IPPR Progressive Review最新文献

Until relatively recently, in diverse contexts, children predominantly played on their streets, rather than in parks and playgrounds.1 Streets offer particular and valuable affordances for children's play but also for sociability,2 and children continue to value their doorstep spaces for play, in preference often to more structured or commercialised spaces.3

Yet, from the present-day perspective of many UK towns and cities – and beyond – it can be difficult to imagine that streets were not made for motor vehicles, or that designing and maintaining streets for those vehicles should not be a priority. In fact, streets have always functioned as spaces not only for other forms of mobility, such as walking and cycling, but also for sociality, for dwelling and for play.4 These diverse functions have been defended by advocates of children's play, including especially women – as mothers, campaigners, activists and experts – who have argued that children have both a right to play and a right to the city.5

Children can only ever be passive participants in automobility,6 yet residential streets and neighbourhoods often form some of the most important spaces in children's everyday lives. For these reasons, children and young people are often most at risk from car dominance, as they are especially vulnerable to road violence, pollution and the erosion of public space, and this is all the more true for children in marginalised and disadvantaged communities.7

Children's outdoor play and their mobility are often intricately entangled – to find spaces to play and to meet with friends, children have to move, and their everyday mobility (the walk to school or around town) is often playful. Bourke suggests that play is the “enactment of childhood”,8 an idea reinforced by the evidence that “children will play anywhere and everywhere”.9 Children's play and mobility are inherently connected and articulated with the spaces and practices of their wider lives too – family, education, consumption and so on.

These foundational claims underline the particular value of streets for children, and for their families, highlighting how the ways that we choose to shape and use streets have a powerful effect on children's lives and their health and wellbeing, shaping important questions of social, spatial and environmental justice. In turn, the implied interconnections between family life, health and wellbeing, environmental quality and justice resonate with the increasing recognition that streets and public spaces that are child-friendly can often also facilitate family-friendly, age-friendly, accessible, healthy and sustainable urban agendas.10 Planning for children's street play should therefore form a central part of plans for Labour's ambitions for active travel, as part of a healthy, low-carbon future,11 as well as its commitment “to raise the healthiest generation of children in our history”.12

Arguing for play can often be seen as frivolous,

‘AI boosterism’ has characterised British industrial policy for digital and data-enabled technologies under successive Conservative administrations, intended to ‘turbocharge’ artificial intelligence (AI) sector growth. Although former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, believed that public trust in AI was essential, evident in his initiatives championing AI safety (such as the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park in November 2023), Sunak retained an unwavering belief that existing laws, complemented by voluntary cooperation between industry and government, would address AI's threats and harms via technical fixes.

Such ‘techno-solutionist’ fantasies have hitherto dominated digital sector policy, in which AI is viewed as the key to solving society's most intractable ills. It is rooted in a pernicious fallacy that ‘regulation stifles innovation’ and must be strenuously avoided if the British economy is to thrive. AI boosterism accepts at face value the bold marketing claims of software vendors, naively believing that if an AI system can perform a given function, it will necessarily deliver its promised benefits in real-world settings once implemented.1 It also ignores the already-evident adverse impacts of AI systems, including ever-growing instances of ‘algorithmic injustice’ involving the use of automated systems which have resulted in human rights violations, particularly when used by public authorities to (a) inform (or automate) decisions about whether individuals are entitled to benefits and services or (b) subject them to unwanted investigation or detention on the basis that they have been computationally evaluated as ‘risky’.2 Likewise, it conveniently ignores the systemic adverse impacts of algorithmic systems, including their ecological toll, the deepening concentration of economic power, and the erosion of democracy, as ever-more powerful tools are harnessed to propagate misinformation, exploitation and pervasive surveillance.3 AI sector growth cannot be justified at all costs, and whether bigger implies ‘better’, demands consideration of ‘better for whom?’ and ‘with respect to what norms, goals and collective values?’.

To deliver on its stated desire to ‘make AI work for everyone’,4 the new Labour government must change tack. It needs to abandon these false narratives and magical thinking and establish a regulatory governance framework that serves the public interest. In this article, I explain what this framework should consist of, beginning by clarifying what regulation is for and why it matters.

In constructing legal guardrails, the new government must focus on how and why digital systems can produce adverse impacts. Algorithmic systems can have capabilities far beyond those imaginable when most of our legal rules and frameworks were established. Legislators must now grapple with their unique risks, whether algorithms take a simple, rule-based form or rely on deep learning techniques, particularly when deployed in ways th