Tony Blair

The leaders that are going to succeed in these next years will be the people that can understand what is happening in places like this.

And the frustrating thing from our perspective, from the perspective of leaders, is that there's very few people in the technology sector who really, even though they would be probably very well intentioned towards the developing world, they sort of think, well, I don't know what I can do in order to help.

But actually, there's massive amounts they can do in order to help.

You can't just hand everything over to the private sector because at the end, the public will expect the public interest to be taken account of by government.

And you may say, well, government's useless at protecting the public interest.

That's another matter.

But on the whole, people in America, people in the UK, they're not going to say, okay, just hand it over to these tech giants and let them run everything.

However...

I do think what should happen, and we have a whole program in my institute now, which we call the reimagined state.

And I think if you look at, there was a minimalist state in the 18th century and in the first part of the 19th century that grew in the last part of the 19th century and first part of the 20th century into a maximalist state, where you look for government to do a lot of things for you and the state grows large.

I think...

We should reimagine the state today as a result of this technology revolution and make it much more strategic.

It's much more about setting a framework and then allowing much more diversity, competition.

And the hardest thing about the public sector in those circumstances is to create self-perpetuating innovation.

If you don't innovate in the private sector, you go out of business.

If you don't innovate in the public sector, I mean, you're still there, right?

It's just the service has gotten worse.

And so I think this is the really tough intellectual task.

How do you, for example, in education today, I mean, how many kids in America actually, you'll have a significant tail of kids that talk really badly, right?

Okay, same probably in any Western country.