Let me guess, nobody asked anyone in that town if they want to participate in the experiment...?
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Absolutely
This is not gonna go well.
Hopefully it fails spectacularly and quickly. Like the ai rerouted all sewage into the drinking water and the entire town has to be evacuated within a week.
Oh it's gonna fail spectacularly and the kids who go to those schools will have to be sent to therapy and then reeducated.
It's always the children who pay the price of our arrogance and stupidity.
And that people responsible are held accountable. Municipal, regional, company project managers, all of them.
!aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
So it seems the UK doing speed run for absolute terrible country.
Holy fuck, Barnsley. Okay. This shows massive disregard for the people living there - I thought they were going to either
- A) build a new town (since they have ALREADY PROMISED TO BUILD NEW TOWNS)
- B) use somewhere already designated as a testing ground or "tech place" like Reading or Oxford or Milton Keynes,
- C) use somewhere smaller like Saint David's or Dent.
But okay.
Barnsley is very near to me, could hop over and investigate, put together a YouTube video or something (when it's actually rolled out). But it would probably just be testimony of people's experience with it.
Them using a larger town for this human experiment is intentional. If they used a smaller place people might know each other well enough to organise an effective resistance to prevent this effort.
Barnsley is near to where I hail from. This is depressing to hear.
When people ask me about where I'm from, I semi-affectionately describe it as a "shit hole up North". The socioeconomic deprivation just oozes out of the cracks in every paving slab. I suspect this is part of why they're the ones doing this scheme — taking advantage of desperation
I was quite involved in local politics during the extreme austerity cuts of the 2010s Tory government, and I genuinely believe that there is some level of collective trauma caused by them. Places like Barnsley were hit the worst because they were already not doing great socioeconomically. As much as I may condemn any local officials who were a part of this godforsaken partnership with big tech, I also have a tremendous amount of sympathy for them.
Could be worse, if they rolled out an AI to Rochdale it'd turn more racist than Grok faster than Tay did.
B) Then northerners with a chip on their shoulder will grouse about tech investment staying in the same towns.
Possibly true. I suppose Labour also did this as a follow-through on the "levelling up the north" that the tory party never figured out.
It’s not all genAI. One example they give is scanning the road surface with the bin lorries. Not a bad idea
AI assistants for the last couple of years in adult social care and children’s services
Fuck no. What the fuck? That’s sick.
One example they give is scanning the road surface with the bin lorries.
People who drive on those streets could have an easy way to report road issues, and frequently they do. The actual hurdle for doing anything about potholes is almost always a lack of funding for road repairs.
Doing some kind of complex electronic sensor system is a waste of money compared to making it easy for people to quickly and easily report issues.
Let’s hope the children can sue the UK and all these companies for fucking up their education.
Turns a small city into the Combine which then starts to push further outwards and outwards swallowing everything in its path.
RIP
Wut
Let's how this will end up
Probably we won't hear about it anymore, because results going to be so bad that it would attract bad rep