Alastair Campbell

And the stuff they were saying at the time, I was like, right, I was scribbling this down.

I thought, I'm going to become our in-house expert on AI.

And then something happened.

I can't remember what happened.

Some conflict.

And I looked away and spent some months thinking about something else.

And by the time I looked back, I was completely gone.

And everything that I thought I knew and thought I understood had largely become obsolete.

And I think that's one of the challenges.

I think that politics, global politics, is particularly ill-prepared to deal with both the opportunities and threats.

Because the advocates of AI, I think, have probably got a bit of a blind spot to some of the risks.

And the people who are fearful of AI have got a blind spot to the opportunities.

And like everything boring, the truth will sit somewhere between the two.

You look at science fiction from the time we grew up, and we're about the same kind of vintage.

You look at science fiction from the time when we grew up, and it was like household robots and flying cars and that kind of stuff.

No one had thought of the mobile phone, and no one had thought that every single person in a developed country could have on-demand access to the entirety of human knowledge, but mainly spends time looking at cat videos and pornography.

Yeah.

And we'll have the same with AI.

I think in some areas, it'll be much, much more transformational than we can get our heads around.

And in other ways, if we had a time machine travel forward 10 years, there'll be lots of things which are very, very, very familiar that we thought would be transformed.