Tony Blair: commitment

Transcript context

…Before COVID we had these health bureaucracies and we hoped they functioned well. It turns out many of them didn't. We probably have equivalents in terms of AI. We have government departments that deal with technology and commerce and so forth. What if they're as potentially broken as we found out that much of our health bureaucracy was? If you were prime minister now or for the next government, what would you do other than "we're going to have a task force and we're going to make sure we're making good decisions"? I'm sure people were trying to make sure the CDC was functional and it wasn't. Would you just fire everybody there and make a new department? How would you go about making sure it's really ready for the AI crisis? You've got to distinguish between two separate things. One is making the system have the skills and the sensitivity to know the different contours of the crisis that you've got. The other is being able to produce potential solutions for what you do. We needed to rely upon the scientific community to say, "this is how we think the disease is going to run." We relied on the private sectors to say, "this is how we could develop vaccines." We had to rely on different agencies in order to say, "I think you could concertina the trial period to get the drugs. " In the end, the decision of whether you lock down or you don't lock down, you can't really leave it to those people because that's not their expertise. If you look at it at the moment, some people want to regulate AI now on the basis that it's going to cause enormous dangers and problems. Because it's general purpose technology, there are real risks and problems associated with it. Europe is already moving in quite an adverse regulatory way. On the other hand, there will be people who say, "if you do that, you're going to stifle innovation, and we're going to lose the opportunities that come with this new technology." Balancing those two things, that's what politics is about. You need the experts, the people who know what they're talking about, to tell you "this is how AI is going to be. This is what it can do. This is what it can't do. We are explaining the technicality to you." But ultimately, what your policy is, you've got to decide that. By the way, whichever way you decide it, someone's going to attack you for it. Let's go back to the topics discussed with foreign leaders at TBI. Take Lee Kuan Yew and his position in the 1960s and the Singapore he inherited. If you were advising Lee Kuan Yew with the advice you would likely give to a developing country now, would Singapore have been even more successful than it ended up? Would it have been less successful? What would the effect of your advice now have been on Singapore in the 1960s?…

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