The bottleneck to progress isn’t engineering, it’s an absurd inability to consider trade-offs that has led to decisions like spending £140m to save the life of a single salmon. AI is about to change all that, says Samuel Albanie

May Britain flourish. I mean this unironically.

To say this in early 2026, however, is to mark oneself out as a dangerous contrarian, or perhaps just someone whose internet service provider has been down since the Platinum Jubilee. I say this with the stubborn affection of a hobbyist developer trying to run Doom on a smart fridge: the hardware is eccentric, the display is glitchy, but deep down, I believe the architecture is solid.

However, to get this fridge playing smoothly, we need to acknowledge that the operating system (our national capacity for decision-making in this increasingly tenuous metaphor) is currently stuck in a boot loop. My optimism for 2026 is not based on hope (a strategy that historically performs poorly in British weather) but instead on a rather specific mechanism: AI-assisted decision-making.

Britain is not currently flourishing. Real wages grew by 33 per cent per decade from 1970 to 2007. Since 2007 they have grown by almost nothing, representing the longest wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars, though in fairness to the current era, Napoleon was eventually defeated and exiled to St Helena, whereas the causes of British wage stagnation remain at large and are frequently invited to speak on panels.

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Reviewing the damage, Matt Clifford calculated that if Britain had........

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