A week today! The show must go on? Revisiting the script of international climate cooperation 10 years after Paris 30th Sep, 1-2.30pm BST. On zoom, free and open to all Drawing on a new SI in GEP, featuring the editors and six of the authors. Register: bisa.ac.uk/members/working-g…

Are data centres becoming the dark satanic mills of the 21st century? It has been a summer of discontent for America’s hyperscalers. Opposition to new data centres is growing across the political spectrum, from Bernie Sanders to Texas' Republican governor. But Britain cannot afford the same kind of tech-lash. Our productivity gap with the United States has roughly doubled since the early 2000s and AI offers one of our best opportunities to close it. In fact, new IMF research highlights how AI could add between 0.1 and 0.5 percentage points a year to UK productivity growth. But there is a problem: trust. New polling from King’s College London finds that: 69% of the public worry about the economic consequences of AI-related job losses and 65% think the economic benefits will mainly go to wealthy investors and large companies. Just 7% think the benefits will be shared fairly. That matters because we need AI to spread faster through British businesses. Workers need to experiment with it, adapt it and use it to change how work gets done. If people believe the bargain is simply that they take the risk while somebody else takes the reward, resistance is predictable. So we need a new Social Contract for the Hyperscalers. A new National AI Dividend Fund would help: a permanent public wealth fund that captures some of the upside when public capital, infrastructure, data and scarce assets help create private value. The state is already helping the AI economy scale through grid connections, planning, public compute and R&D, British Business Bank capital, £20bn-plus of government technology procurement, public datasets and standards and assurance. We should stop leaving the value created by those assets on the table and there is now a big international debate about how to do this. For Britain, the principles should be simple: If the public incurs a cost, recover it. If the public allocates something scarce, price it properly. If public knowledge or infrastructure creates commercial value, retain a royalty or share. If taxpayers take equity-like risks, take equity-like returns. And if extraordinary economic rents emerge, tax the rents rather than the productive investment that created them. Those revenues, shares, warrants and royalties could accumulate in an AI Dividend Fund, eventually diversified along the lines of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. Its returns could then capitalise universal savings accounts for young people: initially helping pay for retraining, but ultimately potentially supporting education, entrepreneurship or a first-home deposit. That begins to point towards something bigger: universal capital and a new wealth-owning democracy for the AI age. Britain made a historic mistake when it gave away much of the North Sea oil windfall as tax cuts instead of converting it into permanent national wealth like the canny Norwegians. We should not make the same mistake twice. New Substack now up: liambyrne.substack.com/p/a-p…