Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair believes that effective leadership requires stability and decisions for the long term, but he also sees a technology revolution greater in consequence than previous industrial revolutions. The former Prime Minister is of the school that AI will change everything everywhere. His argument, which forms a key plank of his institute’s work, is “the big question for any political leader in modern politics is how do I understand, master and harness the technology revolution?”
Blair thinks the world is changing in a way in which people feel they don’t have a lot of control, which is why those who feel uncertain hold onto their identity. He believes understanding the terrain is important before making decisions, which is why he thinks the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did not erode public trust in democracy. Blair said none of the public inquiries into the Iraq War ever found deception; the mistake was the failure to sufficiently understand the terrain that Britain and America were entering.
Blair’s Institute for Global Change has made some detailed policy recommendations, including a digital ID, which, he believes, should be revisited. Figures such as former Chancellor George Osborne have changed their mind, accepting Sir Tony’s point that given how much data we hand over to tech companies, and the potential gains in running services and controlling migration, the idea should be revisited.
Blair acknowledges that he couldn’t foresee the way in which globalisation created a lot of losers, and that potentially his government wasn’t sufficiently ready for, or sensitive to, that. National populism, which is surging across much of the world, is in part a reaction to this. However, Blair insists that “the world is not going to slow down,” and that it’s crucial to reskill and equip people for a world that is rapidly changing.
At 71 years old, Blair retains his passion for politics and religion, and has written a new book called On Leadership. One of the key insights from the revolutions in behavioural economics and neuroscience of the past 20 years is the degree to which our biases and experience frame our understanding of fresh information, which means that even when we don’t want to, we make sense of the new by reference to the old. Blair said his recent election of a Labour prime minister after more than a decade of Tory rule has occasioned endless comparison with the last time that happened, in 1997
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