Tony Blair: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? It's a great question. It's the single most difficult thing. You can't just hand everything over to the private sector because in the end, the public will expect the government to take account of the public interest. You may say that the government's useless at protecting the public interest. That's another matter. On the whole, people in America and the UK aren't going to say, "okay, just hand it over to these tech giants and let them run everything." We have a whole program in my institute now, which we call the reimagined state. There was a minimalist state in the 18th century, and in the first part of the 19th century. That grew in the last part of the 19th century, and first part of the 20th century, into a maximalist state. You look for government to do a lot of things for you and the state grows large. We should reimagine the state today as a result of this technology revolution and make it much more strategic. It's much more about setting a framework and then allowing much more diversity, competition. The hardest thing about the public sector in those circumstances is creating self-perpetuating innovation. If you don't innovate in the private sector, you go out of business. If you don't innovate in the public sector, you're still there. It's just the service has got worse. This is the really tough intellectual task. For example, in education today in America you'll have a significant tail of kids that are taught really badly. It’s probably the same in any Western country. No one today should be taught badly. By the way, everyone should be taught on an individual basis, on a personalized basis. For example, look at what Sal Khan's doing with Khan Academy. We work with them. There are other people doing great things in education using technology. We should be able to create a situation in which young people today are able to learn at the pace that is good for them. No young person should be without opportunity. How you reform the system to allow that to happen, that's the big challenge. With the healthcare system, you will in time end up with an AI doctor. You'll end up with an AI tutor. The question will be what's the framework within which those things operate. How do we use them to allow better service? How do we allow a lot of the people within the healthcare or education systems to concentrate on the most important part of their learning? For example, if you're a doctor now, you’re having to write up a whole lot of notes after a consultation or do lesson planning if you're a teacher. Let’s go back to TBI for a second. When you give a leader some sensible advice and then they don't follow through on it, what usually is the reason that happens? Is it because it's not politically palatable in their country? Is it because they don't get it? To the extent that you have good advice that’s ignored, why does that happen?…

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