Tony Blair: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you think that's fundamentally a question of who the leadership was, like Park and South Korea? There are other factors that are obviously different between these countries. You also mentioned that leadership determines governance. But if you look at a system like the US or the UK, we've had good and bad leaders. Fundamentally, the quality of the governance doesn't seem to shift that much between who the leader is. Is the quality of governance and the quality of the institutions, separate endogenous variables from the leadership? The institutions matter and good leaders should be able to build good institutions. We were talking about Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. Would Singapore be Singapore without those decisions that he took? No. Take, for example, China and Deng Xiaoping. When he decided to switch after the death of Mao and switch policy completely to open China up, that made the difference. If you track back India's development over the past 25 years, you can see the points at which decisions were taken that gave India the chance it has today. The interesting thing about this is how much it really does matter who the leader is and the governance of the country. What I'd say to people engaged in this groundbreaking revolution of artificial intelligence is: we need your help in changing government and changing countries. When I'm talking to people and leaders we work with in the developing world today, I say to them, "don't try and replicate the systems of the West." You don't need to do that. You can teach your children better and differently without building the same type of system we have in the West. I wouldn't design the healthcare system in the UK today as it is now, if we had the benefit of generative AI. The leaders that are going to succeed in these next years will be the people that can understand what is happening in places like this. Here’s the frustrating thing from our perspective, from the perspective of leaders. Even though they would probably be very well intentioned towards the developing world, people in the technology sector think, "I don't know what I can do in order to help. ” Actually there's massive amounts they can do in order to help. When you look at the IT revolution and how much it's improved, say market services versus how much it's improved public sector services, there's clearly been a big difference. Would it have just been better to privatize the things that IT could have enabled more of, like education? What lessons does that have for AI? The public sector didn't seem that good at integrating IT. Maybe it’ll be bad at integrating AI. Should we, say, just privatize healthcare and education as much as possible because all the productivity gains will come from the private sector of those things anyways?…

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