2026年9月16日，伦敦白厅的抗议者要求政府暂停使用人工智能技术。照片来源：Dan Kitwood/Getty Images你是希望得到人类的帮助，还是人工智能机器的帮助？因为英国的公务员体系正在发生变化——而且这种变化并不乐观。政府内部对人工智能技术的使用日益广泛，这使得各个部门逐渐忽视了这些技术所带来的严重威胁。试想一下：你还能与那些“面目模糊”的数字化官僚们争论些什么呢？
Protesters on Whitehall demand the government pause its AI use, London, 16 September 2026. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Do you want help from humans or AI bots? Because the UK civil service is changing – and not for the better The civil servant Rapidly expanding AI use within the government is numbing departments to its profound threats. And try arguing with a faceless digital bureaucrat Another day, another apocalyptic warning about the likelihood that rampantly uncontrollable artificial intelligence will solve all of our problems, including the problem of being alive.
继那些对人工智能持负面态度的研究者宣称“人类文明将在2030年前终结”之后，又发生了“Hugging Face”事件；澳大利亚政府还发现有人工智能程序攻击了其医疗保险网站。如今，大量专家纷纷警告我们：更糟糕的事情还在后面等着我们……谢天谢地，安迪首相似乎把英国推到了对抗这些“自我进化”的人工智能技术的最前沿……不过，其实并非如此。
Hot on the heels of disgruntled Anthropic researchers announcing the end of civilisation by 2030, we’ve now had the portentously named Hugging Face incident as well as the Australian government’s grim discovery of a rogue AI’s attack on its Medicare website. Swarms of experts are now falling over each other to warn us that much, much worse is on the way. Thank God, then, that PM Uncle Andy has thrust Britain on to the bleeding edge of the fight against the rise of the self-improving machines. Except he hasn’t.
虽然伯纳姆确实前往联合国，试图推动英国在制定国际人工智能法规方面发挥领导作用（这一举动可能会激怒某些人），但他上任后的第一件事却是废除了负责人工智能安全研究的“科学、创新与技术部”（DSIT）。政府智库“政府研究所”警告称，这一决定将会造成“真正的危害”；前政府人工智能顾问马特·克利福德则指出：“这种做法浪费了本应用于解决实际问题的时间和精力。”
Not really. Yes, Burnham went to the United Nations and risked enraging the Orange One with talk of Britain’s prospects of leading the drawing-up of international rules for AI. Slightly awkwardly, however, one of Burnham’s first acts after sweeping into office was to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the very department that had been leading work on AI safety. It’s a move that the Institute for Government warns will cause “real harm” and which former government AI adviser Matt Clifford has said “wastes time and energy that’s desperately needed for the actual substance”.
这一切难道不带有典型的“英式风格”吗？既然我们在国内一直未能有效监管这项技术，现在却打算在全球范围内统一其监管标准……不过，这种做法实在不像是一个面临生存危机的政府应有的反应。
Isn’t there something gloriously British about all this? Having failed thus far to regulate the technology effectively at home, we are going to world-beatingly coordinate its regulation everywhere else. Whatever it is, it doesn’t quite feel like the response of a state gripped by existential urgency.
或许，这是因为包括政府部长在内的所有人都已经对“人工智能末日”的风险变得麻木了——毕竟，人总是会习惯任何事情的。当然，如果某个行业内部人士不小心泄露了科学家们关于新技术的负面信息（比如这些技术可能会毁灭人类），人们确实会感到一阵恐慌；但如果你每隔几周就反复向公众灌输这些可怕的消息，那么“大规模灭绝”的可能性最终就会变得像“结肠癌筛查”一样——只是个需要被忽视的“小问题”罢了。
But perhaps that is because all of us – government ministers included – have already become desensitised to the risk of AImageddon. You can get used to anything. Sure, if one industry insider inadvertently leaks the news that scientists building a new technology believe it might kill everyone, a spot of existential panic is to be expected. But if you ram these tidings down our collective throat every couple of weeks, eventually the prospect of mass extinction acquires the urgency of that bowel cancer screening kit you’ve been meaning to send back to the doctor.
公务员们非常清楚人性的这种弱点：就像对日益严重的气候危机一样，他们对人工智能既感到恐惧，同时又对其感到厌烦。那些原本令人震惊的事情逐渐变得习以为常；而那些原本熟悉的事物，则被归类为“需要处理的日常风险”……真正的恐惧，其实是担心会有人组织一场视频会议来讨论这些事情罢了。
Civil servants understand this aspect of human nature only too well. Like the prospect of the galloping climate crisis, we too are simultaneously terrified by AI and utterly bored by it. The extraordinary becomes familiar; the familiar becomes an item on a civil service risk, after which the real fear is that someone will arrange a Teams call to talk about it. median age of civil servants remember, is 43 years, so many have already witnessed enough technological revolutions to choke a chatbot.
公务员的平均年龄是43岁，他们中的许多人已经见证了太多技术革命；他们还记得传真机被电子邮件取代的情景，也还记得那个名叫“Clippy”的愚蠢的人工智能办公助手——它唯一试图“表现出智能”的方式，就是突然冒出来问：“看起来您正在写信，需要帮忙吗？”因此，像我这样的老员工很可能还活着……等到像英国工作与养老金部（DWP）或英国税务海关总署（HMRC）这样的政府部门中，人工智能员工的数量超过人类员工的数量时，我们可能还不会被“有同情心地”淘汰掉。
Which means that, like me, there’s a large faction of the workforce that remembers the replacement of fax machines by email, and their first introduction to Clippy that damnably moronic AI ancestor office assistant whose principal stab at sentience was appearing uninvited to chirp: “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?”So it’s entirely possible that civil servants of my vintage might not yet have been compassionately euthanised by the time government departments such as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) or HMRC contain more AI agents than carbon-based officials.
这听起来可能有些夸张，但事实确实如此。那些部长们坚信，通过利用人工智能（AI）来削减公务员职位，就能有效阻止改革进程的推进；他们表面上平静地表达了对AI可能失控的担忧，但实际上却在积极寻找新的方式来利用这些技术。与此同时，公务员工会则担心政府行动过于仓促，并引用了费边协会（Fabian Society）的研究结果：只有29%的受访者表示他们在工作场所的使用AI相关决策过程中被征求了意见。
It may sound melodramatic, but that’s where we are headed. Ministers – convinced that harnessing AI will help keep Reform at bay by offering the tantalising possibility of slashing civil service jobs – have calmly and robotically emoted their concerns about the machines jumping their guardrails, while enthusiastically searching for things to give them. That’s amid civil service union concerns that the government is moving too quickly, citing the Fabian Society’s research finding that only 29% of those surveyed said they had been consulted about AI tools in their workplace.
他们的担忧是有道理的。据报道，在“数字服务与信息部”（DSIT）被撤销之前，该部门的常务秘书埃姆兰·米安（Emran Mian）曾计划让AI逐渐取代该部门所有离职的公务员，而不是用新人来替代他们。此外，“就业与福利部”（DWP）也在福利体系中积极尝试使用AI技术，利用机器学习系统来识别那些被认为属于高风险的福利申请。面对关于数据透明度和个人信息处理的严重质疑，该部门强调人类仍需保留最终决策权，AI仅用于辅助判断申请人的福利资格。
They’re right to be worried. Before DSIT was deleted, its permanent secretary, Emran Mian, reportedly had plans for AI to eventually replace almost every departing civil servant in his department rather than replacing them with humans. Elsewhere, the DWP has been busily experimenting with AI across the welfare state, directing its machine-learning systems to identify supposedly high-risk universal credit claims. And in response to “serious concerns” about transparency and the handling of personal data, the DWP has been careful to insist that humans retain the final decision and that AI does not determine entitlement.
这种态度究竟只是出于实际考虑的“常识”，还是某些人所说的那种自满情绪（这种情绪其实反映了政府在应对气候危机时的应对方式）呢？无论如何，在最近一系列AI相关事件之后，人工智能部长卡尼什卡·纳拉扬（Kanishka Narayan）向议会商务与贸易委员会作出的种种保证，听起来越来越空洞无力了。
Is this just practical common sense, or the kind of world-beating complacency that some have pointed out is an echo of the government’s response to the climate emergency? Either way, the reassurances given by AI minister Kanishka Narayan to the parliamentary business and trade committee sound increasingly hollow after the spate of recent AI rampages.
公务员们——尤其是那些在公共服务部门工作的人——非常清楚：仅仅声称“有人类参与决策过程”，并不等同于“人类真正掌握着控制权”。
skip past newsletter promotion after newsletter promotion Civil servants – especially those in public-facing government departments – are acutely aware that saying “a human remains in the loop” is not the same thing as saying “a human remains in charge”.
这一点至关重要，因为每个政府最终赖以运转的商品并非数据、生产力，甚至也不是金钱。而是信任，包括英国公众对公务员体系的信任——尽管这种信任度低于经合组织（OECD）的平均水平，但根据公共账目委员会的说法，这种信任正因透明度不足和人工智能标准薄弱而受到威胁。
This really, truly, matters, because the commodity on which every government ultimately runs is not data, or productivity, or even money. It is trust, including the trust that – while below the OECD average– the British public still has in the civil service, and which, according to the public accounts committee is being jeopardised by inadequate transparency and weak standards on AI.
当人类的判断力——以及随之而来的问责制——消失时，会发生什么？我们已经有了一句全国性的口头禅。英国喜剧《小不列颠》中那句“电脑说不行”至今仍引起共鸣，这在一定程度上要归功于英国邮局“地平线”丑闻所留下的挥之不去的阴影。每个人都意识到，当办公桌后的人将责任推卸给一个无法质疑其结论的系统时，那种恐惧感是多么真实，因为在场的人根本没人搞得清楚系统是怎么得出那个结论的。
We already have a national catchphrase for what happens when human discretion – and the accountability that comes with it – disappears. Little Britain’s “computer says no” still resonates – thanks in part to the haunting legacy of the Post Office’s Horizon scandal Everyone recognises the terror of the human being behind the desk surrendering responsibility to a system whose conclusion can’t be questioned because nobody in the room understands how the hell it got there.
这或许才是来自英国政府部门真正的警示。并不是说杀手机器人即将锁上大门并宣布人类的终结。而是说，在那之前很久，政府可能就会悄悄地将成千上万个微小的人类判断交给一群数字官僚，因为这样做更便宜、更快捷，而且可以在部长演讲中被粉饰为“转型”。但对于公众来说，感受绝不会是这样。
And that may be the real warning from Whitehall. Not that killer robots are about to lock the doors and announce the abolition of humanity. But that long before then, governments might quietly surrender thousands of small human judgments to a swarm of digital bureaucrats because doing so is cheaper, quicker and can be passed off in a ministerial speech as “transformation”. It will not feel like that to the public.