Our Future of Britain initiative sets out a policy agenda for governing in the age of AI. This series focuses on how to deliver radical-yet-practical solutions for this new era of invention and innovation – concrete plans to reimagine the state for the 21st century, with technology as the driving force. The United Kingdom has a growth problem. Real wages haven’t risen since 2008 and GDP per person is set to fall over the course of this Parliament. Part of the challenge is that the UK doesn’t have a strategy for creating growth, nor for removing the drags on growth that come from an economy based on technology and intangibles. As the economist Erik Brynjolfsson states, What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to race with the machine. That is our grand challenge. For the UK and other economies, generating shared prosperity requires a new approach to industrial strategy that will accelerate the innovation, adoption and diffusion of AI. Critical to this new model is the recognition that AI is not merely a new technology but an upstream enabler of productivity and competitiveness in the UK’s wealth-generating and job-creating sectors. An AI-era industrial strategy represents a significant departure from traditional approaches to industrial policy, which have often focused on supporting specific sectors or places. In addition, traditional industrial policy instruments – such as subsidies and trade protections – may have limited effectiveness in an era characterised by rapid change, uncertainty and complex feedback loops between technology, the economy and society. Realising the full potential of AI requires a new set of policy instruments that embrace a more agile and adaptive approach to policymaking – one that is guided by experimentation, learning and iteration. This piece sets out what a framework for an AI-era industrial strategy should look like, and priorities within this overall framework include: A coordinated and proactive approach, powered by a centre of government where science-and-technology expertise are deeply embedded. Investment in the critical infrastructure that can be leveraged by multiple industries and applications, as well as the removal of barriers to the flow of knowledge, data, talent and capital. The use of regulatory sandboxes, data trusts and disruptive-innovation labs to accelerate the development and deployment of AI-era technologies. New forms of procurement and co-investment models that can share the risks and rewards of AI development and deployment across the economy. Developing AI-powered UK businesses across a range of sectors that can grow into giants of the world economy. The UK has been too slow to recognise previous technological waves and too ponderous to understand how to take advantage of them. Given the state of the UK economy and the country’s advantages in AI, it cannot afford to be slow in benefiting from this new technological revolution. For the UK, growth
