We’ve automated our first MP. Who’s next?

Paywalled Postscript: ChatGPTMP

This article was first published in CapX. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s just a few quid a month; such is the price genius is reduced to.

When you think of the jobs most likely to be automated away, which do you think of?

Those most at threat are those that are repetitive and rule-based, require minimal social or emotional intelligence – and don’t rely heavily on creativity or complex judgement. Customer service work is often being quoted as at threat, as are routine manual jobs like fast food fry-slingers, routine cognitive jobs like data clerks and entry-level white collar jobs like paralegals.

Perhaps, then, it should come as little surprise that backbench MP is one of the first jobs to be automated away. If the singularity starts by deleting the lowest-value processes first, the redundant political function seems a logical place to start. Many were chatbots already.

West Yorkshire MP Mark Sewards has teamed up with local tech entrepreneur Jeremy Smith to launch an AI-powered chatbot, developed through Smith’s start-up and now available online.

The Metro asked it: ‘Do you support cuts to Universal Credit?’, knowing full well that the real Mark Sewards (please stand up) backed the recent benefits bill that halved the health component of Universal Credit. AI Mark replied confidently, ‘I do not support cuts to Universal Credit.’ On the other hand, it wouldn’t tell The Telegraph if Starmer was a good PM, so it doesn’t make a habit of lying.

I asked it Sewards’ stance on Gaza. He supports ‘a negotiated 2 state solution aiming for a sovereign Palestinian state alongside a safer Israel’. It (he?) affirmed Palestinian rights and emphasised the urgency of ensuring a ceasefire and that humanitarian aid reached Gaza. It wouldn’t condemn Hamas. It wouldn’t say if Israel was committing war crimes.

But that is unfair; after all, the chatbot makes it clear that it is really there to be used for constituency issues.

But the fact that our MPs can be automated away so early in the AI development curve speaks to the devaluation of the role; many have become little more than glorified caseworkers, and act more the part of Councillor-In-Parliament than national legislator.

Some of this is down to the profile of those who become MPs. Increasingly, they are drawn, as I have written in these most august pages, from Weber’s ‘communicating professions’ – which includes councillors. Over 100 members of the current Parliament have council backgrounds, and for some it is not just a background either; in January, ITV reported that one in ten MPs was still acting as a councillor.

But the increasingly localised focus of candidates and MPs has also encouraged two successive expansions in casework. The efficient – and constitutionally correct – response to most casework that reaches an MP’s inbox would be a one-liner: ‘This is not a matter for your MP; please contact your local council.’ But, as pointed out by Peter Heaton-Jones, this isn’t a particularly politically viable option in the modern world:

Problem: on receiving such a reply, the resident will use every available means to broadcast their disgust at your ‘lack of action’, ‘failure’, ‘laziness’ and worse. And with social media being what it is, that means large numbers of people (voters) will develop a hugely negative impression of their MP.

Their reasons vary: some do it willingly, understanding it is the best route to retaining their seat; some do it unwillingly, understanding it is the best route to retaining their seat; some do it because improving their community is what they got into politics to do; some do it because it is the limit of their intellectual capacity. But, increasingly, MPs perform the pantomime: reply with concern, prod the council, play postman between departments, send a flurry of follow-ups. Again, roles most at risk of automation are those defined by repetitive, rule-based tasks, low social or emotional complexity, and minimal creative judgement – precisely the profile of constituency casework.

But it’s clear the quality of laws that Parliament is passing – in particular the Online Safety Act and the Assisted Dying Bill – has reached an all-time low. How could we expect otherwise, when an increasing proportion of the man-hours of our national political class is spent on mindless busywork for constituents rather than scrutinising legislation or proposing the bold reforms this country is desperately in need of.

How do we get there? We could start with a change to the selection process, eliminating the huge personal and financial cost that increasingly confines our politics to the professional classes – possibly by introducing open primaries. Getting fewer talkers and more high-agency doers would go a long way to solving the problem.

So would, as Isabel Hardman suggests in ‘Why We Get The Wrong Politicians’, confronting the culture of political patronage and parliamentary grandstanding and the flawed bill-passing process marked by truncated debates, tokenistic committee scrutiny and coercive amendments – that produces Britain’s running sewer of substandard legislation. Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the available time; loading them with meaningful legislative work would prevent them having available time to fill with councillors’ casework.

Should the vested interests of Councillors-In-Parliament resist such a change, the crisis could simply be leaned into. We could then leave Parliament as a place for constituency casework, transfer more of the legislative scrutiny function to the Lords and normalise selecting cabinet ministers from its ranks again.

Developing a system of temporary Lords appointments could even raise the shocking prospect of following the American model of choosing the best person you can find for the role, rather than the best person you can find on your party benches.

The reversal of Britain’s inertia, decline and collapse is now so pressing that a restructuring of the role of MP is necessary to provide a national political class dedicated to nothing else. We need MPs who are both prepared and able to regain control of the country; otherwise, in time, AI may allow us to dispense with MPs altogether.

Paywalled Postscript: ChatGPTMP

Another Labour MP, Mike Reader, has come under scrutiny for his use of artificial intelligence in managing constituency correspondence. Reader reportedly copied and pasted emails from Caseworker (a widely adopted software platform in the House of Commons that supports MPs and their staff in handling casework) into ChatGPT, then asking it to generate draft responses.

Chat GPTMP might solve some of the problems of managing the ever-increasing load of casework that is increasingly of questionable relevance to the role of an MP as national legislator.

However, there’s no guarantee the situation will improve. There have already been two massive expansions in casework; there is no reason to suspect that the massive increase in capacity enabled by AI will not simply be filled by yet more pointless casework.