Sir Tony’s latest essay is as empty as one would expect an article not titled in sentence case to be.
The problem with Sir Tony is that he knows very little about India, artificial intelligence or technology (to take three topics about which I do know something), but pretends otherwise. This is how he manages to avoid saying anything of interest in 5,600 words (despite his best efforts). Unfortunately, our political class, its nominal ideological diversity notwithstanding, is uniformly woke and politically correct in the way that matters, and therefore afraid to call anybody (other than immigrants with the wrong skin colour) thick. (Burnham comes closest: ‘[s]aying “AI” is not the same as having a plan’.) Thus we find Tim Shipman praising the ‘quality of analysis’ of the piece; Polanski says, in his usually inarticulate way, that he thinks ‘there are positive things. And it’s so important to put that nuance in there’. Even an intelligent Unherd columnist calls Blair the ‘adult in the room’; as leader, he ‘would have told the party…to turn the bulk of their attention to AI’.
Here’s Sir Tony on India.
The first epochal change is in the geopolitical order where America’s superpower status is now shared by China, in time to be joined by India. A sort of G2/3. These countries will be far ahead of whichever nation is in fourth place. By this calculation, everyone else including Britain is a middle power.
This is a vapid throwaway line mostly intended to sound profound rather than an indication of serious thought about the extent to which India will influence the world order.
What makes Sir Tony so confident that China will ‘in time…be joined by India’? Does he know who Arun Jaitley is? Does he know anything about demonetisation? When was the last time he looked at the progress of the Ahmedabad–Mumbai high speed rail line? When was the last time he looked up the average speed on India’s dedicated freight corridors? How many chief ministers can he name? (You, the reader, probably know nothing of this either, but even if you write Blairite screeds, people probably ignore them.)
Why mention India in the first place? Does it matter whether the G3 turns out to be a G2.5 or G2.2? He doesn’t say.
Sir Tony, like many other credulous middle-aged men, also feels the need to talk about AI despite his not knowing anything about it.
The problem with Sir Tony is that, ironically, he displays the sense of victimhood of a lazy postcolonial despot or unthinking university leftist. (I would prefer to say that lazy postcolonial despots take after Blair, but unfortunately the chronology doesn’t work.) This is the worldview of a drunk Iranian who blames a Franco–British conspiracy for the revolution or a Malian general who carefully explains how it’s actually the fault of the French that they succeeded in inviting in the only middle power that somehow would succeed in committing even worse human rights violations in a few short years. Sir Tony here has the mind of a vulgar cantonment drunk, if not the potbelly or fake medals. He is the sort of man who would have asked Mohammed Hanif who his sources for his satirical novel, A case of exploding mangoes, were.
The funny thing is, after the book came out, a lot of people — and some of them were heads of intelligence agencies — I’ve run into them at a party or at a social gathering, and they take me into a corner and say, ‘Son, you’ve written a brilliant novel. Now tell me, who’s your source?‘ I used to find it a bit scary at the beginning that, my God, these people are running my country and they actually believe all the lies that I’ve written.
In Sir Tony’s case, this mindset leads him to declare that AI will uproot everything, but we have no control over how.
There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’.
‘Self-stultifying’ is a kind description. The unfolding of this ‘technological revolution’ is not yet set in stone. It may be pointless to debate whether the average of the set of paths before us is good or bad, but it is hardly pointless to debate the merits of each one.
This probably explains Sir Tony’s rather manichean view of technology regulation as bad and deregulation as good.
Technology policy is the critical factor. If European policy continues in the direction of addressing the dangers rather than seizing the opportunities, i.e. weights technology regulation against the technology sector, it will be impossible for Britain to go back fully into the European Union. We can’t argue that technological innovation and adoption is the key challenge of modern governance and tie ourselves to a technology environment essentially hostile to it.
It’s not hard to intelligently criticise European regulators for being extremely stupid. Sir Tony somehow manages to unintelligently criticise them. He has nothing to say about the space of actual AI regulations, because he knows nothing of that space in the first place. Does Sir Tony really think that, for instance, mandatory reporting requirements would seriously undermine our competitivity? Why? Has he read any legislation in this connexion?
Another nostrum:
[G]overning in the age of AI will be the principal challenge. And opportunity.
Some more vice-signalling on energy:
We must prioritise cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources. This is essential for our competitiveness and for taking advantage of AI.
Where are the numbers? What does Sir Tony think of CfDs? What about nuclear power? Has he ever thought about storage? Or the grid? How exactly does he want to turn gas in the North Sea into lower strike prices? There is an obvious but very expensive and un-Blairite answer, viz. to nationalise the whole thing and segragate it from the global gas markets. Is that what Blair wants? Does he think we have the state capacity to avoid buggering it up? We don’t know. Much easier just to gesture at these points, as if Sir Tony has more meaningful thoughts about them than Burnham or Streeting. If he’s right, that’s by accident.
Another point is that it’s not even obvious that we should naïvely focus on hardware in the first place. The ‘extreme centre’ would have limited financial and political capital. Would it be a better use of that capital to double the number of GPUs in Britain or double the number of researchers from frontier labs? Note these decisions are orthogonal; researchers don’t need to sit next to GPUs to do things. Of course, we should expect this from someone who focuses on banalities like immigration policy for low-skilled workers. If AI is as important as Sir Tony thinks it is, the only important question about immigration policy is the number of researchers from frontier labs we attract. Alas, Sir Tony is easily distracted by brown people, and this time he can only deport rather than bomb them.
We should create a major new partnership with the private and voluntary sectors for apprenticeships and training – not just for the young and unemployed, but for the existing workforce whose jobs will be affected by AI and who need to learn AI adoption.
More nostrums. Replace ‘AI’ with any other important technology (‘the silicon chip’, ‘electrification’, ‘mass literacy’, and so on): the sentence loses none of its (negligible) incisiveness or force.
All governments for the foreseeable future will govern in the age of AI. Those which understand it will see their countries prosper; those which don’t, won’t. This is literally the challenge across all sectors including welfare and health (digital ID is just one, though vital, part of it).
This, at least, is right. It would also help to have some preliminary thoughts about how to avoid a scandal orders of magnitude worse than Horizon. But has Sir Tony ever read a single interpretability paper? Does he even know what interpretability is? What does he think of the government’s consultation on the common law presumption that computer systems operate correctly? (If he thinks that it’s woke sentimentalism to worry about making subpostmasters commit suicide and the only path to economic growth is to be scammed by software contractors, he should say so.) Alas, Sir Tony is not the man. It seems that invading Iraq wasn’t a sufficient education to dispassionately examine the precipitous and horrifyingly grave choices before us. Perhaps we should be thankful that he doesn’t ultimately advance any serious proposals on either India or AI.
What do I think? Well, it would help not to be credulously naïve China hawks.