anwar

UX Research & Strategy | Advisor to @bringinxyz | ex-@fedi @ledger @krakenfx @wise |
Bitcoin convert, former goldbug, long-time Austrian

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

This would theoretically be true if the entire system wasn't built upon fiat. There will be pain.

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

It will be.

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@sakak_musdom @ap_hanley What kind of users did he find there? 🤣🤣🤣

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@Jestopher_BTC @stephanlivera "Ability" shouldn't be confused with intent nor action, though.

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@realrikkidoolan Let's welcome them all to the UK.

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@realrikkidoolan You're claiming sunshine now?

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

Hahahaha what the actual F.

[Muslim Bitcoiner BIP-110⚡ @MBitcoiner]

Halal sports betting is already here

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@skyler_fs Eeeew.

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@Breedlove22 No raw milk?

[Erik @eriklocalhost]

the fbi director and acting attorney general were invited to give a talk on code as speech. the developers who wrote the code are in prison.
#freesamourai

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

Let me tell you why AI could hit Britain harder than almost any other major economy. It's not because the technology is different here. It's because the economy it's landing on is uniquely vulnerable.

Start with what's already happening.

Morgan Stanley published research in January showing that UK companies reported 8% net job losses from AI adoption over the past twelve months. That was the highest rate among the countries surveyed, including the US, Japan, Germany, and Australia. It was twice the international average.

And here's the detail that should alarm everyone. UK firms reported productivity gains of about 11.5% from AI. Almost identical to what US firms reported. But in America, those productivity gains led to net job creation. In Britain, they led to net job losses.

Same technology. Same productivity gains. Different outcomes. The question is why.

The answer is the structure of the economy.

Around three quarters of UK GDP comes from services. Finance, law, consulting, administration, customer service, professional services, the public sector. These are not industries that make physical things. They are industries that process information, manage transactions, draft documents, analyse data, and communicate with customers.

That is exactly what generative AI does.

OECD-based analysis suggests the UK is among the G7 economies with the biggest potential productivity gains from AI, reflecting its high share of AI-exposed knowledge-intensive services, around 23% of GDP. Germany, with its larger manufacturing base, has far less of its economy sitting in the AI firing line. So does Japan.

The UK doesn't make enough things. It processes things. And processing is what AI was built to automate.
The evidence is already visible in the job market.

Research from King's College London found that firms with workforces highly exposed to AI reduced total employment by 4.5% on average. The cuts were concentrated almost entirely in junior positions, which fell by 5.8%. The entry-level pipeline is being squeezed first.

McKinsey found that since mid-2022, UK job adverts fell by 38% in occupations with high AI exposure, compared to 21% in low-exposure roles. The jobs most vulnerable to automation are disappearing from the listings before anyone is formally made redundant.

In 2024, UK digital sector employment dropped for the first time in a decade. The number of 16 to 24 year olds working in the digital sector fell by 39.6% from 2023 to 2024, a loss of around 66,000 jobs. That is not a gradual transition. That is a cliff edge.

Across the economy, official data shows vacancies have fallen by more than a third since 2022. Employers are cutting roles at the fastest rate since 2020. Unemployment has risen to near a five-year high. And the people being hit first are the ones who can least afford it. Young workers. Entry-level staff. People two to five years into their careers. The generation that's supposed to be building experience is finding the ladder is being pulled up behind them.

And here's the trap that makes Britain's situation worse than America's.

In the US, companies are using AI gains to grow. They're reinvesting productivity into new products, new markets, new roles. In Britain, companies are using AI gains to survive. They're banking the efficiency to offset rising employer national insurance, higher minimum wages, and weak economic growth. The productivity gains aren't being reinvested. They're being absorbed by rising costs.

Morgan Stanley's research was blunt. UK firms were significantly less likely than their international peers to step up hiring as a result of AI adoption. They cut the same proportion of roles as everyone else. They just didn't create new ones to replace them.

Britain is getting the disruption without the growth.

And there's another dimension that makes Britain's position even more precarious.

The UK isn't just more exposed to AI disruption than its peers. It's also less able to build the AI industry itself.

Training and running AI models requires enormous amounts of electricity. Data centres are the factories of the AI age. And the UK has the highest industrial electricity prices among IEA member states. More than four times those in the US, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. For AI training facilities, where energy is the dominant operating cost, that makes the UK one of the most expensive places in the developed world to do the work.

The grid can't keep up either. Data centres can be built in 18 to 24 months. Grid connections take 3 to 8 years. Demand connection requests surged from 41 gigawatts in late 2024 to 125 gigawatts by mid-2025, more than double the UK's entire peak electricity demand. The UK's largest data centre today runs at 120 megawatts. The AI facilities now being planned start at 500 megawatts and could reach a gigawatt, enough to power a city the size of Liverpool.

Oxford Economics has warned that hyperscale investors may redirect projects to countries with lower energy costs, including the Nordics and the US. And that warning has already come true.

In September 2025, OpenAI announced Stargate UK, a major data centre project at Cobalt Park in North Tyneside, part of a broader £31 billion tech investment package. It was supposed to deploy up to 8,000 GPUs initially, scaling to 31,000. Sam Altman called the UK a "longstanding pioneer of AI." Seven months later, in April 2026, OpenAI paused the entire project. The reason it gave was the cost of energy and regulation. The company said it would only move forward when the right conditions "enable long-term infrastructure investment."

The UK is the world's third-largest AI market. The maker of ChatGPT chose not to build here because the electricity is too expensive.

If that doesn't tell you everything about where Britain stands in the AI race, nothing will.

And this isn't even a new problem. It's the oldest pattern in the British economy.

Alan Turing, the father of computer science and the man who laid the theoretical foundations for artificial intelligence, was British. Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the Godfather of AI, the man whose work on neural networks underpins ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, was born and educated in Britain. He won the Nobel Prize and the Turing Award. He did his career-defining work in Canada and at Google.

DeepMind, arguably the most important AI research lab in the world, was founded in London in 2010. Four years later Google bought it for around $600 million. It's still based in London. It's owned by California.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He was British. He gave it to the world for free. ARM designed the chip architecture that powers virtually every smartphone on the planet. It was British. It was sold to SoftBank for £24 billion. Frank Whittle invented the jet engine. The government ignored him. The Americans and Germans commercialised it.

Britain has the universities. It has the researchers. It has the ideas. What it doesn't have, and has never had, is the ability to turn those ideas into industries that stay here. The venture capital is smaller. The scale-up ecosystem is weaker. The energy is more expensive. The infrastructure is worse. And so the pattern repeats. British brains, foreign profits.

AI is the latest chapter of the same story. The country that helped invent the field is now more likely to be disrupted by it than to lead it.

So the UK faces a triple bind. Its services economy makes it uniquely exposed to AI displacement. Its energy costs and grid constraints make it uniquely disadvantaged in building the AI infrastructure. And its chronic inability to commercialise its own inventions means the ideas born here generate wealth somewhere else.

Getting the disruption. Missing the industry. Exporting the genius.

Now look forward.

The IPPR modelled what happens as AI moves beyond early adopters into mainstream business. In the first wave, already underway, their central scenario projects 545,000 jobs lost alongside GDP gains of 3.1%. In the best case, no jobs are lost and GDP rises by 4%, roughly £92 billion a year. The difference depends on whether AI is used to augment workers or replace them.

But the IPPR also warned about a second, deeper wave of disruption as AI capabilities expand further. In that broader scenario, up to 7.9 million jobs could eventually be at risk. That is not a prediction. It is a warning about what could happen if things don't change.

The Tony Blair Institute estimates peak displacement of up to 275,000 jobs per year, with 1 to 3 million displaced overall by 2050. The OBR has discussed AI as a potential boost to productivity, with some estimates suggesting it could add meaningfully to growth over the next decade. For an economy that has barely grown productivity at all since 2008, even a modest AI-driven uplift could be significant.

But there's no guarantee the UK captures the upside. Because the upside requires investment in skills, retraining infrastructure, industrial strategy, and affordable energy. And Britain's track record on all four is poor.

This is the paradox. AI could be the thing that finally fixes Britain's productivity crisis. Or it could be the thing that hollows out the middle of the labour market, concentrates gains among the already wealthy, and leaves millions of workers stranded in an economy that no longer needs what they do.

Britain built its post-industrial economy on services. On processing, not producing. On brains, not hands. And now the one technology that is most capable of replacing cognitive work has arrived, and the economy that is most dependent on cognitive work is the most exposed.

The country that helped invent artificial intelligence is about to find out what happens when it can't afford to run it, can't keep the companies that build it, and can't protect the workers it displaces.

Of course, there is a lot of speculation here. The technology is advancing at a rapid pace, so a lot of the numbers presented here could change dramatically. However, it should be relatively clear by now that AI is an enormously disruptive technology, and I think we can all agree that it'd be wise that Britain plays to its strengths in order to benefit, rather than to get negatively impacted.

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@SamaHoole Why do avocados and nuts deserve to be on the left?

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

MIND-BLOWING: THE 10 TOP REAL ACHIEVEMENTS OF TRUMP AND HEGSETH IN IRAN

1. The Strait of Hormuz was open
- Now it’s blocked by two militaries

2. Iran had no nukes
- Now every nation knows it needs nukes

3. Iranians were divided, with some favoring and some opposing the US and Israel
- Now Iranians are united against the US and Israel

4. US military bases had pretended to be assets
- Now they’ve been exposed as liabilities

5. Murdering an entire govt was considered a very bad thing
- Now it’s fine, the US set a precedent for everyone

6. The Gulf states pretended to be loyal to the global family of Islam, not US/Israel
- Now everyone knows the opposite is true

7. The “allies” thought the US valued them
- Now they know the US is destroying them

8. US citizens used to spend nothing on Iran
- Now they’re bleeding US$30 billion on that country

9. Peace negotiations used to be sacrosanct
- Now we know the US says its okay to kill negotiators

10. The world suspected the US was a murderous rogue regime
-
Now
we
know
it’s
true.

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@brucefenton @RepFine He's talking about his new weight loss programme, @brucefenton

[Financelot @FinanceLancelot]

Waking up Wednesday morning to realize we're in the TACO of a TACO of another TACO.

[Muslim Bitcoiner BIP-110⚡ @MBitcoiner]

Born too late to fight during the golden era of Islamic conquests

Born too early to fight behind Imam Mahdi

Born in time to dismantle the global institution of usury and usher in an anti-Riba monetary consciousness.

Get your tickets!
https://t.co/ITf4g2auSt

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@SamaHoole You're describing mass industrialised chicken meat from, largely, one breed, brought up in a specific way.

The chicks I raise get copious amounts of fats and proteins, and exercise!

[anwar @hardmoneyUX]

@prhasn @saifedean Why do you think it's dead?

[Nic @puckrin]

So, let me get this straight.

Trump is now simultaneously claiming that he has won the war, is currently winning the war, needs help to win the war, and doesn't need help to win the war. All to destroy the nuclear program he claims he already destroyed last year.

[Siddharth @DearthOfSid]

If Americans could read 4 whole pages of text, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.