Tony Blair: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's really interesting. This isn’t particular to the UK but even in Western governments, people are often frustrated by this. They elect somebody they think is a change maker, but things don't necessarily change that much. The system feels an inertia. If this is the case, is it because they didn't have the right team around them? If you think of Obama or Trump or Biden, at the very top I assume they can recruit top people. To the extent that they weren't able to exact the change they wanted, it wasn’t because they didn't get the right chief of staff, right? They can probably get the right chief of staff. Absolutely. They can get really good people. One of the things you actually learn about being at the top of a government is that if you pick up the phone and say, "I need you to come and help," to someone, pretty much they will come. That’s not the problem. I say this often to the leaders that I work with. We work in roughly 40 different countries in the world today and that's only growing. We have teams of people that go and live and work alongside the president's team. I talk and exchange views with the president or the prime minister. Very often, the two problems are these. Number one, people confuse ambitions with policies. Often I will speak to a leader and say, "so what are your policies?" They'll give me a list of things. I say to them, "those aren't really policies, they're just ambitions." Ambitions in politics are very easy to have, because they're just general expressions of good intention. The problem comes with the second challenge. Though politics at one level is very crude — you're shaking hands, kissing babies, making speeches, devising slogans, attacking your opponents — when it comes to policy it's a really intellectual business. If they've only got ambitions, then they haven't really undertaken the intellectual exercise to turn those into policies. Policies are hard. It's hard to work out what the right policy is. Take this AI revolution. We're living through a period of massive change. This is for sure the biggest technological change since the Industrial Revolution. This is really difficult work, for political leaders today to understand that, to work out what the right policy is, to access the opportunities, mitigate the risks, and regulate it. What happens a lot of the time is that people are elected on the basis that they are change makers because they've articulated a general vision for change. But when you then come to, "okay, what does that really mean in specific terms?" That's where the hard work hasn't been done. If you don't do that hard work and really dig deep, then what you end up with are just ambitions. They remain ambitions. Now that you've brought up AI, I want to ask about this. I do a lot of episodes on AI. To the people who are in the industry it seems plausible, though potentially unlikely, that in the next few years you could have a huge July 1914-type moment, but for AI. There's a big crisis. Something major has happened in terms of misuse or a warning shot. How well would today’s governments deal with this, given how they function either in the West or how you see them function with the other leaders you advise? They get this news about some AI that's escaped or some bioweapon that's been made because of AI. Would it immediately kick off a race dynamic from the West to China? Would they have the technical competence to deal with this? How would that shape out?…

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