Bring on AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the defining force of the fourth Industrial Revolution, following the revolutions driven by mechanical power (steam), electrical power, and digital computing. Its transformative benefits stretch across productivity, innovation, and social development.
It brings massive productivity gains by the automation of complex tasks: AI goes beyond routine automation to handle cognitive work such as analyzing data, making predictions, and optimizing operations in real time. It brings higher efficiency across many sectors. From logistics and manufacturing to healthcare and agriculture, AI systems can minimize waste and energy use while maximizing output.
It will involve the creation of entirely new industries. AI enables the birth of new fields, including autonomous systems, precision medicine, synthetic biology, digital twins, AI-driven education, and many more. These industries create high-value jobs for AI engineers, ethicists, data scientists and AI product managers, as well as stimulating cross-sector innovation.
It promises better decision-making and resource allocation. Governments, businesses and communities can use AI to make data-driven policy and investment choices, improving infrastructure planning, energy distribution, and public health responses. For example, predictive analytics can anticipate traffic congestion, disease outbreaks, or supply chain disruptions.
There will be inclusive and personalized services. AI can personalize education, healthcare, and public services. Intelligent tutoring, adaptive diagnostic tools, and AI-assisted translation help bridge gaps across socioeconomic and linguistic divides.
It will foster scientific acceleration because AI acts as a force multiplier for human intellect, helping discover new materials, drugs, or energy solutions far faster than traditional methods. For example, AI models are already designing proteins and new battery chemistries at a fraction of the usual R&D time.
It aids environmental sustainability through smarter resource management, energy optimization, and predictive maintenance. AI can significantly cut carbon footprints. And AI-driven climate models and smart grids can help achieve global sustainability targets more effectively.
Governments can help speed up and enable AI-driven growth. To accelerate and amplify these benefits, governments can act as strategic enablers rather than as direct controllers.
It can help develop AI Infrastructure, and have national AI compute centres accessible to startups, universities, and SMEs (like national labs or cloud credits). It can develop open data ecosystems in areas such as health, transport, and the environment, with privacy protections to fuel innovation.
It can support entrepreneurial ecosystems, perhaps by offering AI innovation grants, tax incentives, and public–private partnership programmes to reduce the capital barriers for startups. It can establish regulatory sandboxes where entrepreneurs can safely test AI applications before full deployment.
We could modernize education and reskilling by integrating AI literacy and computational thinking from primary school to higher education. And we might encourage AI vocational programs for upskilling the existing workforce, to make inclusion the norm rather than displacement.
We could replace rigid, one-size-fits-all AI rules with outcome-based regulation focused on transparency and safety. And we could streamline AI approval processes for healthcare, transportation, and finance, so that startups can deploy solutions quickly.
Governments could use AI in their own operations, in public health, infrastructure planning, and service delivery, thereby creating early markets and proof-of-concept success stories for entrepreneurs.
We might encourage AI clusters and collaboration hubs and foster AI innovation districts that co-locate universities, labs, startups, and investors. This might be combined with support for cross-border AI collaboration to attract talent and export AI technologies globally.
The point of all this is to recognize and embrace the AI revolution, rather than trying to resist it. Established vested interests will lobby to control it but, like the earlier industrial revolutions, the best policy might be to stand back and let it run riot, bringing its benefits in its wake.
Madsen Pirie