The backlash against artificial intelligence is gathering force.
Across America this summer, plans for giant data centres are running into cross-country, cross-party opposition from a coalition that now stretches from Bernie Sanders to Republican governors. Communities worry about power, water, jobs and what they see as yet another bargain where Big Tech gets rich and everyone else pays the bill.
Britain can’t afford a similar techlash. Our productivity growth has been miserable for more than a decade and AI might offer a chance to change that, even a little. IMF research suggests Britain could secure significant productivity gains from the technology.
But there is a problem.
As in the US, Brits fear AI will make some richer – but not them richer. Polling by King’s College London found 65% expect the economic benefits of AI mainly to flow to wealthy investors and large companies. Just 7% believe those benefits will be fairly shared. More than half expect AI to increase inequality and social polarisation.
That is a warning we should take seriously. The political danger is not that Britain rejects AI. It is that British business forces through AI and then walks off alone with the prizes.
So, we need a new bargain: build the machines but broaden ownership of the wealth they create.
That begins by recognising reality: AI fortunes will not be created by brilliant entrepreneurs and private investors alone. Workers and the public sector will help build this new economy.
Government will provide scarce grid connections and planning permissions. Public money will fund research and computing capacity. The state will procure billions of pounds of technology. The British Business Bank will help finance growing companies. Valuable public datasets may help train and develop new systems. Government standards and regulation will provide the trust businesses need to operate. Crucially, diffusion of AI will depend on workers finding new ways to weave new tech into daily life.
All of that creates private value. But when society helps create the value, society deserves a share of the reward.
That is why Britain should create a National AI Dividend Fund: a permanent public wealth fund into which we capture some of the returns generated when public assets, investment or infrastructure help create commercial success.
The principle should be straightforward. If the public incurs a cost, recover it. If government allocates something scarce, price it properly. If taxpayers take investment risk, they should receive investment returns. If publicly created intellectual property or data generates substantial commercial value, retain a royalty or stake. And if genuinely exceptional monopoly profits eventually emerge, tax the rents rather than productive investment.
This is not about punishing successful technology companies. Britain needs them to invest here. It is about creating a fair partnership between an entrepreneurial state, innovative businesses and the people whose resources make that prosperity possible.
We have made this mistake before.
North Sea oil represented an extraordinary national inheritance. But Britain frittered away the proceeds as tax cuts to a lucky few. Norway did something different. It converted a temporary resource boom into a permanent national asset, building what became one of the world’s great sovereign wealth funds.
We cannot go back and put Britain’s North Sea oil back underground. But we can refuse to make the same mistake twice.
Imagine instead that some of the wealth created by AI accumulated year after year in a fund owned on behalf of the British people. Its dividends could build savings accounts for every young person, giving them capital for retraining, education or eventually the deposit on a home. Over time, the technological revolution would create not simply more billionaires, but millions more asset owners.
In the 1960s, the American dockworkers’ leader Harry Bridges understood that he could not stop mechanisation transforming his industry. So, he asked a better question: how could his members secure “a piece of the machine.”
That should be our test today. Britain should embrace AI, accelerate it and help build it. But this time, when the future arrives, the British people should own a piece of it.
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