Sixteen areas where the gap between technological capability and institutional readiness is widest. We treat them as one problem appearing in different institutions rather than as separate specialisms — the structures that fail a patient in a clinical triage system fail a claimant in a benefits system for much the same reasons.
Systems that infer, predict and generate are being placed at the centre of decisions that were previously made by people who could be asked to explain…
The distance between what these systems can do and what any institution is equipped to oversee is the widest in any field we work on, and…
Identity systems, payment rails, network protocols, cloud platforms and public registries are the substrate on which ordinary life now runs. They are not products that people…
Democratic government depends on conditions that technology can either support or quietly dissolve: a broadly shared account of what is true, deliberation capable of changing minds,…
Rights that cannot be exercised in practice are commitments rather than protections. Most digital rights frameworks now in force are, on paper, reasonably strong: there is…
Digital infrastructure has a physical footprint — electricity, water, land, minerals, and the emissions embodied in manufacturing hardware that is replaced on a short cycle. It…
A theme page is not a description of an interest. It is a live index: the theme's own position, followed by every paper, working group, event and resource that addresses it. As our published work grows, these pages become the most direct route into it.
If your own work sits in one of these areas and you think we should be reading it — or if you believe a theme is missing — we would like to hear from you.
Most audit obligations in current legislation can be satisfied without anyone examining whether a system produces defensible decisions. This paper sets out…
A reflection on the question beneath our practical work. Infrastructure is usually justified by what it enables. We think it is better…
Medicine spent a century building the institutional machinery for deploying interventions that can harm people. Much of it transfers directly, and is…
