospital, for example. McEwen says we need systems that \u201cfall back to a graceful, safe state\u201d, making sure the world we\u2019ve connected AI to can carry on safely without it. <\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

AFP\/Getty<\/p>\n

But a graceful fallback assumes humans still know how to take over. \u201cThe majority of people don\u2019t do maths anymore. They just go to ChatGPT, or their favourite AI model of choice for everything, and they trust it completely,\u201d says Hare. \u201cThose models are often wrong. You have to know that they\u2019re wrong in order to challenge them. Now imagine in 30 years time, a doctor, a surgeon, who is using AI instead of having been trained properly to do these things. Imagine that across every profession. That is actually my biggest worry. Machines are getting smarter, humans are getting dumber.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s enough to send you scurrying to the nearest analogue library. As has often been said, reading books might be our greatest defence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Years ago, I read author and historian Peter Ackroyd on London\u2019s secret subterranean history. I became obsessed by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-788844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}