The Treasury Committee—a collection of individuals who likely require a five-person task force just to reset their office Wi-Fi routers—has emerged from its mahogany-lined slumber to announce that the United Kingdom is currently vibrating in a state of ‘serious harm.’ The culprit? Artificial Intelligence. Or rather, the fact that the government and the Bank of England are treating the greatest technological disruption of the millennium with the same urgency one might apply to a slightly damp tea towel. It is a spectacle of institutional incompetence so pure it almost qualifies as art. The MPs on this ‘influential’ committee have released a report criticizing the powers-that-be for a ‘wait-and-see’ approach to AI in the financial sector. It is a phrase that perfectly encapsulates the British governing philosophy: if we ignore the future long enough, perhaps it will find a more hospitable island to colonize.

Let us dissect the ‘wait-and-see’ strategy favored by the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). This isn’t the calculated patience of a predator; it is the deer-in-the-headlights paralysis of a bureaucracy that is still trying to figure out how to tax the 20th century. The Bank of England, an institution whose primary function seems to be managing the slow-motion collapse of a currency that hasn't mattered since the invention of the steam engine, claims it is ‘monitoring’ the situation. One can only imagine the intensity of this monitoring—perhaps a group of septuagenarians staring at a flickering terminal until their eyes bleed, or a collective prayer that the algorithms don't notice how little actual value remains in the City’s vaults. The FCA is no better. These are the regulators who couldn’t regulate a school bake sale without accidentally allowing someone to launder money through a lemon drizzle cake. For them, AI is not a tool or a threat; it is a ghost story they tell each other to justify their own inevitable failure.

The committee warns of ‘serious harm’ to consumers. This is the most delicious irony of all. The harm is already here, baked into the very crust of the British economy. The average consumer is already being pulverized by double-digit inflation, a housing market that resembles a feudal lord’s fever dream, and a rail system that operates on the schedule of a drunk butterfly. But now, we are told, AI might make things worse. Oh, the horror. The machines might automate the process of denying people loans or liquidating their pensions. Instead of a human clerk with a soul-crushing mortgage telling you that you’re bankrupt, a sleek algorithm will do it in milliseconds. The ‘harm’ isn't that the system will fail; it’s that it will finally become efficient at its core purpose: the extraction of every last drop of blood from a stone.

Naturally, the political response is a bipartisan festival of stupidity. The Right sees AI as a magic wand that will somehow fix the productivity crisis they spent fourteen years cultivating through sheer, stubborn arrogance. They want the benefits of a tech revolution without the inconvenience of actually understanding the technology. The Left, meanwhile, is busy drafting ‘inclusive’ guidelines to ensure that when the AI eventually plunges the financial system into a black hole, it does so with a properly diverse set of data points. Neither side is capable of grasping that the ‘risks’ aren't just technical glitches; they are systemic. When you plug a hyper-intelligent, lightning-fast learning machine into a financial system built on debt, delusion, and ‘wait-and-see’ vibes, you aren't building a future. You are building a guillotine.

The MPs’ report is a suicide note written in the stilted language of a middle-management memo. It pleads for the government to ‘get a grip.’ But how does one get a grip on an entity that has no neck? The British state is a 19th-century machine trying to regulate a 21st-century god. The Treasury Committee can wag its finger all it wants, but the reality is that the Bank of England and the FCA are already obsolete. They are librarians arguing over the Dewey Decimal System while the library is being uploaded into a hive mind. The ‘wait-and-see’ approach is simply an admission of defeat. They are waiting for the inevitable so they can see who to blame. In the end, we are left with a nation of observers watching their own obsolescence in high definition. It’s not that the robots are coming for our jobs; it’s that our leaders have already surrendered our reality to a line of code they can’t even read.