Decentralized political governance: the key to unlocking AI’s super(local)power

The new report “Governing in the Age of AI: Reimagining Local Government” by Tony Blair Institute for Global Change made my day !

I am what the French call a “Girondin”, a big believer in decentralized public governance and bottom-up solutions to local problems — in contrast with the “Jacobin” who advocates a strong, centralized government

This report by Tony Blair Institute (TBI) makes a convincing case that the ONLY way the UK government can harness and realize the full potential of AI is by devolving more power to local councils.

TBI is calling for the creation of a new institution: the Devolved AI Service (DAIS).

DAIS would act as a co-operative platform for local government to support fast, frugal innovation.

DAIS would provide the vision and governance for local innovation, build and incubate local AI tools and services, transform the infrastructure for scaling innovation and improve local capabilities.

For past 30 years, since the rise of the Internet, I’ve been saying the following:

“If private and public and private organizations want to harness to full power of technology, they must mirror and embody the DISTRIBUTED structure of the Internet.”

In my recent book The Frugal Economy, I show how businesses can shift from CENTRALIZED manufacturing to DISTRIBUTED production and build HYPER-LOCAL Value Networks to deliver personalized products to customers faster, better, cheaper, and sustainably.

The same logic applies to governments too: they need to DEVOLVE power to local authorities so they can harness AI effectively to deliver better services to local citizens by leveraging local resources.

In political theory, this is known as subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity is the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.

In a way, this TBI report is advocating what one might call “AI subsidiarity” — that is, the most effective AI solutions to serve all citizens need to be developed and deployed LOCALLY (taking into account local context) and not by a central authority.

Read my latest World Economic Forum article on how regional and local governments are leveraging frugal innovation — enabled by AI tools — to deliver better public services by spending less.