Life and government are increasingly dependent on digital technology. Its reliable operation has become central to the basic safety and security of citizen and state. A National Digital Service (NDS) is now essential to protect and safeguard sovereignty.
A NDS is a backbone of core digital facilities supporting the most sensitive and important parts of our digital lives, comprising hardened facilities, secure hardware running vetted software, connected by secure communications links. The NDS is not a programme; it would be a permanent national institution, governed by an independent commission accountable to Parliament and chartered with the digital safety of the nation. It would be the NHS for our digital lives.
AI
The NDS is also the locus for sovereign AI capability and capacity. The rest of this century will be defined by which countries have their own AI function, and therefore control over the availability of the technology. This is hard power, defined by physical capacity to host AI models. The models themselves can be developed anywhere in the world, but the ability to use them will depend on hardware infrastructure capacity and technical capability. The UK has the latter in droves, but lacks the former to a critical degree. This policy sets the direction and makes a down payment on the capacity.
Economic Effects of AI
Value concentration and destruction risks proliferate with AI, with the eventual effects on the economy only vaguely discernible from here. The responsibility of government does not change: to protect and enable citizens. Exercising those responsibilities requires AI capacity over which the society has sovereign control. That capacity mutes the debate about which way AI will affect the economy because, which ever direction it takes, the fruits will be harvested by the society as a whole, and the society will have reserved the right to “violence” to its democratic control.
Proposals about the best way to capture value from non-sovereign controlled AI are pointless, especially when constrained to the framing of the current economic and financial architecture. The current global financial system is one of the structures most likely to be impacted by AI. Using structures like company shares and wealth funds to capture value from the effects of AI are the sovereignty imperative expressed in terms that are exposed to the disruption they anticipate. Universal Basic Capital, like Universal Basic Income, suffers from the same basic flaw: it depends on a financial system that is itself subject to the risk it aims to defend against. The great advantage of Universal Services is that they actually build the supply fabric that is the real objective. Defence, energy, and technology, collapse into a single imperative: sovereignty.
Universal AI Services
Once sovereign capacity is established, there will be opportunities to extend the Universal Services with additional AI-powered education, information, and legal Services.