Tony Blair: observation

Transcript context

…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? Right now, definitely not. One of the things that we do as an institute, and one of the reasons I'm here in Silicon Valley, is to try and bridge the gap between what I call the change makers and the policy makers. A lot of the time the policy makers just fear the change makers. The change makers don't really want anything to do with the policy makers because they just think they get in the way. You don't have a dialogue. Let’s say what you're describing were to happen. By the way it's possible at some point it does happen. If it happened right now, political leaders wouldn't know where to begin in solving that problem, or what it might mean. This is what I keep saying to the political leaders I'm talking to today. We're likely to have a change of government in the UK this year. I am constantly saying to my own party, the Labour Party, which will probably win this election, "you've got to focus on this technology revolution." It's not an afterthought. It's the single biggest thing that's happening in the world today. It’s of a real world nature and is going to change everything. Leave aside all the geopolitics and the conflicts and war and America, China, all the rest of it. This revolution is going to change everything about our society, our economy, the way we live, the way we interact with each other. If you don't get across it, then when there is a crisis like the one you're positing, you're going to find that you have no idea how to deal with it. COVID is maybe a good case study to analyze how these systems function. The Tony Blair Institute made what were very sensible recommendations to governments, many of which went unheeded. What I thought was especially alarming about COVID was not only that governments made mistakes with vaccine rollout and testing and so forth, but that these mistakes were so correlated across major governments. No Western government, maybe no government, got COVID right. What is the fundamental source of that correlation? In the way that governments are bad at dealing with crises, they seem in some correlated way bad with crises. Is it because the same people are running these governments? Is it because the apparatus is the same? Why is that?…

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