Community Impact Policy Institute

Tools for the Job? Closing Britain's Skills Divide Through a More Agile System

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Britain’s economy is passing through a period of structural change. The transition to net zero, the rapid adoption ofartificial intelligence and an ageing workforce are rapidly shifting what work is available and what skills they require. This period of disruption is happening faster than the institutions that supply skills were built to move. The labour market is consequently under two kinds of pressure. The first is cyclical and cost-driven, as hiring has slowed to its weakest level outside the pandemic in over a decade.

In this paper, we examine why high worklessness and persistent technical shortages coexist, using a single case study, and we test that experience against the wider research literature. We find the constraint lies less with the people who are out of work than with the system around them.

Reducing AI-Enabled Biological Risk in New York City

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology are making sophisticated biological work possible outside the universities, companies, and government laboratories whose biosafety systems have traditionally contained it. While the likelihood that this leads to the creation or modification of a dangerous pathogen is low, the consequences would be catastrophic. The national debate over whether and how to regulate AI is unlikely to be settled soon. This brief argues that New York City does not need to wait for the AI regulation debate to be resolved. The City can manage AI-associated biological risk with an approach similar to what it applied a decade ago to laboratory biosafety, without directly regulating AI developers or monitoring what people ask AI systems. In 2016 the Health Department did not know which high-containment research laboratories operated in the city or what they handled. The Board of Health required them to register and to report incidents, so that the Department could mitigate risks and plan its response before, rather than during or after, an incident. Keeping track of who is handling dangerous pathogens is something health departments have done for a century. This brief recommends three actions that extend the same approach to high-consequence biological work taking place outside traditional oversight.

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